After that, she had moved to Santiago in Chile. Kate checked her notes to find that Eva’s time there overlapped with Ian’s by six months. She was then sent on undeclared to Paris and then declared to London. She was currently head of the counter-terrorism unit in the Czech Foreign Intelligence Service in Prague.

Kate picked up a pencil and returned to the section relating to Eva’s time in Santiago. Every one of her other postings had a few paragraphs describing her perceived duties, role and activities – usually written up by the SIS resident head of station – but her time in Santiago was blank.

Had Ian not bothered to write anything up about his former lover? Or had he been covering his tracks? Kate made a note on the side of the page to check with Julie as to whether the document had been recently edited inside SIS – and, if so, by whom. She put the file back on Julie’s desk and returned to check some of the newspaper websites to be sure of the Malcolm Glass story, with its many grisly details of what had taken place on ‘Paedophile Island’. Then she headed for the door.

Kate practically ran home, keen suddenly to be away from it all. She cooked supper – a form of therapy that never failed – and lingered at the dinner table with Gus, Fiona and her boyfriend Jay. He was dancing around Fiona like a gadfly. She looked as if she might punch him at any moment. ‘Is it true the prime minister is a paedophile?’ Gus blurted out, after they had finished eating.

‘I don’t know.’

‘He’s a sleazy creep,’ Fiona said, a remark that seemed intended for her wayward boyfriend. Kate had warmed to Jay over the past year, but it was surely time for him to be shown the door.

‘I’m not sure that makes him a paedophile,’ Jay said, and Fiona shot him a warning glance.

Kate’s phone buzzed and, before she could turn it over, everyone had seen that it was a message from Stuart. ‘Is that from Dad?’ Fiona asked, though she knew very well it had been.

‘What does he want?’ Gus asked.

‘“Coming under some pressure. They want to meet this week,”’ Fiona said, displaying an impressive ability to read upside down at speed. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I’d better not go into it.’

‘I thought you were going to be honest with us.’

‘Not to that degree.’

There was a brief, tense silence. Fiona glared at her mother. ‘You said we were all in this together,’ she said eventually. ‘We have a right to know if he’s causing more trouble.’ Now it was Gus’s turn to shoot his sister a warning glance. Or was it just surprise at having lost an ally?

‘There are some things it’s better for you not to know,’ Kate said quietly.

‘Like what?’

‘Like the pressure Dad is under from the people who blackmailed and recruited him in Moscow, or the plan we’ve both agreed to deal with it.’