‘If you always had this kind of kompromat on our new prime minister, why did you need to pay him?’

‘As well as being profoundly immoral, your prime minister is extremely greedy. At the time, we were not certain even the kompromat was enough.’

‘How do we know the video isn’t fake?’

‘Because when you see it you will know it is not.’

‘Let me watch it now.’

‘No. Only when they have accepted our offer.’

Kate finished her cigarette, stood up and went to the window. She watched the shifting eddies in the water below. ‘You have a nerve, I’ll give you that. Why should I trust you at all? I recruited Lena Sabic. She was a blameless young girl who’d had life stacked against her. I bullied and blackmailed her to come and work for you. And you murdered her. You cut her throat and left her for me to find in Greece.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

Kate wasn’t listening. ‘And then, when my beloved friend Rav had managed to unearth some evidence of those payments you made to our prime minister, you murdered him, too, and tried to make it look like suicide by hanging the poor bastard from the light flex in his flat.’

‘Not my decision, either.’

Kate turned to him. ‘So, just to be really clear about this, hell will freeze over before I do anything to facilitate your very kind offer.’

‘Is that so? We ask for nothing but a passport and protection in return for the greatest gift any intelligence agency has ever been offered and you turn me down flat? What would your superiors make of that?’

‘Right now, I don’t care.’

‘I don’t believe you. You want to know how your file in Moscow Centre concludes? The most conscientious – and ambitious – officer currently working for MI6 in London, tipped to be the first female head of the Secret Intelligence Service. A woman who regularly drives herself well above and beyond the call of duty, an officer who always appears to be trying to prove herself to someone or something, whose life has been dominated by the single-minded pursuit of exceptionality.’ He looked at her steadily, daring her to deny it. ‘And yet you want me to believe that this same officer is going to turn down an offer of such gravity without even passing it on to her superiors?’ Mikhail shook his head. He held himself with the poised self-confidence common to all old Etonians. And, unlike his father and many others in Moscow, he had a sophisticated understanding of Western institutions and social mores, gained while he was educated in Britain, which had been Igor’s intention.

‘If I’m as ambitious as you say, I’d keep it to myself. You think my bosses want to know that you have cast-iron evidence their new prime minister is a Russian spy? They had a heart attack at the idea he might be. Certainty would kill them.’

‘Come on, Kate.’

‘You can call me Mrs Henderson.’