‘And what would you like today?’ she continued. ‘We have twenty-one varieties at The Empress. Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Assam, Lapsang Souchong, Ceylon Orange Pekoe, Rose Pouchong—’

Knox held up his hand to stop her. ‘Coffee will be fine.’

The waitress departed, and Knox turned his attention to the window and the water beyond it. A large ferry was pulling up to its moorings as smaller ones, each no larger than a delivery van, criss-crossed the harbour. Occasionally, the boats were joined by a sight that couldn’t be witnessed anywhere else on the planet: planes. Victoria Harbour wasn’t just a seaport, it was also an international airport—the only one in the world whose runway was made of water.

Seaplanes arrived and left from the docks just a few yards in front of The Empress. Some made the short hop over to Vancouver and back, others the slightly longer one over the border with America to Seattle. And a few privately owned ones did both, whenever they wanted. Knox had been sent all the way from London to find one particular plane that fell into that last category.

He’d taken the half-hour trip from Vancouver to Victoria himself the night before. His recent travels around the world had mostly cured his old fears of flying—a result of living in London through the Blitz, then being shuttled between combat zones in military transports in the last days of World War Two. But, seeing how small and flimsy the seaplanes looked in the light of day, he was glad his first experience in one had been under cover of darkness.

Knox’s selection of sandwiches, which were delivered on a three-tiered gold and china plate stand, were delicious. The coffee, unfortunately, was not. It was too weak, and there was far too much of it—a subtle sign, Knox thought, that betrayed how popular Vancouver Island had become with American holidaymakers.

The couple at the next table got up to leave and, keeping an eye on the harbour, Knox reached over and picked up the papers they’d left behind.

The local taste in coffee might have owed more to Canada’s closest neighbour than her European heritage, but her news definitely didn’t. The front-page headlines were split between two stories. First, the continued reeling about the snap election Harold Wilson, the British Labour Prime Minister, had called last month in a desperate—or sensible, depending on which editorial you read—attempt to increase his single-figure majority in the Commons. And second, the latest problems Ian Smith was stirring up in Rhodesia, which had recently declared independence, severed ties with Britain and—again, depending on the paper—seemed to be trying its best to derail the polite and orderly decline of the Empire.