Eye Of The Needle

PART ONE

It was the coldest winter for forty-five years. Villages in the English countryside were cut off by the snow and the Thames froze over. One day in January the Glasgow-London train arrived at Euston twenty-four hours late. The snow and the blackout combined to make motoring perilous; road accidents doubled, and people told jokes about how it was more risky to drive an Austin Seven along Piccadilly at night than to take a tank across the Siegfried Line.

Then, when the spring came, it was glorious. Barrage balloons floated majestically in bright blue skies, and soldiers on leave flirted with girls in sleeveless dresses on the streets of London.

The city did not look much like the capital of a nation at war. There were signs, of course; and Henry Faber, cycling from Waterloo Station toward Highgate, noted them: piles of sandbags outside important public buildings, Anderson shelters in suburban gardens, propaganda posters about evacuation and Air Raid Precautions. Faber watched such things-he was considerably more observant than the average railway clerk. He saw crowds of children in the parks, and concluded that evacuation had been a failure. He marked the number of motor cars on the road, despite petrol rationing; and he read about the new models announced by the motor manufacturers. He knew the significance of night-shift workers pouring into factories where, only months previously, there had been hardly enough work for the day shift. Most of all, he monitored the movement of troops around Britain's railway network; all the paperwork passed through his office. One could learn a lot from that paperwork. Today, for example, he had rubber-stamped a batch of forms that led him to believe that a new Expeditionary Force was being gathered. He was fairly sure that it would have a complement of about 100,000 men, and that it was for Finland.

There were signs, yes; but there was something jokey about it all. Radio shows satirised the red tape of wartime regulations, there was community singing in the air raid shelters, and fashionable women carried their gas masks in couturier-designed containers. They talked about the Bore War. It was at once larger-than-life and trivial, like a moving picture show. All the air raid warnings, without exception, had been false alarms.

Faber had a different point of view; but then, he was a different kind of person.

He steered his cycle into Archway Road and leaned forward a little to take the uphill slope, his long legs pumping as tirelessly as the pistons of a railway engine. He was very fit for his age, which was thirty-nine, although he lied about it; he lied about most things, as a safety precaution.

He began to perspire as he climbed the hill into Highgate. The building in which he lived was one of the highest in London, which was why he chose to live there. It was a Victorian brick house at one end of a terrace of six. The houses were high, narrow and dark, like the minds of the men for whom they had been built. Each had three stories plus a basement with a servants' entrance-the English middle class of the nineteenth century insisted on a servants' entrance, even if they had no servants. Faber was a cynic about the English.

Number Six had been owned by Mr Harold Garden, of Garden's Tea and Coffee, a small company that went broke in the Depression. Having lived by the principle that insolvency is a mortal sin, the bankrupt Mr Garden had no option but to die. The house was all he bequeathed to his widow, who was then obliged to take in boarders. She enjoyed being a landlady, although the etiquette of her social circle demanded that she be a little ashamed of it. Faber had a room on the top floor with a dormer window. He lived there from Monday to Friday, and told Mrs Garden that he spent his weekends with his mother in Erith. In fact, he had another landlady in Blackheath who called him Mr Baker and believed he was a travelling salesman for a stationery manufacturer and spent all week on the road.

He wheeled his cycle up the garden path under the disapproving frown of the tall front-room windows. He put his bike in the shed and padlocked it to the lawn mower-it was against the law to leave a vehicle unlocked. The seed potatoes in boxes all around the shed were sprouting. Mrs Garden had turned her flower beds over to vegetables for the war effort.

Faber entered the house, hung his hat on the hallstand, washed his hands, and went in to tea.

Three of the other lodgers were already eating: a pimply boy from Yorkshire who was trying to get into the Army; a confectionery salesman with receding sandy hair; and a retired naval officer who, Faber was convinced, was a degenerate. Faber nodded to them and sat down.

The salesman was telling a joke. "So the Squadron Leader says, 'You're back early!' and the pilot turns round and says, 'Yes, I dropped my leaflets in bundles, wasn't that right?' So the Squadron Leader says, 'Good God! You might've hurt somebody!'" The naval officer cackled and Faber smiled. Mrs Garden came in with a teapot. "Good evening, Mr Faber. We started without you. I hope you don't mind."

Faber spread margarine thinly on a slice of wholemeal bread, and momentarily yearned for a fat sausage. "Your seed potatoes are ready to plant," he told her.

Faber hurried through his tea. The others were arguing over whether Chamberlain should be sacked and replaced by Churchill. Mrs Garden kept voicing opinions, then looking at Faber for a reaction. She was a blowsy woman, a little overweight. About Faber's age, she wore the clothes of a woman of thirty, and he guessed she wanted another husband. He kept out of the discussion.

Mrs Garden turned on the radio. It hummed for a while, then an announcer said: "This is the BBC Home Service. It's That Man Again!"

Faber had heard the show. It regularly featured a German spy called Funf.

He excused himself and went up to his room.

Mrs Garden was left alone after "It's That Man Again"; the naval officer went to the pub with the salesman, and the boy from Yorkshire, who was religious, went to a prayer meeting. She sat in the parlour with a small glass of gin, looking at the blackout curtain and thinking about Mr Faber. She wished he wouldn't spend so much time in his room. She needed company, and he was the kind of company she needed.

Such thoughts made her feel guilty. To assuage the guilt, she thought of Mr Garden. Her memories were familiar but blurred, like an old print of a movie with worn sprocket holes and an indistinct soundtrack; so that, although she could easily remember what it was like to have him here in the room with her, it was difficult to imagine his face or the clothes he might be wearing or the comment he would make on the day's war news. He had been a small, dapper man, successful in business when he was lucky and unsuccessful when he was not, undemonstrative in public, and insatiably affectionate in bed. She had loved him a lot. There would be many women in her position if this war ever got going properly. She poured another drink.

Mr Faber was a quiet one, that was the trouble. He didn't seem to have any vices. He didn't smoke, she had never smelled drink on his breath, and he spent every evening in his room, listening to classical music on his radio. He read a lot of newspapers and went for long walks. She suspected he was quite clever, despite his humble job: his contributions to the conversation in the dining room were always a shade more thoughtful than anyone else's. He surely could get a better job if he tried. He seemed not to give himself the chance he deserved.

It was the same with his appearance. He was a fine figure of a man: tall, quite heavy around the neck and shoulders, not a bit fat, with long legs. And he had a strong face, with a high forehead and a long jaw and bright blue eyes; not pretty like a film star, but the kind of face that appealed to a woman. Except for the mouth that was small and thin, and she could imagine him being cruel. Mr Garden had been capable of cruelty.

And yet at first sight he was not the kind of a man a woman would look at twice. The trousers of his old worn suit were never pressed-she would have done that for him, and gladly, but he never asked-and he always wore a shabby raincoat and a flat docker's cap. He had no moustache, and his hair was trimmed short every fortnight. It was as if he wanted to look like a nonentity.

He needed a woman, there was no doubt of that. She wondered for a moment whether he might be what people called effeminate, but she dismissed the idea quickly. He needed a wife to smarten him up and give him ambition. She needed a man to keep her company and for-well-love.

Yet he never made a move. Sometimes she could scream with frustration. She was sure she was attractive. She looked in a mirror as she poured another gin. She had a nice face and fair curly hair, and there was something for a man to get hold of… She giggled at that thought. She must be getting tiddly.

She sipped her drink and considered whether she ought to make the first move. Mr Faber was obviously shy-chronically shy. He wasn't sexless: she could tell by the look in his eyes on the two occasions he had seen her in her nightdress. Perhaps she could overcome his shyness by being brazen. What did she have to lose? She tried imagining the worst, just to see what it felt like. Suppose he rejected her. Well, it would be embarrassing even humiliating. It would be a blow to her pride. But nobody else need know it had happened. He would just have to leave.

The thought of rejection had put her off the whole idea. She got to her feet slowly, thinking: I'm just not the brazen type. It was bedtime. If she had one more gin in bed she would be able to sleep. She took the bottle upstairs.

Her bedroom was below Mr Faber's, and she could hear violin music from his radio as she undressed. She put on a new nightdress-pink, with an embroidered neckline, and no one to see it!-and made her last drink. She wondered what Mr Faber looked like undressed. He would have a flat stomach and hairs on his nipples, and you would be able to see his ribs because he was slim. He probably had a small bottom. She giggled again: thinking, I'm a disgrace.

She took her drink to bed and picked up her book, but it was too much effort to focus on the print. Besides, she was bored with vicarious romance. Stories about dangerous love affairs were fine when you yourself had a perfectly safe love affair with your husband, but a woman needed more than Barbara Cartland. She sipped her gin and wished Mr Faber would turn the radio off. It was like trying to sleep at a tea dance!

She could, of course, ask him to turn it off. She looked at her bedside clock; it was past ten. She could put on her dressing gown, which matched the nightdress, and just comb her hair a little, then step into her slippers-quite dainty, with a pattern of roses-and just pop up the stairs to the next landing, and just, well, tap on his door. He would open it, perhaps wearing his trousers and undershirt, and then he would look at her the way he had looked when he saw her in her nightdress on the way to the bathroom…

"Silly old fool," she said to herself aloud. "You're just making excuses to go up there."

And then she wondered why she needed excuses. She was a grownup, and it was her house, and in ten years she had not met another man who was just right for her, and what the hell, she needed to feel someone strong and hard and hairy on top of her, squeezing her breasts and panting in her ear and parting her thighs with his broad flat hands, for tomorrow the gas bombs might come over from Germany and they would all die choking and gasping and poisoned and she would have lost her last chance.

So she drained her glass and got out of bed and put on her dressing gown, and just combed her hair a little and stepped into her slippers, and picked up her bunch of keys in case he had locked the door and couldn't hear her knock above the sound of the radio.

There was nobody on the landing. She found the stairs in the darkness. She intended to step over the stair that creaked, but she stumbled on the loose carpet and trod on it heavily but it seemed that nobody heard, so she went on up and tapped on the door at the top. She tried it gently. It was locked.

