Bannerman stood for some moments before crossing to Slater’s filing cabinet and unlocking it. He crouched down and pulled open the bottom drawer. It was half-empty, about a dozen suspension files hanging on their runners. He lifted them out and carried them over to Slater’s desk and sat down. Mostly they contained cuttings of stories Slater had done on the EEC, a back reference divided into different groups – agriculture, fisheries, transport, taxation. Two of the folders were unmarked. One of them held the cuttings on Gryffe. Bannerman sifted through them.

They didn’t seem to fall into any category. Altogether there were about forty pieces, not stories that Slater had written, but cut from different newspapers. They went back over two years, covering important speeches the politician had made at home and abroad, his appointment eighteen months earlier as Minister of State for Europe, a piece from the Telegraph on his growing importance as a charismatic figure of influence in the party. And the country. It forecast his likely rise to challenge for the leadership in the not too distant future.

There were a number of photographs. Gryffe shaking hands with some African head of state, another in the Middle East. Gryffe speaking at the party’s annual conference. Gryffe relaxing by a swimming pool with a bikini-clad girlfriend on holiday in Malta. He even appeared in the columns of the society diarists; best-dressed man in Britain; most eligible bachelor; a romance with Royalty (the punters would like that, though some of his party colleagues would not); a man of the people destined for the top.

Before this week Bannerman had only been aware of Gryffe in his peripheral vision. The journalist’s focus had been on corruption, political and financial, in Scotland. But Gryffe, it seemed, had become a popular and fashionable figure in London social life as well as in politics. Most of the cuttings, he noticed, were taken from the English papers. He cursed himself for somehow having taken his eye off the ball.

He crammed the cuttings back into their unmarked folder and opened the other. There were fewer cuttings here. A dozen in all, clipped from Belgian newspapers, some French, some Flemish. Two names kept cropping up, Michel Lapointe and René Jansen, although they didn’t appear to be connected. From one smudged, single-column pic Bannerman was able to put a face to Lapointe. A short, fat face. But the quality of the reproduction was poor and it was a face you would pass in the street without recognizing it. There were no photographs of René Jansen, although it was a name that rang a distant bell. Bannerman slipped the cuttings back in their folder, kept the two unmarked files to one side, and put the remainder back in the cabinet.