I considered the fact that Zac had lied to me about how long he spent in the bar with the woman. He said an hour, but the CCTV said it was twice that. The report juddered in my hand, because I was trembling at the hard evidence that Zac had given someone that micro SD card, probably with his home-made pornography on it.

The second thing in the canister resembled a micro memory stick. It was wrapped in a note from Maxine that she’d secured with an ordinary elastic band. Plug this portable drive into his laptop for half an hour. It needn’t be turned on. V important. Do it ASAP. M.

Absolutely no word about getting me out of there. I shook my head in a kind of fury as I tore up the report and Maxine’s note, then dropped them into the sea. I’d hoped to find preparations for my escape in the canister, rather than Maxine’s never-ending to-do list. I sucked at being a spy, and I hated it. It wasn’t lost on me that the thing I’d always wanted to do and be had become a burden, even in this diminished version that had somehow swallowed me up and seemed ready to spit me out in small and bloody pieces.

Zac phoned to say he was going to have a drink with Omar after work tonight, and he would be late because Omar’s wife was not pregnant and Omar was feeling extremely low. This presented me with an unexpected opportunity, so I decided to spend some time in the garden, a place where I wouldn’t be filmed or recorded.

I made myself comfortable on a white-painted iron chair, putting a cushion down before I sat and trying not to be sidetracked by the curses against Maxine that had been going round and round in my head since opening the canister that morning.

The new moon was barely visible in the early evening light. I wanted to follow up on a detail that had been prickling at me since I read the newspaper article in the British Library, though I was prepared to abandon my plan if Zac made one of his surprise early returns. In my lap was a burner phone which I would stash beneath a nearby rose bush if I heard his car.

My first step was to phone the Blackwater Hotel – with my own number blocked, of course. I asked to speak to the manager, Mr Murphy, but the receptionist told me he’d since left. That was welcome news, though I’d known there was a good chance of it, given how many years had passed since Zac and Jane’s visit to Ireland. She connected me instead to the new manager, Mr Byrne.