‘As you know, JTAC has always recruited the brightest and best. We’re lucky to be able to draw personnel from many different branches. You came across to Five from Special Branch originally, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Holm nodded. The way Huxtable phrased it made his transfer to MI5 sound like a cold war defection, but Holm had been an obvious recruit and he’d felt he was coming to the end of his days in the police. When the call had come he’d jumped at the chance.

‘You had a lot to offer back then.’

Holm flinched. Huxtable was getting to the business end of the meeting.

‘Although you’ve had personal issues recently, I see.’ She indicated a printout on the desk in front of her. She looked up and gave a flat smile. ‘Still, it happens to nearly all of us from time to time.’

The inference being that nothing personal would ever happen to Huxtable.

‘My wife.’ Holm shrugged. There was no point in hiding anything. Huxtable was all-knowing and all-seeing. ‘She left me a couple of years ago. Demands of the job, I suppose.’

‘There was nothing else we should have been informed about, was there? No indiscretion on your part?’

‘No.’ If only there had been, he thought. ‘We broke up amicably.’

A straight-out lie. But then he was good at lying. To himself as much as anyone. The split had come out of the blue and the irony of that wasn’t lost on him. He’d spent his life playing detective and uncovering secrets and there was his wife carrying on with the next-door neighbour right under his nose. They’d been at it for months and if he hadn’t returned home from an overseas trip unexpectedly one day and caught them screwing on the living-room floor, they’d probably have continued to pull the wool over his eyes.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Huxtable said. ‘About a new role for you.’

‘I’m happy where I am.’

‘Sure, but your talents are wasted behind a desk. I’m looking for somebody to get out there and be proactive, to chase down leads.’

‘Isn’t that what the police are supposed to do?’

‘They don’t have time to develop anything these days. I’m talking about the bigger picture.’

Holm noted Huxtable’s use of the bigger picture. Noted, too, the euphemisms aplenty in her statement: wasted behind a desk – useless at analysis. Doing things the police don’t have time to develop meant investigating areas they didn’t feel were worthwhile. While get out there suggested, quite simply, that Huxtable wanted him gone from under her feet.

‘And this bigger picture? Where exactly am I to find it?’