‘I was at school with Lord Wycombe. He’s actually already invited me to the shoot and the dinner. So you don’t need to worry. I’ll be there to back you up. To hold your bag for you when you go get the bad guy.’ He smiled.

‘Don’t put yourself down. You handled yourself just fine last night.’

We watched as the girls skipped ahead across the green, exclaiming at the daisies dotted across the grass. I envied them. Who really wanted to grow up and have to deal with all the other crap life threw at you. Like mortgages, and problems at work, and people trying to kill you . . .

*

I dropped Gigi at home to a waiting Ganma and hopped on my bike to the Platform. I screeched into the underground car park just as Jake was climbing into a black BMW with a siren on top.

‘We’ve got the missing Ghost. Just had a 999 call from someone saying that that paedo off Facebook had been secured and that it was getting pretty heated.’

We went full pelt to Clapham, siren blaring.

I checked my watch. The Facebook post had found the Ghost fast. I looked at how many hundreds of thousands of times the post had been shared. The parent network was alive and well and out for blood for anyone who was a threat to their children.

Jake spoke to me over the blare of the siren. ‘You need to talk to Will.’

‘What about?’

‘Next weekend. He wants to surprise you. He asked me to make sure you aren’t working those days. I didn’t know how to tell him I couldn’t control whether or not a Chinese minister was going to be assassinated and how that might affect you being granted time off for a mini-break to the Cotswolds.’

I frowned. ‘You ruined the surprise now – I didn’t know he was planning the Cotswolds.’

‘Seriously?’

‘OK, OK, just say what I told him, which is: we’re all on standby for a big information leak from America.’

‘Too late – I already said we’re on standby for a Russian informant coming in. Is that going to be a problem?’

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll adjust my story to yours when I see him.’

Will was seemingly ignoring my directive to not plan anything until work had calmed down. I didn’t know whether to be touched at his dedication to us getting away together or annoyed that he wasn’t listening to me.

As we approached the location the 999 caller had given, there was a bustle of around thirty people, nearly all women, on the street corner. We pulled to a halt next to them. There was a lot of shouting and jostling.

‘I’ve done nothing! I’ve done nothing!’ came the lone male voice shouting from inside the circle. We got out of the car.

‘Police! Coming through,’ I yelled above the din.