‘It’s a crying shame,’ Maureen exclaimed. She sounded more outraged than upset. Two circles of pink had appeared on her cheeks. ‘Nobody has worked harder than Ahmet. I’ve known him twenty years and he deserves better than this.’

‘Were you also at the Really Useful Company?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘No. We met at the New London Theatre. Ahmet organised a very special evening for me.’ Hawthorne looked at her enquiringly and she realised she was going to have to continue. ‘It was an anniversary.’

‘My software told me that Maureen had seen Cats one hundred times,’ Ahmet explained.

‘I loved that show. I can’t explain why.’ Maureen looked into the far distance. ‘It was the music, of course. “Memory”! “The Rum Tum Tugger”. That always used to make me laugh, every time. There wasn’t a song in that show I didn’t know off by heart.’ She stopped herself, aware that she might look foolish. ‘It filled a hole in my life after my husband died,’ she explained. ‘I went once. Then I thought I’d see it again. And after a while I found that I was only happy when I was in the theatre. It was like a barrier against the world.

‘I couldn’t afford the best seats, but that night I got a surprise. I found myself in the front row. Ahmet had arranged that for me. I had a free glass of champagne in the interval and afterwards I went backstage and met some of the cast. It was a wonderful evening and after that we sort of became friends.’

‘Maureen came to work for me when I set up on my own.’

‘What were you doing before that?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘I was a secretary at Hewlett-Packard in Reading.’

Right then I felt a sense of guilt and sadness that might have been unjustified but which nonetheless affected me. Maureen and Ahmet truly were an odd couple. I’d known that from the start, but I’d been so eager to see Mindgame on the stage that I had ignored my misgivings and let them go ahead. But it wasn’t the failure of the play that upset me. It was the sense that it was all my fault. I was the one who’d brought them down, and although I would go on to other things – there were other books in the pipeline – they’d come to the end of the road. Right then, I wanted to go back outside and never see either of them again. I hoped Hawthorne had found out everything he wanted and we could leave.

But he hadn’t finished yet. He reached into his pocket and took out the crumpled packet of American cigarettes he had found at the theatre. ‘Are these yours, Mr Yurdakul?’ he asked.

Ahmet was puzzled. ‘It’s the brand I smoke. Yes.’

‘I found this in the green room at the Vaudeville.’ He opened the packet, showing Ahmet the three broken white tubes spilling out their tobacco. ‘I wondered why you didn’t finish the pack.’