When he came to her a while later and asked that she probe Madeleine for details of work she was doing in Krakow, where she had unfathomably managed to bag herself a placement instead of Dubai within weeks of Gabriela leaving for Moscow, alarm bells finally started to ring with an urgency she couldn’t ignore. She knew from their intermittent emails while they were both away that Madeleine was immersed in a pre-existing operation there, working to infiltrate a human trafficking ring, which had little reason to concern Emsworth, removed as it was from his jurisdiction.

And yet that was no longer entirely true, was it? During Gabriela’s time in Moscow, the Counter-Terrorism department to which she was assigned had started to work with other units in the organisation on a case involving a highly complex and far-reaching network of criminals with links to human trafficking, VAT fraud and arms trading. Departments could not work wholly distinctly from one another, and the overlap in this case, which straddled various parts of the organisation, would go some way to explaining the files Emsworth had asked her to pull up, which concerned the movement of goods between the UK and parts of Central Africa. Although what it didn’t account for was his reticence to pull the files himself.

Gabriela and Emsworth were seated at his favourite table at the Italian bistro on Crown Passage, and she felt the pasta stick in her throat when he raised the Madeleine question.

‘Could you not ask her?’ Gabriela replied.

The look he gave her made her skin burn.

‘It’s just that I know we’re being encouraged to work together, but I didn’t think it was protocol for someone of my level to monitor another department’s work …’

He paused, lowering his voice, leaning in so that she could smell the red wine on his breath.

‘Be that as it may, it’s also in our interests to make sure we’re not being kept out of the loop with things that might serve our own investigations. You and I both know that we’re very willing to share our findings with other departments, but sometimes others aren’t so forthcoming. Egos get in the way, you know what it’s like. I just want to make sure we have all the information available to us, and I know you and Madeleine are close.’ He stopped, considering me before deciding to carry on. ‘Look, this is completely between us, but we have to be a bit careful about who we speak to. It would seem there’s a leak somewhere; information relating to this case has been flowing into the wrong hands.’

‘What do you mean?’ She sat straighter and he shrugged, as if in defeat.