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Hogarth swore under her breath and returned to the sitting room. O’Brien was right, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier. She loved the theatre and she’d not had a chance to go for weeks. She phoned her school friend Valerie to say she’d not be going with her, but it went to voicemail.

She padded in her fake fur slippers across the grey carpet into the grey hallway and to the front door. Which was grey, she thought. Everything was sodding grey. Her fault for buying a show home.

The protection officer, Bob Brake, was lurking on the doorstep. Good-looking young man but a bit grumpy. She preferred Ollie – a beaming Ulsterman with a quick tongue and joyful eyes who’d been on duty earlier.

She leant out of the door. ‘Listen, PC Brake, I’m staying in tonight. I’ve got a friend, Valerie, due to pop round in twenty minutes – apart from that, not expecting anyone.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Not a hint of a smile, thought Hogarth as she shut the door.

The protesters had packed up two days ago. Nothing to do with the police – they’d simply got bored. But her conversations with the Met over their failure to remove them rankled still. A bunch of wet blankets. And Tennant? The worst sort of wishy-washy liberal. Part of the pseudo-intellectual woke elite that had ruined the police, just like they’d mucked up the BBC.

She poured herself a Winchester Gin – no tonic – and flicked on Sky News. It was the usual roll call of grief, the ticker tape running along the bottom of the screen like a shopping list of aggravation, the symptom of a world gone mad and perhaps a world finally fighting back. ‘Thirty-two-year-old Basingstoke Mosque bomber arrested… Muslim rioters clash with police in Glasgow… Two youths charged with dropping bricks on M6… Asian woman filmed being punched on crowded Tube…’ So much news, so little joy.

Her attention was distracted by the sound of a soft thump on the front door. Why the hell didn’t Valerie use the doorbell? That woman. Hogarth turned off the TV and walked into the hallway. Her hand was on the door handle, when she pulled back. Why wouldn’t Valerie ring the doorbell? She usually did. Somewhere in the back of her mind, behind all the anxieties and excitement of the last twenty-four hours, amid the frustration at missing her play and the loneliness of being stuck here for a night, a small mental alarm bell was ringing.

Silently, she locked the security chain in place across the door and turned to the tiny TV screen the police had insisted on installing when she’d become Deputy PM. Fiddling for the switch at the back of the box, she got a picture. For a moment, the image made no sense. A black object like a bag of laundry looked like it had been thrown on her doorstep. Dirty clothes? She looked closer and, with rising horror, recognised the shape of a body, slumped back against the door. Its face was obscured, but Hogarth knew it was Brake.