‘Those aren’t the only kinds of agents we recruit.’

‘Nice of you to say. I’d be a rubbish informant, and I don’t have access to any intelligence you could possibly be interested in.’ I concentrated on the soft slap of the water as it gently rolled in and out.

‘You have integrity – the qualities that made you want to join us in the first place.’

‘I meant it about skipping the flattery section of your script. You don’t think I have a single atom of integrity. You remember why I bombed my MI5 interview.’

She ignored this unseemly reminder with the tact of a hostess managing an awkward guest. ‘We are authorised to make arrangements of this nature, Holly, in order to detect or prevent a crime, protect national security, or in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK.’

‘Is that some kind of legal document they made you memorise?’

‘Again, you are correct.’

‘What is this really about, Maxine?’

‘Your new boyfriend is Zachary Hunter.’

I was trailing my index finger over the gold lettering on Jane Eyre’s cover, then tracing the edge of the oval portrait of Charlotte between the title and the author’s name. ‘You obviously know that he is.’

‘So you know about his ex-wife?’

‘I know she left him.’ I followed a fishing boat with my eyes, a speck whose ghost-shape outline I could still see, imprinted from when it had been closer to land.

‘Does he know where she is?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘It’s been tried. The experiment was not successful.’

I shrugged. ‘Well why should he know? The fact that she’s not in his life is pretty normal, given the circumstances. That’s how it is with most people after a relationship ends. Not to mention the fact he divorced her on the grounds of desertion.’

If Maxine were given to expressiveness, I couldn’t help but feel that she would be rolling her eyes. ‘She’s classified as a missing person. Did he tell you that the police questioned him about her disappearance?’

There was a trickle of sweat down my spine. ‘The police always question previous partners. There can’t have been any evidence against him or they’d have charged and tried him.’ Then, the obvious thing, the thing I should have asked first, came to me. ‘Why do you care about this?’

‘I care about a missing woman.’

‘No you don’t. Even if you did, it’s not the kind of thing MI5 gets involved in.’

‘Believe what you like. You know it isn’t protocol for us to explain the reasons for what we do to potential informants with no security clearance. Do you know her name?’