Now there was no tea, no smile, just the door ajar. Silva pushed and shouted ‘Hello.’ There was no reply. She walked into the hallway and peered into the living room. The old woman lay stretched out on the floor, her head crocked towards Silva, her eyes blinking.

The ambulance came within ten minutes and Silva held the woman’s hand as they waited.

‘She’s fractured her hip, the old dear,’ the paramedic said as he closed the doors of the ambulance. ‘Nothing to worry about, but if you hadn’t found her…’ The paramedic pinched his nose and shook his head. ‘In this weather the smell doesn’t bear thinking about.’

The ambulance drove away and Silva sat on the low wall outside the house. She pulled out her phone and called her father. Within ten seconds of him answering she was chiding herself for being concerned with his welfare.

‘You disappoint me, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘That woman murdered your mother to further her political ambitions, and yet you walked out on Matthew Fairchild. Ignorant and downright rude.’

‘Rude?’ Silva clenched the phone in her hand. ‘Dad, he wanted me to kill Karen Hope.’

‘Of course. What else are we supposed to do?’

‘Well, duh, phone the police like most normal people would?’

‘There’s no need to be flippant.’

‘I’m being sensible. This is something for the authorities. If the police aren’t good enough then look up a mate from your old boys’ network and speak to someone in the intelligence services.’

‘I’m not sure you understand the complexity of this. If it was that simple we’d have already called the spooks. You need to reconsider your decision, Rebecca. Matthew knows what he’s doing. He showed me the details of the operation and the plan is foolproof.’

‘Please tell me you haven’t bought into this mad scheme, Dad.’

‘Your mother trusted me with those files, Rebecca. I’m doing it for her. She was a decent woman and she deserved more. I let her down, I owe her, and this is my way of paying her back.’

There it was, Silva thought. The sentence was as close to an admission as she was ever likely to hear that her father had never stopped loving her mother. In all the years they’d been separated he hadn’t once admitted the responsibility for the failure of their relationship might lie with him. Now he was saying he’d let her down. It was as if her death had softened him in some way, as if it had cracked open his hard exterior shell and revealed that he was, after all, human.

‘She wasn’t a pacifist, you know.’ He was talking again. ‘She abhorred war, but understood there was sometimes a need for action. This is one of those times. The Hopes killed your mother because of a lust for power and money. She would have understood the need to eliminate them.’