The radio was turned down and Mr Faber called out, "Yes?" He was well-spoken; not cockney or foreign-not anything, really. Just a decently neutral voice. She said, "Can I have a word with you?" He seemed to hesitate, then he said: "I'm undressed."

"So am I." she giggled, and she opened the door with her duplicate key.

He was standing in front of the radio with some kind of screwdriver in his hand. He wore his trousers and no undershirt. His face was white and he looked scared to death.

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, not knowing what to say. Suddenly she remembered a line from an American film, and she said, "Would you buy a lonely girl a drink?" It was silly, really, because she knew he had no drink in his room and she certainly wasn't dressed to go out; but it sounded vampish. It seemed to have the desired effect. Without speaking, he came slowly toward her. He did have hair on his nipples. She took a step forward, and then his arms went around her and she closed her eyes and turned up her face, and he kissed her, and she moved quietly in his arms, and then there was a terrible, awful, unbearable, sharp pain in her back and she opened her mouth to scream.

He had heard her stumble on the stairs. If she'd waited another minute he would have had the radio transmitter back in its case and the code books in the drawer and there would have been no need for her to die. But before he could conceal the evidence he had heard her key in the lock, and when she opened the door the stiletto had been in his hand. Because she moved slightly in his arms, Faber missed her heart with the first jab of the weapon, and he had to thrust his fingers down her throat to stop her crying out. He jabbed again, but she moved again and the blade struck a rib and merely slashed her superficially. Then the blood was spurting and he knew it would not be a clean kill; it never was when you missed with the first stroke. She was wriggling too much to be killed with a jab now. Keeping his fingers in her mouth, he gripped her jaw with his thumb and pushed her back against the door. Her head hit the woodwork with a loud bump, and he wished he had not turned the radio down, but how could he have expected this?

He hesitated before killing her because it would be much better if she died on the bed-better for the cover-up that was already taking shape in his mind-but he could not be sure of getting her that far in silence. He tightened his hold on her jaw, kept her head still by jamming it against the door, and brought the stiletto around in a wide, slashing arc that ripped away most of her throat, for the stiletto was not a slashing knife and the throat was not Faber's favoured target.

He jumped back to avoid the first horrible gush of blood, then stepped forward again to catch her before she hit the floor. He dragged her to the bed, trying not to look at her neck, and laid her down.

He had killed before, so he expected the reaction; it always came as soon as he felt safe. He went over to the sink in the corner of the room and waited for it. He could see his face in the little shaving mirror. He was white and his eyes were staring. He looked at himself and thought, killer. Then he threw up.

When that was over he felt better. He could go to work now. He knew what he had to do, the details had come to him even while he was killing her.

He washed his face, brushed his teeth and cleaned the washbasin. Then he sat down at the table beside his radio. He looked at his notebook, found his place and began tapping the key. It was a long message, about the mustering of an army for Finland, and he had been halfway through when he was interrupted. It was written down in cipher on the pad. When he had completed it he signed off with "Regards to Willi."

The transmitter packed away neatly into a specially designed suitcase. Faber put the rest of his possessions into a second case. He took off his trousers and sponged the bloodstains, then washed himself all over. At last he looked at the corpse.

He was able to be cold about her now. It was wartime; they were enemies; if he had not killed her she would have caused his death. She had been a threat, and all he felt now was relief that the threat had been nullified. She should not have frightened him.

Nevertheless, his last task was distasteful. He opened her robe and lifted her nightdress, pulling it up around her waist. She was wearing knickers. He tore them, so that the hair of her pubis was visible. Poor woman, she had wanted only to seduce him. But he could not have got her out of the room without her seeing the transmitter, and the British propaganda had made these people alert for spies-ridiculously so. If the Abwehr had as many agents as the newspapers made out, the British would have lost the war already.

He stepped back and looked at her with his head on one side. There was something wrong. He tried to think like a sex maniac. If I were crazed with lust for a woman like Una Garden, and I killed just so that I could have my way with her. what would I then do?

Of course. That kind of lunatic would want to look at her breasts. Faber leaned over the body, gripped the neckline of the nightdress, and ripped it to the waist. Her large breasts sagged sideways.

The police doctor would soon discover that she had not been raped, but Faber did not think that mattered. He had taken a criminology course at Heidelberg, and he knew that many sexual assaults were not consummated. Besides, he could not have carried the deception that far, not even for the Fatherland. He was not in the SS. Some of them would queue up to rape the corpse… He put the thought out of his mind.

He washed his hands again and got dressed. It was almost midnight. He would wait an hour before leaving; it would be safer later. He sat down to think about how he had gone wrong.

There was no question that he had made a mistake. If his cover were perfect, he would be totally secure. If he were totally secure no one could discover his secret. Mrs Garden had discovered his secret-or rather, she would have if she had lived a few seconds longer-therefore he had not been totally secure, therefore his cover was not perfect, therefore he had made a mistake.

He should have put a bolt on the door. Better to be thought chronically shy than to have landladies with duplicate keys sneaking in in their nightclothes.

That was the surface error. The deep flaw was that he was too eligible to be a bachelor. He thought this with irritation, not conceit. He knew that he was a pleasant attractive man and that there was no apparent reason why he should be single. He turned his mind to thinking up a cover that would explain this without inviting advances from the Mrs Gardens of this world.

He ought to be able to find inspiration in his real personality. Why was he single? He stirred uneasily. He did not like mirrors. The answer was simple. He was single because of his profession. If there were deeper reasons, he did not want to know them.

He would have to spend tonight in the open. Highgate Wood would do. In the morning he would take his suitcases to a railway station checkroom, then tomorrow evening he would go to his room in Blackheath.

He would shift to his second identity. He had little fear of being caught by the police. The commercial traveller who occupied the room at Blackheath on weekends looked rather different from the railway clerk who had killed his landlady.

The Blackheath persona was expansive, vulgar, and flashy. He wore loud ties, bought rounds of drinks, and combed his hair differently. The police would circulate a description of a shabby little pervert who would not say boo to a goose until he was inflamed with lust, and no one would look twice at the handsome salesman in the striped suit who was obviously the type that was more or less permanently inflamed with lust and did not have to kill women to get them to show him their breasts. He would have to set up another identity-he always kept at least two. He needed a new job, fresh papers, passport, identity card, ration book, birth certificate. It was all so risky. Damn Mrs Garden. Why couldn't she have drunk herself asleep as usual?

It was one o'clock. Faber took a last look around the room. He was not concerned about leaving clues-his fingerprints were obviously all over the house, and there would be no doubt in anyone's mind about who was the murderer. Nor did he feel any sentiment about leaving the place that had been his home for two years; he had never thought of it as home. He had never thought of anywhere as home.

He would always think of this as the place where he had learned to put a bolt on a door.

He turned out the light, picked up his cases, and went down the stairs and out of the door into the night.

Henry II was a remarkable king. In an age when the term "flying visit" had not yet been coined, he flitted between England and France with such rapidity that he was credited with magical powers; a rumour that, understandably, he did nothing to suppress. In 1173-either the June or the September, depending upon which secondary source one favours-he arrived in England and left for France again so quickly that no contemporary writer ever found out about it. Later historians discovered the record of his expenditure in the Pipe Rolls. At the time his kingdom was under attack by his sons at its northern and southern extremes: the Scottish border and the South of France. But what, precisely, was the purpose of his visit? Whom did he see? Why was it secret, when the myth of his magical speed was worth an army? What did he accomplish?

This was the problem that taxed Percival Godliman in the summer of 1940, when Hitler's armies swept across the French cornfields like a scythe and the British poured out of the Dunkirk bottleneck in bloody disarray. Professor Godliman knew more about the Middle Ages than any man alive. His book on the Black Death had upended every convention of medievalism; it had also been a bestseller and published as a Penguin Book. With that behind him he had turned to a slightly earlier and even more intractable period.

At 12:30 on a splendid June day in London, a secretary found Godliman hunched over an illuminated manuscript, laboriously translating its mediaeval Latin, making notes in his own even less legible handwriting. The secretary, who was planning to eat her luncheon the garden of Gordon Square, did not like the manuscript room because it smelled dead. You needed so many keys to get in there, it might as well have been a tomb.

Godliman stood at a lectern, perched on one leg like a bird, his face lit bleakly by a spotlight above-he might have been the ghost of the monk who wrote the book, standing a cold vigil over his precious chronicle. The girl cleared her throat and waited for him to notice her. She saw a short man in his fifties, with round shoulders and weak eyesight, wearing a tweed suit. She knew he could be perfectly sensible once you dragged him out of the Middle Ages. She coughed again and said, "Professor Godliman?"

He looked up, and when he saw her he smiled, and then he did not look like a ghost, more like someone's dotty father. "Hello!" he said, in an astonished tone, as if he had just met his next-door neighbour in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

"You asked me to remind you that you have lunch at the Savoy with Colonel Terry."

"Oh, yes." He took his watch out of his waistcoat pocked and peered at it. "If I'm going to walk it, I'd better leave now."

She nodded. "I brought your gas mask."

"You are thoughtful." He smiled again, and she decided he looked quite nice. He took the mask from her and said, "Do I need my coat?"

"You didn't wear one this morning. It's quite warm. Shall I lock up after you?"

"Thank you, thank you." He jammed his notebook into his jacket pocket and went out. The secretary looked around, shivered, and followed him.

Colonel Andrew Terry was a red-faced Scot, pauper-thin from a lifetime of heavy smoking, with sparse dark-blond hair thickly brilliantined. Godliman found him at a corner table in the Savoy Grill, wearing civilian clothes. There were three cigarette stubs in the ashtray. He stood up to shake hands.

Godliman said, "Morning, Uncle Andrew." Terry was his mother's baby brother.

"How are you, Percy?"

"I'm writing a book about the Plantagenets." Godliman sat down.

"Are your manuscripts still in London? I'm surprised."

"Why?"

Terry lit another cigarette. "Move them to the country in case of bombing."

