‘If I can speak to that, sir,’ I said. ‘The Special Assessment Unit has recently instituted a programme of capacity expansion in order to build greater operational robustness and provide a more efficient service to our partner OCUs when dealing with both Falcon and pseudo-Falcon incidents. The first phase of which is already underway.’

I noticed that Stephanopoulos was hiding her mouth with her hand.

Folsom, who should have known better, took the bait.

‘The first phase being?’ he asked.

‘Strengthening our specialist support, particularly in the forensic and medical area, with a view to providing a continuous on-call service to investigation teams that might need them, coupled with the development of a best-practice guide for use in dealing with suspected Falcon related incidents and investigations,’ I said, and heard Seawoll smother a cough – at least I assume it was a cough.

‘In tandem with phase one implementation, the SAU is also developing a consultation document that will be sent out to all priority Falcon stakeholders prior to being submitted to the commissioner’s office for approval.’

‘Why was phase one implemented without a consultation paper?’ asked Folsom or, in other words, how did you manage to spend money without clearing it with the commissioner first.

‘Phase one was implemented under existing Home Office guidelines,’ I said. Last updated in 1956 – during the Suez Crisis, no less, which must have been a good week to announce bits of political housekeeping you might not want to attract too much attention. ‘In addition, phase one was financed entirely from within the current SAU budget.’

In other words, we have our own money so you can stick your oversight in your La Traviata and smoke it.

Folsom hesitated and then shrugged. He wasn’t happy, but he was playing a long game. Besides, he was right – the current Folly operational structure was archaic and not fit for purpose. It was just that I didn’t trust him or Lady Ty to fix it.

Of course, now I was going to have to deliver a consultation paper pretty damn sharpish or I was going to be in major trouble.

So we moved onto what seemed like five days, but was actually just a couple of hours, of wrangling about who was going to do what. Which in the end boiled down to deciding that the NCA would carry on investigating the Faceless Man’s shadowy commercial empire, CTC would handle the Americans and the Folly would handle the Falcon related stuff with support from Belgravia MIT.

‘It’s a good thing that was sorted out,’ said Seawoll. ‘I was beginning to worry.’

We were still running short-handed because Belgravia was busy mopping up their stabbing, but at least we had Guleed who was, I felt, going to be thrilled to bits.