‘You thought I was one of them?’ he asked.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Then who are you?’

‘What was your story?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she breathed. ‘They meant what they said.’

Sam allowed a silence to fall between them. When he spoke, his voice was softer. Calmer. ‘Is your front door locked?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘What about the burglar alarm?’

Clare shook her head. ‘It’s a dummy.’

‘All right then. Listen to me carefully. I’m in the military. As long as I’m here I can make sure nothing happens. You believe me, don’t you?’

She nodded again.

‘Good. Listen, Clare, I’m sorry if I frightened you out there. Truth is, I’m not quite sure what’s going on or who I can trust. I think I can trust you, but you’ve got to tell me what you know. Will you do that?’

Still she looked at him timidly. ‘All right.’ She smiled, a scared little smile. Her breath came in long, slow sighs, as though she were psyching herself up to speak.

And then she did. Slowly. Nervously.

‘About a month ago, this guy got in touch. He’d read one of my articles – I can’t remember which one – and said he wanted to talk.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say. To be honest, I thought he was a nutter. Refused to meet anywhere there might have been CCTV. I kept trying to put him off – thought he sounded like the type to do a Jill Dando on me – but he kept calling till I agreed to meet him just to shut him up.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘To start with, out of town. He wanted to go somewhere deserted, but I wouldn’t do that, so we met in the car park of a service station on the M4. He was scared shitless.’ Clare looked down. ‘I know I’m not one to talk.’

‘Carry on.’

‘He said his name was Bill. Cockney lad. I didn’t believe him, but I don’t think he expected me to. He was…’ She shrugged. ‘Mid-twenties? A bit younger maybe. Bolshie. Would’ve come across as a bit of a wide boy if he wasn’t so frightened.’

Clare started to chew on her thumbnail, clearly perturbed by the memories.

‘What was he frightened of?’

She paused and breathed heavily, steadying herself. ‘I didn’t believe him at first,’ she said. ‘It just sounded like… I don’t know… just rubbish. Thought he was a timewaster. He said he’d been recruited by MI5 as some kind of operative. Someone to do their dirty work.’

‘MI5 already have people to do their dirty work,’ Sam stated.

Clare looked sharply at him before carrying on. ‘He said he’d been taken to some kind of training camp, a place where they were trained up in certain techniques. Weapons training, surveillance, things like that. The camp was in…’

‘… Kazakhstan,’ Sam completed her sentence under his breath.

Her eyes narrowed at him as she nodded. ‘Like I said, I thought it was all bullshit. Bill could tell I wanted to get away so he stopped talking. He just made me promise to call him if I wanted to know more.’

‘And did you?’

‘I didn’t want to. I just tried to ignore it for a couple of days. But I couldn’t. I kept thinking about it. The story was far-fetched, but he sounded convincing. At least, he sounded as though he had convinced himself. So I called him back. Arranged to meet again, somewhere we could talk more privately this time. He asked me for some money – a couple of hundred pounds.’

‘Didn’t that make you suspicious?’

‘Not really,’ Clare replied. ‘Everyone thinks their story’s worth something and most people think it’s a lot more than that. I also got the impression that he really needed the money. We arranged to meet at a country pub, out in the sticks somewhere. That’s where he told me everything he knew.’ She tapped her finger on the document. ‘Everything that ended up in there. Look, could I have a glass of water?’

Sam nodded. ‘Go ahead.’

The woman stood up and turned her back to him. As she took a glass from a kitchen cabinet and filled it with water, she spoke. ‘So are you going to tell me your name?’ she asked, clearly trying to sound bold, but unable to hide the tremor in her voice.

‘Sam,’ he replied.

‘And what part of the military are you in, Sam?’

She turned to face him and drank deeply.

Sam didn’t reply. Clare nodded, as though his silence had confirmed a suspicion of hers, then took her seat once more.

‘In the article,’ she resumed, ‘I call them “red-light runners”. In fact, that’s what Bill called them.’

‘Who?’

‘People like himself. People MI5 are targeting. From what he said, they’ve been on the lookout for thrill-seekers. Danger merchants. The kind of young men who would run a red light without a second thought. Long story short: Bill told me that MI5 have ways of identifying people like this. It’s amazing really, the kind of information they have on all of us. The red-light runners, they all fit some kind of…’ She searched around for a phrase. ‘Psychological profile. They look at the obvious things, of course. Criminal records, employment history. But smaller stuff, too. Speeding fines to judge their attitude to risk, supermarket club-card points to draw a picture of their lifestyle. Air miles – the kind of person they’re looking for is more likely to have visited Ibiza than Vienna, if you know what I mean. They use all this information to draw up a profile of people willing to take risks. And willing to be groomed.’

There was a noise. Clare’s head shot round to see what it was.

‘It’s nothing,’ Sam told her. ‘Just the house creaking. Carry on.’

Clare took a moment to compose herself. ‘Bill was terrified,’ she continued. ‘He kept referring to a job, something the security services wanted him to do. He never told me what it was, but it was enough to give him second thoughts about working for them. He was on the run, hiding from them.’

‘If he’d gone dark,’ Sam asked dubiously, ‘what was he doing talking to you?’

Clare shook her head slightly. ‘That’s what I couldn’t work out. At first I thought it was just the money. I mean, the kid had to eat, you know what I mean? But then maybe I thought it was more than that. I think perhaps he was gambling that if he spilled the beans and it appeared in the national press, it would embarrass MI5 into shutting the operation down.’

‘The guys from Five,’ Sam muttered, ‘don’t really do embarrassment.’

The woman shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she replied. ‘It was difficult for me to back any of this up. It was all down to Bill’s word and I wasn’t even sure how much I believed him. The only thing I knew for sure was that he was very, very frightened of being found out. That led me to believe that there was at least something in what he was saying. And whatever it was that the security services were asking him to do, it was something bad.’ She looked straight into Sam’s eyes. ‘Something one of these red-light runners would baulk at.’

For some reason, the stare she gave him made Sam feel deeply uncomfortable.

‘Go on,’ he told her.

‘That was the last time I saw Bill. We spoke on the phone once or twice, when I wanted to ask him a question or check a fact. I wrote my article sitting at this table. I didn’t show it to anyone. I didn’t even mention it to anyone. To be honest with you, I didn’t even think it would see the light of day. I thought it would be laughed at.’

‘So why did you carry on writing it?’

Clare stuck her neck out slightly. ‘Because I believed it,’ she said. ‘I believed, at least, that some of it was true. My plan was to show it to the powers that be, to gauge their reaction to what I had written.’

‘And did you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Clare replied, her Irish accent suddenly light and dancing. ‘I did that all right.’ She stared into the middle distance, as though remembering something that left her numb. ‘I did that all right,’ she repeated.

‘And what happened?’

Clare frowned. ‘It sounds a bit stupid, doesn’t it? Giving everything you’ve got to the enemy, I mean. But actually I wasn’t being all that dumb. The way I figured it, they could do one of three things. If it was all a load of rubbish, they’d just ignore it. I’d have been stymied if they’d done that, to be sure. If it was true, they could either deny it – that’s what I was hoping for – or slap a DA notice on it.’