And now? Why had I given Walt permission to use the old house, far to the north; to hunker down with whoever the hell it was he was so desperate for me to see? Why had I dispatched my only friend to make sure it was up to his standards and to hide away those few precious trinkets from another time, another life? It was because it was exciting. It was because Talbot had been rude to me and I wanted to stick my thumbs in his eyes in some way or another. Why was I heading north to join Walt? It was to get away from London – to return to a place where I had once been a different person entirely and where somebody I loved was going to help me make sense of myself again. That was it, I realized. Everything else was just some elaborate construct that permitted me to go home and see Felicity. I didn’t like who I’d become. I knew that life didn’t provide absolutes and that few fights come down to good against bad, but I was spending too much time in a murky shadow-world where pragmatism and compromise were seen as justification for looking away while terrible things went unpunished and unremarked. I was supposed to be a cog in a machine, part of an unwieldy but effective apparatus that kept people safe and stopped the Cold War from freezing too many people to death. But politically, philosophically, morally, I’d never been any more in favour of Capitalism than Communism and if I hadn’t been sent to the Peace Protests as a spy I’d have been there as a civilian. I was sick of spying on good people. I was sick of putting the needs of the state above the needs of its people. And Walt knew it. That’s why he picked me. I was the new recruit who didn’t think it would be a good idea to hide their love of George Orwell or stand when the national anthem played. I was the outsider – the northern lass with the trace of a Geordie accent; the politician’s wife who would sooner go to a Led Zeppelin concert than take tea with the queen. I was wrong for the intelligence service, but also exactly what it needed. I started shaking my head at myself, giving little tuts of annoyance, working myself out, picking myself apart. What the hell was I meant to do about acts of evil happening thousands of miles away? Britain had just won a war, for God’s sake. Maggie’s popularity was at an all-time high. Huge swathes of the public had got into the old Blitz spirit and celebrated every dead Argentinian as we trundled our way through the Falklands conflict and reclaimed a few square miles of inhospitable rock. What were we going to do? Invade Guatemala and tell the president to stop being beastly? It was a bloody joke.