‘Probably not,’ said Casey. ‘I think I could tell when he was lying, and I think that he was telling the truth when he was talking about Cavendish.’

‘I thought Luke said that Cavendish was clean,’ said Miranda. ‘One of the good guys.’

‘We’ve been told that before,’ said Casey.

Casey was watching Hessa. Hessa had asked – quietly, sleepless in the airport – as they waited for their plane: ‘What happens to Bantham now?’

‘Nothing happens to Bantham now,’ Casey’s voice was cold. ‘Not now.’

Casey had ground it into Gabriel before they left the apartment: You tell no one about us. There is no quiet warning to Cavendish. No guilty confession. Nothing. Don’t forget what we have on you.

And he’d looked up at her, from the depths of his brown tweed sofa. I promise. I promise. I’m sorry.

‘But Bantham admitted it, that stuff with the companies.’

‘Do you think,’ Casey had turned to Hessa, surrounded by the endless marble of Dulles airport, ‘that he will ever do anything like that again?’

Hessa thought of the broken man, tear tracks on his face.

‘No,’ said Hessa slowly. ‘It’ll be the straight and narrow for Bantham, from now on.’

‘Well then.’

A form of justice, maybe.

And Bantham might be useful one day, Casey didn’t say to Hessa. He might even end up a sort of friend. It happened, oddly often. There was a relief, sometimes, when someone already knew the worst about you.

‘Well done, back there, Hessa,’ Casey said aloud. ‘I know they aren’t easy, those front-ups. You did well.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hessa, very quietly.

Luke, annoyed with himself out in Delhi, had already found an address for Cavendish, safe in his Greek retirement.

‘Paxos,’ Luke wrote. ‘It’s a little island, one of the Ionians. Fly to Corfu, and then there’s a ferry the rest of the way. Not much there. Especially not at this time of the year.’

‘Can you come?’ Casey asked Miranda, when Hessa was out of the room.

‘No.’ Miranda was looking down at her screen, so Casey couldn’t see her face. ‘Not this time.’

Days before, Casey had caught Miranda staring at a picture of a pretty girl on a corporate-grey website. Curling highlighted hair, coy little eyes and a how-can-I-help-you smile. Rebecca. Becky.

‘OK.’

Changing the subject, Miranda told Casey about the conversation with Verity Taylor, and the rest of her research into surrogacy. ‘As Audrey said, there are different rules and regulations all around the world.’ Miranda spoke quickly. ‘Surrogacy divides approximately into altruistic and commercial procedures. Very few people will go through an entire pregnancy, not to mention the birth and all the tests, out of the kindness of their hearts. So that leaves commercial. The Kim Kardashian route.’

‘Right.’