"No, not everyone," he says, a low, heavy stone in the pit of his stomach when he sees how pale she is, her dark eyes even more fathomless and guarded for a moment. "Enough of them, but not...that friend of yours."

Not that Helen Watson had been spared her own kind of horror that night, but Darlington can't bring himself to say more than that.

"If it's meant to be funny, it's lost on me," he says flatly, breathing out a slow, unsettled breath as he passes a hand over his face.