A lot of the surprise at Dean’s appointment had been fuelled by the open secret even before the transfer from Westminster Bridge Road that Johnson, for ten years the department’s Foreign Office link, resented being passed over for the very top job in favour of a schoolmasterly outsider. The bald-headed man broke away at last from his fascination with the river to produce a brief, functional smile when Dean listed Jeremy Simpson as the department’s legal advisor. The red-faced man emerged last, as political officer Patrick Pacey.

Charlie’s mind was way beyond the Director-General’s staccato delivery. Whatever this meeting was about, it certainly had nothing to do with his dismissal or enforced early retirement. What then?

The Director-General made another ineffective foray into the pushed aside file, abandoning the search as quickly as he had begun it to rotate his spectacles. Closer, Charlie saw one of the earpieces was padded with surgical tape for comfort. Tapping them against the discarded dossier, Dean said, ‘We’re in times of change.’

‘Yes, sir’

‘You think you can change?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Into a pumpkin if I have to, Charlie thought.

‘How would you feel about living permanently abroad?’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘Moscow.’

Natalia Nikandrova Fedova rarely thought about him any more. When she’d finally accepted he was going to go on failing her it had been a positive effort to keep him out of her mind but it had become easier as the months passed. But it was unavoidable today. Natalia smiled, the sadness of the past dimming her all-absorbing love of the present, as she watched Sasha whoop and scream with the excitement of opening each new birthday gift. Maybe he didn’t know about Sasha. Natalia had convinced herself she’d found the way to tell him; made up her mind he would understand because he was so very good at the business they were both in – the best she’d ever known, far better than she could have ever been – and hated him for not suddenly arriving, unannounced, as she had sometimes fantasized he would. It shouldn’t have needed a child to bring him back if he’d loved her.