London, present day
She hasn’t eaten since breakfast. Following the map on her phone, she walks the twenty minutes or so from Isobel’s flat to Highbury Corner, stopping at a tiny café near the tube station. It is the kind of place she has only discovered in adulthood, after years of refined restaurants and stuffy hotels with her parents, and she still relishes the sound of cheap meat sizzling on the griddle.
‘I’ll have a bacon roll, please, and a chocolate muffin,’ she says.
‘Hot drink with that?’ the woman behind the bar asks.
Madeleine’s eyes survey the foam cups and industrial size pot of Nescafé.
What is wrong with people? ‘No, thanks,’ she says. She won’t go that far.
Taking a seat while she waits for her order to be called, Madeleine’s mind drifts back to Isobel, and the question she had asked about Madeleine’s reason for being at the inquest. She would have liked to tell her about Sean asking Madeleine to join the team based on information initially supplied by an old MI6 friend of his, suggesting a tertiary link between the Witherall family and Ivan Popov and Irena Vasiliev, whose frankly polymathic endeavours – including their human trafficking operation and tax evasion, with plenty more between – meant that what had started as one investigation had quickly morphed into another. But that’s not how things work and Isobel knows it. Besides, it was almost embarrassing, how little progress had been made since Ivan Popov had been detained. They had Gabriela’s testimony alongside information obtained by his maid, Polina. He would be charged with something, that was for sure, but how much they could make stick was another matter. Not least if he ended up refusing to testify against Irena Vasiliev – though the way things were going it was unlikely Interpol or Europol could get at her, and if they did it would be a tussle. The whole thing could take months if not years. Unless they could just break that bloody EncroChat.
‘Bacon roll, chocolate muffin?’
By the time Madeleine tunes into the hum of the café, she can tell from the woman’s face and the volume of her voice this is not the first time she has called out her order.
‘Thank you,’ Madeleine says, taking her food. ‘I don’t need a bag.’