I was feeling depressed, and the weather wasn’t helping my mood. It had rained almost continuously throughout June, July and August, and the Indian summer the weathermen had promised us for September hadn’t turned up, although there appeared to be more curry houses than ever before, so maybe that was what they meant. I walked through steady drizzle, with my hands in my jacket pockets, and I couldn’t remember feeling so rotten. Everything right now was bloody rotten, and the days were getting short and the air was getting chilly, and there was a long, long winter ahead with nothing much to look forward to.

I was thirty-two years old, and in my eighth year as an agent for MI5. Eight summers ago had been a glorious summer, and I had spent most of it in Paris. That was where the MI5 talent spotters had stumbled across me, and decided I was a sufficiently unpleasant piece of work to fit nicely into their little company. Not that they’d bothered to ask me first: with a little co-operation from their chums in the Paris Sûreté, I was set up and flung into a Parisian slammer, with little hope of getting out until long past retirement age – unless I joined MI5.

To be completely accurate, it was a combination of greed and laziness that had put me into this situation in the first place, but for MI5 to demand a lifetime’s allegiance in return for their help, was, in my opinion, even more greedy. Mostly, I forgot about the background, and got on with my work, but there were occasions, like today, when I could think of a lot of other things I’d prefer to be doing, and I became morose.

I hate paperwork, and the assignment I was currently on was all paperwork. I had been attached to C4, the anti-terrorist division of MI5, with the task of preparing for my boss, MI5’s Director General, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope – better known as Fifeshire – what was to be virtually an encyclopaedia of terrorists in the United Kingdom. I think what he had in mind was one of those glossy coffee-table books, of the type that people like giving as presents to friends they know will never read them, called something like Fifeshire’s Compleat Terrorist, and featuring every known terrorist in bright colour, with a few lines of text on their breeding habits.