‘A supreme professional in a world of novices and blowhards’

One Of Our Ministers Is Missing features spies, gangsters and a minister who mysteriously disappears while on holiday in Crete. This is how it begins.

Brady walked with the swagger of a man who considered himself invincible. Over 6ft tall, with strong features and a full head of dark hair flecked with grey, his weight was the same in middle-age as it had been when he was 20. On this lovely spring day, the first good weather of the year, he cut an impressive figure sauntering along Stoke Newington High Street towards Stamford Hill, on his way to confirm a business transaction – one of only two he’d need to make in 2017.

At a hundred grand a time Brady could live comfortably on a couple of jobs a year. It helped that his earnings were untaxed, and that he operated at the expensive end of the market – because he was good, very good, at what he did. In a sector filled with novices, blowhards and psychopaths, Brady was the supreme professional.

Raised in west Belfast during the Troubles, he’d been recruited by republican paramilitaries as a 16-year-old. They’d trained him well, soon discovering that Brady had all the qualities required of an expert sniper: discipline, concentration sound judgment and an inexhaustible reserve of patience.

He and his wife had been living in this opulent part of north London for 15 years. Cathleen had no idea how her husband earned his money. She thought he was an international trader in gilts and bonds, who worked from home except when he had to attend meetings or conferences – a couple of times a year.

The swagger was a mannerism that Brady had never quite managed to eliminate. While his profession demanded that he attract as little attention as possible, his height made that difficult. The way he walked was a product of his physique, enhanced by the need to look menacing in the tough district in which he’d been raised. He’d acquired a gum-chewing habit in his youth, finding that it aided concentration, but he’d never taken to smoking or drinking. Chewing was his only vice – apart from killing.