"Should I?"

"Half the National Gallery has been shoved into a bloody big hole in the ground somewhere up in Wales. Young Kenneth Clark is quicker off the mark than you. Might be sensible to take yourself off out of it too, while you're about it. I don't suppose you've many students left."

"That's true." Godliman took a menu from a waiter and said, "I don't want a drink."

Terry did not look at his menu. "Seriously, Percy, why are you still in town?"

Godliman's eyes seemed to clear, like the image on a screen when the projector is focused, as if he had to think for the first time since he walked in. "It's all right for children to leave, and national institutions like Bertrand Russell. But for me, well, it's a bit like running away and letting other people fight for you. I realise that's not a strictly logical argument. It's a matter of sentiment, not logic."

Terry smiled the smile of one whose expectations have been fulfilled. But he dropped the subject and looked at the menu. After a moment he said, "Good God. _Le Lord Wool Pie_."

Godliman grinned. "I'm sure it's still just potatoes and vegetables."

When they had ordered, Terry said, "What do you think of our new Prime Minister?"

"The man's an ass. But then, Hitler's a fool, and look how well he's doing. You?"

"We can live with Winston. At least he's bellicose."

Godliman raised his eyebrows. "'We?' Are you back in the game?"

"l never really left it, you know."

"But you said-"

"Percy. Can't you think of a department whose staff all say they don't work for the Army?"

"Well, I'm dammed. All this time…"

Their first course came, and they started a bottle of white Bordeaux. Godliman ate potted salmon and looked pensive. Eventually Terry said, "Thinking about the last lot?"

Godliman nodded. "Young days, you know. Terrible time." But his tone was almost wistful.

"This war isn't the same at all. My chaps don't go behind enemy lines and count bivouacs like you did. Well, they do, but that side of the thing is much less important this time. Nowadays we just listen to the wireless."

"Don't they broadcast in code?"

Terry shrugged. "Codes can be broken. Candidly, we get to know just about everything we need these days."

Godliman glanced around, but there was no one within earshot, and it was hardly for him to tell Terry that careless talk costs lives.

Terry went on, "In fact my job is to make sure they don't have the information they need about us."

They both had chicken pie to follow. There was no beef on the menu. Godliman fell silent, but Terry talked on.

"Canaris is a funny chap, you know. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. I met him before this lot started. Likes England. My guess is he's none too fond of Hitler. Anyway, we know he's been told to mount a major intelligence operation against us, in preparation for the invasion, but he's not doing much. We arrested their best man in England the day after war broke out. He's in Wandsworth prison now. Useless people, Canaris' spies. Old ladies in boarding-houses, mad Fascists, petty criminals."

Godliman said, "Look here, old boy, this is too much." He trembled slightly with a mixture of anger and incomprehension. "All this stuff is secret. I don't want to know!"

Terry was unperturbed. "Would you like something else?" he offered. "I'm having chocolate ice cream."

Godliman stood up. "I don't think so. I'm going to go back to my work, if you don't mind."

Terry looked up at him coolly. "The world can wait for your reappraisal of the Plantagenets, Percy. There's a war on, dear boy. I want you to work for me."

Godliman stared down at him for a long moment. "What on earth would I do?"

Terry smiled wolfishly. "Catch spies."

Walking back to the college, Godliman felt depressed despite the weather. He would accept Colonel Terry's offer, no doubt about that. His country was at war; it was a just war; and if he was too old to fight, he was still young enough to help.

But the thought of leaving his work-and for how many years?-depressed him. He loved history and he had been totally absorbed in mediaeval England since the death of his wife ten years ago. He liked the unravelling of mysteries, the discovery of faint clues, the resolution of contradictions, the unmasking of lies and propaganda and myth. His new book would be the best on its subject written in the last hundred years, and there would not be one to equal it for another century. It had ruled his life for so long that the thought of abandoning it was almost unreal, as difficult to digest as the discovery that one is an orphan and no relation at all to the people one has always called Mother and Father.

An air raid warning stridently interrupted his thoughb. He contemplated ignoring it-so many people did now-and he was only two minutes' walk from the college. But he had no real reason to return to his study; he knew he would do no more work today. So he hurried into a tube station and joined the solid mass of Londoners crowding down the staircases and on to the grimy platform. He stood close to the wall, staring at a Bovril poster, and thought, But it's not just the things I'm leaving behind. Going back into the game depressed him, too. There were some things he liked about it: the importance of little things, the value of simply being clever, the meticulousness, the guesswork. But he hated the blackmail, the deceit, the desperation, and the way one always stabbed the enemy in the back.

The platform was becoming more crowded. Godliman sat down while there was still room, and found himself leaning against a man in bus driver's uniform. The man smiled and said, "Oh to be in England, Now that summer's here. Know who said that?"

"Now that April's there," Godliman corrected him. "It was Browning."

"I heard it was Adolf Hitler," the driver said. A woman next to him squealed with laughter and he turned his attention to her. "Did you hear what the evacuee said to the farmer's wife?"

Godliman tuned out and remembered an April when he had longed for England, crouching on a high branch of a plane tree, peering through a cold mist across a French valley behind the German lines. He could see nothing but vague dark shapes, even through his telescope, and he was about to slide down and walk a mile or so further when three German soldiers came from nowhere to sit around the base of the tree and smoke. After a while they took out cards and began to play, and young Percival Godliman realised they had found a way of stealing off and were here for the day. He stayed in the tree, hardly moving until he began to shiver and his muscles knotted with cramp and his bladder felt as if it would burst. Then he took out his revolver and shot the three of them, one after another, through the tops of their closecropped heads. And three people, laughing and cursing and gambling their pay, had simply ceased to exist. It was the first time he killed, and all he could think was, Just because I had to pee.

Godliman shifted on the cold concrete of the station platform and let the memory fade away. There was a warm wind from the tunnel and a train came in. The people who got off found spaces and settled to wait. Godliman listened to the voices.

"Did you hear Churchill on the wireless? We was listening-in at the Duke of Wellington. Old Jack Thornton cried. Silly old bugger…"

"…haven't had fillet steak on the menu for so long I've forgotten the bally taste… wine committee saw the war coming and bought in twenty thousand dozen, thank God…"

"Yes, a quiet wedding, but what's the point in waiting when you don't know what the next day's going to bring?"

"No, Peter never came back from Dunkirk…"

The bus driver offered him a cigarette. Godliman refused, and took out his pipe. Someone started to sing.

A blackout warden passing yelled, "Ma, pull down that blind Just look at what you're showing," and she shouted, "Never mind." Oh! Knees up Mother Brown…

The song spread through the crowd until everyone was singing. Godliman joined in, knowing that this was a nation losing a war and singing to hide its fear, as a man will whistle past the graveyard at night; knowing that the sudden affection he felt for London and Londoners was an ephemeral sentiment, akin to mob hysteria; mistrusting the voice inside hnn that said "This, this is what the war is about, this is what makes it worth fighting"; knowing but not caring, because for the first time in so many years he was feeling the sheer physical thrill of comradeship and he liked it.

When the all-clear sounded they went up the staircase and into the street, and Godliman found a phone box and called Colonel Terry to ask how soon he could start.

Faber… Godliman… two-thirds of a triangle that one day would be crucially completed by the principals, David and Lucy, of a ceremony proceeding at this moment in a small country church. It was old and very beautiful. A drystone wall enclosed a graveyard where wildflowers grew. The church itself had been there-well, bits of it had-the last time Britain was invaded, almost a millennium ago. The north wall of the nave, several feet thick and pierced with only two tiny windows, could remember that last invasion; it had been built when churches were places of physical as well as spiritual sanctuary, and the little round-headed windows I were better for shooting arrows out of than for letting the Lord's sunshine in. Indeed, the Local Defence Volunteers had detailed plans for using the church if and when the current bunch of European thugs crossed the Channel.

But no jackboots sounded in the tiled choir in this August of 1940; not yet. The sun glowed through stained glass windows that had survived Cromwell's iconoclasts and Henry VIII's greed, and the roof resounded to the notes of an organ that had yet to yield to woodworm and dry rot.

It was a lovely wedding. Lucy wore white, of course, and her five sisters were bridesmaids in apricot dresses. David wore the Mess Uniform of a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force, all crisp and new, for it was the first time he had put it on. They sang Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd, to the tune Crimond.

Lucy's father looked proud, as a man will on the day his eldest and most beautiful daughter marries a fine boy in a uniform. He was a farmer, but it was a long time since he had sat on a tractor; he rented out his arable land and used the rest to raise racehorses, although this winter of course his pasture would go under the plough and potatoes would be planted. Although he was really more gentleman than farmer, he nevertheless had the open-air skin, the deep chest, and the big stubby hands of agricultural people. Most of the men on that side of the church bore him a resemblance: barrel-chested men, with weathered red faces, those not in tail coats favouring tweed suits and stout shoes.

The bridesmaids had something of that look, too; they were country girls. But the bride was like her mother. Her hair was a dark, dark red, long and thick and shining and glorious, and she had wide-apart amber eyes and an oval face; and when she looked at the vicar with that clear, direct gaze and said, "I will" in that firm, clear voice, the vicar was startled and thought "By God she means it!" which was an odd thought for a vicar to have in the middle of a wedding.

The family on the other side of the nave had a certain look about them, too. David's father was a lawyer; his permanent frown was a professional affectation and concealed a sunny nature. (He had been a Major in the Army in the last war, and thought all this business about the RAF and war in the air was a fad that would soon pass.) But nobody looked like him, not even his son who stood now at the altar promising to love his wife until death, which might not be far away, God forbid. No, they all looked like David's mother, who sat beside her husband now, with almost-black hair and dark skin and long, slender limbs.

David was the tallest of the lot. He had broken high-jump records last year at Cambridge University. He was rather too good-looking for a man-his face would have been feminine were it not for the dark, ineradicable shadow of a heavy beard. He shaved twice a day. He had long eyelashes, and he looked intelligent, which he was, and sensitive.

