He was forty-six and he had worked in that building on a facilities contract since 2029 and nobody in it could have told you his name.
That is not a failure of security. It is the entire mechanism.
Peter Oakes cleaned and he fixed things and he was on the list for four floors, and he had been vetted in 2029 and re-vetted in 2032 and both of those were clean because there was nothing to find.
He had a wife who left in 2031 and a daughter of nineteen at Bristol and a flat in Erith with eleven years left on it.
And in the May of the year before, a man of about thirty-five approached him in an entirely ordinary way outside a supermarket, and was extremely pleasant, and did not mention anything at all for four months.
The money came in at four hundred and eleven thousand euros over eleven months, into an account in his sister's name in Spain, and his sister did not know and still does not.
The first payment was eleven thousand and it was for nothing.
That is the part the inquiry could not get four separate panels to understand: the first payment was for nothing. He was asked for nothing and he gave nothing and eleven thousand euros went into an account.
By the fourth payment he had described a corridor.
By the ninth he had walked a route with a phone in his pocket, and told himself for about four months that he had not done anything, because he had not.
They found him on the Thursday.
He had not run. He was at home in Erith with the television on and a bag by the door that he had packed on the Tuesday afternoon and had not picked up, and when four people came through that door he stood up and said, "Right," and that was the whole of it.
He said one thing in eleven weeks of interviews that anybody has ever repeated.
They asked him — on the fourth day, with a lawyer in the room, on the record — whether he had understood what was in those files.
And Peter Oakes said: "There are people in them, aren't there."
"Yes."
"Yeah," he said.
He got eleven years.
He served six and a half and he came out in 2041 and his daughter did not speak to him for four of those years and then did, and he lives in Spain now about ninety minutes from his sister and works in a marina and has never once been asked a question about any of it by anybody who knows.
Ines Duarte has thought about him a great deal and has said one thing about him, once, in a yard in Vigo, in about the ninth year, to a man called Mateus who had asked her whether she hated him.
"No," she said. "I have tried. I got about four days out of it in the first week and it was extremely good while it lasted.
"He is a man of six and forty who cleaned four floors for six years and who nobody in that building said good morning to, and somebody outside a supermarket was pleasant to him for four months.
"And every single thing I have ever built works exactly the same way," said Ines Duarte. "You find a person nobody is looking at, and then you are kind to them for a long time.
"He is not a traitor. He is a legend. Somebody built him and it took four months and it cost four hundred and eleven thousand euros, and the only difference between what was done to him and what I did to you is that I wrote mine down."