Outside it was warmer than it had been in Edinburgh, the sky heavy and grey, the first drops of rain beginning to fall. Bannerman felt the initial pangs of rootlessness that always came when he arrived in a strange place. The disorientation, the sense of being utterly alone. It was only then that he rediscovered his affection for home. He thought about the cluttered tenement flat in Edinburgh that he called his home. Somewhere in all its drab familiarity hid a sense of belonging. The grey routine of the Post, the close, dark winter streets of the northern capital, the parochial insularity of it all; gems of security to be taken out and polished during lonely nights in strange hotel rooms under foreign skies.

The taxi ride from the airport took only twenty minutes, through the industrial outskirts on the north-west fringe of the city, past the Centre Commercial on the Avenue Leopold III, down on to the Boulevard Général Wahis and the Boulevard Auguste. Streets where once German tanks had rolled in from the east, defeated Belgians watching from windows and doorways with a quiet hatred. Now the city was being rebuilt, adapting to a new world. The hammers of the demolition workers smashing down the past – rows of grey terraces and cobbled squares, tall crumbling tenements that had known better days, and worse. Bannerman wondered what kind of future today’s planners were building.

The Berlaymont stood in the heart of the commercial sector of Brussels, a massive building shaped like a star if viewed from above, towering over the city skyline, great walls of window curving inwards. The outer wall of each office was glass from floor to ceiling, so that looking in from the outside you felt that half the building had been cut away, like a half-­demolished tenement, and you at once had a private view into every room or office where people worked and fought and hatched plots. Out front was the Métro. Across the boulevard the lesser white-stone office block that housed the Council of Ministers.

The press briefing was still in progress. The five men of the Porte Parole sitting along a table at the top end of the Salle de Presse addressing a clutch of fifty or more reporters in French. The journalists were arranged along five rows of benches set in a semicircle around the top table, like a mini-conference chamber; microphones at each place, headsets linked to translation booths in galleries set high up along either side. They were empty. The journalists asking questions all, it seemed, fluent in French.