The whole thing was idyllic: two happy, handsome people, children of solid, comfortably off, backbone-of-England-type families getting married in a country church in the finest summer weather Britain can offer.

When they were pronounced man and wife both the mothers were dry-eyed, and both the fathers cried.

Kissing the bride was a barbarous custom, Lucy thought, as yet another middle-aged pair of champagne-wet lips smeared her cheek. It was probably descended from even more barbarous customs in the Dark Ages, when every man in the tribe was allowed to-well, anyway, it was time we got properly civilised and dropped the whole business. She had known she would not like this part of the wedding. She liked champagne, but she was not crazy about chicken drumsticks or dollops of caviar on squares of cold toast, and as for the speeches and the photographs and the honeymoon jokes, well… But it could have been worse. If it had been peacetime, father would have hired the Albert Hall.

So far nine people had said, "May all your troubles be little ones," and one person, with scarcely more originality, had said, "I want to see more than a fence running around your garden."

Lucy had shaken countless hands and pretended not to hear remarks like "I wouldn't mind being in David's pyjamas tonight." David had made a speech in which he thanked Lucy's parents for giving him their daughter, and Lucy's father actually said that he was not losing a daughter but gaining a son. It was all hopelessly gaga, but one did it for one's parents. A distant uncle loomed up from the direction of the bar, swaying slightly, and Lucy repressed a shudder. She introduced him to her husband.

"David, this is Uncle Norman."

Uncle Norman pumped David's bony hand. "well, m'boy, when do you take up your commission?"

"Tomorrow, sir."

"What, no honeymoon?"

"Just twenty-four hours."

"But you've only just fished your training, so I gather."

"Yes, but I could fly before, you know. I learned at Cambridge. Besides, with an this going on they can't spare pilots. I expect I shall be in the air tomorrow."

Lucy said quietly, "David, don't," but Uncle Norman persevered.

"What'll you fly?" Uncle Norman asked with schoolboy enthusiasm.

"Spitfire. I saw her yesterday. She's a lovely kite." David had already fallen into the RAF slang: kites and crates and the drink and bandits at two o'clock. "She's got eight guns, she does three hundred and fifty knots, and she'll turn around in a shoebox."

"Marvellous, marvellous. You boys are certainly knocking the stuffing out of the Luftwaffe, what?"

"We got sixty yesterday for eleven of our own," David said, as proudly as if he had shot them all down himself. "The day before, when they had a go at Yorkshire, we sent the lot back to Norway with their tails between their legs and we didn't lose a single kite."

Uncle Norman gripped David's shoulder with tipsy fervour. "Never," he quoted pompously, "was so much owed by so many to so few. Churchill said that the other day."

David tried a modest grin. "He must have been talking about the mess bills."

Lucy hated the way they trivialised bloodshed and destruction. She said: "David, we should go and change now."

They went in separate cars to Lucy's home. Her mother helped her out of the wedding dress and said: "Now, my dear, I don't quite know what you're expecting tonight, but you ought to know."

"Oh, mother, this is 1940, you know!"

Her mother coloured slightly. "Very well, dear," she said mildly. "But if there is anything you want to talk about, later on…"

It occurred to Lucy that to say things like this cost her mother considerable effort, and she regretted her sharp reply.

"Thank you," she said. She touched her mother's hand. "I will."

"I'll leave you to it, then. Call me if you want anything." She kissed Lucy's cheek and went out.

Lucy sat at the dressing table in her slip and began to brush her hair. She knew exactly what to expect tonight. She felt a faint glow of pleasure as she remembered.

It happened in June, a year after they had met at the Glad Rag Ball. They were seeing each other every week by this time, and David had spent part of the Easter vacation with Lucy's people. Mother and Father approved of him he was handsome, clever and gentlemanly, and he came from precisely the same stratum of society as they did. Father thought he was a shade too opinionated, but Mother said the landed gentry had been saying that about undergraduates for six hundred years, and she thought David would be kind to his wife, which was the most important thing in the long run. So in June Lucy went to David's family home for a weekend.

The place was a Victorian copy of an eighteenth-century grange, a square-shaped house with nine bedrooms and a terrace with a vista. What impressed Lucy about it was the realisation that the people who planted the garden must have known they would be long dead before it reached maturity. The atmosphere was very easy, and the two of them drank beer on the terrace in the afternoon sunshine. That was when David told her that he had been accepted for officer training in the RAF, along with four pals from the university flying club. He wanted to be a fighter pilot.

"I can fly all right," he said, "and they'll need people once this war gets going-they say it'll be won and lost in the air, this time."

"Aren't you afraid?" she said quietly.

"Not a bit," he said. Then he looked at her and said, "Yes, I am." She thought he was very brave, and held his hand.

A little later they put on swimming suits and went down to the lake. The water was clear and cool, but the sun was still strong and the air was warm as they splashed about gleefully. "Are you a good swimmer?" he asked her.

"Better than you!"

"All right. Race you to the island."

She shaded her eyes to look into the sun. She held the pose for a minute, pretending she did not know how desirable she was in her wet swimsuit with her arms raised and her shoulders back. The island was a small patch of bushes and trees about three hundred yards away, in the centre of the lake.

She dropped her hands, shouted, "Go!" and struck out in a fast crawl. David won, of course, with his enormously long arms and legs. Lucy found herself in difficulty when she was still fifty yards from the island. She switched to breaststroke, but she was too exhausted even for that, and she had to roll over on to her back and float. David, who was already sitting on the bank blowing like a walrus, slipped back into the water and swam to meet her. He got behind her, held her beneath the arms in the correct lifesaving position, and pulled her slowly to shore. His hands were just below her breasts.

"I'm enjoying this," he said, and she giggled despite her breathlessness.

A few moments later he said, "I suppose I might as well tell you."

"What?" she panted.

"The lake is only four feet deep."

"You…!" She wriggled out of his arms, spluttering and laughing, and found her footing.

He took her hand and led her out of the water and through the trees. He pointed to an old wooden rowing boat rotting upside-down beneath a hawthorn. "When I was a boy I used to row out here in that, with one of Papa's pipes, a box of matches and a pinch of St. Bruno in a twist of paper. This is where I used to smoke it."

They were in a clearing, completely surrounded by bushes. The turf underfoot was clean and springy. Lucy flopped on the ground. "We'd swim back slowly," David said.

"Let's not even talk about it just yet," she replied.

He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backwards until she was lying down. He stroked her hip and kissed her throat, and soon she stopped shivering. When he laid his hand gently, nervously, on the soft mound between her legs, she arched upwards, willing him to press harder. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him open-mouthed and wetly. His hands went to the straps of her swimsuit, and he pulled them down over her shoulders.

She said, "No."

He buried his face between her breasts. "Lucy, please."

"No."

He looked at her. "It might be my last chance."

She rolled away from him and stood up. Then, because of the war, and because of the pleading look on his flushed young face, and because of the glow inside her which would not go away, she took off her costume with one swift movement and removed her bathing cap so that her dark-red hair shook out over her shoulders. She knelt in front of him, taking his face in her hands and guiding his lips to her breast.

She lost her virginity painlessly, enthusiastically, and only a little too quickly.

The spice of guilt made the memory more pleasant, not less. Even if it had been a well-planned seduction then she had been a willing, not to say eager, victim, especially at the end.

She began to dress in her going-away outfit. She had startled him a couple of times that afternoon on the island once when she wanted him to kiss her breasts, and again when she had guided him inside her with her hands. Apparently such things did not happen in the books he read. Like most of her friends, Lucy read D. H. Lawrence for information about sex. She believed in his choreography and mistrusted the sound effects-the things his people did to one another sounded nice, but not that nice; she was not expecting trumpets and thunderstorms and the clash of cymbals at her sexual awakening.

David was a little more ignorant than she, but he was gentle, and he took pleasure in her pleasure, and she was sure that was the important thing.

They had done it only once since the first time. Exactly a week before their wedding they had made love again, and it caused their first row.

This time it was at her parents' house, in the morning after everyone else had left. He came to her room in his robe and got into bed with her. She almost changed her mind about Lawrence's trumpets and cymbals. David got out of bed immediately afterward. "Don't go," she said.

"Somebody might come in."

"I'll chance it. Come back to bed." She was warm and drowsy and comfortable, and she wanted him beside her.

He put on his robe. "It makes me nervous."

"You weren't nervous five minutes ago." She reached for him. "Lie with me. I want to get to know your body." Her directness obviously embarrassed him, and he turned away.

She flounced out of bed, her lovely breasts heaving. "You're making me feel cheap!" She sat on the edge of the bed and burst into tears.

David put his arms around her and said: "I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. You're the first for me, too, and I don't know what to expect, and I feel confused… I mean, nobody tells you anything about this, do they?"

She snuffled and shook her head in agreement, and it occurred to her that what was really unnerving him was the knowledge that in eight days time he had to take off in a flimsy aircraft and fight for his life above the clouds; so she forgave him, and he dried her tears, and they got back into bed. He was very sweet after that…

She was just about ready. She examined herself in a full-length mirror. Her suit was faintly military. with square shoulders and epaulettes, but the blouse beneath it was feminine, for balance. Her hair fell in sausage curls beneath a natty pill-box hat. It would not have been right to go away gorgeously dressed, not this year; but she felt she had achieved the kind of briskly practical, yet attractive, look that was rapidly becoming fashionable.

David was waiting for her in the hall. He kissed her and said, "You look wonderful, Mrs Rose."

They were driven back to the reception to say good-bye to everyone. They were going to spend the night in London, at Claridge's, then David would drive on to Biggin Hill and Lucy would come home again. She was going to live with her parents; she had the use of a cottage for when David was on leave.

There was another half-hour of handshakes and kisses, then they went out to the car. Some of David's cousins had got at his open-top MG. There were tin cans and an old boot tied to the bumpers with string. the running-boards were awash with confetti, and "Just Married" was scrawled all over the paintwork in bright red lipstick.

