My uncoupling from the intelligence services was never allowed to develop into a full-blown divorce – once they have you, they don’t easily let go – and at intervals I was asked for certain favours. Introductions, the opening of doors, occasionally the closing of doors and the clearing-up of mess, the unofficial use of the Embassy’s facilities for purposes I didn’t need or wish to know about – these were the most common requests. Once, during a very early placement like some le Carré Cold War spy, I had to take a train journey across Berlin and glad-hand a potential defector at a prearranged rendezvous, complete with code words and items of identification, but such amateur dramatics were thankfully rare. I think they always knew my heart wasn’t in it.

After retirement from the Foreign Service I found my time and supposed expertise on distant lands, partly as a consequence of my two books, in regular demand. I advised a range of Congressional committees, helped produce endless numbers of reports and investigations, developed a close relationship with the Democrats. I acquired an apartment down in Washington that I continue to maintain and liked to think I had the ear of at least some of the Capitol’s players. When I lost Julia I took on most of the invitations that were offered, thinking that keeping busy might prove the best way to ward off the paralysis of grief. But after a few years the unmitigated meaninglessness of pretending insight into an increasingly fragmenting and anarchic world left me weary and despondent and so I retreated to the coastal house that was to be our final resting place. Now, some days, the only person I engage with is Hannah, and if she knew how much that has started to mean to me she would ask for double what I pay her to act as my housekeeper.

I can’t see the ocean from the house but somehow I always know it’s there, and not just when storms worry the shoreline because it manages to salt along the bloodlines, nestles its restless murmur in the inner ear, so even when I walk the city’s streets I think I can hear it assert itself over whatever traffic rushes by. Sometimes I stroll the beach, offer brief good mornings to the dog walkers and exchange polite nods with the joggers who have no surplus breath to respond in words.

In the last month I have walked it more often than usual, because it feels like a good place to think and perhaps hoping that the vastness that stretches so endlessly might serve to absorb the things that are troubling me, but as I stand and watch the waves break they seem only to press anxieties even deeper.

It was when walking the beach, about a month ago, that I first realised I was being watched. At the start I supposed it was the legacy of spending too much career time around spooks and laughed it off as a manifestation of my ingrained fears. But it wasn’t past experience that warned me, so much as the sixth sense that we all possess and which has the ability to triumph over even the most skilled fieldcraft. So the man on the boardwalk in sweats and Nikes turned his attention to his newspaper slightly too studiously when I glanced towards him, and his companion loitering by the kiosk with the cup of coffee somehow failed to convince in his adopted pose of casual indifference to all around.