‘The world you inhabit is not the same as everyone else’s. Mine is even less so. Xavier’s necessary. I wouldn’t do anything unless I really needed to. I have to pass this time. I thought you got it.’

‘I think I do. Certainly I understood that Angela was a mistake. What do you mean pass? Are you facing some sort of test?’

Lots of background noise, she wrote for Baarda. He’s somewhere busy.

‘I grieve for Angela,’ he said. ‘She was angelic. Everything a mother should be. I never once saw her …’ He broke off.

‘Hello?’ Connie asked. ‘Is everything okay?’

No response.

Line still open, Connie wrote.

Baarda was busy demanding answers on his own phone from MIT’s technical team, who were listening in.

‘You were saying you never saw Angela do something. What was that?’

‘Lying bitch!’ he yelled.

‘Can you tell me what’s going on? Maybe I can help—’

‘He’s got a photo of Elspeth naked in the shower!’

Connie flipped open her laptop and thrust it at Baarda. Someone talking about Elspeth. TV/online? she scribbled.

Baarda began tapping away furiously at the keys.

‘Photos can be manipulated. It’s impossible to know if what you’re seeing these days is real. Please don’t—’

‘Shut up!’ he ordered. ‘He’s speaking.’

Connie could hear a different voice in the background, familiar, but she couldn’t place it immediately. A second later, it was joined by her own laptop streaming a feed of a video that had obviously gone viral given the way the numbers beneath the video were hopping up by hundreds every few seconds.

‘I knew Elspeth for quite a while,’ Nick Bowlzer was saying into his laptop camera. ‘The real her. Not the fake version you see in all the photos or at those posh dinners. Bethy – that’s what she liked me to call her – wasn’t really like that. I really thought we were …’ He paused for dramatic effect and wiped a sleeve over his eyes, ‘Soul mates. I know she was married, and I’m making this video partly to say how sorry I am to her husband.’

Fuck! Connie scribbled on her notepad.

‘But also so the world gets to know Bethy better. It’s important to me that everyone can see how human and fragile she was. Flawed like every one of us. The truth is, we both fought it, but I guess the heart wants what the heart wants.’

‘She was supposed to be pure!’ Elspeth’s captor howled. ‘I knew she could never be as perfect as Angela, but this … she’s a whore! Did you know about this?’ His panting into the phone was furious.

‘The man talking just wants his five minutes of fame. He might not even know Elspeth …’