Walker hesitated.

I pressed. ‘Right now you’re in more trouble than I am. You might appreciate my help.’ This didn’t get an immediate denial.

‘You’re working for Saracen,’ I said. He tapped his cigarette, studied me again. I knew what threshold we were at – either I was going to be permitted entrance or not. In my experience it’s the wrong time to push. I took a mouthful of brandy. There had been no suggestion they knew about the dead man. That was a card I held.

‘Do Six know?’ Walker asked.

‘I get the feeling they have an interest. Why would that be? Have you not told them?’

‘Vectis’s relationship with your employer is somewhat strained, as you can imagine.’

‘All sounds very delicate.’

I could relate to his impatience with the well-spoken, well-educated men and women at the top of Six and the FCO and the MOD. There was a no-nonsense edge of grammar school in his intonation, which endeared him to me. When we had last met he had described himself as a scholarship boy like me, army scholarship to Sandhurst in his case. You wouldn’t have guessed that, before Six, Walker had spent four years in the SAS – not if your idea of the SAS was unthinking action men. In reality the SAS was defined more by mavericks, especially for Walker’s generation. They had a restless drive. It meant their thoughts often ended up turning to making money, and they set about it with gung-ho confidence, a lot of contacts and not always sensitivity to the nuances of a business environment. Walker looked energetic and out of his depth.

‘Well, I wish she’d tried to contact us.’

‘How long had she been over here?’

‘Six weeks.’

‘And she went missing five days ago?’

‘That’s right. Last contact was on the morning of the fourth.’

‘What was she doing?’

‘Saracen are involved in a big deal over here. They’ve got a few active fields but want to buy a lot more. But their reputation is somewhat tarnished, shall we say, which means activists were on them before they’d even got going. When Saracen got taken over last year, the new owners hired a company called Piper Anderson Communications to try to clean things up. And Piper Anderson hired us. Obviously they needed to know who was doing what – in the environmentalist community, in rival companies, in the Kazakh government. So we sent Joanna over.’

‘How long’s she been working for you?’

‘Six months.’

‘Really? She only left Six in April.’

He saw what I was thinking: Six had a process for those jumping ship. Intel officers were precious and dangerous and sensitive, whether or not you still wanted to employ them.

‘We had words. They weren’t sorry to see her leave, it seemed.’

‘Why not?’

‘Falling-outs. Obviously I wasn’t privy to the details. We softened her landing financially.’