He leaned on the stern rail, watching the mourning pennant flutter in the gentle breeze. It was the fifth one he’d hung there since the death of his grandfather, a constant reminder of what he had achieved. It was pleasant to contemplate what he was going to do to Muller. Just the thought of it made his blood pump faster in his veins. Tonight, he’d go ashore and find a woman to fuck, fuelled by the fantasy of what Utrecht promised. He really had made progress. Now he could use their bodies for rehearsal as well as release.

Carol stared out of the window at the fat russet buds on the tree outside. She had no idea what kind of tree it was, nor did she care. All she knew was that there was something profoundly restful about gazing at it. Every now and again, the counsellor would ask her something in an attempt to provoke some response, but she’d found that it wasn’t hard to ignore the banal questions.

She wanted her life back. She wanted to be where she was before, in a place where betrayal was not a common currency used as cavalierly by those who claimed to have right on their side as it was by those who knew they were the bad guys. She wanted to be somewhere she could escape the conviction that her own side had treated her worse than the enemy.

Radecki had raped her. But that was something she could survive, because in a sense that had been a legitimate act of war. She had done everything in her power to destroy him; the risk she had taken was that he would fight back.

What Morgan had done was infinitely worse. He was supposed to be on her side. In her book, that meant he owed her a duty of care. Or, at the very least, honesty. But he had thrown her to the wolves in an act of cold-blooded calculation. He had set her up as surely as he had set up Radecki.

She knew now that Radecki had been telling nothing less than the truth when he had accused her of being part of a conspiracy whose first act had been to murder his lover. She knew because on that first morning in Den Haag, she had sat in the briefing room and refused to say one word about what had happened until Morgan had answered her questions.