He crossed the lawn, being careful to avoid the largest wild flowers, and paused in front of one of the big house’s drawing-room windows, through which he saw the same sight that had been there every morning for the last week: Jack Williams in a cable-knit jumper, balancing on top of a ladder, repairing a few square inches of his ancestral home. This morning he was chipping away at a broken piece of cornice, the sling his right arm was supposed to be in tossed over the edge of the old sofa, and the bottom of his jumper riding up, revealing the scar tissue that spread across his side.

Knox still hadn’t fully processed how it felt to have Williams back, alive, and home at Rabley Heath, and he wasn’t sure he ever would. It was incredible, amazing. But, under his elation, worry rumbled.

A few days after an ambulance, fire engine, and several police cars had arrived at Shoreham Airport and Knox, Williams, Bennett, and Holland had been taken back to London, Knox had been sent a report from the doctor who had treated Williams for the bullet Bennett had put in his shoulder. It suggested that he’d been shot at least twice before, had had multiple bones broken and reset, and, at some point, had suffered severe frostbite. It was, in the doctor’s opinion, a miracle that the man’s body hadn’t completely collapsed along with his mind.

The same afternoon Knox had received the doctor’s report, he’d gone to see Holland and made several impassioned statements about returning to a more active form of duty, because it was clear that MI5 needed every able-bodied operative doing everything they could to defend the country against a seemingly unshackled KGB.

Holland had turned him down flat.

‘You’re not ready,’ he’d said. ‘And this isn’t finished.’

Knox was a little affronted, but Holland was right.

The director general wanted to give Williams the rest he so badly needed, in the familiar surroundings of Rabley Heath, with Knox by his side. There were conditions, of course. The primary one being that Williams wouldn’t be able to leave. He would be under house arrest, and Knox would be his jailer.

Knox wasn’t sure if they’d be the last orders he’d receive from Holland as director general. Now things were calmer, he might be mulling over his retirement again—but Knox hadn’t asked, just in case he was. For the same reason, he’d also never questioned whether Holland had been serious when he’d ordered Knox to kill him in Shoreham, or if he’d just been trying to stall Williams and buy some time.

Knox walked through the back door of the house, past its cavernous and non-functioning kitchen, and down a dark, creaking corridor to the drawing room.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked as he stepped through the open door.