He sensed something amiss as they waited to check in. ‘Julie told me to book here,’ he said. ‘Apparently it was important.’

Kate smiled at Julie and took her to task ten minutes later when they met at the café beneath the palm trees on the terrace.

‘Well, it is where it all started.’ Julie grinned.

‘You can’t spend the next few weeks torturing him.’

‘Oh, Lord, I can.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘Besides, that’s not what I have in mind at all.’

‘No, no, no.’ Kate shook her head. ‘No. Seriously. No.’

‘Now you’re sounding like my father.’

‘No.’ Kate fixed her friend with a steady gaze. ‘I really am serious. Absolutely not.’

Julie threw the cigarette packet across the table. ‘Have a smoke and chill out, for God’s sake.’

‘I thought you were going out with Danny, anyway.’

Julie lit up. ‘I am, sort of.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, as far as these things go.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s none of your business, that’s what it means.’

The waiter arrived and Julie ordered: ‘Gin, Fever Tree tonic, lemon, ice.’

Kate said she’d have the same and they watched him weave his way back to the bar. ‘This place is worth Shirley Grove’s money. I’ve always wanted to stay here.’

‘Whatever happened to the Ottoman Empire?’ Julie asked, gesturing at their surroundings. She’d studied sociology at Manchester University and, despite being one of the smartest women Kate had met, liked to glory in ignorance outside her core interests.

‘It collapsed.’

‘I know that. How?’

‘It joined the wrong side in the First World War.’

‘I thought it rotted from within.’

‘People used to think that. It did fall behind some of its rivals, like Russia, militarily. But it was still reasonably strong until it threw in its lot with the Germans. As even you will remember, that didn’t end well for anyone.’

The waiter brought their drinks and Kate finally succumbed to the temptation of a cigarette. ‘Give me what you have,’ she said. ‘Callum will be here in a moment.’ This was the first chance they’d had to talk alone and out of earshot since meeting at Heathrow, so Julie knew exactly what her friend was driving at. ‘Nothing at all on this Natasha Demidova. She’s never appeared on our radar before.’

‘Really?’

‘I triple-checked.’

Kate pondered this. It was perfectly plausible that someone might have flown beneath the radar. They certainly didn’t have a record of every single member of the SVR’s staff, but it was frustrating nevertheless. If the woman was a fake, the Russians would naturally have made sure she was a clean skin. The less they knew, the less able they would be to judge her motives and veracity. ‘What about Irina and the original Operation Cyclone?’

‘As you guessed, all closed down. The thing that’s a tiny bit odd is that your part of the file is still open. The way Irina originally made contact with you at the Blue Mosque, your further meetings in the bazaar, and all your assessments of her potential are still open and intact, but there’s no explanation of what happened next. No matter how many ways you go through the filing system, you hit a dead end.’