“So,” she said. “Eric Blair was born in Manchester in 1965. He moved to Melbourne with his parents when he was six and he moved back there after finishing his education. Got a decent education, as you’ll see from the graduation certificate from high school and the bachelor’s degree from Macquarie University in Sydney. He’s unmarried and doesn’t have kids. He likes golf and is a member of the Royal Melbourne.”

Milton held up the membership card and then a handicap certificate. “He’s not very good. He plays off a handicap of twenty-one.”

“Do you play?”

“No.”

She grinned. “So shut up.”

“Job?”

“He works for the Red Cross,” she said. “Lots of excuses to travel, and they have awful network security. Eric Blair is a programme management delegate, just finished a posting in Bangladesh and about to move into a role that will have him travelling more widely to make sure that aid budgets are being properly spent. There’s a record for you in their HR department, and they’ll be paying your wages into the Commonwealth account every month.”

“What about the accounts?”

“They have a little money in them, but they won’t stand much scrutiny.”

“It’s okay. I’ve still got contacts who can flesh that out for me.”

“Someone from Group Three?”

“Maybe,” Milton said with a smile. He knew that Ziggy Penn would be able to hack into the bank’s servers and create months of false transactions for him. He would build a credit history for Eric Blair that would be robust enough to beat all but the most thorough of investigations. Milton would set him to work as soon as he had finished with Victoria.

Victoria shuffled down on the lounger so that she could stretch out her legs. “It’s all pretty thorough.”

“It certainly is.”

“The passport will pass all the usual tests: ultraviolet, machine checks, everything.”

Milton looked at the document. It was blue, with the Australian coat of arms on the front cover. Milton thumbed through it and saw the picture that he had emailed to Victoria on the photo page and pages that had been stamped with visas and other evidence of entry to countries all around the world.

“Eric gets around,” Victoria said.

Milton closed the passport and put it back with the other documents.

“Do you need anything else?”

Milton dropped the documents into the bag. “No. This is all great. How much do you want for it?”

Predictably, she waved his offer away. “On the house. It was fun. Like I said, I haven’t done anything like that for a while. It was good to dust off the cobwebs, prove I still had it in me.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled. “Forget it.” She took her sunglasses from her pocket and put them on. “You going to go and see Sakura?”