She had been unsure whether to make this trip. John is in the first stages of dementia and she does not want to be away from him. He’s still John, a lot of the time, but there are moments when he forgets that he’s long since retired from work or that he doesn’t live in Brampton or that one of his sons is dead. Brian killed himself in prison in 1977. He’d been Pike’s accomplice in a post office robbery. The postmistress had been killed and Brian, overcome with guilt and terrified of Pike trying to silence him, had turned himself in and given evidence against the older man. Brian couldn’t handle prison. He hanged himself the day they took away his radio for some minor breach of prison rules. Pike did his time without difficulty. Served eighteen years for murder then came home to his mam’s house. He’d only been out a week when his past caught up with him. He was killed with a solitary blow to the head in an alleyway outside a Newcastle nightclub. The only witness described, a tall, dark-haired old man who smelled of wood-shavings and wore a gypsy-scarf around his neck.

‘You in there, Loveday?’ asks Cordelia.

She’s peering at him like a specimen on a slab. She has little sympathy for the condition he is in. Old age strips the veneer from people – that’s what Felicity used to say. And Cordelia knows herself to be a hard, stubborn woman. It is the face she wears for the world and it is the one she knows to be her true self. Half a century in counter-intelligence and she has yet to find any evidence that she is wicked. Difficult, yes. Unflinching, certainly. She has even been called ‘ruthless’ by certain broadsheet newspapers that have yet to make their mind up about her brief tenure at the top of MI6. But she is pleased to fall well short of wickedness. Her grandchildren would find it hard to hug somebody evil, she feels sure of that. And they dote on their fearsome, funny grandmother.

Loveday coughs again and then manages to wriggle upright. There is still an intelligence in his eyes and despite the watery lenses, the blue irises are sharp and focussed.

‘Mrs Hemlock,’ he says, and there is a slight smile to his lips.

‘It’s not been Hemlock for a long time.’

‘She’s a baroness,’ says Felicity, from her chair. ‘Retired now, though she still goes to meetings.’

Cordelia hides her smile behind her hand. The ‘meetings’ are the cross-party intelligence and security committee and her statutory attendance days at the House of Lords.

‘You’ve come for me?’ asks the man in the bed, wheezing. ‘After so much time? Why?’

‘Because you’re dying,’ says Cordelia, flatly. ‘And I’m old and so is everybody who remembers what happened. And if I don’t ask you now, I’ll never know.’