My daughter rang me from a hospital bed and said four words. I drove there in my dress uniform — and found her husband’s family already in the corridor with a lawyer and an agreement dated nine days earlier.

Which means somebody had rung them before anybody rang me.

By the time I worked out who it was I had stopped being surprised by anything, and I am not going to name them here because they are twenty-four years old and they were frightened and they did what the family that employs them has trained everybody in that house to do.

They rang the office first. That is the protocol in that family and it has been for years and it is not written down anywhere.

Something happens, you ring the office, and the office decides who else gets told.

Four hours later a woman on a trolley used her own phone and broke that protocol for the first time in fourteen months, and that is the only reason any of this exists.

His father, Ridley, in a suit that cost more than my car. A lawyer behind him with a folder.

And about twenty people in that corridor between the nurses’ station and the lifts — two nurses, a doctor, families, a security man near the door.

Ridley came across and got hold of my wrist in front of every one of them and said:

Nobody needs to make this into a whole thing.