Lucas stood with his back to the wall beside his front window. Edging a couple of fingers under the blind, he lifted it an inch or two and peered through the crack. Newly alert to the dangers of unwanted attention, he had heard a car pulling up outside, and the hum of the engine as it idled. The vehicle was half out of view, and in the late evening darkness it was hard to make out anything except that it was small and silver. By the time the door buzzer sounded, he had retreated to the sofa, his bunker for most of the day. He sat up with a moan and reached for the cushion that had been under his bad leg. Hugging it with both arms, he rocked slowly, through the next ring and the silence that followed, willing whichever bloodhound it was to give up.

It had begun that morning. When he’d ventured out for milk, there had been a woman with angry red lips and big kohl-rimmed eyes, who had stepped into his path, waving a press ID card.

‘Professor Shaw, would you like to comment on…?’

No, he wouldn’t. Lucas had spun on his heel and gone back inside, making a mess of getting the door open, so the woman had had the chance to finish her sentence and then repeat it, again, and again. ‘No comment,’ Lucas had mumbled, and then shouted, hating the note of panic in his voice, aware of the journo snapping pictures with her phone and the impression he was creating of being someone with something to hide. Not long afterwards, there had been a couple of phone calls, one from a woman who could have been the doorstepper, the other from a smooth-voiced man who said he was from a local radio station. Lucas had switched his phone to silent after that, vowing only to answer numbers he recognised. Ralph had called, with kind words, and then the Master, both agreeing with his grim guesswork that the leak to the papers had come from Charlie Giddings and advising silence to ride it out. By then a new wave of Twitter notifications had started, queuing up on screen, and though Lucas kept telling himself that he didn’t need to read them, it turned out that some self-sabotaging part of him did.