“Sixteen, seventeen.” Taylor reached out to grind the cigarette against the brickwork before flicking it toward the street. She picked up her mug, moved to the sofa. “I thought he was a wonderful man. I don’t know why I protected him. It would have been the end of him, I suppose, and I didn’t believe he deserved that. In the context of everything I’d seen on this job, it seemed forgivable.”

Kane wondered how he would have responded. Possibly the same. Possibly he would have felt more exposed, as a man, collaborating on this cover-up.

“Know if he had previous?”

“Obviously, if there was a history of this kind of thing he would have been dropped by the intelligence service.”

“Not always the case.”

“Maybe not. I went to his home once, you know?” Taylor said. She sounded surprised as she said it.

“Really?”

“We developed a kind of friendship. Around the time everything was falling apart for me. I went to his house, in Shepherd’s Bush. It was incredibly empty, I thought. Incredibly lonely.”

“How had he been recently?”

“Not entirely well.”

“No more incidents?”

“I really hope not.”

Kane felt his memory of Rory Bannatyne coming into deeper focus. Like a lot of highly talented people, he didn’t entirely fit in the world of adults. He had a touch of Peter Pan to him, and perhaps the Pied Piper, too—not the first spy to draw on those personae. They were often the mercurial and charismatic ones. The service moved you from one job to another, each new mission allowing a fresh start, the fantasy of a fresh you. Rory reminded Kane of military acquaintances who gave the impression that an exterior persona had hardened so fast that it left something vulnerable inside, trapped beneath the shell. And then danger itself became a form of protection.

“You must have had risk assessments for the island, before he went over there,” Kane said.

“I was told to use existing ones produced for GCHQ. I couldn’t drop in a security team. Rory was experienced enough to keep an eye out as he went along. And it’s British territory. I’ve checked all travel in and out, searched for patterns that might suggest some kind of cell or hit team. There’s nothing. At the same time, obviously we’re having to check all data Rory had access to, all live projects.”

The intelligence service didn’t like people killing themselves. It responded as if it constituted a form of defection. This wasn’t entirely irrational: suicide pointed toward trouble—that could mean guilt over some double dealing, or fear of blackmail in an ongoing recruit attempt by a foreign power. Records of what an officer knew were kept up to date in case of emergency, to avoid the panicked trawls of years gone by: what operations might be compromised, which individuals were at risk of exposure.