Her husband rolled his eyes. ‘If you can call it that. Took me a week to get around to reading it. Now I wish I never had.’

‘Why, is it that terrible?’

‘Oh, it’s very eloquently written. That’s not the problem. He makes some, ah, revelations. Rather explicit ones.’

She raised a knowing eyebrow. ‘I see.’

Georgie was most likely thinking prostitutes, kinky S&M secrets, dominatrices and the like. ‘Not that sort of revelations,’ Seaward told her. ‘Something else, even more scandalous. Deeply disturbing. And dreadfully dangerous.’

She looked bewildered. ‘Why on earth haven’t you mentioned this to me before?’

Seaward wasn’t a believer, but his wife had been raised strictly Church of England and still held fast to her principles. He replied, ‘Because I was concerned that it might upset you, dear.’ He swallowed the last of his cognac and wanted more, knowing that she wouldn’t let him off the hook until he’d told her everything.

‘Upset me?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Very well. In short, Abbott’s book isn’t really a memoir. It’s a whistleblower confession purporting to reveal the existence of some kind of Luciferian cult within the most powerfully connected circles of British society.’

Georgie went pale with shock, as though someone had slapped her. She stared at him. Her book slipped off her lap and fell to the floor, and she made no attempt to pick it up.

Seaward went on, ‘He alleges, quite candidly and in the most appalling detail you can possibly imagine, that certain high-up and very well-known members of our political and business establishment are involved in practices that I can only describe as occult ritual, witchcraft and demon worship. There. I’ve said it. Not that I feel much better for getting it off my chest. I hope you understand why I felt it better to hold back from telling you earlier. I know you have sensibilities about those kinds of things.’

Georgie went on staring at him for a drawn-out moment, unsure whether to believe him. She cleared her throat. ‘And you’ve actually read it? It’s real?’

‘As though I’d be making this up. Yes, I have read it. At any rate, I’ve read the hundred-page sample that’s saved on a computer memory stick, sitting right there in my briefcase. The remaining three hundred juicy pages are yet to be revealed. And I don’t care, because I want no part of it. Tomorrow morning I’m telling Andrew that, as senior partner, I’ve decided that we need to turn Abbott down. And once I’ve done that, I’m going to destroy the memory stick and put it out of my head forever.’

She was still staring at him. ‘Do you believe it, Roland? Can it be true?’