But I don’t. Instead, I hitch myself up, pull my hair out of the way and hover an ear over his heart to listen. He is definitely breathing. It is there, soft but even, the rhythm of someone deeply asleep. To the best of my judgement, it is the kind of sleep-breathing that is hard to fake.

I slip off the bed and step onto the cold wood, sweeping my clothes from the chair and my shoes and bag from the floor as I move. The door gives a small creak as I open it, but George doesn’t stir. I wince when it creaks again as I close it behind me and enter the sitting room.

I look around me as I dress. Given my impromptu invitation to the pub, and the unplanned blow to the head, George clearly didn’t have time to prepare for a guest. The utter mess in this flat is endearing, compared to Zac’s hyper-ordered ways.

The sitting room sofa is covered in a mix of discarded coats, carrier bags that haven’t been unpacked, and two laptops, both closed. The floor is a gauntlet of books, piled so high any of them could tip at a puff of air. If one of these books is a fake shell for storing things, finding it would be as easy as locating a specific grain of sand on an endless beach. I step carefully between the piles, in dread of the crash that would come if one were to topple.

My ever-persistent secret voice is saying, Stop it, Holly. You like him. He’s searching the Deep Dark Web for you with his VPN. Even if you are suspicious of his ability to do this, not every man is a Zac. But a louder secret voice is saying, Then he has nothing to worry about. It doesn’t hurt to be cautious. And you’ve learned the danger of not being.

I examine the spines of some of the books. Dickens . . . Hardy . . . the Brontës. Is it a coincidence that George has so many of my favourites? Mixed in among these are odd volumes in other languages. I pick out French, Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian. The last two make me even more certain that this man is no ordinary computer geek.

I don’t have any equipment with me, but I have a basic app on my phone for detecting hidden cameras. I aim it at the most obvious places – television, computer, light fixtures, the thermostat knob, a wall clock, even the pens scattered across his desk and the car-lock remote mixed up in them. Nothing pings the sweeper app, but if George is British intelligence, his surveillance tools are likely to be immune to any detector of mine.