They drove away, smiling and waving, the guests filling the street behind them. A mile down the road they stopped and cleaned up the car. It was dusk when they got going again. David's headlights were fitted with blackout masks, but he drove very fast just the same. Lucy felt very happy.

David said, "There's a bottle of bubbly in the glove compartment."

Lucy opened the compartment and found the champagne and two glasses carefully wrapped in tissue paper. It was still quite cold. The cork came out with a loud pop and shot off into the night. David lit a cigarette while Lucy poured the wine. "We're going to be late for supper." he said.

"Who cares." She handed him a glass.

She was too tired to drink really. She became sleepy. The car seemed to be going terribly fast. She let David have most of the champagne. He began to whistle St Louis Blues.

Driving through England in the blackout was a weird experience. One missed lights that one hadn't realised were there before the war: lights in cottage porches and farmhouse windows; lights on cathedral spires and inn signs and most of all the luminous glow, low in the distant sky, of the thousand lights of a nearby town. Even if one had been able to see, there were no signposts to look at: they had been removed to confuse the German parachutists who were expected any day (Just a few days ago in the Midlands, farmers had found parachutes, radios and maps, but since there were no footprints leading away from the objects, it had been concluded that no men had landed and the whole thing was a feeble Nazi attempt to panic the population.) Anyway, David knew the way to London.

They climbed a long hill. The little sports car took it nimbly. Lucy gazed through half-closed eyes at the blackness ahead. The downside of the hill was steep and winding. Lucy heard the distant roar of an approaching lorry.

The MG's tires squealed as David raced around the bends. "I think you're going too fast," Lucy said mildly.

The back of the car skidded on a left curve. David changed down, afraid to brake in case he skidded again. On either side the hedgerows were dimly picked out by the shaded headlights. There was a sharp right-hand curve, and David lost the back again. The curve seemed to go on and on forever. The little car slid sideways and turned through 180 degrees, so that it was going backwards, then continued to turn in the same direction. "David!" Lucy screamed.

The moon came out suddenly, and they saw the lorry. It was struggling up the hill at a snail's pace, with thick smoke, made silvery by the moonlight, pouring from its snout-shaped bonnet. Lucy glimpsed the driver's face, even his cloth cap and his moustache; his mouth was open as he stood on his brakes. The car was travelling forward again now. There was just room to pass the lorry if David could regain control of the car. He heaved the steering wheel over and touched the accelerator. It was a mistake.

The car and the lorry collided head-on.

Foreigners have spies; Britain has Military Intelligence. As if that were not euphemism enough, it is abbreviated to MI. In 1940, MI was part of the War Offlce. It was spreading like crab grass at the time-not surprisingly-and its different sections were known by numbers: MI9 ran the escape routes from prisoner-of-war camps through Occupied Europe to neutral countries; MI8 monitored enemy wireless traffic, and was of more value than six regiments; MI6 sent agents into France.

It was MI5 that Professor Percival Godliman joined in the autumn of 1940. He turned up at the War Office in Whitehall on a cold September morning after a night spent putting out fires all over the East End; the blitz was at its height and he was an auxiliary Fireman.

Military Intelligence was run by soldiers in peacetime, when in Godliman's opinion espionage made no difference to anything anyhow; but now, he found, it was populated by amateurs, and he was delighted to discover that he knew half the people in MI5. On his first day he met a barrister who was a member of his club, an art historian with whom he had been to college, an archivist from his own university, and his favourite writer of detective stories. He was shown into Colonel Terry's office at 10 A.M.

Terry had been there for several hours; there were two empty cigarette packets in the wastepaper basket. Godliman said, "Should I call you 'Sir' now?"

"There's not much bull around here, Percy. 'Uncle Andrew' will do Fine. Sit down."

All the same, there was a briskness about Terry that had not been present when they had lunch at the Savoy. Godliman noticed that he did not smile, and his attention kept wandering to a pile of unread messages on the desk.

Terry looked at his watch and said, "I'm aching to put you in the picture, briefly finish the lecture I started over lunch."

Godliman smiled. "This time I won't get up on my high horse."

Terry lit another cigarette.

Canaris' spies in Britain were useless people (Terry resumed, as if their conversation had been interrupted five minutes rather than three months ago). Dorothy O'Grady was typical: we caught her cutting military telephone wire on the Isle of Wight. She was writing letters to Portugal in the kind of secret ink you buy in joke shops.

A new wave of spies began in September. Their task was to reconnoitre Britain in preparation for the invasion to map beaches suitable for landings; fields and roads that could be used by troop-carrying gliders; tank traps and road blocks and barbed-wire obstacles.

They seem to have been badly selected, hastily mustered, inadequately trained, and poorly equipped. Typical were the four who came over on the night of 23 September: Meier, Kieboom, Pons, and Waldberg. Kieboom and Pons landed at dawn near Hythe, and were arrested by Private Tollervey of the Somerset Light Infantry, who came upon them in the sand dunes hacking away at a dirty great wurst.

Waldberg actually managed to send a signal to Hamburg: ARRIVED SAFELY. DOCUMENT DESTROYED. ENGLISH PATROL 200 METRES PROM COAST. BEACH WITH BROWN NETS AND RAILWAY SLEEPERS AT A DISTANCE OP 50 METRES. NO MINES. FEW SOLDIERS. UNFINISHED BLOCKHOUSE. NEW ROAD. WALDBERG.

Clearly he did not know where he was, nor did he even have a code name. The quality of his briefing is indicated by the fact that he knew nothing of English licencing laws: he went into a pub at nine o'clock in the morning and asked for a quart of cider.

(Godliman laughed at this, and Terry said: "Wait: it gets funnier.")

The landlord told Waldberg to come back at ten. He could spend the hour looking at the village church, he suggested. Amazingly, Waldberg was back at ten sharp, whereupon two policemen on bicycles arrested him.

("It's like a script for 'It's That Man Again'," said Godliman.)

Meier was found a few hours later. Eleven more agents were picked up over the next few weeks, most of them within hours of landing on British soil. Almost all of them were destined for the scaffold.

("Almost all?" said Godliman.

Terry said: "Yes. A couple have been handed over to our section B-l(a). I'll come back to that in a minute.")

Others landed in Eire. One was Ernst Weber-Drohl, a well-known acrobat who had two illegitimate children in Ireland. He had toured music houses there as 'The World's Strongest Man.' He was arrested by the Garde Siochana, fined three pounds, and turned over to B-1 (a).

Another was Hermann Goetz, who parachuted into Ulster instead of Eire by mistake, was robbed by the IRA, swam the Boyne in his fur underwear and eventually swallowed his suicide pill. He had a flashlight marked "Made in Dresden."

("If it's so easy to pick these bunglers up," Terry said, "why are we taking on brainy types like yourself to catch them? Two reasons. One: we've got no way of knowing how many we haven't picked up. Two: it's what we do with the ones we don't hang that matters. This is where B-l(a) comes in. But to explain that I have to go back to 1936.")

Alfred George Owens was an electrical engineer with a company that had a few government contracts. He visited Germany several times during the '30s, and voluntarily gave to the Admiralty odd bits of technical information he picked up there.

Eventually Naval Intelligence passed him on to MI6 who began to develop him as an agent. The Abwehr recruited him at about the same time, as MI6 discovered when they intercepted a letter from him to a known German cover address. Clearly he was a man totally without loyalty; he just wanted to be a spy. We called him "Snow"; the Germans called him "Johnny." In January 1939 Snow got a letter containing (1) instructions for the use of a wireless transmitter and (2) a ticket from the checkroom at Victoria Station.

He was arrested the day after war broke out, and he and his transmitter (which he had picked up, in a suitcase, when be presented the checkroom ticket) were locked up in Wandsworth Prison. He continued to communicate with Hamburg, but now all the messages were written by section B-l(a) of MI5. The Abwehr put him in touch with two more German agents in England, whom we immediately nabbed. They also gave him a code and detailed wireless procedure, all of which was invaluable.

Snow was followed by Charlie, Rainbow, Summer, Biscuit, and eventually a small army of enemy spies, all in regular contact with Canaris, an apparently trusted by him, and all totally controlled by the British counterintelligence apparatus.

At that point MI5 began dimly to glimpse an awesome and tantalising prospect: with a bit of luck, they could control and manipulate the entire German espionage network in Britain.

"Turning agents into double agents instead of hanging them has two crucial advantages," Terry wound up. "Since the enemy thinks his spies are still active, he doesn't try to replace them with others who may not get caught. And, since we are supplying the information the spies tell their controllers, we can deceive the enemy and mislead his strategists."

"It can't be that easy," said Godliman.

"Certainly not." Terry opened a window to let out the fug of cigarette and pipe smoke. "To work, the system has to be very near total. If there is any substantial number of genuine agents here, their information will contradict that of the double agents and the Abwehr will smell a rat."

"It sounds exciting," Godliman said. His pipe had gone out. Terry smiled for the first time that morning. "The people here will tell you it's hard work: long hours, high tension, frustration, but yes, of course it's exciting." He looked at his watch. "Now I want you to meet a very bright young member of my staff. Let me walk you to his offlce."

They went out of the room, up some stairs, and along several corridors. "His name is Frederick Bloggs, and he gets annoyed if you make jokes about it," Terry continued. "We pinched him from Scotland Yard-he was an inspector with Special Branch. If you need arms and legs, use him. You'll rank above him, of course, but I shouldn't make too much of that; we don't, here. I suppose I hardly need to say that to you."

They entered a small, bare room that looked out on to a blank wall. There was no carpet. A photograph of a pretty girl hung on the wall, and there was a pair of handcuffs on the hat-stand.

Terry said, "Frederick Bloggs, Percival Godliman. I'll leave you to it."

The man behind the desk was blond, stocky and short; he must have been only just tall enough to get into the police force, Godliman thought. His tie was an eyesore, but he had a pleasant, open face and an attractive grin.

His handshake was firm.

"Tell you what, Percy, I was just going to nip home for lunch," he said. "Why don't you come along? The wife makes a lovely sausage and chips." He had a broad cockney accent.

