‘You’re interrogating me, Sara.’

‘I, we, need to know. Because what if happenstance is Morahan’s death and coincidence is my father’s fall? And the third stage – what converts the whole pattern into enemy action – is still to come.’

‘Are you telling me you know what that will be?’

‘No. If only I did. But the farm that terrorised Marion Green and Sami Mohammed has the smell of death. The very words Marion used. The files contain cases of unexplained disappearances. The tips of icebergs, our source says.’

‘We still only have those tips,’ said Patrick. ‘They prove nothing. A dead end.’

‘No!’ She’d raised her voice; realising it, she glanced around the canteen. There was no one in earshot. ‘We now have Morahan. My father. We have the threat to you. Above all, now you’ve told me, we have the contract. I don’t think you truly understand what it might be.’

‘What do you mean, it might be?’

She moved to within inches of him. ‘For God’s sake, Patrick, you must have suspected,’ she whispered. ‘Kareem’s licence to kill. In some form or other. To murder. Say that’s what it was. Imagine the consequences if Sir Frances Morahan had ever begun to suspect that and then succeeded in proving it.’ She paused. ‘Imagine the consequences if you and I prove it now.’

Death. The black-scarved women had disappeared and the anaesthetist and nurse returned to their work; in their places a blonde-haired, tear-stained girl in her late teens comforted by an older woman, perhaps waiting for a young lover’s fate to be decided. The arbitrariness of the night; a motorcycle crash, drug overdose, stabbing, an old man’s heart finally giving out.

‘Did I suspect that?’ said Patrick softly. ‘I’m not sure I had the imagination. But, yes, I knew it was all wrong. I was too weak. Or too scared.’

‘As you said, you were corralled, manoeuvred, whatever you want to call it.’

‘It’s always haunted me. It’s the reason I wanted to be on the Inquiry. When I first heard about it, the terms of reference felt like a pistol shot – if that contract with my name on it ever came out. I thought I could control things from the inside.’

‘But then Sayyid came along. And Morahan. And me.’

He bowed his head. ‘Yes.’

‘And now?’

‘I have to be able to live with myself.’

Sara rose. ‘Come on, back to Dad.’

He felt – and looked – beaten. ‘Do you want me to stay?’

She moved towards him, kneeled, and held his face in her hands. ‘Of course I want you to stay.’

There seemed no change – the expressionless face, soft breathing, barely rising and falling chest, the light show of the monitors, the depth and colour of the bruising.

‘How’s he doing?’ Sara asked Bridget, knowing, as soon as she’d asked, that the question was unanswerable.