‘Why all this? I don’t get it. Why have you gone off the rails, fiddled Timber Wolf’s payments for money you don’t need, exaggerated your reporting when the bare bones would have been sufficient, got yourself into trouble with girls in the Office, set up here with Christine when you could have her without turning your life upside down, taken to that’ – Charles nodded at the whisky – ‘and let yourself be used by Timber Wolf and the EU? You must have sensed what they were up to, suspected it anyway, but you never said anything. It wouldn’t have counted against you if you had – you’d have got credit for it, Brownie points, more than. You were well thought of in the Office and in Whitehall, in line for my job; I was going to recommend you. Your marriage was okay and you had a mistress here whom no one suspected. And now what you’re contemplating is going to put you in prison. Either that or the misery of endless self-justification in Moscow or somewhere, despised by everyone whose good opinion you previously sought. It’s not as if you’re a fanatical Remainer, seeing the EU as the only right and practical cause and British disaffection as self-defeating xenophobia. It’s not that, is it, Gareth? You don’t even have a cause.’

‘I was – am – a Remainer.’

‘So are lots of people, in the Office, in Whitehall, everywhere, about forty-eight per cent of them. But they don’t do this. You could have resigned and campaigned for it if you felt that strongly. But you don’t, do you, not really? So, why? Tell me. If you can.’

Charles’s tone was deliberately taunting. When confronted by a madman with a gun best keep talking. It seemed to be working. The bottle clinked against the rim of his glass as Gareth poured himself more whisky with his left hand. His right still rested in his lap, holding the pistol on its side, pointing along the top of his thigh at Charles. ‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘Self-analysis has never really been my thing. Nor yours, I suspect. Self-indulgent waste of time. We’re trapped within ourselves. Analysis can’t be trusted when that which is to be analysed is what purports to be doing the analysing. You can’t step outside yourself. I am what I am. Why do you think I’m doing it? You have a go.’

‘I can’t say. You can’t follow someone into madness, which is where you seem to be heading.’ He had been wrong about Daniel, he now realised. Daniel was not mad, just a bit nutty. This was something else. ‘I had thought – I thought you were someone else.’