‘Is he, though?’

There was another long silence. They stared at her as if she had just lost her mind. Kate was reminded that when Ian and Suzy had thrown in their lot with the changing guard, they had done so with conviction. ‘What do you mean, is he?’ Suzy asked. ‘I thought it was your firmly held conviction.’

‘The Service devoted a lot of time, energy and expense to attempting to prove it, Kate,’ Ian reminded her. ‘In Istanbul at the start of the whole affair and then with Igor’s attempted defection, which I knew at the time we should have gone through with.’

There were so many things Kate could have said at this point: that the defection had collapsed because the Russians had kidnapped her children; that Ian, Suzy and the Service generally had effectively demanded she totally reject any suggestion of the prime minister being a stooge for Moscow as the price for her leaving SIS without a board of inquiry into her own conduct.

But what was the point? The prime minister’s fortunes had withered and he now, finally – as they all did – stood on the brink of annihilation. The Party was swinging behind Imogen Conrad, and Ian and Suzy were happy to fit the truth to this new reality. Only Imogen seemed genuinely troubled by Kate’s hesitation. ‘I thought you were absolutely convinced of his guilt,’ she said.

‘I was.’

‘And now you’re not?’

‘I’m more hesitant.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the prime minister has promised to let Stuart back into the country if she carries out this investigation and declares him innocent,’ Suzy said, with a triumphant smile. It was all Kate could do to resist punching her.

‘Is that true?’ Imogen asked.

‘I need to go over everything once more,’ Kate said. ‘For my own peace of mind. His argument is that he may be many things, but certainly not a paedophile. And it’s true that if Moscow wanted to create a long-term misinformation ploy he would be the perfect target.’

Kate could tell Ian was torn. Since this very conclusion had been his consistently held belief from the start, it was requiring all his strength to resist informing Kate that he had told her so. Now that the political wind had changed so had his convictions.

Imogen held the floor. She was the coming force. ‘Listen, Kate. You know how much I admire you,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow it will be announced that we have enough letters in for a vote of no confidence. It will be held next Wednesday and I’m pretty sure we’re going to win. It might be a bit nip and tuck, but the Party is now over the James Ryan phenomenon. He’s a tarnished, spent force, with an electorate that once thought of him as something different, and if we want to win again, we have to forge a new direction. I’ve been around long enough to be certain he’s finished. If you carry on with your investigation, whatever he may have promised you, he will use whatever slender straws in the wind you can find as hard evidence that he’s the victim of a monstrous international conspiracy.’