‘He might still succeed,’ said Jake. ‘Peng doesn’t fly out until tonight. We still have the auction at Christie’s to get through.’

‘We need absolute confirmation. And if Frederick is involved we need to know to what degree. He might have got close enough to Tenebris to know who the people behind it are. We need names.’ Hattie turned to Geraint. ‘Do a full search into Frederick’s finances, background, everything you can get your hands on. If he has the resources to run, we need to cut them off. We need to take him alive and find out everything he knows.’

I remembered something Camilla had said. ‘His wife’s art gallery. One of us should pay it a visit. Frederick helped with their accounts. That could be an easy place to hide money.’

Hattie looked at me. ‘If Frederick is the Snake he knows that we’re going to put this together. He knows that once we get the EpiPen results confirming poison, we’ll work out that someone in or close to the delegation had to be involved. You need to throw him off. Make him believe we’re onto someone else.’

Hattie was right. Frederick couldn’t know we suspected him.

I got out my phone and texted: We think Peppa is doing so well she has a PA working for her. Meet at Christie’s at 5 p.m.

Frederick pinged back straightaway: OK. See you there.

‘I’m going to try and meet with Dugdale face to face,’ said Hattie.

‘You don’t think Dugdale is in on it?’ I’d known Duggers the longest and couldn’t believe he would have any role in tearing apart the Security Services he held so dear.

Hattie shook his head. ‘Highly unlikely. But if I lay everything out for him, he can at least shed some light on exactly how the hell this could be happening.’

I thought back over the last few days. How different everything looked if Frederick wasn’t one of us but one of them.

Goddammit.

‘The invasion at Platform Eight. Outside Gigi’s nursery I said something about nuts. Frederick must’ve thought I was talking in code. That I was talking about work. He thought we’d cottoned on to the EpiPens. That’s why they took the risk of breaking in. They thought we were about to unravel their whole plan.’

All that drama.

All those dead Ghosts.

Robin.

Gone.

Just because my daughter went to nursery with a peanut in her pocket.

Jake nodded. ‘And when Frederick realised we didn’t have a clue about the EpiPens, they went ahead with the plan.’

A throwaway comment I’d made to someone I thought was a colleague, a friend, had set off a chain of events that led to so much bloodshed.

How had I been such a shitty judge of character?