‘She’ll get fired, obviously.’ Dominic brushes his shirt rather than look at me. ‘She won’t have known who you were. She’s telling the truth about that. Liv knows that too. Someone in Jonas’s position should know to have asked more questions, even if she liked the early answers. Olivia’s got no choice other than to cut her off. They’ll use everything against us when we break this. It’s going to be hard enough to distance ourselves from the fact that Jonas opened the door in the first place – whoever her contact was, or still is, probably had plenty to do with the whole sick lot in the first place.’

‘Did you—?’

‘No,’ he interrupts. ‘Of course not. I couldn’t have picked you out of a line-up before our trafficking investigation. But I knew this morning, on the train. When you told me who you really were. Because Jonas had told me, after she’d brought you on for 270trafficking, how you had come to her attention. The Deptford Gazette thing never smelled right to me. That’s why I’ve left her out of the loop since we came back from Warchester. I had to be sure of what I suspected.’

I know even before I blink that tears are flooding down my cheeks. The idea that my job, Marie’s job, the very core of her existence, is even a fraction less than all my own work is too much to bear. I built Marie, not them. It was me. All me.

‘Jonas’ll be OK,’ he mutters, still fiddling with his shirt. ‘There’s worse corruption out there. And she’s tough, with a ton of relevant experience. She was played though, good and hard. And she’ll have to own that. There is no way Liv could keep her here once we go full bore with this, no way. It’ll be one of their first comebacks, that we were part of the whole stitch-up.’

‘You mean…’ My hands fly to my face.

‘Steady on,’ he says, gripping both my shoulders. ‘Breathe, come on. In, out, in, out … That’s better. And no, I don’t mean anything. This is the bit where we win, Marie. We do. All that idealistic shit they pump you with at journalism school – bearing witness, giving voice to the voiceless, holding the powerful to account – it’s actually true, believe it or not, even if it does make you feel like a total wanker when you say it out loud to anyone with half a brain cell. Sometimes it really does work: you tell the terrible stories, and someone has to do something about them. Like trafficking. Do you think we ask women like Beata to prostitute their experience just for our network’s sake? This is what we do, at our best. And it’s why people like us do it. It amplifies us. It literally brings us back to life, too.’