I was guided to the address Niall Connor had given me, buried in the South Downs, off a side road between Petworth and Fittleworth. The house had a frontage of Georgian rect-angular symmetries. A gravelled parking area surrounded a circular space of carefully cultivated wild-flower garden. It looked familiar. I somehow felt I had encountered its perfection before.

One o’clock had been suggested and I arrived on the dot, just as I would have done for a business meeting. Perhaps this was a business meeting. I wouldn’t be able to say until Niall Connor told me what he wanted to talk about.

I had to wait before my ring at the old-fashioned bell-pull was answered and the way Niall Connor slouched against the doorway suggested the delay had been deliberate. His keeping me waiting expressed some kind of power game or one-upmanship. He had the look of someone who liked to be in control.

Not wanting to make the mistake I had with Ingrid Richards, I’d done my Wikipedia homework on him. In many ways, their journalistic careers had followed similar trajectories, though he was some eight years younger. They had covered many of the same wars and conflicts and had no doubt been frequently thrown together in terrifying circumstances. Offering plenty of opportunities for we-might-die-tomorrow sexual encounters.

Niall Connor’s journalistic career had been hugely successful. He’d won lots of awards for his intrepid reportage. His greatest coup had been in 1986, when he’d sprung the British hostage, fellow journalist Paul McClennan, from his captors in Beirut. As soon as I saw the name the details came back to me. The escape plan had involved Niall Connor in complex secret contacts, bribery of McClennan’s captors, a hazardous drive across the war-torn city with the released hostage in his car boot and smuggling him on to an aeroplane. The climax had been a triumphal media-crowded arrival to Heathrow. The photograph of Niall Connor raising the arm of Paul McClennan as they stepped off the plane was one of the iconic images of the 1980s, almost on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The exploit had led to a predictable circus of press and television coverage. The inevitable book had followed, written by Niall Connor ‘with the cooperation of Paul McClennan’. It sold in its millions to a public who seemed in those days to have an insatiable appetite for hostage stories. There was even a movie, in which the parts of Connor and McClennan were taken by two very good-looking Hollywood A-listers.

This daring escapade had raised Niall Connor’s status from a respected English war correspondent to an internationally known guru of journalism. His byline on a report was highly sought-after the world over. That one scoop had also considerably raised his market value and the success of the hostage story had a powerful effect on the sales of the many books he subsequently produced about various international wars and crises.

Paul McClennan soon dropped off the public radar. Traumatized by his hostage experience, he had no taste for the ferocious public scrutiny it brought him. He gave up journalism and, after a series of mental breakdowns, changed his name and lived the life of a recluse.