‘In what way?’

‘Just this nameless sense of dread, of being permanently on guard and anxious, as if someone is about to come around the corner and shoot me at any moment or, worse, the children.’

‘And you say you felt like this before the events of six months ago, your husband’s betrayal and the deaths of the young woman you recruited as an agent, then your deputy, Ravindra?’

Kate hesitated. Unburdening herself was painful. She felt as if she was standing on the edge of a precipice and all she could see was how far there was to fall. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘When would you say it started?’ He was looking at her over his glasses.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you feel anxious as a child?’

‘No. I was pretty confident.’

‘One can be confident and anxious.’

There was a long silence. Kate stared at the floor as she racked her brains. And suddenly it was as if a window opened to allow a chink of light into the darkness. ‘I guess I was, yes. Anxious, I mean.’

‘About what?’

‘Not the usual things, like exams. I was pretty cool about all that. I didn’t mind very much what other people thought of me, either. I wasn’t anxious about friendships, or whether anyone did or didn’t like me or approve of what I was doing. But . . . I suppose loss . . . death.’

‘Loss of what? Or whom?’

Kate thought hard about that, too. It was bloody difficult casting her mind back across the years and trying to unravel the complex weave of thought and emotion. ‘Death, generally. The loss of someone or some people I loved, or of letting them down in some way. My own death, too, I suppose. Just the vagaries and impermanence of human existence. There were times when that uncertainty, the unpredictability of life, was paralysing.’

‘Did you fear you would lose your mother?’

‘No. I never had a relationship with her. I wasn’t close to her as a young child, and after I learnt of her infidelity – she had a long-running affair with my best friend’s father, a guy called David – I would say I came actively to hate her. I was brought up by my father. I understood from an early age that my mother was unreliable and often quite undermining, even poisonous.’

‘Did your father challenge that?’

‘No. That was the only issue I ever really had with him. I could never understand how he could love my mother. And, particularly, how he could go on loving her after she had treated him so badly. But he just quietly took me out of her orbit, which wasn’t difficult because she is the most self-absorbed and, indeed, selfish woman I have ever met.’

‘You were worried about losing your father, then?’

Kate had never thought about it like that. ‘Yes, I suppose I was.’ She stared at her hands. ‘I definitely was. I had no siblings, so I guess my father was all I had. I was petrified something would happen to him.’