‘Of course, Billie,’ Holm said softly. ‘But my boss happens to be Thomas Gillan, the Director General of MI5, and he has the ears of both the home secretary and the prime minister. I think your chief constable is answerable to them, don’t you?’

Later, after she’d finished work, Silva wandered over to the Barbican and sat in a bar at the quayside. The shadows grew long and the sun hovered low and weak in the west. She made a bottle of Corona last an hour, sucking on the lime wedge when she’d finished. The envelope was back on the saloon table alongside Sean’s card. In terms of gravity the contents of the envelope should have been uppermost in Silva’s mind, but it was Sean’s words she kept coming back to: Sorry. Can we talk? Love, Sean. He deserved better, and before long he’d undoubtedly luck out. She had a vision of him in a garden surrounded by a white picket fence. Smoke from a barbecue. Bottles of beer in a bucket of ice. Kids running amok. A woman on a veranda with a plate of cookies. She wasn’t sure if that was her. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

She bought a cappuccino and shivered as she sipped the foam from the top. She fended off a polite offer from a hopeful young man to buy her another drink with a ‘no thank you’ and a smile and pushed herself up and walked to the Hoe.

As she stood at the top of Madeira Drive and looked down at the sea, a car pulled alongside her. A BMW. Black. Tinted windows. The same car that had followed her on the motorway. A door clicked open and a man got out.

‘Ms da Silva,’ the man said. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a sober tie. He was mid-forties and his brown hair was short and neat. A pair of rectangular, rimless glasses completed the outfit and made him look like a bank manager or an accountant. ‘Might I possibly have a word?’

The accent was impeccable, with the pure vowels and precise consonants. She wondered if he was an associate of Fairchild’s.

Silva bounced on the balls of her feet. ‘What is it?’

‘We can walk, if you’d like,’ the man said. He indicated the route up to Plymouth Hoe. ‘Or we can stop here.’

Silva shook her head. Wondered what the heck was going on in her life to make strange middle-aged men hit on her.

‘I don’t know what the hell you want, but you’ve got one minute and then I’m off.’