There was chaos in the control room. Some of the men had risen from their consoles to stare wide-eyed at Harry, and more especially, at the gun she was pointing in Hepton’s face. A few onlookers, caught between one desk and another, had frozen where they stood, while others had slipped out of the room. Harry didn’t appear to see any of this. She had eyes only for Hepton. He was still seated at his computer but had taken his hands off the keyboard and placed them either side of it. His left hand rested on the desktop, his right hand on Nick Christopher’s heavy dictionary.

‘I can’t believe,’ Harry was saying, ‘you thought you could just walk in here.’

‘Why not?’ said Hepton. ‘You did, after all.’

She didn’t seem particularly angry or vengeful or confident or nervous. She seemed … relaxed. A job was a job, and this was just another one. Hepton took pleasure in the scars across her face, the result of his boiling water.

‘Now look,’ Nick Christopher said from somewhere behind Hepton’s shoulder. ‘You can’t just come in here waving a bloody gun—’

‘Don’t waste your breath, Nick,’ said Hepton. His fingers had closed around the book under his right hand.

‘That’s right,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t waste your breath.’

Hepton swallowed hard. He had one last card. ‘I was sorry to learn about your mother,’ he said.

Harry’s eyes widened, then narrowed to slits. ‘What?’

‘Your mother,’ Hepton repeated casually. ‘I was sorry to learn that she committed suicide. Something to do with your father, wasn’t it?’

‘Shut up.’

‘He was in the army, wasn’t he? I find that odd, you see.’ He paused.

‘You find what odd?’

‘That you should end up working for the military, working for everything your father stood for. Yet he was so brutal to your mother, to Harriet.’

‘Shut up!’

‘That was why you left home, wasn’t it? Did the old drunkard like to give you a beating too, eh?’

It was enough. Harry’s teeth were bared in absolute, mindless hate. She swung back the pistol and whipped it across Hepton’s face. As it connected, he brought up his left hand and gripped Harry’s pistol hand, her left hand, angling the gun away from him, while his right hand, now clutching the dictionary, swiped at her head, connecting heavily. The gun went off, its deadly charge hammering home into a computer screen, which sparked once before starting to smoke.