I am clear about why I am so furious. It is because he is habituated to lying, even when his cover has been broken. The intelligence officer in him – even if it is a force for good – will always trump everything else. It has become a part of his DNA, so that it is impossible to disentangle the role from any true feelings he may have. That line of Maxine’s is too blurry to see – you can’t even tell when you’re crossing it.

I shake my head so wildly my hair flies and slaps me in the face. ‘I’m done with men who spy on me. And lie about it.’ I open the door and walk through it without looking back.

Then
April Fool

Two years earlier

Cornwall, 1 April 2017

Eight days after I met Maxine in the park, two things appeared in the canister in the gorse. Both were the very opposite of what I’d hoped to find.

The first thing was a typed report outlining what the hotel’s CCTV revealed. It was the first classified document Maxine had ever shared with me, the sort of thing I used to dream about being trusted with, but it left me feeling sick rather than triumphant.

Upon entering the hotel, the pregnant woman went straight into the bar. She arrived at the same time as Zac, and they were then escorted to a table. They kissed on the cheek when they greeted each other and when they parted. No other physical contact between them was observed. Their hands were visible at all times during these interactions. Informant A – me, presumably – came briefly into the frame. The woman exited the bar and hotel directly, after spending one hour and fifty-five minutes with Zac. She didn’t stop or touch anything on her way in or out. The woman was not deemed to be a person of interest.

After the woman left the hotel, Zac walked through the lobby. There, he bumped into an unidentified man in what had a high probability of being a brush pass, though this was clumsily executed by Zac, who appeared not to be experienced at tradecraft. They were not able to trace or identify this man, and the facial recognition software did not produce a match. The possibility that the man had used heavy make-up could not be discounted. After a brief visit to his room at 9 p.m., Zac ate dinner alone in the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant, looking at his phone and reading a book before returning to the room shortly before 2 a.m. He didn’t leave the hotel at all that evening.