‘Hello, Gabriel.’ Casey stepped forward, a cocktail-party smile on her face. ‘How nice to see you.’

Bantham’s mouth twisted into a smile as he looked at her. ‘And how lovely it is to see you again too, Miss Benedict.’

His light brown hair was smoothly in place, the shoes glossily polished. Even in the heat of Chittagong, Bantham wore a cream linen suit, a square of blue silk peeping out of his breast pocket. In his left hand he held a passport.

‘For a Pippa Lancaster,’ he said. ‘Who I gather will disappear soon after she gets back to the UK. Daughter of a Miranda Lancaster.’

‘That’s what my passport says,’ Miranda shrugged.

They shook hands, Bantham holding on to Casey’s for just a second too long.

‘Her date of birth is backdated,’ he said. ‘Some airlines won’t fly newborns, apparently.’

Casey had called him, as soon as Poppy was born. And he’d understood, without being told, that this would buy her silence for ever.

‘They’ll know though,’ he had said. ‘I can do it, but I can’t do it without being caught.’

‘But this way’ – and there was almost a laugh in her voice – ‘you will be the hero of the hour.’

‘You can’t do that,’ he had said. ‘You can’t make that happen.’

‘Every story needs a hero,’ said Casey. ‘And this one hasn’t got one yet.’

‘But it’s illegal.’

‘Not,’ she said, ‘until we say so.’

He could hear the icy arrogance in her voice. Bantham had been working in London when the Telegraph faced down the prosecution bosses, after brazenly sending tens of thousands of pounds to an anonymous Swiss bank account. Go on, they dared the politicians. Arrest us. Just try it. But the money was for the disc that contained evidence of the MPs’ expenses scandal, and by then the public was deep in a raging fury over duckhouses and moats and tennis courts and swimming pools. Quietly, the police looked the other way.

‘If I did help you, we’d have to have met somewhere before,’ Bantham had bargained. ‘Not in DC.’

‘Never in DC.’ Casey buried the Four Seasons smoothly. ‘Somewhere else, many years ago.’

‘You knew I would be able to get this baby out of Bangladesh.’ He was thinking aloud.

‘I’m turning to you because you’re the only person who can possibly help us,’ said Casey.

Bantham thought about it for a moment. ‘What happens to the baby when you get home?’ he asked.

Casey had asked Heather about the theoretical registration of a newborn in the UK. ‘There is a system for women who insist on having babies outside of the hospital system,’ the health editor had said thoughtfully. ‘Free-birthing, they call it. Not my cup of tea, but each to their own. There is a way of registering births after that. I can find out.’