He smacked the packet of sugar three times against the table and tipped it into his coffee. He did the same with another, then stirred it in, scooping and turning the liquid with a teaspoon. An agent, Kate thought, of superstitious rituals.

A young man came past on a scooter. At the last moment, he looked in their direction in a manner that might have been accidental but felt deliberate. Was he trying to catch Kate’s eye or perhaps that of the waitress behind her? Kate turned, but the girl was nowhere to be seen and the deck outside the café was otherwise empty.

Kate tried to disguise her reaction, but Incisor had seen it and his body language altered immediately. He sat up straight, pushed away his coffee, uninterested. He glanced about him nervously again and stroked his dog, as if looking for reassurance. ‘It was nothing,’ she said.

‘He was too interested.’

‘He was checking me out, but not as a potential agent for a hostile power.’

‘He—’

‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on enough stakeouts and clandestine meetings in hostile environments all over the world to know for certain that only self-confident sexual predators make eye contact with total strangers.’ He didn’t seem reassured and she wasn’t so sure she was either.

‘I can’t do it,’ he said. He put some roubles on the table. ‘Tell your masters in London I can’t do it.’

‘Wait a moment.’ He was about to get up when she gripped his forearm. ‘Sit down,’ she instructed him.

His resistance seemed to evaporate. His shoulders sagged again. ‘You shouldn’t overreact and neither will we,’ she said. ‘I’m offering you everything you ever wanted here. If the pressure of your secret existence is getting to you, here is a chance to end it. With one bound, you will be free.’

Kate recalled the last time she had used that line, with Lena, in Istanbul and Greece. Had she believed it then? Perhaps. But all she had managed to achieve was to send the poor girl to certain death and she wasn’t any more confident this would end differently. ‘You don’t believe it,’ he said.

‘I do,’ she replied, with as much confidence as she could muster.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It is too dangerous.’

Kate leant closer. ‘You don’t have a choice. If you want what has been promised to you, it is infinitely more risky to attempt to keep up this double life for another two years and we both know that. This is swift and decisive, one strike and you’re out – and a rich man.’

He took another sugar packet. He hadn’t touched his coffee. Kate let his silence play out. The sound of the morning birdsong appeared newly deafening, as did the chatter from the family of ducks on the water. ‘They will have alarms,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know how to beat them.’

‘How does the internal security system work?’ she asked. ‘And on what realistic timescale?’