Eliza doesn’t colour or hesitate. ‘I wish. I’d love you to meet him, but he’s flying to Edinburgh tomorrow afternoon.’

So I say yes to the make-your-own-pizza dinner, promising to meet them there after I finish work. ‘What a shame your husband will miss it.’

Her response is a vague and regretful nod, and I see that yet another of my attempts to introduce Zac into the conversation has led nowhere.

I cannot make up my mind if this is natural or deliberate. Is it normal never to say her husband’s name? Probably, I decide, at least at this early stage of friendship. When I glance at my watch and realise I need to be at the hospital in fifteen minutes, I am no closer to working out if Eliza is Zac’s co-conspirator, his victim, or oblivious to it all.

Then
Concealment

Two years and one month earlier

Cornwall, Early March 2017

The conversation between Milly and Scarlett was running on a loop in my head. Invisible hands seemed to haul me from the bed where I was curled, in a practically catatonic state, hair wet from my bath and in my nightdress. Those hands pushed me into the baby’s room, where I had a hiding place, a box stowed under a floorboard that I’d prised up. They pulled me down the stairs and into Zac’s ground-floor study. This was another camera-free zone, presumably because he didn’t want whatever he did in there to be filmed. They pressed me into his desk chair, where I sat and stared at the rusting latches of his old steamer trunk.

It was a heavy blue rectangle of aluminium, covered in dents. Zac claimed that the key was lost, but it didn’t matter, it only contained old notes from medical school, he’d break into it someday when he could be bothered. Like Bluebeard’s wife, I had tried every key I could find. Unlike her, I hadn’t found one that worked.

In my hands were the objects that I’d removed from my hidden box. An old book on locks and locksmithing that I’d ordered using the local library’s computer, and several sizes of flat-edged screwdrivers. I was also holding the burner phone I’d used to record Milly and Scarlett earlier that day, in case I needed its camera.

What I was about to do was an absolute betrayal of trust. It didn’t matter what Maxine called it. It didn’t matter whether the person was highly placed in British intelligence, or a handler, or a jealous husband, or a lowly human asset on the ground, or a suspicious girlfriend. I was the last two, but spying is spying, and it’s a shitty thing to do. I was certainly feeling shitty that Zac had been doing it to me.