The Company’s shrink didn’t have her own rooms at the Bunker in Noisy. She used one of the senior manager offices that sat vacant until an expert from the Cat or the military was brought in to brief a Y team. It was a modern office in an old building, which was the plight of the French security apparatus. The ceilings were high and patterned but the furniture could have come out of an Ikea catalogue from 2003. Bare desk, an Olivetti electric typewriter on a small wheeled trolley, a landline phone and a safe in the corner. No smartphones, no wi-fi, no data switches, and the only computer screens were hooked into an internal system. The Bunker was an ‘air bridge’ facility. There was no email or internet connection and cell phones didn’t work, even if one could be snuck past the DGS security people. Even hard copy was limited—it was against French law to take written material out of a DGSE facility, unless you were at least a director or two-star general, and then only if you were accompanied by an authorised person.

De Payns sat on a sofa and watched the shrink, known only as Dr Marlene, organise her leather compendium. She was in her late forties, trim, with a black bob and very bright red lipstick. He assessed her as neurotic and more concerned with status and appearance than love or sex. If he wanted to leverage her, he would use flattery, probably focusing on her intellect or superior taste.

‘So, Alec. May I call you Alec?’

‘Sure,’ he said, reaching for his coffee in a white mug emblazoned with the golden cockerel of the French rugby team.

‘I like your mug. You’re a rugby player?’

‘I played at school.’

‘Which school?’

‘Saint-Joseph of Reims.’

‘That was your grandfather’s school?’

De Payns paused. The shrinks were going to do this again. Raise the fact that, when he was fifteen, he secretly enrolled himself in the Jesuit boarding school once attended by his paternal grandfather in order to escape a toxic home environment—one dominated by the ceaseless fights between his highly independent English mother and traditional French father.

‘Yes, it was my grandfather’s school, and no, my father didn’t know I was enrolling.’

She smiled at him, and he waited for the inevitable comment about how most teenagers are sent to boarding school against their will; they didn’t enrol themselves. But Dr Marlene seemed to get it.

She switched topic. ‘How many firearms incidents have you been involved in?’

‘Four.’

‘When?’ she asked, jotting this on a pad. He noticed she had small handwriting.

‘Two in Kosovo, one in Tunis, one in Lebanon.’

‘Discharges?’

‘Two were discharges—one from my sidearm, one from my colleague’s. The other two instances were me threatening an adversary with my sidearm, and one time I had a Beretta nine millimetre held to my temple.’

She smiled. ‘No discharge, I gather?’