‘I’m Holly,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Eva.’

She looked this Eva in the eye, trying to see what she could make of her. Eva looked back. Eva wasn’t scared of her, that was for sure. Still, people weren’t usually scared of her, apart from Piotr Filipek in that interview. Ha!

‘Why are you looking for Freida?’ Eva asked.

‘You know who she is then?’

‘Of course.’

‘And how much has he told you?’ Holly said, nodding her head towards Piotr, who seemed to be making a pot of tea.

‘Actually I found out more than him all on my own,’ Eva said.

‘Ha!’

Holly allowed herself to laugh out loud – a pleased, but restrained, single note accompanied by an exhale.

‘So.’ She straightened her back and clasped her hands together. ‘You’d better start by telling me everything you know.’

There was something in Eva’s accent, in the way she tilted her head, that seemed familiar. Holly had known a lot of people in her life, though. She had advised a lot of women – she offered her support freely, especially in the early days, wanting to pass on the revelation of the pouch experience. But Eva wasn’t one of those women. Eva was hostile. And didn’t like her, Holly realised with a smile, as Eva said the words:

‘It has happened before.’

At first Holly didn’t know what she meant. And then, like the sudden blare of a car horn, she did. She wasn’t smiling any more.

‘But I would have been told about it.’

‘No one was told about it.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘FullLife keep their research as confidential as their mistakes.’

‘But surely the parents would have …?’

Piotr was back, carrying an old-fashioned teapot with a tea cosy tucked under his arm. It was yellow, Holly noticed, with a pattern of sheep on it. White sheep, and black sheep, together. God, she missed Will.

Piotr put the teapot on the low table, the tea cosy on top of the teapot, and said gently, raising his eyes to look at hers: ‘Perhaps they found it too hard to talk about. Perhaps they were … ashamed.’ He looked away.

‘There have been five deaths, that we know of,’ Eva said. ‘The first one was three years ago. Most of them from used pouches.’

Piotr sat down opposite them. ‘I think they’ve been encouraging the parents to blame themselves.’

‘And not everyone is listened to,’ Eva added, the edge to her voice audible.

Holly reached up and took her wide-brimmed hat off. It seemed wrong now, absolutely wrong, to be wearing it. She would leave it here, whatever happened next.

‘Then we need to change that,’ she said, a shake in her voice that she tried to dismiss. ‘We need to find out what’s wrong with the pouches.’