‘Luke, if this is about you finishing somebody off in cold blood I really don’t want to know. It might be just part of the job for you, but I’d rather you spared me the details.’ She tucked into her avocado on toast and ate it noisily while glancing around distractedly.

There. She had just offered him an off-ramp right there. He could take it with both hands and she’d be none the wiser. But, no, he loved her, and he wanted to make a clean breast of it: this bloody secret kept gnawing away at his conscience and he felt he owed her the truth.

‘No, Lise, I’m afraid it’s something else. Something a bit more personal than that. Something that affects us both.’ Come on, Carlton, spit it out. You’re only prolonging the agony here for both of you. ‘Look, I’m really sorry,’ he said, ‘but the fact is … the fact is I slept with someone over there.’ Total silence. ‘In Iran,’ he added pointlessly.

Slept with someone? There hadn’t been any sleeping involved as he remembered it. It had been a moment of pure carnal lust between him and Tannaz, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer, someone he was supposed to have been protecting. They had needed each other that morning in the Bandar Abbas safe house, but he knew full well that that didn’t wash. What he had done that day was inexcusable. The fact that Tannaz hadn’t survived the ensuing firefight a few days later made their brief union in that hot Gulf bedroom all the more poignant. But he chose to spare Elise that particular detail.

He waited. Her reaction, when it came, was not what Luke was expecting.

Elise didn’t blink. She reached out an arm and Luke braced himself for the stinging slap across the face that he knew he deserved. But instead she stroked his cheek once more. Wow. He hadn’t seen that coming.

‘It’s okay, Luke. I guessed something like that must have happened.’

‘You did? But you never said anything.’ How come women are so good at knowing these things, and us guys are just crap? he thought.

‘Call it a girl’s intuition, I don’t know,’ she said mildly, looking away towards the window for a moment. ‘Anyway …’ she wiped her lips with a napkin ‘… that was delish,’ she pronounced. ‘And I have some news of my own.’

‘You do?’ Elise’s behaviour was unnerving him: she was taking this suspiciously calmly. Luke, on the other hand, was finding it hard to hide his anxiety. He began rubbing the missing-finger joint beneath the table, as he so often did in moments of stress.