‘He’ll be with you for the rest of your life,’ she’d told Knox when he’d said he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to his best friend. ‘You need to carry more than his death.’

Knox went back to work, but without Williams it felt like there was an invisible wall around him, an impenetrable distance between him and everyone else that only Holland, sometimes, could cross.

Since then Knox had stepped away from running all but the most important active operations—like Calder Hall—and dedicated more and more time to sifting through MI5’s past. It had given him a focus, a purpose, but it had also widened the gulf between him and everyone except the few people he was closest to.

Now, Knox felt almost as adrift as he had after Williams’s death. But this time Holland wasn’t here to help him through it.

He had no idea what he should do next. The problem was a lack of concrete, tangible evidence to guide him. He hadn’t found anything to suggest Bianchi and Moretti were more than the couple of chancers he’d originally dismissed them as. There was nothing that connected them to the Russians. And nothing to link them back to Manning, either. So, why was Manning so interested in them? Or Knox, for that matter? Why go to the trouble of kicking him out only to bring him back in? Why not leave him out in the cold where he couldn’t cause him any more trouble?

Was it just as Manning had said himself, to use Knox to prove his innocence, all the while enjoying watching him squirm and chase false leads? With Manning now sitting in Holland’s seat, the only higher powers Knox could turn to for support were political ones, and they wouldn’t dare touch the acting head of MI5 without a cast-iron case against him.

Knox had nothing, and he needed something. He needed to do something. He decided he needed, in the words of Holland, to pull himself together and get on with his job. So, he climbed out of the Eames lounger, and took himself out of his flat and down the two streets that led from Kemp House to Bar Italia.

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Even at his most maudlin, the streets of Soho at night had the power to make Knox feel better.

After his parents’ deaths, Knox had gone to live with his grandmother, who had tried to keep him safe by limiting his world to the few streets of the East End where she’d spent her whole life. It hadn’t worked. As soon as he was old enough to understand there was a vast city out there beyond Bethnal Green waiting to be discovered, Knox became a person of two distinct halves—the well-behaved grandson by day, and the night owl who would pound the capital’s pavements and alleys for hours.