‘Not well.’ He described the interview. ‘My worry is that if he’s making it up – possible but unlikely – how are we going to tell the Foreign Office and Whitehall that the intelligence they’ve been relying on and which they say is making a difference to the negotiations is a fantasy, made up by the case officer? They’d close us down.’

‘Your head would be on the block, that’s for sure. Mind you, it’s been there before and you haven’t yet been parted from it.’

‘My head’s the least of it. In fact, I don’t think he can be making it up. Not all of it, anyway. More likely he’s exaggerating and embroidering, as we suspect, rather than inventing. And doing a very good job of it. When he’s predicted they’ll say X or Y in negotiations it’s turned out to be true, give or take a bit. He couldn’t invent that sort of stuff without the gift of prophecy. He’s been right too often to be right by chance.’

‘But would inventing really be that difficult for anyone who follows what’s going on? The big themes are all predictable – you don’t need secret intelligence to identify what’s going to come across the table at you, the major concerns of both sides are signalled in advance. You could probably invent plausibly so long as you don’t go into too much detail.’

‘But Whitehall likes it and they’re the experts.’

‘Only because it conforms to what they already know or suspect. Has any of Timber Wolf’s reporting – alleged reporting – been truly game-changing? Or even surprising?’ She screwed up her face again at another bellowed order.

‘Maybe that’s the nature of these negotiations, with so much played out in public beforehand as leaks or press speculation. What persuades me that some at least of it is real is the similarity of phrasing between Timber Wolf’s predictions and the write-ups we see of the negotiations. If you do a textual analysis there’s clearly a common source.’

‘But you say he’s still shifty about Timber Wolf’s sub-sources. Why should that be? Why should he be reluctant to name them? I’m sure he always has in the past, with any other case he’s done.’