For two days Knox was grilled by interrogators in Leconfield House, and, he assumed, shadowed by Watchers, the Service’s leg men, whose job it was to keep an eye on persons of interest. Knox refused again and again to admit where he’d been on Sunday night, claiming that Holland himself had sworn him to secrecy. Eventually, the interrogators gave up, and a summary review board was convened. Knox didn’t expect to emerge unscathed, and he didn’t.

He took another swig of his beer. It was warm and flat. He needed another one.

‘Well, that didn’t take long,’ a voice above him said.

Knox looked up from his glass at Nicholas Peterson.

‘Come to rub it in, Nicholas?’

‘The DG wants to see you,’ Peterson replied. His voice was a clipped, officious staccato.

Peterson was the right-hand man of Gordon Manning, the newly installed acting director general. His garish Prince of Wales check suit, currently in fashion among a certain type of civil servant, looked very out of place in the middle of the Gresham Arms. Peterson was, according to Knox, a subservient, bureaucratic yes-man who had no business being anywhere near MI5. They did not get on.

‘You just suspended me.’

‘The Service suspended you.’

Of course.’ Knox reached out to finish the dregs of his beer, but thought better of it. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want anything,’ Peterson replied, ‘Manning does.’

‘Well, he knows where to find me.’

‘Don’t be tedious, Richard. He’s offering you a way back in.’

‘Really? Thanks, but I think I’m done.’

‘You’re done when the Service says you’re done. You’re suspended, not fired,’ Peterson said. ‘And when you are fired, you’ll have a résumé almost entirely covered by the Official Secrets Act.’

Knox caved. He knew Peterson was right. He couldn’t just walk away from MI5 after fifteen years, and deep down he didn’t want to.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Deptford.’

‘Jesus,’ Knox said, smoothing back his hair and picking up his jacket. ‘It must be serious.’

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The further east they went, the worse the city looked. From the alabaster facades of Mayfair and Westminster to the shuttered shops and Blitz bomb craters of Lewisham, Knox watched the city decline through the window of Peterson’s MI5 standard-issue Ford Consul as he did his best to sober up.

‘We’ve never had it so good,’ he said to himself, parroting Harold Macmillan’s favourite slogan as he watched an old, broken-backed woman lean over to brush her cracked and pitted front step. Peterson ignored him.

Half an hour after leaving Whitehall the car pulled into a narrow turning off Deptford High Street and stopped outside a low-rise tenement block.