The car was empty but for a laptop and the contents of a first-aid kit spilled across the front seats. Down by the pedals was a nylon pouch used for carrying a spare box magazine for a handgun. The grey fabric of the driver’s seat was bloodstained. There was blood smeared on the window and the door handle.

The caretaker called out. He stood between the car and the cemetery, waving for me to come over.

A few metres away from him, I saw the fabric showing through the snow.

I dug with my hands, not minding that they went numb in seconds. I uncovered strands of hair, then skin, clearing the snow gently around her closed eyes. Joanna lay on her side. The snow remained pink around her right arm where she’d bled from beneath a shoelace tourniquet. Her lips were parted, frozen.

I crouched with my face to the exposed skin and felt the illusion of warmth. The caretaker muttered a prayer in Arabic. O God, forgive our living and our dead … Yes, I thought. I’d heard that prayer too many times but the words had never felt so necessary. The stupid game. She knew that and she’d kept playing. I saw the girl at the recruitment interview, climbing through the window and out of her life. I had loved her then. I couldn’t remember why we had waited. Why had we let them rob us of our lives?

Some pins remained in Joanna’s hair, the ones that had fastened the wig. I took a hairpin and pocketed it. I touched my lips to her frozen cheek because that was what I wanted to remember doing. A unique intelligence had gone from the world, a dangerous, discontented one that involved some knowledge of me, and that was gone too. I didn’t want to leave her here. I thought of people I had encountered in Abkhazia, exiles from a flurry of war who had dug up the corpses of their relatives to bring with them, all shrouded in tarpaulin on the back of a pickup truck. Who was going to collect Joanna Lake? Not Vectis. The embassy, perhaps. I imagined her loaded onto a plane, unloaded tactfully on British soil. A spy’s repatriation: anonymous, unmourned.

I returned to the half-excavated Chevy, retrieved the laptop. It was the one I’d seen her use on the mall CCTV. The battery was dead. I looked around, thought of her last minutes here. Terrified? Surprised by an incongruous euphoria? Still fighting, I thought. Where was she trying to get to?

I pointed towards the abandoned farm buildings at the back.

‘Anyone there?’

The caretaker shook his head. Then a thought occurred to him. I saw his sunken eyes come to life. He said something about ambulances.