than that, because I was so madly in love with Brett.
Steady on, Zoë, I told myself, taking another gulp of wine. You haven’t even met the guy yet. And what would happen to Frazzle if you were off in Moscow gathering intelligence?
This was true, of course. I was just waiting for a Tinder date. I was just an ordinary twenty-seven-year-old, chronically single, with a job and a cat and an appearance that was, given I was smallish and slimmish with lots of curly red hair, like a woman in a pre-Raphaelite painting on a good day and one of those troll dolls on a bad one.
I’d been dating, on and off, for the past six months, and Mr Right hadn’t turned up. There was no reason to believe that Brett would be him, but I’d realised by now that I began every date with the same heady sense of expectation, the same wild imaginings of how my life might change if this one turned out to be The One.
And, if I was brutally honest with myself, this date had a certain feeling of being the last roll of the dice. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried. I’d tweaked my online profile over and over again. I’d composed witty message after witty message. I’d put different filters on my pictures. I’d sat in bars like this one, expectant and hopeful, only to be disappointed or let down or ghosted.
And speaking of which, where exactly was Brett?
I looked at my phone, shifting uncomfortably on the bar stool, which had a rail near the bottom that my legs weren’t quite long enough to reach. The two women at the table next to mine glanced at me, glanced away again, and whispered to each other.
Yes, I am waiting for a date, I wanted to snap at them. No, he hasn’t turned up yet. Anything else you’d like to know? But I didn’t say anything, because there was a text from Brett on my phone saying he was running ten minutes late – actually, what it said was, Runign 01 mins l8 soz, but my translation skills were just about adequate for that. Maybe spies weren’t allowed to use predictive text, or he was used to sending WhatsApps in code.
We’d been due to meet at five, and it was eleven minutes past. Right on cue, I saw him through the window, hurrying down the street. There was the chiselled jaw, the smudge of designer stubble, the muscular shoulders under his grey T-shirt. I felt a little fizz of excitement.
He wasn’t older than he’d said, or shorter, which I knew by online dating standards meant I’d pretty much hit the jackpot already. But there was something strange about the way he approached the bar. He didn’t walk in a straight line. He did a kind of wide parabola from one side of the pavement to the other, and back again. Maybe it’s a spy thing, I thought, confused. Maybe it’s how you check you’re not being followed.
He reached the door, put his hand on the handle and pulled, even though the sign said push. Then he peered at it, confused, pulled again and finally pushed, so hard that he almost fell into the room. The women at the next table giggled. Clutching the door handle to steady himself, Brett looked around the bar. I raised a hand in a half-wave.
‘Zoë!’ his voice rang out above the hum of conversation, not the James Bond-ish voice I’d been expecting, but a normal London accent, or maybe Essex. ‘There she is!’
He let go of the door and hurried towards my table, knocking into a couple of others on the way and sending a bar stool flying and a small dog darting for cover under its owner’s legs.
I watched, confused at first and then horrified. Oh no, my mind screamed. Oh nononono. But I was here, he was just a couple of feet away, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to escape. I was going to have to get through a date with a man who was clearly completely steaming.
‘Zoë!’ He pulled me into a hug so strong and unexpected it snatched me off my stool, and my legs flailed helplessly in mid-air for a second before I slipped through his arms to the floor. His T-shirt was wet with sweat that, judging by the smell, was ninety per cent tequila. His breath smelled of fags and I could see a half-smoked one tucked behind his ear. Blurry