Her cheek elicited a momentary grin. ‘That’s enough, lady lawyer. Now bugger off, both of you. And don’t take a peep at the young couple.’ With that, he stalked away, right to the end of the pier.

‘Goodbye, J. And thank you,’ said Patrick, not bothering to raise his voice. The brown-corduroyed figure was already well out of earshot, leaning over a railing and hawking into the gurgling sea.

‘Do you ever feel someone’s orchestrating this?’ Sara asked.

‘You’re ahead of me again,’ said Patrick.

Once past Ashford on the direct route to London, after Patrick walked up and down their coach, inspected the toilets each end and returned to his seat with a nod of the head, they’d begun to talk.

‘It’s like those clouds gathering over the sea,’ said Sara. ‘I sometimes think someone’s whipping up a storm, pitching you and me into it, and then waiting for it to blow itself out. Don’t you ever feel that?’

He smiled gently. ‘To be honest, I don’t. Must be lack of imagination.’

‘It all starts with Sayyid. But who is Sayyid?’

‘I guess we can shortlist – though I don’t see it gets us anywhere.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Someone who’s obtained a sample of unredacted MI5 files from two separate periods. Who had access to your dinner with Kareem and its transcript. Who’s motivated by conscience and believes there’s something rotten in the British secret state that the Morahan Inquiry offers a unique opportunity to investigate.’

‘It may be a whistleblower we’ve never heard of and never will. But imagine,’ she said, her eyes lighting up, wanting him to play her game, ‘it’s someone we know…’

‘There are only two,’ replied Patrick flatly. ‘Aren’t there?’

Her eyes dulled. ‘You tell me.’

‘J himself. And…’

‘Sylvia. Now that I understand her.’

‘Correct. Perhaps even working together.’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

They fell into silence. As they emerged from the long tunnel cutting through the monotony of east London’s suburbia, she stared out of the window at the curved concrete shapes of its 2012 Olympics. She thought of that triumphal event; then, however bristling with security it might have been, the city felt safe. No one believed they could be part of a crowd leaving stadiums with a suicide bomber in their midst about to blow himself up. For the four years that followed, Britain and Europe seemed a nation and a continent at relative peace. Then came Paris, Brussels, Manchester, London, political upheaval and burning tower blocks, not to mention refugees, mass drownings in the Mediterranean, that sense of a country and a world soured by menace.