I thought of what Isaac Mills had said about the nine Black Gale villagers, and how Vale had spent two weeks bringing them here one by one. I remembered my own experience of getting here, of the one that Jo had described too: engine noise, a cramped, coffin-like space. We’d both been drugged, been confused, disordered, our eyes had been covered, our ears, our senses suppressed, but we remembered the coffin. And then I thought of Adrian Vale pretending to be Robert Zaid, getting away with the assimilation of someone else’s identity, and, despite Zaid’s huge wealth, choosing to work a day job at the Foreign Office. It had always sat uncomfortably with me, but I’d just come to accept that it was because those first ten years he spent abroad at embassies and high commissions gave Vale the breathing room he needed. It gave him the space to properly convince the world that he was Robert Zaid, before he returned home again. And maybe that was a part of it.

But it wasn’t all of it.

As I closed in on the road sign, I thought of the email I’d seen in Zaid’s house from a company called Parsonfield, and I remembered recognizing the name but not being sure from where. And then, finally, I thought of the sequence I could never figure out.

G76984Z.

I stopped in front of the sign, out of breath, nauseous, and looked at the name of the nearest town to here, and the number next to it, the distance I’d have to go to get there: 43. I could see the road unfurling ahead of me, a stripe of asphalt that extended so far into the distance, it eventually ceased to exist. There were no other cars coming. There were no towns anywhere close.

I dropped to my knees as everything rushed me at once: in the photograph I’d seen on the wall of his home, where he’d been standing in front of a Gulfstream jet, he hadn’t just bought the jet, he’d actually learned to fly it; the reason he worked at the Foreign Office was so he could gain a diplomatic passport, allowing him to bypass customs checks and luggage searches; Parsonfield wasn’t a company, it was an airstrip south of London; G76984Z wasn’t a map reference, it was the tail number on Vale’s Gulfstream; and it wasn’t a real coffin we’d been transported in, it was a compartment inside his jet.

And then there was the car that passed me earlier, that I’d missed as I’d run so desperately through the grass: it had been left-hand drive. Its registration plate had been foreign. It didn’t belong in the UK because we weren’t in the UK.

We were an ocean away.