Eva thought about saying she’d prefer to go home and pack a bag of overnight things, but she was too impatient to see where all this was going to lead.

‘I’m ready,’ she said, stepping back from the door, allowing Holly to head down the stairs first and taking the chance to whisper to Piotr: ‘Why did she get so upset?’ Piotr looked as confused as she was.

‘We’ll talk to her on the train,’ he whispered back, his lips close to her ear.

They could hear Holly reaching the first-floor landing, her walking stick making a determined thump on every step.

Holly stood on the busy concourse of Euston Station and waited for the crowds of people to politely break around her – which is exactly what they did.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s a direct train to Inverness. Leaving in twenty minutes.’

She sighed, impatiently, as Eva and Piotr looked up to study the board.

‘I’m not senile,’ she snapped. ‘It’s right there.’

‘Oh, yes, I see,’ said Eva.

Piotr’s journalist’s eyes were watching her. She still needed to keep a close eye on him, Holly thought. She hadn’t been wrong before – he was a little wolfish. Dishevelled too. It would be easy to think he was bumbling, but she knew better than that. Perhaps it was some kind of disguise.

‘Why don’t you get us some tickets?’ she said.

‘But where do we go after Inverness?’

‘The Far North Line,’ both Holly and Eva replied, looking at each other in surprise as their words synchronised.

As he walked towards the ticket office, Holly turned to Eva and asked the question that had been in the back of her mind all afternoon.

‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ she asked.

Eva smiled in a way that Holly found secretive.

‘I think you knew my mother, a little,’ she said. ‘You did an interview together, twenty years ago now. She was protesting against the pouch. She stayed in touch with you for a while after that I think – she liked to argue. She used to talk about you.’

Holly raised her eyebrows, went to adjust her hat before remembering that she had left it behind, and why.

‘I remember, I think,’ she said. ‘Avigail, yes? Avigail Goldberg.’

‘Goldsmith.’

‘And you work there too, at her organisation?’

‘I did,’ Eva said. ‘We’ve just closed down.’

Holly didn’t smile or make any comment at first – she remembered liking Avigail, though she hadn’t seen or heard of her for years. As the pouch had grown in popularity, the protesters had sort of disappeared, the way people do in London when other people stop listening to them. But Holly wanted to say something now that would be respectful, and besides, the truth usually fell out of her mouth whether she wanted it to or not.

‘You might have to reopen,’ she said. ‘Once word of all this gets out.’