‘How did he sound?’ he asks, ignoring her question as he opens up his attaché case. ‘Did you try closing your eyes and just listening?’ He pulls out his laptop and a reporter’s notebook and puts them on the table.

‘He sounded like Rob,’ she says quietly, thinking of the scarf. Her plan seems so naive now. ‘But it wasn’t him. It’s scaring the shit out of me, Ajay. This isn’t him either,’ she adds, nodding at the blinds. ‘Shutting me in like a bloody prisoner.’

‘I can understand,’ he says in his best bedside voice. The one he used when he first came to visit her at the hospital.

‘What’s going on, Ajay?’ she asks, walking over to the sink. Her hair’s still a mess after her shower – there isn’t a hairdryer in Rob’s bachelor pad – and she starts to brush it as they talk, tilting her head to one side.

‘How do you mean?’ he says.

‘You have a key. So does Rob. But oddly I don’t seem to have one. That’s not right, is it? Not bloody normal at all.’ She sounds deranged as she vents her frustration on the tangles in her hair.

‘Rob’s nervous about you being in London,’ Ajay offers.

She’s brushing too vigorously now. ‘Is that so?’ she asks, unable to disguise her anger. She walks over to the bathroom and checks her hair in the mirror. ‘I’m thirty-bloody-three, Ajay,’ she calls out through the open door, still looking at herself. God, she’s a wreck. ‘I’m not a child.’

She doesn’t mean to be angry with Ajay. They normally speak so freely at their meetings. He’s helped her through a difficult recovery, become a friend.

‘What’s that for?’ she asks, coming back over and nodding at the laptop.

‘Rob wants me to run some final recognition tests.’ Ajay manages a pinched smile. ‘The results from the weekend were so encouraging.’

She shakes her head in despair. She’s too tired. She was hoping that Ajay might have come to get her out of this place.

‘I’m not doing any more tests,’ she says, glancing at his laptop as she sits down on a stool opposite him.

‘I understand,’ Ajay says, writing something down in his notebook. ‘Rob thinks you’re still at risk from the criminals you helped to identify,’ he continues. ‘Hence all this.’