After taking his enforced break, Holm returned to work to find his new role meant a shift to a different office. The place was a tiny box room under a staircase. A couple of computers sat on what appeared to be desks from a school classroom, and a brown filing cabinet stood sandwiched between them. The two office chairs had seen better days and the single telephone was so ancient it looked like it was made of Bakelite and had come from the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall. There was, Holm noted with some dismay, no window.

He went over to the filing cabinet and pulled open one of the drawers. It was empty aside from a solitary typed index card that bore a reference to the IRA and Bobby Sands. Holm left the card where it was and slid the drawer shut. The events mentioned were from before his time in MI5, before his spell in Special Branch. He’d been a mere PC on the beat back when the Northern Ireland conflict had been at its height, but there was something appropriate about the card being in the drawer, him being in this room. Time had moved on and what was once relevant became nothing more than rubbish. Or, in these days of heightened concern for the environment, was slipped into the recycling bin. That was it, Holm thought. He was a product that had come to the end of its useful life and Huxtable had decided to send him off to the shredder to be pulped.

He moved across to one of the chairs and sat. To be fair to Huxtable, at least she hadn’t pushed him out the door. He’d been given a chance to make amends, to work out the final couple of years he had left, to earn the right to leave without a cloud hanging over him. Holm adjusted the position of one of the computer monitors, and as he did so he thought about his new role. Basically she’d given him free rein, with the only instruction being to stay well clear of current operations. That meant he was to focus on areas other than Islamist extremism. Taher was strictly off-limits.

Which left what? Huxtable said she wanted weekly updates, but Holm knew he only had to fill a few sheets of paper with bullet points and wave them under her nose. The whole exercise was something of a charade, just a way to employ him until he could get his full pension, perhaps a means of keeping him sweet so he didn’t make trouble. Yes, that had to be the truth of it. When you knew where the bodies were buried everybody was either your very best friend or your most hated sworn enemy. He’d worked for the intelligence services for long enough to realise nothing was ever quite as it seemed, but what Huxtable’s ulterior motive might be didn’t really concern him.