“Julian,” she said softly, as though about to talk him down off a ledge.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“This can’t go on.”

He felt the threshold keenly, the one he’d always lived on. The life of home and family on one side, the taut wire of security and country on the other, an invisible space always just an arm’s reach away that could rip him from normality at any moment. The world Alison belonged to, as though she was his fairy paramour.

“It’s not—” he tried, but found himself unwilling or unable even to say what it wasn’t.

“Just let me in,” Josie said softly. “You never have. Tell me. Be honest with yourself, even. Have you even done that? Looked in the mirror and admitted what’s going on in your head?”

The very idea had him shrinking away, and for a vile moment he was pathetically grateful there was a real emergency, something he had to act on now, immediately. Just so he didn’t have to deal with or think about things.

“I’m sorry,” again, utterly inadequate, an admission of failure, and then he was pelting down the stairs, out the door, jabbing at the car fob to unlock it. He hated driving in London, but he couldn’t wait around for a taxi at this hour. He needed to be moving, to have even the illusion of progress.

On the way he called the emergency line at work and reported that Alison had called and what she’d said. They had a lot of questions; he had no answers. He’d already seen there was no record of the call on his phone. He then cut them off before they could put him through to someone with the authority to stop him.

He called the police next, regular 999. He reported seeing suspicious activity at the Natural History Museum. Fake suspicions came effortlessly to his lips, anything to get the closest beat officer over there. He felt a cold stone in his stomach with the knowledge that he might have sent good people in on false pretences to get killed by foreign agents. But Alison. She would hate him for it, but he could only drive so fast and get so far. She’d said “not in immediate danger,” but he remembered Billy White, beaten to death.

He put in a call to Royce, got no answer and left a message. He called the office again, telling them he had reason to believe a terrorist act was taking place at the museum, with hostages. He was en route, he told them, and needed any support they could give. After he hung up, his phone rang again, heavy with official forbiddance. He didn’t answer it.