It was a mongrel of a house. Originally a Jacobean hall dating back to 1605, its tall, ornate red brick facade had become flanked by two Georgian wings of columned York stone in the early 1800s. The most recent addition to it—a low-slung modernist extension that ran the entire length of the rear of the house—had been built in the late thirties, just before the outbreak of the war. The cream box had wide sash windows that gave visitors uninterrupted views of the impressive grounds, and an enormous parquet floor that was sprung for dancing. But it had been a long time since anyone had thrown a party at Rabley Heath.

It was always a strange homecoming for Knox, returning to a place where he lived but that wasn’t really his.

Rabley Heath belonged to the family of Jack Williams. Williams was the man Northcott had reminded Knox of. The man who had been Knox’s closest friend for fifteen years. The man who had joined Knox in MI5 after they met over wine and war stories during the strange days after the liberation of Paris. And the man Knox had sent to his death seven years ago.

Williams’s parents, who’d sired their only child late in life, had both died shortly after the war. Williams had been the last scion of his line, but he was also not legally dead. Officially he was missing in action, which meant that Rabley Heath had been left standing empty and slowly turning to rack and ruin until the family’s septuagenarian solicitor, unable to sell the house as it fell further into decay, wrote to Knox begging for his help.

Williams had used to joke that Rabley Heath wasn’t so special.

‘I’m from where the trains going places are still speeding up,’ he’d say.

But he and Knox had spent years of happy, hungover weekend afternoons in its cavernous rooms and overgrown gardens, Williams slowly teaching Knox how to relax and Knox indoctrinating Williams into the orphan club he’d been a member of since his own parents had died when he was a child. Yet, Knox ignored the letter from the solicitor for months. Seven years after losing his best friend, he still wasn’t ready to return to Rabley Heath. He told himself he was too busy with work, and his life in the city. But that wasn’t true, and eventually one afternoon when he was sitting bored in his office on the fifth floor of Leconfield House he found himself writing a reply.

Now he had two homes to match his double life as a spy: his flat at the top of Kemp House, a tower block in the heart of Soho, and the gatehouse that stood guard at the entrance to Rabley Heath.