While Hatfield House had been used as a hospital during the war thanks to its proximity to the de Havilland aerodrome, Rabley Heath had been used as a training base for the Special Operations Executive. The SOE was a paramilitary organisation of agitators and provocateurs, dreamed up by Churchill, who were used to stir up trouble and mischief behind enemy lines. The reason for the government’s borrowing of the house had been kept secret, but once Knox and Williams had joined MI5 after the end of the war it hadn’t taken them long to find it out.

The SOE hadn’t left the place as they’d found it. Fireplaces were stained with soot marks, thick strips of wallpaper hung from walls, some rooms on the upper floor had been left stacked high with crates, and the ballroom floor had lost its bounce. But none of that seemed to bother Williams when he was finally given the keys to his home back.

Knox looked through the smudged window of one of the drawing rooms in the east wing and let his mind wander back through the countless hours he’d spent lying on its dust-caked sofa in a past life that felt simultaneously maddeningly distant and painfully close. After a few minutes of bitter-sweet reverie, he forced himself back into the present and moved on.

He completed his lap of the house and checked as much of the gardens as he could before they became impenetrable with knotty weeds and old bushes left to overgrow.

As he took the windbreaker off in the doorway of the gatehouse the telephone started to ring. He hadn’t wanted his peaceful country retreat disturbed by having one installed, but Holland had insisted on it when Knox had announced he was taking over Rabley Heath. The price of his isolation was that it could be shattered at any moment.

He picked up the receiver and listened to the female voice on the other end.

‘This is Avalon Logistics,’ she said. ‘Your delivery is due tomorrow morning.’ Then she hung up.

It was a message from Holland. It was time to go back to London.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

‘What the hell was that?’ Jay Gibson asked Bennett from behind his desk in his small oven of an office.

Two fans were blowing full at him, but thick beads of sweat were still running down his temples. It was the middle of the afternoon the day after the exchange in Cerro de San Francisco, and it was hot.

‘I was trying to stop someone being killed,’ she replied.

She wasn’t sweating, but it took all her willpower not to put her hand up to her short fringe, which kept fluttering, caught on the edge of the twin blasts from Gibson’s fans.

‘And how exactly were you going to do that? They were highly trained, ruthless murderers, and you had a torch.’

‘The numbers were even,’ Bennett said.