I tried to get my head above my heart again. It was pointless. I relaxed and hung there in a grotesque parody of a dirty-blond bat. Outside, metal banged and creaked. The air throbbed with the drone of a powerful engine. Once or twice I thought I could hear the muffled shouts of orders being given – but in what language or to what end I couldn’t tell. I continued to sway. I was definitely moving forward. Not fast, but the container was in perpetual, deliberate motion.

I closed my eyes and tried to add up what I knew – which wasn’t much. Doc Levy, dead; the figure of his assassin, fleet-footed, making good his escape; the phone call from Frank – if it had been him who’d called. I felt the knot of revenge tighten in my gut, and chided myself.

No, Max. Concentrate on what you know – not what you think you saw or heard.

But my focus wandered. In my mind’s eye I drew a bead with the old Martini–Henry on that little man running away and … and then came back to reality with a start.

Never make it personal.

It was one of Colonel Ellard’s rules that I’d never learned to obey. Personal was exactly what the job had become.

I didn’t know if the man I’d seen leaving that night had killed Doc. But whoever did murder him had left a deliberate calling card: another bullet to the heart – and not the head, as you’d expect from a professional. On the face of it, whoever had shot me up in Donegal had done for Doc, too. If that was true, then perhaps the gunman hadn’t fried. He’d survived.

Frank had sent me on a job to kill an old terrorist. Why, exactly, he wanted him dead I didn’t know – and Frank wasn’t saying. But he’d expected me to find something important in the cottage. Perhaps I had.

It wasn’t unusual, either, for Frank to act outside DSF’s chain of command – except for one defining fact: the kill was on home ground. Frank could run his shitshow wherever and whenever he liked, but absolutely not, as General King would say, ‘in bloody Blighty’. The job might have been across the border, but it didn’t matter. Ireland is Ireland, and different rules applied now that the war was over – for Whitehall, at least. Breaking them would have consequences.