Home. The word cut him like a blade. Because where was ‘home’ now? Certainly not in the Battersea riverside flat any more. An orphan since the age of ten, Luke had almost no family to fall back on. So if he was not going to return there where was he going to sleep tonight – at the Battersea Travelodge? Bedding down in a lonely bachelor’s room for one while the traffic sped past beneath his window? His spirits sank lower still.

‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘Let’s get on with this, shall we? What’s the update on Jenny?’

Angela grimaced. ‘Everyone’s taken it pretty badly,’ she said, as they walked together towards the lifts, ‘but Jenny’s a fighter. She’s out of the induced coma, and they’re saying she’ll pull through. We’re still trying to find out what actually happened at the Ivanovsky. It does look like it might have been an accident, but you can imagine how C feels about this.’ She stood back as the lift doors pinged open and two people got out. ‘Right now we’re just trying to make sure one of our people is keeping an eye on her around the clock. Let’s not forget that the FSB tried to finish off Navalny with Novichok when he was in Omsk Hospital in the summer of 2020.’

She pressed a lift button and turned to face him. ‘Right. Down we go.’

They took the lift, not up to the operations room but to a part of the building Luke had never been to before, a place two floors below the ground. He reckoned they must be about on a level with the surface of the Thames at low tide, right beneath Vauxhall Bridge, not that you could tell in this soundproofed, windowless corridor. For an instant he experienced an unwelcome flashback to a lockup garage in a Moscow suburb, to a place where a man had agreed to cooperate under great duress. Hell, Luke still hadn’t come to terms with that one and there were no excuses for it. If this ever got out he’d find himself in court before he knew it, and he couldn’t expect any top cover from this lot.

‘I don’t believe,’ said Angela, ‘you’ve been into Area D before.’ She indicated the featureless corridor they were walking down. ‘Well, this is it. There are rooms down here that you and I will never, ever visit, right up to the day we hand in our passes.’

‘Why are we here, Angela?’ He tried to keep the tiredness and exasperation out of his voice, but realized he must have sounded quite irritable. ‘Sorry, you were probably just about to tell me.’

‘I was. I’m taking you to the Stage.’ They had stopped in front of a plain steel door with a cardkey access system.

‘The Stage?’ He looked at her questioningly.