Sausage and chips was not Godliman's favourite meal, but he went along. They walked to Trafalgar Square and caught a bus to Brixton. Bloggs said, "I married a wonderful girl, but she can't cook for nuts. I have sausage and chips every day."

East London was still smoking from the previous night's air raid. They passed groups of firemen and volunteers digging through rubble, playing hoses over dying fires and clearing debris from the streets. They saw an old man carry a precious radio out of a half-ruined house.

Godliman made conversation. "So we're to catch spies together."

"We'll have a go, Perce."

Bloggs' home was a three-bedroom semi-detached house in a street of exactly similar houses. The tiny front gardens were all being used to grow vegetables. Mrs Bloggs was the pretty girl in the photograph on the office wall. She looked tired. "She drives an ambulance during the raids, don't you, love?" Bloggs said. He was proud of her. Her name was Christine.

She said. "Every morning when I come home I wonder if the house will still he here."

"Notice it's the house she's worried about, not me," Bloggs said.

Godliman picked up a medal in a presentation case from the mantelpiece. "How did you get this?"

Christine answered. "He took a shotgun off a villain who was robbing a post offlce."

"You're quite a pair." Godliman said.

"You married. Percy?" Bloggs asked.

"I'm a widower."

"Sorry."

"My wife died of tuberculosis in 1930. We never had any children."

"We're not having any yet," Bloggs said. "Not while the world's in this state."

Christine said: "Oh, Fred, he's not interested in that!" Shs went out to the kitchen.

They sat around a square table in the canter of the room to eat. Godliman was touched by this couple and the domestic scene, and found himself thinking of his Eleanor. That was unusual; he had been immune to sentiment for some years. Perhaps the nerves were coming alive again, at last. War did funny things.

Christine's cooking was truly awful. The sausages were burned. Bloggs drowned his meal in tomato ketchup and Godliman cheerfully followed suit.

When they got back to Whitehall Bloggs showed Godliman the file on unidentified enemy agents thought still to be operating in Britain.

There were three sources of information about such people. The first was the immigration records of the Home Office. Passport control had long been an arm of Military Intelligence, and there was a list going back to the last war of aliens who had entered the country but had not left or been accounted for in other ways, such as death or naturalisation. At the outbreak of war they had all gone before tribunals that classified them in three groups. At first only "A" class aliens were interned; but by July of 1940, after some scaremongering by Fleet Street, the "B" and "C" classes were taken out of circulation. There was a small number of immigrants who could not be located, and it was a fair amgumption that some of them were spies. Their papers were in Bloggs' file.

The second source was wireless transmissions. Section C of MI8 patrolled the airwaves nightly, recorded everything they did not know for certain to be theirs, and passed it to the Government Code and Cipher School. This outfit, which had recently been moved from London's Berkeley Street to a country house at Bletchley Park, was not a school at all but a collection of chess champions, musicians, mathematicians, and crossword puzzle enthusiasts dedicated to the belief that if a man could invent a code a man could crack it. Signals originating in the British Isles that could not be accounted for by any of the Services were assumed to be messages from spies. The decoded messages were in Bloggs' file.

Finally there were the double agents, but their value was largely hoped-for rather than actual. Messages to them from the Abwehr had warned of several incoming agents, and had given away one resident spy-Mrs Matilda Krafft of Bournemouth. who had sent money to Snow by post and was subsequently incarcerated in Holloway prison. But the doubles had not been able to reveal the identity or locations of the kind of quietly effective professional spies most valuable to a secret intelligence service. No one doubted that there were such people. There were clues someone, for example, had brought Snow's transmitter over from Germany and deposited it in the cloakroom at Victoria Station for him to collect. But either the Abwehr or the spies themselves were too cautious to be caught by the doubles. However the clues were in Bloggs' file.

Other sources were being developed: the experts were working to improve methods of triangulation (the directional pin-pointing of radio transmitters); and MI6 were trying to rebuild the networks of agents in Europe that had sunk beneath the tidal wave of Hitler's armies. What little information there was was in Bloggs' file. "It can be infuriating at times," he told Godliman. "Look at this."

He took from the file a long radio intercept about British plans for an expeditionary force for Finland. "This was picked up early in the year. The information is impeccable. They were trying to get a fix on him when he broke off in the middle, for no apparent reason. Perhaps he was interrupted. He resumed a few minutes later, but he was off the air again before our people had a chance to plug in."

Godliman said, "What's this 'Regards to Willi'?"

"Now, that's important," said Bloggs. He was getting enthusiastic. "Here's a scrap of another message, quite recent. Look: 'Regards to Willi.' This time there was a reply. He's addressed as 'Die Nadel'."

"The Needle."

"This one's a pro. Look at his message: terse, economical, but detailed and completely unambiguous."

Godliman studied the fragment of the second message. "It appears to be about the effects of the bombing."

"He's obviously toured the East End. A pro, a pro."

"What else do we know about Die Nadel?"

Bloggs' expression of youthful eagerness collapsed. "That's it, I'm afraid."

"His code name is Die Nadel, he signs off 'Regards to Willi,' and he has good information and that's it?"

"'Fraid so."

Godliman sat on the edge of the desk and stared out of the window. On the wall of the opposite building, underneath an ornate window sill, he could see the nest of a house-marten. "On that basis, what chance have we of catching him?"

Bloggs shrugged. "On that basis, none at all."

It is for places like this that the word "bleak" has been invented.

The island is a J-shaped lump of rock rising sullenly out of the North Sea. It lies on the map like the top half of a broken cane, parallel with the Equator but a long, long way north; its curved handle toward Aberdeen, its broken, jagged stump pointing threateningly at distant Denmark. It is ten miles long.

Around most of its coast the cliffs rise out of the cold sea without the courtesy of a beach. Angered by this rudeness the waves pound on the rock in impotent rage; a ten-thousand-year fit of bad temper that the island ignores with impunity.

In the cup of the J the sea is calmer; there it has provided itself with a more pleasant reception. Its tides have thrown into that cup so much sand and seaweed, driftwood and pebbles and seashells that there is now, between the foot of the cliff and the water's edge, a crescent of something closely resembling dry land, a more-or-less beach.

Each summer the vegetation at the top of the cliff drops a handful of seeds on to the beach, the way a rich man throws loose change to beggars. If the winter is mild and the spring comes early, a few of the seeds take feeble root; but they are never healthy enough to flower themselves and spread their own seeds, so the beach exists from year to year on handouts. On the land itself, the proper land, held out of the sea's reach by the cliffs, green things do grow and multiply. The vegetation is mostly coarse grass, only just good enough to nourish the few bony sheep, but tough enough to bind the topsoil to the island's bedrock. There are some bushes, all thorny, that provide homes for rabbits; and a brave stand of conifers on the leeward slope of the dip at the eastern end.

The higher land is ruled by heather. Every few years the man-yes, there is a man here-sets fire to the heather, and then the grass will grow and the sheep can graze here too; but after a couple of years the heather comes back, God knows from where, and drives the sheep away until the man burns it again.

The rabbits are here because they were born here; the sheep are here because they were brought here; and the man is here to look after the sheep; but the birds are here because they like it. There are hundreds of thousands of them: long-legged rock pipits whistling peep peep peep as they soar and pe-pe-pe-pe as they dive like a Spitfire coming at a Messerschmidt out of the sun; coracrakes, which the man rarely sees, but he knows they are there because their bark keeps him awake at night; ravens and carrion crows and kittiwakes and countless gulls; and a pair of golden eagles that the man shoots at when he sees them, for he knows-regardless of what naturalists and experts from Edinburgh may tell him-that they do prey on live lambs and not just the carcasses of those already dead.

The island's most constant visitor is the wind. It comes mostly from the northeast, from really cold places where there are fjords and glaciers and icebergs; often bringing with it unwelcome gifts of snow and driving rain and cold, cold mist; sometimes arriving empty-handed, just to howl and whoop and raise hell, tearing up bushes and bending trees and whipping the intemperate ocean into fresh paroxysms of foam-flecked rage. It is tireless, this wind, and that is its mistake. If it came occasionally it could take the island by surprise and do some real damage; but because it is almost always here, the island has learned to live with it. The plants put down deep roots, and the rabbits hide far inside the thickets, and the trees grow up with their backs ready-bent for the flogging, and the birds nest on sheltered ledges, and the man's house is sturdy and squat, built with a craftsmanship that knows this old wind.

This house is made of big grey stones and grey slate, the colour of the sea. It has small windows and close-fitting doors and a chimney in its pipe end. It stands at the top of the hill at the eastern end of the island, close to the splintered stub of the broken walking-stick. It crowns the hill, defying the wind and the rain, not out of bravado but so that the man can see the sheep.

There is another house, very similar, ten miles away at the opposite end of the island near the more-or-less beach; but nobody lives there. There was once another man. He thought he knew better than the island; he thought he could grow oats and potatoes and keep a few cows. He battled for three years with the wind and the cold and the soil before he admitted he was wrong. When he had gone, nobody wanted his home.

This is a hard place. Only hard things survive here: hard rock, coarse grass, tough sheep, savage birds, sturdy houses, and strong men.

It is for places like this that the word "bleak" has been invented.

"It's called Storm Island," said Alfred Rose. "I think you're going to like it."

David and Lucy Rose sat in the prow of the fishing boat and looked across the choppy water. It was a fine November day, cold and breezy yet clear and dry. A weak sun sparkled off the wavelets.

"I bought it in 1926," Papa Rose continued, "when we thought there was going to be a revolution and we'd need somewhere to hide from the working class. It's just the place for a convalescence."

Lucy thought he was being suspiciously hearty, but she had to admit it looked lovely: all windblown and natural and fresh. And it made sense, this move.

They had to get away from their parents and make a new start at being married; and there was no point in moving to a city to be bombed, not when neither of them was really well enough to help; and then David's father had revealed that he owned an island off the coast of Scotland, and it seemed too good to be true.

