‘What’s she like?’

Jemima and Thomas looked at each other.

‘We don’t really know her,’ said Jemima. ‘First time we met her was at Stansted.’

‘I’m sensing something,’ said Liam.

‘To be brutally honest,’ said Tom, ‘she’s a bit of a pain in the arse. She’s a very attractive girl, but massively high maintenance. No sense of humour. Started bad and got worse, to the point where she hardly said a word to anyone today. She was just in a foul mood, I guess. I thought time of the month, maybe.’

‘Tom!’ hissed Jemima.

‘I’m trying to be fair to her,’ he said, defensively. ‘If she had PMT, fair enough. If not… Anyway, we tried to ignore it. All week she’d been giving her boyfriend a hard time.’

‘How do you mean, a hard time?’

‘I don’t know. She was just very cold to him, I thought. What did you think, Jem?’

Jemima nodded. ‘Yes, cold’s the right word. They hadn’t been going out very long, and it was like she had to bring someone, so she brought Nick? He was pretty fed up with her, I think. I don’t think they were going to continue seeing each other after… after…’

She started crying again, apologising through her sobs.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Liam. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Boyfriend seemed a decent bloke,’ said Tom Carter. ‘She’s a teetotaller, so she’d go to bed early every night, and he’d stay up boozing with us.’

‘You said she was high maintenance?’ said Liam.

‘Yeah,’ said Carter. ‘Like, we had a massive drama yesterday because she suddenly realised she hadn’t packed her favourite bikini. Sunday and Monday, a green bikini’s fine. Then suddenly it has to be her shocking pink one. So we spent half the morning yesterday trawling round the shops in the Old Town trying to get a shocking pink bikini in her size. In the end, the rest of us left her to it. She eventually turned up with the damned thing at about three o’clock. Don’t get me wrong, it looked pretty good on her, but…’

He tailed off.

‘I don’t know what more we can tell you,’ he said, eventually. ‘It’s just a terrible, terrible thing.’

32.

AT ABOUT THAT time, Justin Nicholls’ car arrived at the gate to No. 10 Downing Street.

He walked to the front door, nodded and smiled to the uniformed copper on duty outside, and stepped in.

As he did so, his mobile rang, with an MI6 identifier.

‘Nicholls,’ he said.

It was Alec Palmer.

‘The Spanish say the boat was empty when it blew up,’ said Palmer.

‘Empty?’

‘Yes. There was a guy driving it, but he jumped off and started shooting people, and it exploded a few seconds after that. The human debris field starts a few metres from the vessel itself – there were some Spanish marines nearby who copped the whole thing. But there’s no sign of any human remains from the inside.’

‘Could they be mistaken?’

‘No.’

‘If I’m going to tell the PM, I need to be sure.’