“Found you.” Peter’s cheek was cold. When he didn’t reply, I said, “Not in the States then? Not having a spiritual crisis with the lay brothers?”

“Forgive her. I think she heard about them on Radio Four.”

“They know you’re here then?”

“I shouldn’t have come, but I wanted to see them. To explain.” He sounded tired, like someone at the end of a long, hard-fought race they hadn’t won.

“What’s going on, Peter? What is it you have to explain? What have you done?”

What Peter—tight-lipped Peter—had done was talk. Or more accurately, he had downloaded files, financial statements, client information, and internal memos from the company he worked for, from the corporate service provider with the half-foreign name. Like me, Peter had been playing detective. In his case, he’d been matching offshore accounts with shell corporations, detailing transactions, logging the money as it flowed upstream and downstream, from the Gulf and China, from Russia and Mexico, from the hands of politicians, public officials, and oligarchs into shell corporations in tax havens. Corruption. Bribery. Tax evasion. Money laundering. Money siphoned from aid projects, environmental protection projects, public services. Profits from illegal deals, from violated trade sanctions, the vast sums of the arms and drug trades. Then he’d leaked it, drip by drip and then finally in a gushing flood, to a pair of journalists from the Guardian.

“In the beginning, it was like a secret vice. Seeing it in the news, knowing it was me. Watching the people around me getting rattled.”

“So you’re hiding from the police? Or your colleagues?”

“Actually, it’s the Russians. Mafia clients of ours. Predictably they aren’t too keen on having their dirty laundry exposed. It’s not that they’re worse than anyone else, only the Russians are prepared to do something about it. To stop the leaks, I mean. They throw people off buildings. Everyone knows it. There were four suicides after the leaks broke. A fixer working for one of our brokers came off a multistory car park. They always say it’s suicide, but I don’t believe it. It doesn’t add up.”

“The broker, was his name Ward Collier? I was there. I saw it.”

“Collier worked for a rival fund. I don’t know how he was involved…” Peter swallowed. His voice was hoarse. “Andy, my phone was tapped. I was followed. After the wedding, I went home and someone had been in my flat. Then there were two men in a black car. I saw them twice. Once outside my building, then the same car with the same men waiting for me in a side street at my work. I knew. I just knew. Did anyone follow you here?”

“How could anyone follow me? No one knows I’m here.”

“You hired a fucking private detective.”