A child disappeared in the night. They want the eyes, went the whisper. And the girls, so young, watched for every minute of every day.

There were stories about Kunming, too, not far over the border, in China. The transplant capital of the world, Kunming, a city where no one asked questions. Not the doctors, and certainly not the patients. Not when your kidneys are shutting down, a bit worse every day, and every other fragment of hope is gone.

‘The area around Cox’s Bazar has always been known for trafficking,’ said Hessa baldly. ‘For decades. The girls get moved on everywhere from that region. To India, mainly. But all across Asia, too. Europe, even, some of them.’

Although there were thousands of eastern European girls in London already.

‘Would the Rohingya women be working in the garment factories?’ asked Miranda. ‘Is that how the message could have been packed into the skirt?’

It was mostly the women who worked in the factories in Bangladesh. Hour after hour, piece after piece, on the pretty little dresses they would never ever wear.

‘I don’t know how many work in the factories,’ said Casey. ‘The Bangladeshi government doesn’t want the Rohingyas to assimilate with the locals. So the refugees are banned from learning Bengali, quite deliberately, to keep them isolated from the rest of the population. And then there are the checkpoints along the roads outside the camp. The camps aren’t fenced, but the refugees can’t move about the country freely either. Bangladesh won’t give them passports, of course.’

Again, Casey felt that flare of anger. They had moved around for decades, the Rohingya. From Myanmar to Bangladesh, and back again. Never settling: always hunted.

‘So could they be in the factories?’ Miranda asked.

‘They might be,’ said Casey. ‘The men certainly get work outside the camps, although legally they aren’t supposed to. Day labourers. Salt farming. That sort of thing.’

Back-breaking work, all of it.

Dash appeared at the door.

‘Ross has packed Tillie off to Liverpool Street,’ he said, rumpling his dark hair as he spoke. ‘What’s going on?’

Dash always raked at his hair when he was thinking. Ross managed the day-to-day of the newsroom. Dash – more cautiously, gaming out every step first – was in charge of strategy for the Post.

Dash was quiet, compared with his news editor. Watchful, and instinctively secretive. He could be very funny, inconspicuously, and he had an uncanny ability to predict where a story might go next. He spent all day negotiating. ‘The Tories’ll give us a good interview with the pensions minister if . . .’

When the newsroom was chasing the biggest stories – a bomb ripping apart a Tube station, a cabinet minister on the brink – it was Ross who dispatched reporters, screamed at recalcitrant subs, blitzed through copy. Dash, a few steps away, would assess, calculate, anticipate the next move.