Marshall and Pearce must have been in that very same meeting room the day Grant had shared his ultimate plan. Marshall, thinking of his young family in the Derbyshire Dales (or so the story went), had been horrified. Inspired by the risk to Hannah and his twin daughters (apparently), who would be doomed to grow up and grow old on New London’s upper floors (as if that would be a bad thing), Marshall had reached into the company’s private army training programme and pulled out a red-haired teenager.

Oliver Gabriel Roth, then aged twelve, was set to burst out of comprehensive school four years later with a fine assortment of high grades. He had planned to enter the military, but a place in the British Armed Forces didn’t offer half as much money as a private defence contractor. And to a young man with unsupportive parents, money mattered.

Roth remembered Marshall’s reasons for choosing him. Apparently he had seen ‘a battling attitude, raw unbridled enthusiasm, and a total reliance on victory for his sense of self-worth’, according to an email on his computer that Roth hadn’t been meant to look at.

Despite Roth’s young age and lack of experience, Marshall was convinced there was nobody on his payroll more suitable for the assassination of Nicholas Grant.

From the beginning, Roth had known the reasons for his promotion. He had even met his target face to face and shook him by the hand. The private education promised to the authorities was a lie, replaced by intensive military training. By his thirteenth birthday, he had been going to bed each night twirling the childproofed bottle of cyanide tablets between his fingers, waiting with growing impatience for the signal to slip them into Grant’s morning coffee.

The signal never came. Marshall had never admitted it, but Roth knew his boss had accepted that his own fate relied on the success of Nicholas Grant. But by calling off Grant’s assassination, Marshall had surrendered his fate to a teenage boy too.

Roth had never blackmailed him aloud, and he had never needed to. Even that day, with Britain subdued and the war nearly won, a cheeky smile on his face told Marshall everything he needed to know. To buy his silence, Oliver Roth had been swept into a life of luxury on Floor A, and total freedom from authority.

One year on from Takeover Day, the relationship between the Big Four was complicated. Each one of them was hated by each of the others, but their animosity was rarely committed to words. There was an unspoken wobbly tension between them, like a wooden raft tied with loose rope, but they depended on one another for survival.

Roth drummed his fingers on the top of the forensic bag one more time, and smiled at Marshall.