When Blaise Metreweli was announced as the next head of MI6 it was immediately apparent she had long been groomed for the top.
The woman set to become the first female spy chief in the agency's 116-year history had all the right attributes.
Fiercely intelligent, Ms Metreweli had grown up abroad in a multilingual home and excelled at Cambridge – where she read anthropology at Pembroke College and was in the winning crew in the 1997 women's Boat Race – before she graduated, and then... disappeared.
From the age of 22, her name was only mentioned in public when receiving honours 'for services to British foreign policy' and in a civil service notice documenting a bland economics posting to Dubai. Despite entering her 20s in the Wild West early days of social media, there is no trace of her online.
There are no loose-lipped acquaintances, either. Indeed, when the news broke of her appointment earlier this month, the most interesting thing contemporaries could say of her is that she still enjoyed rowing.
