What had made Rory suddenly curious, during his final days alive? Taylor turned back through Kudus’s notes. She reasoned that most of the people Moretti’s family were in contact with wouldn’t have known much themselves. Taylor had worked closely with the US in enough roles to have gained some insight into how things operated. Once above “top secret,” operations branched out into special access programs, each with its own security channel. That covered new weaponry research, special forces, black ops. You were read into the information compartments one by one. The idea was to prevent anyone but a tiny handful from having a complete picture.

The investigative journalist who’d done the digging was called Lee Perryman. According to his web page, Perryman was now a professor of journalism at Berkeley. Taylor called the office number on his university web page, listened to it ring for a minute, then left a message, asking him to get in touch with her.

She returned to the hanging at the heart of it all. In a wasteground behind a couple of foreclosed homes in Antelope Valley. Studying Google Maps, she tried to identify the wasteground in question on satellite view, but it looked like it was now a playing field.

“Was it on his way home?”

“I don’t think so, not according to the family. I can’t get a residential address. I think he may have been staying on-site.”

“No suggestion of what he might have been doing there?”

“Nothing that I can find.”

Hanged himself out of the blue . . .

She called the direct number she’d been given for the pathologist taking another look at Rory’s corpse, Dr. Alexandra Glenning.

“I wondered if you’d had any fresh insight,” Taylor said.

“I was about to call you,” Glenning said. “I can’t promise answers, but I may be able to give you some new questions. Can you come in? This is something that should probably be done in person.”

Saint Thomas’s was the major Westminster hospital, surreptitiously serving all manner of governmental needs, and as such it had secure areas: subterranean facilities, secret morgues, dedicated clinics. They also had pathologists vetted by the military and government to work on sensitive corpses.

Rory Bannatyne was a sensitive corpse. Taylor was met at the front, led through by Glenning herself, a brisk middle-aged woman with a Scots accent. Former army medic, Taylor guessed. She knew Glenning had overseen the Berezovsky autopsy and consulted on a couple of intelligence service suicides.

“The body’s been badly looked after. There’s traces of everyone who came into contact with it. Was he in military hands?”

“Yes.”

“On a plane?”

“Yes.

“Okay.”

They arrived at a postmortem examination room. It was operation-­theater white, with a camera and mic suspended above the slab, a twenty-seven-­inch screen at the side, infinite drawers and cupboards.