‘You think that’s knowing people?’ I stopped myself before saying: attitudes like that led to the mess in Turkey. ‘Knowing a community? A culture? When you have software that understands pride, hate and revenge, I’ll start job hunting.’

‘Is that what you deliver?’

‘Sometimes. Not always.’

‘A horizon watcher, connoisseur of men’s hearts and nation’s souls, removed from events, paring your fingernails.’

‘You know what I do.’

‘You fall in love with foreign places and then destroy them.’ She knocked her drink back aggressively, as if this might deflect my own anger. I was beyond anger. I felt something had broken inside her. The comment was in poor enough taste that I barely knew what she meant by it. Five minutes later I was suggesting she get professional help for what she went through. The feeling was mutual, apparently. There aren’t many places an argument can go once you reach the imperatives to seek counselling. We were both burned out in our own ways. And how would therapy work? A spy goes to a psychologist. I cannot tell you what I do, or the precise events that haunt me. My unconscious is covered by the Official Secrets Act. Obviously, the services anticipated this and wheeled in some shrinks of their own, so petrified of the confessions they received they’d close you down at the first whiff of anything classified. And, of course, they were equally concerned with assessing your risk to Six as to yourself. None of which helped the free and frank revelation of psychological turmoil you craved. If you were lucky you got some MOD psychiatrist on his way to retirement who gave good prescriptions – powerful enough to knock you out, some might say – but little by way of empathy.

And what would that free and frank revelation be, anyway? I can no longer feel the things I once felt. My dreams have become air-conditioned warehouses for the dead. I remember men and women whose fates I am entwined with, but cannot remember which war they are from, and this troubles me, but maybe not as much as it should do. Every night, when I close my eyes I see an egg-sized piece of shrapnel melting the synthetic fibres of a hotel carpet. Every morning when I wake I check the pillow for blood. The problem with trauma is that it’s a plughole, and every bad thing gets drawn towards it, towards the thought: That was where I lost the life I was meant to have.

Joanna spoke in her sleep. I would listen, of course. An agent of mine in Ukraine used to refuse general anaesthetic in case he let secrets slip while unconscious. I had told him that was unnecessary and tried not to dwell on the lives I was making people lead. Joanna’s night ramblings never made much sense, never opened the gates of Shefford Park to me. Sometimes she’d wake up screaming.