‘Maybe,’ she agreed, as she reeled from the implications of the words on the screen before her. Until now, she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge how much she desperately needed the finger of guilt in this investigation to point towards Ian Granger, her nemesis, not her friend and former mentor, Sir Alan Brabazon.

Was it really possible he was Dante?

‘Fucking hell!’ Imogen shot to her feet. She flicked the screen back to ITV, where they were reporting news that ‘allies close to the prime minister’ had told Good Morning Britain that ‘the endless succession of fake news scandals about the PM’s past has been orchestrated by an Agent Dante working at the heart of MI6, whose identity is now being urgently sought by the Security Service’.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Imogen shouted.

Kate stared at the screen, wishing the news it imparted – now running in a ticker tape along the bottom – could be reeled back in. Her own phone buzzed. It was a text from the prime minister himself. Please come to Number Ten immediately. James Ryan.

26

TEN MINUTES LATER, when she was shown into his study, the prime minister was standing with his back to her, gazing out at the Downing Street garden. A red box was open on the ancient wooden desk, its contents spilt across the leather top like the detritus of some undergraduate essay research.

He turned. ‘Kate,’ he said. He looked as if he had aged physically, his cheeks puffy, his hair greying at the temples, but regressed mentally, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders sloping. He had a steaming mug of black coffee on the windowsill beside him, which he did not appear to have touched. ‘It’s a bloody business,’ he said.

She didn’t enquire which bit of this affair he had in mind, though there were plenty of candidates.

‘Don’t you think?’

‘Yes, Prime Minister.’

He didn’t look as if he would welcome an interrogation into which aspect of her investigation he might have been referring to. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just had to.’

‘Had to what?’ she said, though she knew what he had done. She just wanted him to admit it.

‘I leaked it, of course.’ He waved airily at the outer office. ‘I mean, they did. Dark arts and all that.’

‘I assumed as much.’

‘I know I said I wouldn’t.’ He nodded, as if genuinely troubled, though why a man who was a byword for perfidy should care about this broken word was a mystery. ‘But the chief whip tells me I’m going to lose next week. The tide is turning against me. The team were convinced I needed a powerful counter-narrative to change that and this was the only one they felt might do the trick.’

‘And, after all, it is the truth.’

He frowned at her. ‘I thought you’d be furious.’

‘I find I’ve got to the age where fury is overrated.’

‘I wish I had!’ He was gazing out over the garden again. ‘I’d like to roast Imogen Conrad over a roaring fire.’