“It just seemed like—I mean, yes, they look alike, because we’re picking up on the big differences between them and us, right? But if you start really looking, there’s a lot of variation between them, on a bone-structure level. What if it’s like we’re, well, we’re bigots like Billy White, only used to faces like ours? So we tell each other”—she put on a gruff, loutish voice—“they all look the same to me. Because we’re only seeing the differences. And because, in Billy’s case, he was a racist turd. But even so.”

“You’re saying we’re seeing…what, they’re not the same family, they’re the same nationality? But…from where, Matchbox? Tell me, so I can cross it off the holiday list.”

“I don’t know. Nowhere. Stupid thought, like I said. An ethnic group from nowhere we know, turning up in ones and twos to conduct impossible thefts and kidnap top scientists. I mean, it’s ludicrous, right?”

“Right,” he agreed, and the two of them locked eyes as Alison patently tried to rid herself of her suspicions and, just as visibly, failed.

Julian had been the final protégé of Germaine Willoughs, who’d practically died in harness, only two weeks between his collapse in the office and his death in hospital. His had been a long life in the Service—escapades against the Soviet Bloc, murky doings in proxy states—the sort of career that could have crippled any number of governments had he ever decided to write his memoirs. At the end he’d been on the far side of irascible, impatient with a Service that was modernizing in leaps and bounds. His successors hadn’t coped well with the chaos he’d left behind. It had taken Leslie Hind’s appointment before anyone could swipe the reins and get the department under control. Julian was certainly not a favourite of Hind’s, but she wasn’t someone to throw away a useful tool because it had someone else’s initials on it.

Being called in to see Hind always brought a stab of schoolboy guilt. She had that stare, a headmistress who knows precisely what you were doing behind the bike sheds. She was in her mid-fifties now, grey-haired and with a lean, raptorial face. Under her guidance the department’s machinery ran smoothly. Nails that stood up received a hammering and squeaky wheels were replaced.

Her office was pristine. In one corner Hind’s secretary was typing to the whisper of voices in her earphones. Along the far end was Hind’s large desk: not Willoughs’ mahogany behemoth from the days of the Raj, but something functional and severe. Hind herself was hunched behind it, reading the contents of a file, tilted so he could neither see its innards nor read its label. Her eyes flicked between it and her monitor while she sipped her tea.

“Mr. Sabreur.”