Kate really wasn’t hungry, but neither of them touched their food. She was grateful for the wine, though. ‘You know what troubles me honestly,’ she said. ‘The question I keep coming back to?’

‘Why you?’

‘Not so much that.’ She shrugged. ‘Hard as it is, perhaps I just have to accept I was picked for my credulity.’

‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Better candidates there by the dozen.’

‘How did Dante know about my friendship with Sergei? It’s a key pillar of this entire operation. How did he know my instinct would be to trust what Sergei told me and not ask all of the many questions that should have automatically come to mind?’

Sir Alan finally turned to his food. He cut and ate with measured precision. ‘I knew, as you have already pointed out,’ he said at last.

‘But how? I’m not sure I’m satisfied with how you spotted that connection so easily in my files.’

‘Instinct. Not so much what was in your file, but what you left out. One does develop a sense of these things, you know, after a lifetime in the Service.’

‘You knew that before the operation in Istanbul or afterwards?’

‘Afterwards.’

‘But that doesn’t track,’ Kate said. ‘Whoever set this thing up knew about my relationship with Sergei years previously – long enough ago to have him attend the same counter-terrorism conference in Sofia in 2012 and deliberately avoid me. Ian wasn’t even head of the Russia Desk by then, let alone controller, Europe. How would he have seen that potential in my files?’

‘He might have done, if he’d gone looking for it. And Dante was searching, I’ll wager.’

Kate put her wine down. She was tired of his intellectual jousting. If this was a world he wished to cling to, like the dying light, it was one she wanted to leave behind her. ‘Shall we stop playing games?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t you finally tell me what you really think?’

He concentrated on his food with consummate deliberation.

‘And why is it I always get the sense you know more than you’re telling me?’ she added.

‘Suspect, not know.’

‘Then tell me what you suspect.’

He sipped his wine and chewed his food. He dabbed the corner of his mouth with a napkin and seemed once or twice on the verge of sharing something with her. But then the moment passed. He imperceptibly withdrew. ‘I suspect Ian Granger was a Russian plant even before he joined the Service. I think the KGB was never as down-and-out in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union as we once thought. The most reliable and subtle officers – Igor Borodin at the forefront of them – never lost faith in better days and a return to the old ways.’

Kate didn’t believe him and the disillusionment was crushing. All those years of looking up to him, of modelling her career on his sinewy steel, charm and intelligence, and yet here they were, one to one, cutting to the quick, while she listened to him lying to her.