‘Do you?’

‘I think so, yes.’

Rose gripped her wrist, took the keys and started the car. They drove all the way home to Kate’s house in Battersea in uneasy silence. Rose turned off the engine again as she parked outside. ‘Try not to think too ill of me,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not sure I could bear that.’

‘I’d never think worse of you,’ Kate replied, though even as she said it, she was not precisely sure it was true.

‘I know what your mother’s betrayal of your father did to you. I’m not naive enough to think this revelation will land without impact.’

Kate looked at her aunt. ‘You’re not my mother and you never will be. What happened between you and Simon or even you and Sir Alan is not my business.’ She hugged her aunt and put her hand on the door lever. But she hesitated again. ‘Are you sure he confessed to his wife?’

‘Yes, quite sure.’

Kate was thinking of the prime minister’s description of Sir Alan’s dominance of the moral high ground. ‘It couldn’t have been used to blackmail him?’

Rose shook her head. ‘No, not least because Alice did a better job of forgiving him.’

Kate walked away, stopping to gather herself at the front door as she put the key into the lock. Not my business, she told herself. Just not my business.

But the evening had one more surprise in store, in the shape of Ian Granger hunched at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of tea. There was no sign of either of her children. ‘Fiona let me in,’ he said apologetically.

Kate took off her coat and hung it up. She flicked the kettle back on. She turned to face him. ‘This is a bit of a liberty, Ian.’

‘I’ve forced the Security Service to call off its dogs,’ he said.

‘There’s enough deception in that single sentence,’ she replied, ‘to keep me occupied for months.’

‘I’m offering an alliance.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘Finding Dante. Bringing this to a conclusion. Look …’ He put his tea to one side and leant forward, elbows on the table. ‘The Security Service think it must be you. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say they’re obsessed by the idea. But it can’t be you, as I’ve now told them many times.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t think even your worst enemy believes you’re bad enough to expose your husband as a spy and have him exiled to Moscow to the heartbreak of your own children.’

‘Unless it was to deflect suspicion from me and in preparation for the day when I’m finally exposed and have to flee to Moscow myself.’

‘If you’re Dante and have survived more than a decade, perhaps two, at the heart of the Service, I don’t think you’d assume your days were numbered.’

‘All right, but it could be you. Indeed, on some measures, it probably is you. So how is an alliance going to work?’

‘Because there’s only one person at a senior level within the Service who has been sceptical of the claims of this operation from the start. Who was it who argued for caution over the recording of that bugged conversation on the super-yacht? Who worried we might be being set up? Who didn’t want to take it forward? Who doubted Igor Borodin’s veracity as a defector and didn’t want to go through with it?’