The disembodied eyes returned one day: now I saw they were attached to a man in a white coat, white gauze mask, white hood, white gloves. I couldn’t speak to him, and he didn’t say anything to me - just checked my tubes and wrote things down on a white pad. I thought that my hearing must have gone again at some point, because every sound was amplified. When he moved his foot on the linoleum, it was like a coin dropping in a well.

I no longer felt pain - physical pain, that is. I thought about Anna every day, every hour. And grieved for myself, and the life I’d wasted.

Another man came to see me after that, wearing the same garb. It was Smale.

‘You survived,’ he said. ‘They didn’t think you would.’

I watched his eyes. Narrow and slanted, they seemed to me to be the kind of eyes that would belong to a small ugly grey fish. I tried to imagine the face of such a fish, and fitted it behind his mask.

‘You were extremely lucky,’ said the fish. ‘You were in a medical facility when it happened. You were out for a minute and a half - your heart even stopped beating. The wog doctor you came with declared you dead. But then you came to - almost as if you had heard us and weren’t willing to go.’

The fish paused. ‘Of course, a lot of people have been hoping you wouldn’t make it.’ He looked away contemplatively. ‘Not me, though. We’d lose so much valuable information.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Let’s get your clothes sent up, shall we? We’ve an important meeting to get to.’

London looked exactly the same: office workers jumped around puddles and struggled with umbrellas. We sploshed through the streets in the black Bentley. I sat in the back in my old suit, my hands cuffed to two soldiers sitting either side of me. Smale was up in front. Near Piccadilly Circus Underground, we stopped at some lights and I glimpsed the headlines at a newspaper kiosk. ‘THE PRIME MINISTER AND MOSCOW: LATEST REVELATIONS! ’ blared the poster for The Times, while The Telegraph had the more subdued: ‘MOUNTBATTEN SUSPENDS ARMS TO NIGERIA’.

‘Mountbatten?’

Smale turned back to look at me, his eyes dead. ‘He formed a government a couple of weeks ago.’

I couldn’t think what to say. ‘Wilson wasn’t KGB’ was what eventually came out.

‘Really?’ Smale replied, with a smile soaked in aspic. ‘Did you believe everything your handler told you?’ Then he turned away again and told the driver to take a right at the next junction.