A taciturn but pretty young woman with straight black hair came to meet her and escorted her to the prime minister’s office behind the Speaker’s chair. ‘I don’t know what the hell you people are playing at down there,’ she muttered. Kate wondered again at the supreme – and annoying – self-confidence young special advisers attached to Downing Street were wont to exude, as if they had just inherited the earth.

The prime minister rose from behind his desk as she entered and guided her to a seat in the deep green chair by the door. He didn’t bother to offer her tea or coffee. ‘Well?’ He sank on to the wide sofa opposite.

He ran a hand through his dishevelled hair as his special adviser curled up on the sofa opposite, long legs and short enough skirt just revealing the tops of lace stockings. She hadn’t offered her name. ‘You asked to see me, Prime Minister,’ Kate said, glancing at all the weighty tomes lining the bookshelves in the old-fashioned wood-panelled room. Kate thought of the much greater men and women who had occupied the office before him. How had it come to this?

‘Of course I asked to bloody see you.’

Kate wasn’t going to make this easy for him. If her career was to expire, as seemed likely, if not frankly inevitable, it was only reasonable to derive some enjoyment from its dying embers. She waited. So did he, but not for long. He could barely contain his rage and it was the first time she had ever really witnessed it. His temper was legendary. ‘Well, are you going to offer me an explanation or not?’

‘Of what, Prime Minister?’

‘Are you totally deranged?’ the PM said, as his special adviser glared at Kate, shifting in her seat, so that her skirt rode up another notch. He surely couldn’t be having an affair with her as well, she wondered idly.

Kate thought of that terrible video. Real or fake, true or false? So much seemed to ride on her judgement, her instincts. Had she believed in its credibility because she thought the character of the man she’d seen in it matched exactly that of the one before her? ‘We’ve been trying to do our duty,’ she said quietly.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ the special adviser spat at her.

The PM leant forward, elbows on knees, so his eyes seemed hooded and brooding as he awaited an answer. Kate thought he was ageing rapidly. ‘The former leader of the Russian SVR, Moscow’s equivalent to SIS—’

‘Yes, yes, I know what the bloody SVR is by now, for God’s sake. That’s something you have achieved in your determination to give yourself a starring role in my life story.’

‘He offered to defect.’

The PM just stared at her. ‘And?’