"I own the sheep, too," Papa Rose said. "Shearers come over from the mainland each spring, and the wool brings in just about enough money to pay Tom McAvity's wages. Old Tom's the shepherd."

"How old is he?" Lucy asked.

"Good Lord, he must be oh, seventy?"

"I suppose he's eccentric." The boat turned into the bay, and Lucy could see two small figures on the jetty: a man and a dog.

"Eccentric? No more than you'd be if you'd lived alone for twenty years. He talks to his dog."

Lucy turned to the skipper of the small boat. "How often do you call?"

"Once a fortnight, missus. I bring Tom's shopping, which isna much, and his mail, which is even less. You just give me your list, every other Monday, and if it can be bought in Aberdeen I'll bring it."

He cut the motor and threw a rope to Tom. The dog barked and ran around in circles, beside himself with excitement. Lucy put one foot on the gunwale and sprang out on to the jetty.

Tom shook her hand. He had a face of leather and a huge pipe with a lid. He was shorter than she, but wide, and he looked ridiculously healthy. He wore the hairiest tweed jacket she had ever seen, with a knitted sweater that must have been made by an elderly sister somewhere, plus a checked cap and army boots. His nose was huge, red and veined. "Pleased to meet you," he said politely, as if she was his ninth visitor today instead of the first human face he had seen in fourteen days.

"Here y'are, Tom," said the skipper. He handed two cardboard boxes out of the boat. "No eggs this time, but there's a letter from Devon."

"It'll be from ma niece."

Lucy thought, That explains the sweater.

David was still in the boat. The skipper stood behind him and said, "Are you ready?"

Tom and Papa Rose leaned into the boat to assist, and the three of them lifted David in his wheelchair on to the jetty.

"If I don't go now I'll have to wait a fortnight for the next bus," Papa Rose said with a smile. "The house has been done up quite nicely, you'll see. All your stuff is in there. Tom will show you where everything is." He kissed Lucy, squeezed David's shoulder, and shook Tom's hand. "Have a few months of rest and togetherness, get completely fit then come back; there are important war jobs for both of you."

They would not be going back, Lucy knew, not before the end of the war. But she had not told anyone about that yet.

Papa got back into the boat. It wheeled away in a tight circle. Lucy waved until it disappeared around the headland.

Tom pushed the wheelchair, so Lucy took his groceries. Between the landward end of the jetty and the clifftop was a long, steep, narrow ramp rising high above the beach like a bridge. Lucy would have had trouble getting the wheelchair to the top, but Tom managed without apparent exertion. The cottage was perfect.

It was small and grey, and sheltered from the wind by a little rise in the ground. All the woodwork was freshly painted, and a wild rose bush grew beside the doorstep. Curls of smoke rose from the chimney to be whipped away by the breeze. The tiny windows looked over the bay. Lucy said, "I love it!"

The interior had been cleaned and aired and painted, and there were thick rugs on the stone floors. It had four rooms: downstairs, a modernised kitchen and a living room with a stone fireplace; upstairs, two bedrooms. One end of the house had been carefully remodelled to take modern plumbing, with a bathroom above and a kitchen extension below.

Their clothes were in the wardrobes. There were towels in the bathroom and food in the kitchen.

Tom said, "There's something in the barn I've to show you."

It was a shed, not a barn. It lay hidden behind the cottage, and inside it was a gleaming new jeep.

"Mr Rose says it's been specially adapted for young Mr Rose to drive," Tom said. "It's got automatic gears, and the throttle and brake are operated by hand. That's what he said." He seemed to be repeating the words parrot-fashion, as if he had very little idea of what gears, brakes and throttles might be.

Lucy said "Isn't that super, David?"

"Top-hole. But where shall I go in it?"

Tom said- "You're always welcome to visit me and share a pipe and a drop of whisky. I've been looking forward to having neighbours again."

"Thank you." said Lucy.

"This here's the generator," Tom said, turning around and pointing "I've got one just the same. You put the fuel in here. It delivers alternating current."

"That's unusual. Small generators are usually direct current," David said.

"Aye I don't really know the difference, but they tell me this is safer."

"True. A shock from this would throw you across the room, but direct current would kill you."

They went back to the cottage. Tom said, "Well, you'll want to settle in, and I've sheep to tend, so I'll say good-day. Oh! I ought to tell you: in an emergency, I can contact the mainland by wireless radio."

David was surprised "You've got a radio transmitter?"

"Aye," Tom said proudly. "I'm an enemy aircraft spotter in the Royal Observer Corps."

"Ever spotted any?" David asked.

Lucy flashed her disapproval of the sarcasm in David's voice, but Tom seemed not to notice. "Not yet," he replied.

"Jolly good show."

When Tom had gone Lucy said, "He only wants to do his bit."

"There are lots of us who want to do our bit," David said.

And that, Lucy reflected, was the trouble. She dropped the subject, and wheeled her crippled husband into their new home.

When Lucy had been asked to visit the hospital psychologist, she had immediately assumed that David had brain damage. It was not so. "All that's wrong with his head is a nasty bruise on the left temple," the psychologist said. She went on: "However, the loss of both his legs is a trauma. and there's no telling how it will affect his state of mind. Did he want very much to be a pilot?"

Lucy pondered. "He was afraid, but I think he wanted it very badly, all the same."

"Well, he'll need all the reassurance and support that you can give him. And patience, too. One thing we can predict is that he will be resentful and ill-tempered for a while. He needs love and rest."

However, during their first few months on the island he seemed to want neither. He did not make love to her, perhaps because he was waiting until his injuries were fully healed. But he did not rest, either. He threw himself into the business of sheep farming, tearing about the island in his jeep with the wheelchair in the back. He built fences along the more treacherous cliffs, shot at the eagles, helped Tom train a new dog when Betsy began to go blind, and burned off the heather; and in the spring he was out every night delivering lambs. One day he felled a great old pine tree near Tom's cottage, and spent a fortnight stripping it; hewing it into manageable logs and carting them back to the house for firewood. He relished really hard manual labour. He learned to strap himself tightly to the chair to keep his body anchored while he wielded an axe or a mallet. He carved a pair of Indian clubs and exercised with them for hours when Tom could find nothing more for him to do. The muscles of his arms and back became near-grotesque, like those of men who win body-building contests.

Lucy was not unhappy. She had been afraid he might sit by the fire all day and brood over his bad luck. The way he worked was faintly worrying because it was so obsessive, but at least he was not vegetating.

She told him about the baby at Christmas.

In the morning she gave him a gasoline-driven saw, and he gave her a bolt of silk. Tom came over for dinner, and they ate a wild goose he had shot. David drove the shepherd home after tea, and when he came back Lucy opened a bottle of brandy.

Then she said, "I have another present for you, but you can't open it until May."

He laughed. "What on earth are you talking about? How much of that brandy did you drink while I was out?"

"I'm having a baby."

He stared at her, and all the laughter went out of his face. "Good God, that's all we bloody well need."

"David!"

"Well, for God's sake… When the hell did it happen?"

"That's not too difficult to figure out, is it?" she said. "It must have been a week before the wedding. It's a miracle it survived the crash."

"Have you seen a doctor?"

"Huh. When?"

"So how do you know for sure?"

"Oh, David, don't be so boring. I know for sure because my periods have stopped and my nipples hurt and I throw up in the mornings and my waist is four inches bigger than it used to be. If you ever looked at me you would know for sure."

"All right."

"What's the matter with you? You're supposed to be thrilled!"

"Oh, sure. Perhaps we'll have a son, and then I can take him for walks and play football with him, and he'll grow up wanting to be like his father the war hero, a legless fucking joker."

"Oh, David, David," she whispered. She knelt in front of his wheelchair. "David, don't think like that. He will respect you. He'll look up to you because you put your life together again, and because you can do the work of two men from your wheelchair, and because you carried your disability with courage and cheerfulness and-"

"Don't be so damned condescending," he snapped. "You sound like a sanctimonious priest."

She stood up. "Well, don't act as if it's my fault. Men can take precautions too, you know."

"Not against invisible trucks in the blackout!"

It was a silly exchange and they both knew it, so Lucy said nothing. The whole idea of Christmas seemed utterly trite now: the bits of coloured paper on the walls, and the tree in the corner, and the remains of a goose in the kitchen waiting to be thrown away: none of it had anything to do with her life. She began to wonder what she was doing on this bleak island with a man who seemed not to love her, having a baby he didn't want. Why shouldn't she? Why not? well, she could… Then she realised she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do with her life, nobody else to be other than Mrs David Rose.

Eventually David said, "Well, I'm going to bed." He wheeled himself to the hall and dragged himself out of the chair and up the stairs backwards. She heard him scrape across the floor, heard the bed creak as he hauled himself on to it, heard his clothes hit the corner of the room as he undressed, then heard the final groaning of the springs as he lay down and pulled the blankets up over him. And still she would not cry.

She looked at the brandy bottle and thought, If I drink all of this now, and have a bath, perhaps I won't be pregnant in the morning. She thought about it for a long time, until she came to the conclusion that life without David and the island and the baby would be even worse because it would be empty.

So she did not cry and she did not drink the brandy, and she did not leave the island; but instead she went upstairs and got into bed, and lay awake beside her sleeping husband, listening to the wind and trying not to think, until the gulls began to call, and a grey rainy dawn crept over the North Sea and filled the little bedroom with a cold pale light, and at last she went to sleep.

A kind of peace settled over her in the spring, as if all threats were postponed until after the baby was born. When the February snow had thawed she planted flowers and vegetables in the patch of ground between the kitchen door and the barn, not really believing they would grow. She cleaned the house thoroughly and told David that if he wanted it done again before August he would have to do it himself. She wrote to her mother and did a lot of knitting and ordered nappies by mail. They suggested she go home to have the baby, but she knew, was afraid, that if she went she would never come back. She went for long walks over the moors, with a bird book under her arm, until her weight became too much for her to carry very far. She kept the bottle of brandy in a cupboard David never used, and whenever she felt depressed she went to look at it and remind herself of what she had almost lost.

