All completely innocent, he insisted, like a mantra, as Alison let him in.

“Stir-fry,” he said. “Hoi sin, bok choi, something something bean sprouts.”

“Something something,” she echoed wanly. “My favourite.” She locked and bolted the door before hanging awkwardly at the boundary of the kitchenette as he set everything out.

“Is it Derek?” he asked over his shoulder. “He’s been in touch again?” A pause as he carefully lined up a handful of oil and sauce bottles, in the same way he did with pens on his work desk. “Or is it Cleary?” The source who had died. “Stewey Leminkin and SO15 were cut up about that, I hear. But police will keep tabs on White’s associates, and we’ll keep watch over Khan—and never the twain will meet, hopefully.”

“And what about whoever was behind White?”

He paused a moment before decanting some peanut oil and turning the heat up. “I know he kicked off very suddenly for a man working himself up, but as you said in your report, there’s nothing to show he had a handler.” Alison’s protracted silence needled him. “Matchbox?”

Her expression was oddly flat; he knew it of old. Alison’s flaw was digging too deep, going beyond the evidence into personal suppositions.

“Stewey got a rap on the knuckles, way I heard,” he remarked. “For getting you involved with his source.”

“I asked—”

“I know. And my feedback was that without that, we might be looking for Khan’s body instead. But you know how Hind is. Everything by the book. And no grand conspiracies.”

“I know,” she said, that expression still there.

“Lay off the unverified sources for a while,” he suggested, making a pun of it by waggling the hoi sin bottle at her.

“What if I had the motherlode of unverified sources, Spiker?”

When he looked over, she was actually glancing about, as if fearing unfriendly ears, even here.

“You cook,” she told him. “I’ll show you later.”

Alison saw a therapist, he knew. It was one of the few things that she went out for these days. Her job was drawing meaningful patterns from a vast morass of complex interactions, and people’s lives (and large sums of government money) often hung in the balance based on her recommendations. Get too far into the mindset and you started seeing patterns everywhere. Was it still paranoia when it wasn’t you that they were out to get, but the whole country? And yet Alison was keeping it together, more than a year since her last crisis of confidence. Seeing her so brittle twisted something inside Julian, just as when John was buckling under school stress or Josie wasn’t talking to him. He wanted to fix things, but he didn’t have the tools. That twist was twice as hard when it was Alison. Josie was tougher, he reasoned evasively.