They found Everett’s suitcase in a pensione off the Avenida Arequipa. Cheap, brown leather on cardboard, frayed at the corners, one clasp broken. Inside: a paperback Penguin Classic (Conrad, naturally), two shirts pressed by a hand that had long ago given up caring, and a thin envelope labeled “Santos. Do not forward.”

The suitcase was all that remained.

No body. No grand betrayal. No noble sacrifice. Just a gap in the world where Everett used to be.

They said he was working as a trade attaché. They always say that, it’s one of those titles the Foreign Office issued with a serious face that hides a wink and a nudge. Everyone in Lima knew better. Even the Peruvians, who pretended not to. A Briton of that age and reticence, always alone, always scribbling in that notebook of his; it was obvious. But he was polite, punctual, and didn’t ask for much. That counted for something. Probably.

Hugo Pearson, a consular functionary who’d once shared a bottle of pisco with him at the Miraflores Golf Club, described Everett as ‘harmless.’ It was the sort of word that got used often about spies who weren’t dangerous enough to shoot or promote. Along with ‘non-entity’ and ‘well that’s a surprise!’

What Everett actually did, or was supposed to do, no one could say with any certainty. He had a desk in an office with no files, a phone that seldom rang, and a typewriter with a bare and stretched ribbon. Some suspected he was a leftover from a project that had quietly been shut down, left in-country because no one could quite be bothered to repatriate him.

In truth, Everett had once mattered. Years earlier, in Santiago, he’d passed a file from one of the contacts he handled, that unraveled a Cuban network. The sort of coup that gets a man noticed in Langley, nodded at in Whitehall. But he hadn’t followed up. No appetite for ambition. No interest in leverage.

“He has the instincts of a monk,” his old handler once wrote in a report. “But without the conviction or the weird haircut.”

What brought him to Lima in the final stretch was something no one admitted out loud: they needed someone expendable. A body to staff an office, a face to show at receptions, a man whose absence wouldn’t cause too much paperwork. He did his duty with the quiet grace of someone who expected nothing more.

The embassy Christmas party was the last place anyone remembers seeing him.

Pearson remembered him standing by the buffet table, sipping whisky, eyes scanning the crowd like a priest watching over sinners. He didn’t drink often, but when he did, it had the air of obligation, like he owed it to someone not to be sober for a while. You would never get the feeling that he enjoyed a drink.

Later, someone heard he’d been asking questions about a French mining consultant in Callao. The man had come from nowhere, spoke Quechua too well, and never once registered with the local security services. Everett had made a note. A few notes, in fact.

But then, Everett always made notes. That was part of the performance. You filled notebooks so it looked like you were watching. Whether you were or not didn’t matter much.

When he missed a meeting the next day, no one noticed. When he missed three, they called the pensione. The landlady said he’d left early, as he always did, wearing his grey suit and carrying his little black umbrella. It hadn’t rained in Lima in weeks.

They found the umbrella in a storm drain five blocks away.

So Pearson filed the missing person report with the sort of interest one reserves for dead plants or overdue library books. No one expected results. The Peruvian police didn’t bother. Even the embassy seemed mildly relieved, what that being another salary line off the books.

Only one man seemed bothered. Colonel Salazar, a retired military intelligence officer turned café philosopher. He remembered Everett.

“A quiet man,” he said, tapping ash from his cigarette, “but not stupid. He knew where the bones were buried.”

Salazar suspected Everett had come too close to something. Something old and rotting, something best left buried. He’d spoken, apparently, of an arms pipeline running through Ecuador, ghost companies registered in the Caymans, Russians with bad Spanish pretending to be hydro engineers. A rotten core in the centre of an alliance no one wanted to proliferate. In truth, nobody wanted to acknowledge its existence.

“Everett knew,” Salazar said. “Not everything. But enough to get himself erased.”

Pearson didn’t believe it. Or said he didn’t. But when he burned Everett’s last notebook, per instructions from London, his hands did shake a little.

Three months later, a young woman appeared at the pensione. English, early thirties, wore linen like she had a pathological hatred of ironing. She claimed to be Everett’s niece. Asked about a letter. A parcel.

The landlady gave her the suitcase. She opened it there, right on the front desk, and rifled through it with the air of someone looking for a ghost.

She found the envelope marked “Santos. Do not forward.”

Santos, it turned out, was a fixer Everett had used now and then. Local man, half-blind in one eye, ran errands. The woman found him in a bar behind the bullring.

He recognized her by her eyes. Same as Everett’s. Cold. Tired.

“He was looking for something,” Santos told her. “Said it wasn’t big, but it was dangerous.”

“What was it?”

“A name. One name.”

She didn’t ask whose.

He gave her a folder. Inside: a single photograph, a typed sheet of notes, and a napkin with a date and a café scrawled in Everett’s distinct hand. That was all.

She took the folder, said thank you, and vanished.

Two weeks later, Santos was found in the canal. Double tap. Shot once in the chest and once in the forehead. No witnesses.

No one spoke of Everett after that. The embassy seemed to manage with one attaché fewer. Pearson moved to Bogotá. Colonel Salazar died of a heart attack during a game of chess.

But sometimes, in the bars off Jirón de la Unión, someone mentions the British man who, legend now had it, knew too much and said too little. They say he’s still there, somewhere. Sitting in the back of the café with a cup of black coffee, watching the door. Taking notes.

They say there was no home left to go to.

Only the job.