I nodded, and I could not tear my eyes from her as she went to the table and took out her box of pens and opened her drawing book. I walked over to her and watched her work for a bit. She was drawing Stan’s head, and she had captured him very well. The bulging beauty of the eyes, the extravagant ears flowing like the hair of a girl in an old-fashioned painting, the nose like a squashed prune, the feathered glory of his tail.

I touched her hand and her eyes met mine.

‘Scout,’ I said, ‘it’s just you and me now. But we’re all right, aren’t we?’

She looked at her drawing and then back at me.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re all right.’

I breathed again.

‘Scout?’

‘What?’

‘I’m very, very proud that you’re my daughter.’

She got up and gave me an awkward embrace, her arm around my waist as I kissed her on top of her head. Then she broke off and went off to her bedroom, Stan trailing behind her, his tail up like a periscope.

I turned to the TV as Ben King came out of Number Ten and began walking towards the camera. Siri Voss was beside him, hugging her papers, but as they reached the camera she stepped aside with a smile, waiting for him just out of shot.

Ben King smiled. Then he cocked his head at the camera, and looked into it the way he had so often looked at me – a penetrating, lopsided look, disarmed and disarming, as if he saw something in you the rest of the world had yet to see.

Something glinted for a moment but I couldn’t tell if the fragment of light was on the TV screen or just inside my head.

And then I realised that Ben King had a glass eye.

And I saw that what James Sutcliffe had claimed was true. Someone had lost an eye in that room twenty years ago – a small forfeit for a young girl’s life. But it wasn’t Hugo Buck.

How had I missed it?

You, I thought, as Ben King smiled for the cameras in Downing Street. You.

And I saw a vision of two boys at a breakfast table, twin brothers, arguing with a fury that neither of them had known before, identical in every way apart from their hearts, and one of the brothers threw a glass with full force at the other’s face. And I knew it wasn’t Ned who was in that basement room the night they stole Anya Bauer’s life.

It was his brother, Ben.

‘Daddy?’ Scout said.