Shefford village looked cold and empty as I took a final drive through. The first time I visited Joanna here it had been spring. We walked from the farms into woodland with thick carpets of bluebells, everything so simple and bright it seemed to mock us and the barren rooms in which we strategised the world. We picnicked in a clearing, lay back on the grass, an unthreatening English sun above us.

I saw her face with the sun on it, and then her face in moonlight, on our last night in Turkey together, driving along the Iskenderun–Aleppo road. The road was permanently slick with contraband oil dripping from supposed vegetable trucks. The route saw a lot of oil smuggled out and a lot of people trying to reach the refugee camp in Reyhanli. A complex of Byzantine architecture remained close to the border, ruins which had been largely destroyed and reused to reinforce the border itself, but leaving the better portion of a triumphal arch as testament to Rome’s north-eastern frontier. Joanna had been amused by my interest in it. In moonlight the arch was ghostly. One wall of a tower remained, so it looked like a tool with a blade and a handle.

We stopped and got out of the car and she took my arm.

‘Look,’ she said.

Stars blanketed the sky. We lay down to watch them, spotting asteroid showers.

We had kissed before, but not with necessity. Perhaps we had been waiting to become desperate. To prove something. Everything stopped for a moment as I tasted her.

It occurred to me that maybe she thought I was going to die, that this was her last chance. Or perhaps she had decided that she was going to die.

What did she go back to the UK to do?

You’re taught to cultivate trusted insiders. What they don’t say, but becomes obvious, is you need someone inside Six as much as anywhere. The party where I’d seen Marsh flirting with Joanna was Hugh Stevenson’s fortieth. Stevenson was someone I considered a friend. I obscured my caller ID for his sake.

‘Hugh, it’s Elliot. I wondered if you’d heard from Joanna recently?’

‘You’re in town?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you meet? Now?’

Stevenson shared his inherited townhouse with three dogs, his father’s collection of South East Asian memorabilia, and a Nepalese man I had never met. It was a beautiful house on a wealthy Hampstead street. I watched him passing through the golden spotlights of the streetlamps towards me, his silhouette baggy in an oversized belted jacket, his German Shepherd bobbing by his side.

At the end of the street we fell in step.

‘Good to see you, Elliot.’

‘You too.’

‘You’ve lost weight.’

‘It’s possible.’