‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I asked her myself after you got her out of that cupboard, and she said if she truly wanted to blow someone up, she’d have put the bomb under Crombie’s seat.’

Bish flinched. He hoped for Violette’s sake that she hadn’t said this to anyone else.

Bish had been home for less than a day when Elliot rang again.

‘Get yourself to Kingly Court, Ortley. A colleague would like to have a word.’

He’d already downed his second Scotch for the morning. Wasn’t in the mood to stay focused. The previous evening he’d left an exhausted Saffron and Bee with Rachel and Maynard and driven home alone. Bish had always refused to break bread with David Maynard in the home he once owned. And here was Elliot trying to involve him in something he didn’t want to be involved in. It was boarding school all over again except now the Home Secretary was involved.

‘Get off at Oxford Circus. I’ll send you the address,’ Elliot said before hanging up.

Bish hated public transport. These past two years he had lived in the Isle of Dogs. He worked locally and drove there, avoiding the West End at all costs. Saffron lived in Gravesend, his daughter in Ashford, both accessible within an hour via the A20. Getting to the West End was another story. The DLR seemed unnatural to him. An automated tram was too close to a metaphor of his life, on so many levels. No one at the helm, people putting their lives into those driverless hands. So he took the Tube from Canary Wharf, regretting it in an instant. The heat and the body odour combined with his throbbing headache made him want to take up cycling.

Elliot’s directions led to a café with outdoor tables. Bish suffered from the opposite of seasonal illness. He hated sunshine, and for the life of him couldn’t understand how a man with skin as white as Elliot’s would want to sit outside. At school Elliot had been called anything from Casper to albino boy, and the older he got, the more ghostly he seemed to become. Rachel used to refer to him as the Spectre of Death.

The man sitting with Elliot had a pissed-off look that he directed at anyone who ventured too close. It was the sort of look that belonged to a harassed man at the end of the day, not at ten in the morning. Elliot introduced him as Grazier. He was older than Bish, but fit. Bish didn’t question whether Grazier was his first or last name because he didn’t want a relationship with the man and asking such a question would suggest he did.

A selection of morning papers lay on the table before them. All about the same person. SPAWN OF SATAN. VIOLENT VIOLETTE. POISONOUS AND PROMISCUOUS. The alliterations were turning his stomach. Violette LeBrac was front-page news everywhere he turned. Most media outlets had dropped the Zidane surname.