It was rare for Len Gibbons to entertain ideas that were not necessary to the business in hand. He lifted the photographs in turn, one of a younger man and one of an older, and held them where she could see them. Ridiculous, unnecessary, but he did it. ‘For you and me, Sarah, our moment in the spotlight is nearly over. We’ll be moving into the wings and it’ll be their turn to hog the stage… If they’re any good, we’ll win. If they’re not, we’ll… I hate to think of the end game if they’re not good enough and where they’ll be. Anyway…’

‘I’m sure they’re good men,’ she said gently. ‘The best available.’

He reached for his phone. ‘Which they’ll need to be.’

He was a star, his exceptional abilities accepted by all who came into professional contact with him. He knew the range of his talents and treated less skilled ‘croppies’ with disdain, something near to contempt: he had childhood friends, no boozing pals. The best relationship currently in his life was with his ‘oppo’, Ged. There were some on the team who murmured, behind their hands, that Ged deserved beatification for tolerating ‘stags’ with that ‘cocky little prick’, but everyone acknowledged that Danny Baxter – called Badger to his face – was the bee’s bollocks when it came to the arts of working in a covert rural observation post, where he and Ged huddled against the elements on a freezing night, halfway up a valley’s slopes in the hide they’d built.

Aged twenty-eight, and still nominally a policeman, Badger had been transferred the previous year to the surveillance teams of Box – their call-sign for the Security Service.