Getting on well with the new book, working title is Kings Ransom. A bit of an extract below, a little scene setting perhaps, a history lesson perhaps, or pure fiction? You decide...

“The threats are real, that is why we are here.”

“I thought at first that you were, well, regular spies, you know. I never realised exactly who we were protecting.”

“No, I realise that. By our nature we have to be reclusive.”

“Things I expected you, sorry, us, to be involved in, we aren’t. I am struggling sometimes to understand the defining line. I mean, with that business with Ivan, Edward, Henry, you, all acted exactly like spies would. ”

“If you just sit back and look who is at risk, rather than what, then you will be able to determine if it is something that warrants our attention, and if so, how urgent that attention need be. Like any one, when people we love are put at risk, or in George’s case harmed, we use all our resources to strike back. On that occasion it pleased Her Majesty’s Government to allow us, rather than the usual services, to deal with the matter. If it had gone awry, then there was deniability and we would have just been portrayed as people seeking private revenge.”

“I understand that, but then, I am trying to catch up here, because I am new to all this, looking at what we are supposed to be doing, you know, for our day job, I have been reading the files. It adds to my confusion. Didn’t we fail in Paris?”

“Oh no, any thing but, we succeeded greatly in Paris, and the world also benefited from an outcry against drunk drivers. Three deaths in that underpass saved countless more by keeping many drunk drivers off the road.”

“But Henri Paul wasn’t drunk.”

“No, but crucially the autopsy showed that he was. And the rider of the motorcycle will never be found, despite The Grocer’s money. The white Fiat is also now a dead end following the Andanson’s suicide.”

“But it wasn’t suicide.”

“The coroner thinks that it was. Everything found was consistent with filling the car with petrol and setting light to it by himself.”

“Except the amount of carbon monoxide in his blood exceeded what he could have taken in before death from the conflagration.”

The Colonel dipped his head and closed his eyes and made no comment.

“Teacher will keep quiet?”

“Everyone keeps quiet. There are so few of us actually in the know. The Chamber only take on people that we can trust, and have only been let down once in the last three hundred and thirty seven years. We are not the kind of people to write memoirs or sell stories to newspapers.”

“I can’t believe the reason why we did it though, I mean, converting to Muslim? It goes against everything I believed I knew.”

“You have to understand her position and how the Establishment, as she saw it, was railing against her. She was seeking a safe port in a storm and the opportunity to fight back against her detractors in a way that they could not defend. It would have been catastrophic for the Monarchy and succession.”

“Let me read the files again, I’m still not sure. One other thing though, there seems so few of us.”

“We do not need a large organisation, we have other resources we can call on, as you saw last year in Gibraltar. The other issue is that the right calibre people are actually becoming quite tough to find. It is a vocation almost, and we need people who are exceedingly highly trustworthy.”

“You seemed to take me on very quickly; you couldn’t have possibly vetted me that quickly.”

“As soon as the first flag was raised on you, even before you did your bit on the Post Office floor, we started a file on you and started profiling you, and believe me, our profilers are the best in the world.”

“What do you mean, before the Post Office? I hadn’t even met Edward until then.”

“No, but you had encountered him several times. It was actually quite by chance that we spotted you taking an interest in Edward, but then a small chance is sometimes all it takes.”

“I don’t think I can quite believe you.”

“I am absolutely straight let me tell you.”

“I am sure that you are, but still, checking me out before I had even managed to garner Edward’s interest, probably before I even realised I was interested in Edward is a bit much. Let me see my file, I want to know what attracted you to me, and when, and then what you did.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But I have seen your file, Edward’s file, even Lord Chalford’s, why not mine?”

“Golden rule. We can all see every file, except for our own. Keeps us honest if we don’t know what is in our own file. Absolute rule laid down by George.”

“George, which George? I haven’t seen a file on anyone called George, except for the short one on Anne’s George of course.”

“King George II, son of King George I, father of George III.”

“Right, of course. Silly me, George II, I should have realised.”

“We are who we are. There is only us, we can not, must not, dare not fail.”

“I don’t accept failure, it is not in my makeup.”

“I know, why do you think you are here? You are here on your own merit, not because of whom your boyfriend was or who you are married to. Having caught my attention and interest, I would probably have approached you at some point anyway, even if you and Edward had amounted to nothing. Your profiling was better than Rosemary’s had been, and she had looked after us for many years, so long in fact, that I actually inherited her from my predecessor who also inherited her. She was a bit of a star, but perhaps a little bit ‘old school’. I could read her and knew her better than she knew herself. I could tell that she had begun to wane even before she knew her time was coming to an end. I was already looking for a replacement when you came on my radar. Your position, as my PA, is exceedingly important and I could not risk a long term vacancy necessitated by Rosemary leaving before I had identified a suitable replacement. Timing is everything.”

“Looking back now, I could almost think that you ordered that snow storm to see if I would still deliver my report to the council on time, or if I would just cry ‘Force Majeure’ and crawl back under my duvet.”

“Not even I would engineer weather of that magnitude on cue in order to test a potential recruit, although under the right circumstances, and with the help of the Royal Air Force, we can and do certain things at certain times. We have caused rain, but it can be inexact and that can lead to a deluge when all we wanted was an inconvenient rain storm. We explore that route only with the greatest of caution.”

“It was raining unexpectedly in Paris if I recall.”

“Was it? I don’t remember.”

“I understand. But don’t take me for a fool. If you don’t want to talk about something, then say so, don’t feign amnesia. I may not have been here long, but I do know how good your memory is, especially on major operations like that one. That operation was world changing. I do not believe that you would have forgotten a major detail such as the weather, especially if it was a key part of the operation. Treat me like a fool and I will leave. I shall not stay where I am not respected.”

“I stand by what I have said. Some things are better left unspoken, and I, Geraldine, shall not be interrogated.”

“Perhaps you should be. Who are you accountable to?”

‘You know that. I am absolutely accountable to only one person. There can only ever be one person.”