Miranda tipped her chair back, sipping her coffee.

‘I rang Savannah too,’ Casey said.

Savannah was an aid worker who had guided Casey around the Rohingya camps the year before, down in the south of Bangladesh. Red-haired and tough-eyed, she strode around the camps, her rage flickering about her. In Lambasia, one of the sprawling encampments, Savannah had pointed out a child with a horribly swollen throat. ‘Diphtheria,’ Savannah had shouted in her broad New Zealand accent, flinging her hands in the air. ‘We had beaten fucking diphtheria right the way around the world. It was basically gone, for Christ’s sake. Rammed into history, where it belonged. And now it’s back, for fuck’s sake. Who does this? Who does this to people?’

‘Does Savannah know anything about it?’ Miranda asked now.

Casey hesitated.

You know how fucking dark things are here, babe. You know what it’s like. But I’ll ask, course I will. I’ll talk to the women I know well. And I think they’ll tell me, if they know anything.

‘Savannah doesn’t know much,’ said Casey. ‘Not yet.’

There was a light tap on the doorframe. It was Audrey, the Post’s legal affairs correspondent, with a tired smile on her face.

‘Casey,’ she said. ‘You were looking at the legalities around getting surrogate babies back to the UK?’

‘Yes.’ Miranda pulled out a chair for her. ‘It seems so complicated.’

Audrey slumped into the chair. ‘Long day yesterday,’ she apologised. ‘Old Bailey for a murder, and then out to Woolwich for more of that grisly terror trial.’

Audrey ran her hands over her neatly braided hair, visibly pulling herself together.

‘Right. The legalities of surrogacy are a nightmare.’ Audrey handed round copies of a Foreign Office document, reading aloud random sentences. ‘International surrogacy is a complex area . . . The process for getting your child back to the UK can be very long and complicated, and can take several months to complete. Strongly recommend specialist legal advice . . .’

Audrey looked at Miranda. ‘Basically, it’s fiendishly complicated, takes ages and varies from country to country. You need to get the child a passport, and separately you need to get something called a parental order to transfer various legal rights from the surrogate to you. There are different rules depending on whether the surrogate is married or not, and whether the British father is actually genetically linked to the child or not.’

‘So, for example, if you use a surrogate in the US . . .?’

‘If a child is born to an US citizen, they get American citizenship. That means you can apply for a US passport and you can usually bring the baby back quite soon. Then you go through the other hoops back in England.’

‘Why wouldn’t everyone just go to the US?’

‘California is the centre of the industry,’ said Audrey. ‘It’s very expensive though.