Cordelia doesn’t turn her head when she becomes aware of the man to her left. She uses her peripheral vision as she has been taught. She’s surprised at how close to her he has managed to get without her noticing. This is a shingle beach. The sea wall is to her back. He must have made barely a sound as he approached. She examines him from the feet up. He’s shoeless. He’s got socks on and they’re thick with damp sand. He must have approached her through the sand dunes. He wears baggy blue suit trousers, shiny at the knees and with three different crease lines poorly ironed into the shins, giving the seam the appearance of an abandoned pleat. He wears an unfashionable raincoat, fastened to the very top. A woollen hat, the sort that might appear in a comic as a gift from a half-blind aunt, is pulled down over his ears. It’s a garish clash of blue-and-white zigzags, entirely without any discernible pattern or form. He wears thick glasses, their lenses speckled with rain. He’s not even close to being handsome, but there’s an absurdly confident smile on his face as he stands there, shoes in his hand, and waits for her to give him her attention.

‘Can I help you?’ she asks, turning her head and glaring at him with hard eyes.

He makes a face, pretending to look distressed. ‘Good Lord, Hinny, is that where the nickname came from? The Basilisk. Well played. If we could weaponize that quality we’d have won the war by next Tuesday.’

Cordelia licks her lips. Takes her time. Lets the moment stretch out like a cat in front of the fire. She has to fight the urge to smile. She doesn’t know whether she’s passed or failed but she feels as though she’s achieved something simply by spotting him before he was close enough to hit her with his shoe. She finds herself curiously beguiled by the odd little man, though she’d be hard pressed to explain why. He has a Rumpelstiltskin look about him – a sense that he could play the happy imp up until the moment he tore himself in two out of anger. She’s certainly not alarmed at having her nickname relayed to her by a stranger. She knows that such encounters are part of her training. She’s been followed by active agents and tasked with losing them on hectic London streets. She’s had to make spur-of-the-moment decisions about whether or not to proceed with simulated dead-letter drops based on her own instincts as to whether she is being observed.

‘Hinny?’ she asks, at last.

‘The Geordie twang,’ he says, rummaging in his coat and producing his cigarettes. He lights up and observes her through a cloud of blue-grey smoke. He doesn’t seem compelled to say anything else.