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isn’t.’

    ‘Of course, prime minister: I’m happy to help if I can, though I’m pretty sure that there is nothing much to discover.’

    ‘Still, I would be grateful.’

    Kilmartin nodded. Unless he was very much mistaken he had just been appointed the prime minister’s personal intelligence officer.

     
     
    The bells were being rung open rather than half-muffled, as is usual for the dead. And when the peal fell suddenly into the cold, bright Tuesday morning the people in High Castle’s Market Square glanced towards the church, eyes freshening, as though spring was being announced, or someone had decided that life itself should be celebrated. Kate paused. Above her, a camera in a black hemisphere fixed to the side of a building watched everything in the square yet, like the woman who had followed her on the short walk from the hotel, it almost certainly missed the striking beauty of the moment.

    She was certain about this watcher, a slim woman in her mid-thirties wearing a tan trouser suit. She plainly had more training than practice in surveillance. There was no substitute for experience, as she had always been told by McBride, nominally second secretary (economic) at the embassy in Jakarta, but in reality MI6’s head of station. That was a lifetime ago, when she was married and living in a flat near the embassy, but Kate hadn’t lost the ability to read a street and spot the false moves of a bad actor. And this girl, as McBride would have said, wouldn’t cut the mustard in the Scunthorpe Repertory Theatre.

    Kate walked on to the stalls at the centre of Market Square. A police helicopter came noiselessly from the south then hovered high over the square sending a rhythmic thud around the walls of the castle. Twice it repositioned itself by falling away down the valley then nosing into the sharp westerly wind blowing across the Marches. Three civilian helicopters followed at a much lower altitude and landed on a piece of open ground beneath the escarpment of red sandstone, where their rotor blades turned and bounced in the wind. Then the official cars began to arrive, two accompanied by unmarked protection vehicles that sat just to the right of the rear bumper of the saloons and stuck to them like pilot fish. The cars swept into the square in a way that made heads turn, then followed Sheep Street to the Bailey Hotel, where their occupants were decanted into a room, which Kate learned had been laid on by Eyam’s stepmother for the mourners making the trip from London.

    She stopped at a stall selling wraps, shawls and scented candles to get a better look at her pursuer. The woman moved behind a stand of jams and pickles, then retreated to the line of market stalls at the top of the square. Why the hell was she being followed?

    Kate picked up a black and mauve scarf.

    ‘It’s Nepalese - silk and cashmere,’ said the stallholder, placing a rolled cigarette on a battered tobacco tin. ‘They call that colour damson. A pal of mine imports them from the village in Nepal where they’re made. But I got to admit they’re dear.’

    The scarf went well with the short dark grey herringbone jacket and black trousers she’d chosen for the funeral. She put it on and looked at herself in a smudged mirror that hung from the front of the stall, angling it slightly to see over her shoulder. The watcher had moved behind her and glanced twice in her direction. ‘Screw this,’ she said softly and turned and eyeballed the woman, who looked away.

    ‘The scarf?’ said the stallholder.

    ‘I’ll take it,’ Kate said with a smile.

    ‘Looks terrific on you: just right for your dark colouring, if you don’t mind me saying.’

    ‘I don’t,’ she said and removed five twenties from her purse.

    ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, wrapping the money carefully onto a fold of notes. ‘The place is crawling with filth.’

    ‘Filth?’ she said, smiling. ‘The police are here for the funeral.’

    ‘Who’s that for