It took forty-three years for Cordelia to finally find Loveday Parker. He had existed under a dozen different aliases in the decades since the war. None really suited him. He was no Guy Pevington or Simon Arbuthnot. He was no Tim Kernick or Emmet Trent. The only name that fitted him was a solitary letter. He used to use it as a signature, in green ink, on the top-secret documents that crossed his desk and which went straight on to the Home Secretary and Her Majesty once they had been properly vetted.

For a short while, in the late 1950s, Loveday Parker had answered to the name of ‘X’. He ran a very specialized unit within MI6. He had the power to make decisions that changed the world, and he knew enough secrets to bring governments to their knees. He was not a good man or a bad man. He was simply the leader of a spy network that spanned the globe.

Cordelia and Felicity sit at his bedside in the comfortable, private hospital where Loveday lays dying. He is eighty-seven years old, though the chart at the foot of his bed declares him to be three years younger.

For the last four years he has been known as Patrick Bainton and has been living in a pleasant apartment on a leafy Victorian road in Weymouth. He has not had to suffer many hardships since leaving MI6 in 1969. His cover as a diplomat ensured he earned a good pension and he has received large dividends from the half-dozen global companies of which he is a major shareholder. He is also an honorary fellow of his old university and gives generously to Westminster School, where he spent his formative years and which gave him respite from the life he endured at the family home in Gilsland, where his elder sister tortured him without mercy whenever she found opportunity.

‘Loveday,’ says Cordelia. ‘Wakey-bloody-wakey.’

He coughs afresh. It’s a horrid, rasping sound; a match struck on brick, and then he starts to gag as the fluid in his lungs bubbles up to spill onto his chin and pyjamas.

‘Cordy, he’s almost gone,’ says Felicity, shaking her head. She looks weak and old, sitting back in the hard-backed chair and starting to shiver.