I did know this: MI6 was in turmoil. The same thoughts came back to me that had spun around my head as I pivoted upside down in the ship’s hold: no one was above suspicion. That was the truth of it. The fact that Frank had kept Whitehall out of the loop was proof, if ever it was needed, that the men in charge – and men, to a man, they were – ran their own shows, for their own reasons. And even if the bad apple could be singled out, the rot rarely stopped where you could see it. I’d always been too focused on the job in hand, too occupied with tactics to consider strategy, let alone embroil myself in intrigue. If MI6 was rotten, I had no idea how far the contagion might have spread – if indeed it had at all.

Sure, the chairs around the national security poker table at Vauxhall Cross were rearranged every so often. And when the music stopped, some of those men in charge were amazed to discover they no longer had a seat at the game – even, recently ‘C’ himself, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. But when the stakes are as high as national survival, shuffling the players doesn’t clean up the game if men like Frank make sure the hands are only ever dealt from a stacked deck. Do what thou wilt had become the whole of their law, as it had mine when I ran to Doc.

I reread the story in the paper I’d picked up in Ashford. It was illuminating, in so far as it was inaccurate in almost every detail. You could always rely on journalists to get everything wrong. Which was nothing if not alarming, given that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ counted on them for an astonishing amount of their information. The piece asked the usual simplistic questions. ‘Are the Troubles going to blow up again?’ (Answer: ‘It’s Ireland; you never can tell.’) And, ‘Is this the work of a dissident lone wolf?’ (Answer: ‘It’s Ireland; you never can tell.’) Over the following eight hundred words the reporter supposed the attack part of an obscure Irish Republican feud – which, because it wasn’t, rendered the entire write-up extravagantly absurd. The article attributed the release of my name and photograph to unnamed ‘security sources’, while simultaneously stating that ‘British and Irish intelligence services had declined to comment’.

I bet they had.