‘I’m sorry about your mum,’ I say, catching my breath as I see mute tears pouring from his eyes, his gaze fixed somewhere long back in the past. That’s what happens when you’ve cried so much that you think it can’t be possible to cry anymore. The tears just roll but nothing else happens, nothing at all. There’s no sound. No release. Nothing except water.

‘Yeah,’ he mutters, dropping his head so his tears drip on to the toes of his shoes, close to mine now as he crouches down. ‘I guess I’ll always need convincing that the Met isn’t at fault.’

We both stiffen as my phone starts to vibrate in my pocket, 229sending tremors up my arms and into his hands on my shoulders. He sniffs as he gets to his feet, suddenly moving like an old man.

‘Jonas,’ he says, pulling his own phone from his pocket. ‘She must have…’ He stops, frowning down at the handset still in his hand. ‘Wait – is that yours? Is she calling you? Or is it Olivia?’

I hug myself tighter, resting my chin on my knees as I look up at him. Shadows scud through the lobby as we speed through the tunnels on the final approach to Liverpool Street.

‘No, it’s not,’ I say, squeezing myself so hard I think my ribs could crack, vibrations buzzing up and down the left side of my body from the brick in my pocket. ‘But that’s where we go after. Back to the newsroom, I mean. First, we have to go to Whitehall…’

‘Whitehall?’ He stares at me, hands frozen around his phone as I slide myself to standing, back against the wall.

‘We need proof,’ I say. ‘And it needs to be admissible. It won’t be enough for me to just tell my story. It doesn’t matter what else you’ve got. They’ll discredit me before the last word has gone on air, make you a laughing stock, not to mention blow up my entire life. And that is if we even get that far…’

‘I don’t understand,’ he says as I dig around in my pocket. ‘Proof of what?’