‘But she never made any attempt at conversation?’

‘No. The opportunity never quite arose. We were always passing each other. She seemed like she moved everywhere with purpose and confidence.’

‘Until …’

‘Well, that was the strange thing. One day her whole demeanour changed. Now, you might say I never spoke to the girl so how would I know her demeanour had changed, but it did. I guess I’d seen her playing two or three times a week for months and months, and suddenly she seemed to move around the club in a quite different way. She played tennis with the same four, or sometimes singles with one of the guys. But she walked swiftly away afterwards, with her head down – as if something terrible had happened.

‘Anyway, I didn’t think much about it – none of my business, after all – until we found ourselves on a weekend in Ankara with a spectacularly tedious group called International Women in Business. I have no idea what a Russian intelligence officer would be doing there, but we clocked each other during the day at one or two of the symposiums and then, after dinner with a couple of American diplomats I knew vaguely, I went for a nightcap and found her at the bar.’

‘Did you strike up conversation, or did she?’

‘She did. I went to order a drink and she moved to sit next to me. “On my tab,” she told the waiter. To be honest, I was quite tired and wasn’t all that up for an encounter with one of Putin’s spooks, but there didn’t seem any way out. She was drunk. And by the time I’d been there a while, very drunk indeed.’

‘Intriguing,’ Kate said.

‘Mystifying, I thought. To begin with, I was fairly certain she was hitting on me. It wouldn’t have been the first time at an event like that.’

Kate smiled.

‘She appeared to be on the cusp of telling me something. And then she thought better of it and lurched off to bed. She struck me as a deeply unhappy woman.’

Julie had ordered a Barolo – the most expensive on the menu, if her performance so far on the trip was anything to go by – and they waited while the waiter replenished their glasses. Tess Winkelman continued to sip her water until he had glided away again.

‘By now my interest was definitely piqued. And, fortunately, that interminable conference had a whole twenty-four hours to run, so I passed her a note the following morning inviting her to dinner. I suggested a time and a place that was well out of the way. She appeared to nod, but she never showed up. I was pretty disappointed, to be honest. I felt something quite important was about to land in my lap and had been snatched away.

‘I came back to the hotel and looked into the bar, but she wasn’t there either. I decided to write it off as a strange incident and headed to bed. And then, there she was, sitting on the balcony of my room with a bottle of whisky, two glasses and a packet of cigarettes on the table before her. “Take a seat,” she said. I was annoyed and asked her what the hell she thought she was doing. She told me to relax. Claimed she couldn’t say what she needed to say in any public space.