‘I’m not sure which is worse, Islamist extremism or having Philip Larkin as your lord and guide.’

After the news Sarah went up to work in the third bedroom, which they had turned into a study, while Charles sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and red box. The box had been delivered by car that evening, filled with papers in addition to those on the secure laptop. For anything requiring sustained concentration he preferred to work from paper. It was, he acknowledged, another sign of generational redundancy; younger people would simply never know the advantage of paper.

However, he wrote his note on Daniel for MI5 on-screen, having already got the desk officer’s designation from Michael Dunton but copying it to Michael anyway. He mentioned the knife purchase, adding that in the time he had known Daniel he had seen nothing to indicate a propensity to violence in him. Then with a heavy heart he lifted from the red box the inch-thick paper on resources and the forthcoming showdown with the Treasury, the most consequential issue he was currently involved with. There was a meeting about it the following morning after his hoped-for Foreign Office meeting with Robin Woodstock. Finances were a mess, barely comprehensible as well as in short supply. He hated having to attend to them, acknowledging to himself that this was not the mark of a great – or perhaps even adequate – chief. Nevertheless, he would be expected to have a good grasp, with clear and well-argued reasons why they should have more, or at least not have less. It would not be a good morning.

Chapter Six

He met Sonia early the next morning in the Regency Cafe, ten minutes’ walk from Smith Square, just off Horseferry Road. His excuse for meeting her there, knowing she wouldn’t like it, was that they were unlikely to meet anyone from the Office. He liked the place for its thick uncompromising mugs of tea or coffee, its generous fried breakfasts, its gruff but well-mannered working clientele and for the man and woman who called out the orders in parade-ground voices. The noise was such that there was no danger of being overheard. He was the only suit there.

She hunched over her tea, glancing furtively at the exclusively male customers. ‘How can they eat all that? I don’t think they’d heard of mint tea when I asked for it. And this is so strong I can almost stand my spoon in it.’ She winced as the woman bellowed out an order for two-fried-eggs-fried-bread-bacon-beans-fried-potato-mushrooms-tomatos-two-teas. She nodded at Charles’s plate. ‘I don’t know how you can eat all that.’

‘I like to have something to look forward to when I get up. The rest of the day could be pretty bleak. At least there’s no music here.’

‘No one would hear it. You wouldn’t bring Sarah here, would you?’

‘She wouldn’t come.’

‘Anyway, how did Gareth take your news?’