“So…” says Pete, and I gratefully drag my eyes away from his wife’s made up face and leopard print silk dressing gown and back to his bloodshot blue eyes under bushy grey brows “…you think it was London?”

I take him in, try to. His grey hair, even at four in the morning, combed in regimented lines back from his forehead. His perma-tan spectacularly failing to hide the paleness around his eyes and lips, or the high colour on his cheekbones, almost like rouge. Those eyes – watery, but unwavering.

I take another sip of dishwater to buy some time, but it doesn’t help much, and I’m left with “I think so, yeah.”

He puffs his cheeks out, holds the pose for a second, then poooofs the air out in a sigh, sending sparkle lights across my field of vision. He looks old. I mean, he is old, they both are, in their seventies at least, but with the tans and the carefully selected wardrobe and so on, they normally make a good fist of looking… not young, but alert, wiry. Healthy.

Not tonight. I guess 4am and crisis have a way of reasserting the age thing.

“Russians, do you think? Or that American lunatic, even?”

Part of me wants to laugh. I mean, what could it possibly matter? But then I look down at Charley, sacked out on the leather sofa next to me under a mountain of blankets. Be kind, says Luke in my mind, as he often would in person, and I shy away from that train of thought in a hurry, but it centres me. Another sip of mud, then

“I don’t know, obviously, but I doubt it. If it was them, there’d be more bombs, I think. A lot more. I mean, it could have been an accident, I suppose. Anything’s possible. But I doubt it.”

He’s nodding soberly as I stumble my way through my thoughts, taking it in.

“So you think it’s the… you know… whachercallem… Jihaddies?”

I think about that for a second.

“If I was guessing, yes. It must have been a warhead, the size of the blast… I mean, if that was London and it was this big this far out, that’s a huge device, has to be a warhead…” I realise I’m painfully close to rambling, talking too fast, but can’t seem to help it. “So, so it’s probably a stolen device, or bought, you know, black market, Russia’s been a mess since forever, huge arsenal, it only takes one…”

He’s nodding again, looking a little paler.

“I mean, I’m just guessing. Like I said, could be a misfire, I suppose.”

“You don’t think it was a meltdown, maybe? Like Chernobyl?” He nods at Sharon. “We thought…”

I glance back at her, and see something awful in her face. Sadness and fear, mixing to make desperation. I swallow hard before answering.