‘After I dropped you off at the office, I was hailed by two men as I approached the front door of my flat. I recognised one of them from an episode twelve years ago both visually and from his Scottish accent.’ Sara almost buckled, thinking of her father’s description of the driver in the parked car. ‘He reminded me whose side I was on,’ continued Patrick. ‘The second man, it turned out, had an expertise in knuckle blows which he used to reinforce the message. The one who spoke addressed me as “boy”.’

She stood at an angle, her profile silhouetted by the morning light flooding in. Despite the long skirt and scarf wound over her head and shoulders, her svelteness and a frailty he saw for the first time stirred him.

‘I’m sorry, Patrick. Not just bastards, racist bastards too.’

‘It was premeditated. To get under my skin.’

She hesitated, wondering whether to tell him about the men waiting outside her house. No. This was not the moment – not what this conversation was for.

She turned. ‘So, whatever it is their “side” is protecting, wherever it might lead, you don’t want to let them get away with it.’

‘I don’t know. Because I don’t know what’s buried there.’

‘Is that why you’re doing this? Because you think there’s a buried reason that explains why Morahan wanted me? And it may be linked to his death?’

He rubbed his eyes and squinted, feeling wrong-footed, assailed by a confusion of emotions. It was safer for both of them if she knew nothing more. If he provoked her into making some revelation, he couldn’t foretell the outcome. And for him, if not her – yet or ever – it was personal. Would the door between them, that he’d believed she was allowing slowly to open, now slam shut?

‘It’s your decision,’ he finally said.

Sara too understood the moment with a devastating clarity. Morahan’s death would almost certainly mean Sayyid drying up as a source – he was most unlikely to start giving classified information to anyone more junior. In fact, she recalled Morahan saying Sayyid had told him in their strange car trip that there would be no more.

There was no need to embroil herself further; no need to be propelled on a journey whose direction she could not control. Morahan’s death would be consigned to history as an unsolved oddity, beloved of conspiracy theorists but otherwise forgotten. She could go back to Ludo. Men in parked cars would fade away. Maybe that would be for the best.

It was not a decision she had the right or strength to make alone; she had to find a way of sharing it. There was no one else.