The line of his jaw, the gloss on her lips, the self-assurance of being the people other people always have to fit in with. Is it that the lonesome nurse – working away from home and family – was always going to comply with their request? With trumpets blaring, on Monday 17th December a phalanx of sombre family members laid the body of 46-year-old night-sister Jacintha Saldanha into a brick-lined grave. It is widely known that Saldanha fell for a prank phone call from two Australian radio hosts pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles asking after Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, who had been admitted to King Edward VII Hospital suffering from acute morning sickness. Three days later Saldanha was found hanged, driven to suicide by her failure to spot the prank, presumably. But perhaps she half-knew when she put the call through to the ward. The banter, the easy manner, their physical, sexual confidence – these characteristics stayed with Michael Christian and Mel Greig even when they suppressed them, donning sackcloth and ashes in TV interviews designed to atone for their part in Saldanha’s death; and Saldanha the Serious might even have heard these characteristics, understood them, in the grain of the voice at the end of the phone. In which case, it was not that she was fooled by Mel Greig’s desperately poor attempt to sound like the Queen; rather, that she immediately recognised all those years of not being fully in on the joke. Anticipating the insiders’ mocking tones – circles of hell for the uninitiated, perhaps Saldanha played along and put the call through pronto, in the forlorn hope of exiting their terrifying orbit.