“Sure, this was where her father had planned the De Beers diamond heist when she was three. It was the very room where her uncle had orchestrated the hijacking of eighty percent of the world's caviar when she was seven.”

“She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply - notions as self evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with courage to confront him.”

“This was the place where someone had led her, only she could not remember who and could not remember when. Just that this was where she was now.”

“Mosca had preferred it when she could hear the edge in her companion’s voice. Now she felt like someone who knows that there is a scorpion somewhere in the room but can’t see where it is.”

“Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity”

“Exposed to the world for what she was; numbed with worry and fear; trying to answer the question... The same question the police had thrown at her over and over seven years ago.....Where are the Children?”