‘Will do.’ Charles was of course aware that he was lying by omission. He didn’t like misleading Robin but was confident that the only way to resolve the issue was to see Timber Wolf himself, which Robin was most unlikely to go along with. Having the chief of MI6 personally debrief an agent in Brussels who was working against the EU would be a risk too far for Whitehall. But Charles was rediscovering the exhilaration of calculated risk-taking, something he didn’t feel often enough these days.

He walked briskly back to Smith Square, detouring as usual through Westminster Abbey’s Palace Yard. It was one of several places – the Chiltern beech-woods where he had grown up, the sea view from his own house on Scotland’s west coast, a particular village green in County Durham – that never failed to have a calming and reassuring mental effect, like the gentle rain of grace. He reached Head Office just in time to walk straight into the resources and finance meeting, which was in the boardroom. Jenny, his secretary, caught him as he went through.

‘Sonia rang. She wants to speak urgently. Didn’t say what it was about.’

‘Ring her back and say I’ll call as soon as I’m out of this meeting.’

Peter, his director of finance and resources, was as negative and nit-picking as usual. Charles, hating anything to do with money himself, easily forgave him that; it was what he was paid to be. Without that persistent brake bureaucracies had an inherent tendency to spread and add weight, spending ever more on maintaining themselves at the expense of what they were there to do. As a portion of the MI6 budget, support and administration costs rose faster than operational expenditure, mostly government-imposed. Health and safety, human rights and equalities legislation, diversity and deprivation monitoring and now something called inclusion assessments were costs imposed by Whitehall without any consideration of the effect on core business. Charles thought that the agencies and the MOD should be exempt from such legislation, and had said so more than once. He knew that each time he let his views be known there was heightened speculation about his retirement, and he knew too that his solitary struggle against the prevailing cultural and bureaucratic tide would get him nowhere. But he didn’t mind, reasoning that he may as well say it while people were compelled to listen rather than afterwards, when he wouldn’t be heard.

‘We could monitor and assess ourselves into the ground until we do no spying at all,’ he had complained at one board meeting, ‘and no one would notice. But if ever we fail to account for how many women we have at senior grades or how many black and ethnic minorities we recruit, or the gender pay gap, all hell breaks loose.’