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At his insistence, the group of eminent public Britons had convened to meet Alois Haydn in a private club off Shepherd’s Market. He’d ordered them over there, and now he’d ordered them over here. The man was a maniac for secrecy. There was an air of irritation in the room, as they had all left urgent work. They were unaccustomed to being summoned, and unaccustomed to waiting.

This club was a remnant of a London that – so far as outsiders imagined – had long disappeared. It was the London in which gentlemen never wore brown shoes except with corduroy trousers and tweed jackets; the London whose tobacconists mixed cigarette blends just as sir preferred, and where Purdeys were bought in pairs for young sons; the London of unmarked doors, of Albany chambers (not ‘flats’, still less ‘apartments’), where the tea was forever Darjeeling and the gins only came pink. It was a London, frankly, that was mostly now for sale to wealthy foreign nostalgists. But there were still a few pockets of the old ways.

A circle of padded leather chairs had been arranged in front of an ornate marble fireplace. One of those present was actually smoking – tobacco. A discreet handwritten sign on the door told club members that the Red Library had been reserved until lunchtime by ‘PLS’. The full name of the company whose executive had gathered in the small, stuffy room in Mayfair had been deliberately chosen because it was the dullest and most meaningless available.

The average age of the people assembled in the room was well into the seventies, and one weatherbeaten and famous face must have been ninety if he was a day. Yet the gathering unmistakably exuded power as well as experience. An informed observer – Ken Cooper, say – would have recognised everyone there.

Admiral Lord Jock Dalgety, former chief of the Defence Staff, was rubbing his long red nose and muttering something to General Sir Mike Patten, who had led the British forces in Iraq and who still failed to look convincingly like a businessman. Dame Cecily Morgan, former director of MI5, was sitting utterly still and silent, her hands neatly folded in her lap. She had been recruited by General Patten after a late-night club dinner when they had found themselves the last two guests remaining at the table for ten.

‘What, really, do you have to look forward to, Cecily?’ he had asked her as they nursed their brandies.

‘Well, Mike, I guess five or six more years of independence in my flat, learning to cope with just a little more pain each year, and then the usual expensive, overheated, piss-scented home. Suffocating, those places. I’ve got a few nieces and nephews, but no children. That’s what the service does to you. I’m luckier than most: there’s enough money left for decent wine and a film-channel subscription until I finally kick the bucket.’ Even as a young woman, Cecily had been known for her blunt speaking.

The old general nodded vigorously. ‘For me, what I really dread is the old girl going first. Left to myself it’ll be too much whisky every evening and then a fall in the bathroom one night when I’m stumbling around on my way for a piss. Can’t even enjoy the theatre any more. Weak bladder. The old girl does a decent omelette, and keeps an eye on me, but she’s not well. They train you for the battlefield and what might happen there, but where’s the situation report for those last ten years?’

Patten then began to describe a more interesting possible final chapter to Dame Cecily, earning decent money and travelling, even at her advanced age, to some interesting parts of the world where she might actually meet some rivals from the old days whom she had never dreamed of seeing face to face. The powers that be wouldn’t be happy, but what could they do? God already Called her God. She hadn’t been hard to convince, particularly when she learned that the mysterious company contained many people she had known for most of her working life. Lord McDonald, the fire-eating chairman of United Meats, and Baroness Tessie Fremantle, the Miss Marple-featured former permanent secretary at the Treasury, would be among her colleagues. As would Dickie Greene, the hairy-eared, scarlet-jerseyed former director of the Secret Intelligence Service and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Every one of those now assembled in the room had done things in their past that they would prefer didn’t become public – cooked figures, spread deceptions, strangled careers, and in Dame Cecily’s case looked the other way while enemies of Britain were tortured, even killed. All of them were lined and creased by years of responsibility and hard choices. None of them had many years left. They were all ‘comfortable’ in the narrow financial sense, but they had all been uncomfortable, itchy and uneasy in the constricted world of retirement. One last adventure mattered much more to each of them than any paycheque that might be involved.

Despite the high average age of its senior board and their general air of languor, PLS was a comparatively recent organisation. It had been founded in 1988 by some former members of the intelligence services, senior military officers and a few financial eagles to bring ‘advanced research techniques’ to British companies that found themselves in some sort of trouble. In the letters of association and early discussions about contracts, nothing remotely illegal was ever mentioned. ‘No guns, no bugs, no break-ins. Except as a last resort’ was PLS’s unofficial motto, and the company prided itself on maintaining a façade of utter respectability.

Much of its work was simply about reaching the right people, and putting the right people in touch with each other. You wanted to build a power station in Turkey? PLS would find the minister whose approval was essential. You had failed to win a major contract in Russia? PLS would find out why, and would even be prepared to sell you the most confidential details of the winning bid. If a major bank was in trouble with the FSA over allegations of money-laundering in South America or the Caribbean, PLS could find out exactly who had opened certain accounts, who had been paid to do so, and quietly negotiate with the appropriate law-enforcement agencies in the US to smooth things over.

Ex-ambassadors would pick up the phone to call State Department officials they used to play golf with, or former SIS officers would drop in on old contacts in Florida or Mexico City. If there were difficulties over some necessary but discreet payments being made to a Saudi prince in connection with a contract for a turboprop training aircraft upon which many hundreds of jobs in Walsall depended, Professional Logistical Services soon came to expect a call. Everything would be explained in due course: the no-doubt-necessary but not-discreet-enough payments had been ‘misunderstood’ – the prince, who was a humanitarian as well as a patriot and a businessman, intended to use the money to improve the working conditions of Bangladeshis in the Kingdom. The money was not baksheesh, but aid. And so the world turned, and the client book grew thicker. PLS opened doors most people didn’t even know existed. It was virtually unknown in the wider world. But its success rate was very high.

The company’s offices were in a cul de sac by Green Park, a hundred yards north of Clarence House, sandwiched between a boutique hotel and the headquarters of a hedge fund. Analysts, number-crunchers and secretarial staff worked long hours in the small, cream stucco building’s quiet, wood-panelled rooms.

In the hot, smoky room in Shepherd’s Market, Dame Cecily turned to Admiral Dalgety.

‘Really, Jock. Where is the little cunt?’