‘No, Pa. You listen. I’m helping. I want to help. Those bairns deserve everything I got, and more. So do you, and so does Ma. So why don’t you just let me? I’m sorry, Pa. I’m sorry if I’m doing better than y—’ Billy stopped. His father’s face was suddenly crestfallen. Perhaps he had taken it too far. He set his glass down and muttered, ‘Sorry, Pa, this bourbon’s stronger than I reckoned. It’s gone straight to my head. I’m going to bed now. It’s Christmas in the morning. I always loved Christmas.’

Billy did not turn back, not even as his mother came back into the room. Upstairs, he threw himself onto his bed, with fists clenched at his side. Through the walls his brothers and sisters were still chattering. By God, he missed the pure innocent magic of Christmas.

Innocence. Now, there was a word. Billy tried to ignore it, but he could still hear his father as he closed his eyes to go to sleep. There’s right and there’s wrong. Well, Billy had always known it. And taking tips from Mr Charles for eavesdropping on Lord Edgerton and his Fascist Union friends, copying down the contents of a few envelopes passed here and there, taking careful note of what Graf and Gräfin Schecht said about Mr Baldwin and Mr Chamberlain when they gathered for drinks in the hotel bars, had never seemed so very wrong to him. Billy was too young to remember the Great War, but he was not young enough that he couldn’t see the impression a war like that left on his father. Who would want the world to slide into another war like that? And if the titbits he picked up in the hotel might help Mr Charles in whatever glorious endeavour he was engaged in, well, Billy was proud to do it.

But then he thought of Vivienne Edgerton and Mr Simenon, his illicit trips to the Midnight Rooms, the phials he brought back. He thought of how she had cornered him in that suite, and the look of neediness and desperation on her face.

And the thing he had promised to do, all so that she would not tell.

Serving Mr Charles and whoever he was working for was one thing. That was a noble secret. But being in the service of Vivienne Edgerton? Betraying his friends, so that he himself might not be betrayed? Well, that was quite another.

What if I don’t do it? he wondered. The thought kept him awake long into the night. If I say no? Well, then she tells Mr Charles who’s been supplying her, and then . . . then it’s my neck on the chopping block, then it’s me being marched out of the Buckingham without even a letter of recommendation to my name.