‘There are still decent people at Millbank,’ he says, as if I’m muttering nonsense. ‘People who will do the right thing if they see this – if they hear what we’re doing …’

‘There’s a chain of command,’ I say, half pleading for him to stop making me defend the indefensible. ‘It’s all changed, Walt. If I even try to get anybody to look into this or to clear an operation, then I’m going to have to go up every rung of the ladder – by the book, all above board …’

‘While innocent people are murdered by our friends,’ he says, and there is a flash of something in his features that I would have called ‘desperation’ in a lesser man. He recovers himself quickly. ‘All I’m asking you to do is listen. I don’t want to have to resort to Plan B.’

I don’t ask what Plan B is. I presume he means taking his information to another friendly source within GCHQ. I should have asked, I think. Forty years later I feel like reaching into the memory and dragging myself out of that place, telling that silly slip of a thing not to get involved. If ignorance is bliss then knowledge is torture and I swear to God I would give anything to have stayed in the dark. But I couldn’t help myself. It was guilt and ego and a desire to impress an old friend, and within a fortnight I would be hanging from my thumbs in a different darkness, listening to the screams of the dying and the sobs of my oldest friend.

‘OK,’ I tell him. ‘Tell me all of it.’

FELICITY

Transcript 0018, recorded November 30, 2016