She thought of other blinking white dots on black screens, of monitors and alarms, and something inescapable finally ran her to ground. She realised she had been trying to stay ahead of it for hours, keep her mind busy, hope to avert it with information or just sheer activity, but she was out of road. Her eyes filled up and the tears began to spill.

‘What is it?’ Ingrams asked, his voice soft but not solicitous, like it wasn’t his place to enquire too deeply.

‘Jim,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. ‘He’s not just my boss. He’s my uncle; well, my mum’s cousin. All of this: the shooting, the break-in, wiping the hard drive. It means he’s dead, doesn’t it?’

She stared up at him from Jim’s chair, searching for what she might read in his expression. Ingrams said nothing, because he had nothing to offer. In his face she could see that he had known the truth of this way back, probably the moment that shotgun took out the windows.

She bent forward, her head resting in her hands, trying to disguise her sobbing from this comparative stranger but powerless to prevent the grief from seizing her as she accepted the truth of it all. She felt so cold, so isolated. This should be news she was receiving from a caring source, someone to hold her in these moments. Instead it was bereavement by way of deduction and inference. Bereavement at a remove: the acceptance not merely that Jim was dead, but that he most likely had been for days, and she was only now finding out.

Everything she had feared when she felt that instinctive disquiet in this office on Monday morning had been proven true. In recent times, it seemed, all her worst fears came true. Yes, it’s cancer. Yes, it’s spreading. No, it’s not treatable. Yes, it will only be months.

Yes, it looks like tonight will be the end. Yes, she’s gone now.

Yes, Jim’s dead too.

Ingrams said nothing, remaining a few feet away. She didn’t know whether she hated him for standing there in indifferent silence or was grateful to him for keeping his distance and not intruding.

‘Who are you?’Jasmine asked, her voice reduced to a rasping whisper.

‘We need to get you a place to stay,’ was his reply. ‘If they’ve been to where you work, they probably know where you live. It won’t be safe there.’

Jasmine had a vertiginous sense of events threatening to overtake her, of becoming a piece of flotsam swept along by this tide. She felt like she had nothing to cling on to, apart from Ingrams, and she barely knew who he was.

‘I need my phone charger,’ she said, a single practical thought bubbling up with undue prominence as her mind searched for ways to give her back some degree of control.