Back inside his flat, Knox emptied the crate onto the dining table and spread out the contents. He picked up the slim MI5 file on Bianchi and Moretti. It was scant. Copies of their passports, a few details about their daily routines, a police report for a night Moretti had spent in a cell for being drunk and disorderly a few months ago, and not much else.

Then, the rest of the crate: business cards for both men, an address book, and several bundles of paper, which Knox assumed must have been the ones scattered across the desk in their makeshift office.

Knox’s instincts told him he’d been given the edited lowlights. Nothing jumped out to him that justified Manning’s interest in their deaths, or even MI5’s surveillance of them, as light as it might have been. Manning was already tying his hands behind his back. It was frustrating. But it was all Knox had to work with, so it was where he had to start.

The business cards were elegant, but didn’t give away anything other than the Italians’ names and their address, which Knox already knew. There was no company or mysterious foreign phone number to call. The address book contained the details of several high-profile organisations, but they all matched the list Manning had reeled off in their makeshift study. There were no curious omissions or additions.

Of the four bundles of papers, three of them were written entirely in Italian, which Knox had never learned. The fourth appeared to be a series of mathematical equations, advanced enough to use symbols rather than letters or numbers—another language Knox couldn’t read. It wouldn’t have taken much to get the Italian pages translated. Knox only needed to walk a few hundred yards to Bar Italia, the twenty-four-hour Italian cafe on Frith Street, buy an espresso, and call in one of the many favours the cafe’s waiters owed him. He knew he could rely on their tact—he’d owed them his fair share of favours over the years for secrets they’d kept and indiscretions they hadn’t held against him—but he decided it probably wasn’t worth the security risk in case the papers did end up containing something important. He’d have to send them on through official channels and wait for someone to be assigned to translating them.

The equations, however, he might be able to get help with sooner.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5