Simpson was smaller and broader in the flesh than she appeared on television and looked quite a few years older, too, with thick-rimmed reading glasses on a chain around her neck and a tight bob of grey hair. She wore barely any make-up and betrayed few signs of vanity. She looked flustered to have arrived last.

‘Let’s begin,’ the prime minister said, as if they were about to have a party.

Sir Alan stood up. He sure as hell wasn’t the entertainment. ‘As you know, we scheduled this meeting yesterday evening, before the events in Narva. We had received a tipoff from a reliable source that the Russians were about to roll the dice again. Our working assumption is that the GRU is the agency responsible and they appear to be following the playbook that worked so well for them in Crimea: create unrest, claim the local Russian minority is under threat, and intervene.’

Sir Alan had the remote control for one of the screens at the end of the table and he flicked it on. It was showing the feed from PCR2 on SIS’s internal server, which Danny must have switched out to line. ‘This is a farm in a small village called Puhlova, which was bought from a local man by a firm registered in Helsinki some months ago. The true owner is hidden behind so many holding companies that it will take us some time to get to the bottom of it, but I think we can safely assume we will find it’s one or other agency of the Russian state.’

Sir Alan zoomed in on the muddy ground and moved to point at the screen. ‘It’s hard to make out unless you look very closely, but you can see here the tyre tracks of lorries or heavy trucks. Our understanding is that the Night Wolves – which is a Russian paramilitary group mainly made up of veterans from the war in Chechnya and closely allied with the Kremlin – have stored enough weapons here to mount a serious challenge to the Estonian state.’

‘Looks like any other farm,’ the prime minister said. ‘What have they got hidden in there? Pitchforks?’ He was smiling, as if this was still some kind of joke.

‘We don’t know yet.’ Sir Alan closed down the feed and clicked on another. ‘Kate here and her team found this hotel nearby on the Baltic, which we think at least some of the Night Wolves are staying in.’

‘Looks tempting,’ the prime minister said. Kate glanced from one man to the other. It was hard to imagine that these two had once been school friends. If they were faking their disdain for each other, they were great actors.

Sir Alan flicked on Sky News, which was still showing pictures of last night’s violence. ‘We have no doubt that the original attempt to pull down the statue of Lenin, which of course triggered the protests and then the counter-violence, will have been orchestrated from Moscow. Indeed, the entire event, from beginning to end, appears to have been their work.’