#

Outside the interview room, Gabriel waited for Campbell.

‘Good work,’ she said. ‘Pull the video from the supermarket CCTV. Jones is supplying the NRF, I’m sure of it. How long will it take?’

Campbell looked at his watch. ‘May take an hour or two to rouse the right person at the company HQ on a Sunday. But with luck, we should have something late afternoon.’

One step closer to the NRF, thought Gabriel as she walked away. And for the first time in days, the excitement and anticipation drove the worries about Abu Mujahid from her mind. Her first instinct had been to tell Tennant, who had parked himself upstairs in a conference room for the day, one of his weekly visits to the factory floor. But not today, not now.

#

County Durham

The forecast was for snow, which suited Ben Thomas’s mood and made the likelihood of getting back to London tonight remote. He glanced through the window of his study across a scrubby back garden, through to the grey fields and moors of Long Bank beyond. He’d bought this cottage in his County Durham constituency two years ago, and while it made a welcome escape for spring and summer weekends, he had to drag himself here in January.

A dark object moved across the field. Thomas squinted his eyes to bring it into better focus. It was a fox, as brazen as anything, strolling across the grass in broad daylight, with a dead bird in its mouth. Thomas watched it cross to the stone wall then vanish into a hole.

Thomas threw himself back in the leather office chair and rubbed his eyes. The morning papers were scattered around the wooden table and the PM had pushed the Leeds terror attack off the front pages.

He picked up the Mail on Sunday. The PM, The Prince and the Payoff. The Sunday Telegraph had PM in Saudi bribe row. The Sun had the PM’s face superimposed over a pig alongside: The PM’s Porky-Pies. And the Herald, which had broken the story the evening before, an emphatic: Time to Stand Down.

The story was simple enough. Six years ago, while the PM was still Foreign Secretary, he’d received a payment of nineteen thousand pounds from an investment bank owned by a Saudi prince. The payment had been declared on his income tax form, which the Herald had got hold of. It was an unambiguous conflict of interest.

Number Ten had been on the phone last night, asking Thomas to shore up the PM on the Sunday morning shows. He’d declined. Instead, he’d tweeted a line giving full support to the PM.

The phone went. It was Hogarth.

‘Ben. Are you alone?’

‘Couldn’t be more alone right now. In the bloody constituency. Nothing but the missus and a flock of sheep for one hundred miles.’

‘Well, don’t get snowed in. Listen, I wanted to touch base about the PM. Terrible business.’

‘Terrible,’ echoed Thomas with as much sincerity as he could bother to muster.