‘… can’t say I’m surprised. Hero-worshipped him, from the little I know. Always was the bleeding heart. One may as well try and explain the concept of pragmatism to one’s horse. Of course, one can invest one’s time and money and one’s patience but sometimes the bad blood will overcome the attentions of even the most patient handler. I’d tell you about her father but her mother was too free with her affections to be able to keep the list of possible suspects under the thickness of the telephone book. Good God but she’s put me in a dashed awkward situation. I won’t go, that’s the long and the short of it. They can bark all they want but I need to steer well clear or the minister will have lied to the Commons and we might struggle to survive the fallout. It should never have come to this. Did you see the operational notes from the Greenham Common operation? Good God but she was more protester than a member of the intelligence services. She stuck photographs of our children to the fence. Our actual children! A show of solidarity, part of maintaining her cover – that’s how she explained it when her superiors dared to question it. But our actual children? Even poor Stefan, God rest him. And now, this dalliance with that bloody nuisance of a man. I won’t be giving him what he wants and damn the consequences, for him, for me and especially for Cordelia. Have I not tried? To suddenly turn her back on queen and country, on her own family – I know that we can make all of this irksome business go away but it’s going to have a terrible knock-on effect and the Americans are going to feel dangerously over-exposed. I’ll keep trying to get Pelletier on the phone. Really, there’s the most frightful flap going on in Washington about all this and it’s most embarrassing to have to tell them that it’s my own bloody wife who’s right at the centre of an international incident. Clean it up, softly-softly if you could. Best if she doesn’t ever know I gave the nod, if it can be avoided. Keep things between the gentlemen, as it were …’

It was my husband. It was Cranham Hemlock, Assistant Private Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and one of the senior civil servants sitting on the Joint Intelligence Committee. He’d been bugged. And he’d given me up without a second thought.

I felt cold. Felt goosebumps rise all over my body. Felt a desperate desire to walk out into traffic and end the screaming in my head.

I thought of Stefan. Thought of Louis and Tamara. Thought of Flick. Looked away from the road, and back towards the light.