The light refracts off the floor-length windows that form two of the four walls of Olivia’s office, so bright that if I could just angle one of the panes a fraction, I could burn the point of a dart into the leather of her chair. Beyond the glass, the City of London shimmers in the late-afternoon sun, its hundreds of tall, glass-fronted buildings trembling with their multiple reflections of each other, shifting and changing with every frond of cloud that drifts across the sky, no thought to what its shadow does to the shapes below. There’s so much glass in this part of London that every window’s a mirror, except it’s almost impossible to ever see clearly. Olivia’s rasp brings me back into the room, a crucible of light between all these versions of truth reflected back at me.

‘I don’t understand,’ she says, all bouncy hair as she shakes her head. ‘She’s an intern, Dominic, isn’t she?’

‘I’m an assistant producer,’ I say, as much to myself as anyone else. This is where it ends, I think, shading my eyes. If my screams are keen enough, sharp enough, I can shatter the whole lot, all the glass, all the buildings, all the towers of lies built up around me, around all of us. And it will be Marie, not Carly, who emerges from the rubble.

‘You just need to listen to the tape, Liv,’ Dominic says, placing my phone reverently on the desk in front of her. ‘It’s the last piece of the puzzle. It’s all we need.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake settle down, Dom,’ she barks, a billow of fabric and perfume. ‘I know you’re desperate for a breakthrough on Andromeda but this is the stuff of fantasy—’

She jumps as Dominic bangs his hands on the desk.260

‘She’s in danger, Liv. Genuine danger. And we’re sitting on an atom bomb of a story, which, by rights, should never have been out of the public domain. All this time we’ve been equating national interest with the public interest when in fact, it’s anything but. She never even knew that captain was her dad. It’s only because of our leak that she’s put the pieces together.’

Memories scud through my mind like a kaleidoscope, whirling into a mosaic of broken pieces, beautiful from one direction, horrifying from the other. It was all a setup, Rach groans into my ear. He tapped Jase for you just to get to her… I shake the kaleidoscope again, shards of reasoning and explanation flying into the air.

‘You do that again and I’ll call security. I mean it, Dominic.’ Olivia’s voice cuts through the air alongside another shaft of setting sun. ‘Just sit down and start from the beginning. I want every source, every single source, every development. Marie, you too. Marie?’