Three weeks before the baby was due, she got the boat into Aberdeen. David and Tom waved from the jetty. The sea was so rough that both she and the skipper were terrified she might give birth before they reached the mainland. She went into the hospital in Aberdeen, and four weeks later brought the baby home on the same boat.

David knew none of it. He probably thought that women gave birth as easily as ewes, she decided. He was oblivious to the pain of contractions, and that awful, impossible stretching, and the soreness afterward, and the bossy, know-it-all nurses who didn't want you to touch your baby because you weren't brisk and efficient and trained and sterile like they were; he just saw you go away pregnant and come back with a beautiful, white-wrapped, healthy baby boy and said, "We'll call him Jonathan."

They added Alfred for David's father, and Malcolm for Lucy's, and Thomas for old Tom, but they called the boy Jo, because he was too tiny for Jonathan, let alone Jonathan Alfred Malcolm Thomas Rose. David learned to give him his bottle and burp him and change his nappy, and he even dandled him in his lap occasionally, but his interest seemed distant, uninvolved; he had a problem-solving approach, like the nurses; it was not for him as it was for Lucy. Tom was closer to the baby than David. Lucy would not let him smoke in the room where the baby was, and the old boy would put his great briar pipe with the lid in his pocket for hours and gurgle at little Jo, or watch him kick his feet, or help Lucy bathe him. Lucy suggested mildly that he might be neglecting the sheep. Tom said they did not need him to watch them feed; he would rather watch Jo feed. He carved a rattle out of driftwood and filled it with small round pebbles, and was overjoyed when Jo grabbed it and shook it, first time, without having to be shown how.

David and Lucy still did not make love.

First there had been his injuries, and then she had been pregnant, and then she had been recovering from childbirth; but now the reasons had run out.

One night she said, "I'm back to normal now."

"How do you mean?"

"After the baby. My body is normal. I've healed."

"Oh, I see. That's good."

She made sure to go to bed with him so that he could watch her undress, but he always turned his back.

As they lay there, dozing off, she would move so that her hand, or her thigh, or her breast, brushed against him, a casual but unmistakable invitation. There was no response.

She believed firmly that there was nothing wrong with her. She wasn't a nymphomaniac. She didn't simply want sex; she wanted sex with David. She was sure that, even if there had been another man under seventy on the island, she would not have been tempted. She wasn't a sex-starved tart, she was a love-starved wife.

The crunch came on one of those nights when they lay on their backs, side by side, both wide awake, listening to the wind outside and the small sounds of Jo from the next room. It seemed to Lucy that it was time he either did it or came right out and said why not; and that he was going to avoid the issue until she forced it; and that she might as well force it now.

So she brushed her arm across his thighs and opened her mouth to speak and almost cried out with shock to discover that he had an erection. So he could do it! And he wanted to, or why else and her hand closed triumphantly around the evidence of his desire, and she shifted closer to him, and sighed, "David…"

He said, "Oh, for God's sake" and gripped her wrist and pushed her hand away from him and turned onto his side.

But this time she was not going to accept his rebuff in modest silence. "David, why not?"

"Jesus Christl" He threw the blankets off, swung himself to the floor, grabbed the eiderdown with one hand, and dragged himself to the door. Lucy sat up in bed and screamed at him, "Why not?" Jo began to cry.

David pulled up the empty legs of his cut-off pyjama trousers, pointed to the pursed white skin of his stumps, and said, "That's why not! That's why not!"

He slithered downstairs to sleep on the sofa, and Lucy went into the next bedroom to comfort Jo.

It took a long time to lull him back to sleep, probably because she herself was so much in need of comfort. The baby tasted the tears on her cheeks, and she wondered if he had any inkling of their meaning. Wouldn't tears be one of the first things a baby came to understand? She could not bring herself to sing to him, or murmur that everything was all right; so she held him tight and rocked him, and when he had soothed her with his warmth and his clinging, he went to sleep in her arms.

She put him back in the cot and stood looking at him for a while. There was no point in going back to bed. She could hear David's deep-sleep snoring from the living room. He had to take powerful pills, otherwise the old pain kept him awake. Lucy needed to get away from him, where she could neither see nor hear him, where he couldn't find her for a few hours even if he wanted to. She put on trousers and sweater, a heavy coat and boots, and crept downstairs and out.

There was a swirling mist, damp and bitterly cold, the kind the island specialised in. She pulled up the collar of her coat, thought about going back inside for a scarf, and decided not to. She squelched along the muddy path, welcoming the bite of the fog in her throat, the small discomfort of the weather taking her mind off the larger hurt inside her.

She reached the cliff top and walked gingerly down the steep, narrow ramp, placing her feet carefully on the slippery boards. At the bottom she jumped off on to the sand and walked to the edge of the sea.

The wind and the water were carrying on their perpetual quarrel, the wind swooping down to tease the waves and the sea hissing and spitting as it crashed against the land, the two of them doomed to bicker forever.

Lucy walked along the hard sand, letting the noise and the weather fill her head, until the beach ended in a sharp point where the water met the cliff, when she turned and walked back. She paced the shore all night. Toward dawn a thought came to her, unbidden: It is his way of being strong.

As it was, the thought was not much help, holding its meaning in a tightly clenched fist. But she worked on it for a while, and the fist opened to reveal what looked like a small pearl of wisdom nestling in its palm: perhaps David's coldness to her was of one piece with his chopping down trees, and undressing himself, and driving the jeep, and throwing the Indian clubs, and coming to live on a cold cruel island in the North Sea…

What was it he had said? "…his father the war hero, a legless joke…" He had something to prove, something that would sound trite if it were put into words; something he could have done as a fighter pilot, but now had to do with trees and fences and Indian clubs and a wheelchair. They wouldn't let him take the test, and he wanted to be able to say: "I could have passed it anyway, just look how I can suffer."

It was cruelly, screamingly unjust: he had had the courage, and he had suffered the wounds, but he could take no pride in it. If a Messerschmidt had taken his legs the wheelchair would have been like a medal, a badge of courage. But now, all his life, he would have to say: "It was during the war but no, I never saw any action, this was a car crash. I did my training and I was going to fight the very next day, I had seen my kite, she was a beauty, and…"

Yes, it was his way of being strong. And perhaps she could be strong, too. She might find ways of patching up the wreck of her life. David had once been good and kind and loving, and she might now learn to wait patiently while he battled to become the complete man he used to be. She could find new hopes, new things to live for. Other women had found the strength to cope with bereavement, and bombed-out houses, and husbands in prisoner-of-war camps.

She picked up a pebble, drew back her arm, and threw it out to sea with all her might. She did not see or hear it land; it might have gone on forever, circling the earth like a satellite in a space story.

She shouted, "I can be strong, too, damn it." And then she turned around and started up the ramp to the cottage. It was almost time for Jo's first feed.

It looked like a mansion, and, up to a point, that was what it was: a large house, in its own grounds, in the leafy town of Wohldorf just outside North Hamburg. It might have been the home of a mine owner, or a successful importer, or an industrialist. However, it was in fact owned by the Abwehr.

It owed its fate to the weather-not here, but two hundred miles southeast in Berlin, where atmospheric conditions were unsuitable for wireless communication with England.

It was a mansion only down to ground level. Below that were two huge concrete shelters and several million reichsmarks worth of radio equipment. The electronics system had been put together by a Major Werner Trautmann, and he did a good job. Each hall had twenty neat little soundproof listening posts, occupied by radio operators who could recognise a spy by the way he tapped out his message, as easily as you can recognise your mother's handwriting on an envelope.

The receiving equipment was built with quality in mind, for the transmitters sending the messages had been designed for compactness rather than power. Most of them were the small suitcase-sets called Klamotten, which had been developed by Telefunken for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.

On this night the airways were relatively quiet, so everyone knew when Die Nadel came through. The message was taken by one of the older operators. He tapped an acknowledgment, transcribed the signal, quickly tore the sheet off his note pad and went to the phone. He read the message over the direct line to Abwshr headquarters at Sophien Terrasse in Hamburg, then came back to his booth for a smoke.

He offered a cigarette to the youngster in the next booth, and the two of them stood together for a few minutes, leaning against the wall and smoking. The youngster said. "Anything?"

The older man shrugged. "There's always something when he calls. But not much this time. The Luftwaffe missed St. Paul's Cathedral again."

"No reply for him?"

"We don't think he waits for replies. He's an independent bastard-always was. I trained him in wireless, you know, and once I'd finished he thought he knew it better than me."

"You've met Die Nadel? What's he like?"

"About as much fun as a dead fish. All the same he's the best agent we've got. Some say the best ever. There's a story that he spent five years working his way up in the NKVD in Russia, and ended up one of Stalin's most trusted aides… I don't know whether it's true, but it's the kind of thing he'd do. A real pro. And the Fuehrer knows it."

"Hitler knows him?"

The older man nodded. "At one time he wanted to see all Die Nadel's signals. I don't know if he still does. Not that it would make any difference to Die Nadel. Nothing impresses that man. You know something? He looks at everybody the same way-as if he's figuring out how hell kill you if you make a wrong move."

"I'm glad I didn't have to train him."

"He learned quickly, I'll give him that. Worked at it twenty-four hours a day, then when he'd mastered it, he wouldn't give me a good-morning. It takes him all his time to remember to salute Canaris. He always signs off 'Regards to Willi' That's how much he cares about rank."

They finished their cigarettes, dropped them on the floor, and trod them out. Then the older man picked up the stubs and pocketed them, because smoking was not really permitted in the dugout. The radios were still quiet.

"Yes, he won't use his code name," the older man went on. "Von Braun gave it to him, and he's never liked it. He's never liked Von Braun either. Do you remember the time-no, it was before you joined us… Braun told Nadel to go to the airfield in Farnborough, Kent. The message came back: 'There is no airfield in Farnborough, Kent. There is one at Farnborough, Hampshire. Fortunately the Luftwaffe's geography is better than yours, you cunt.' Just like that."

"I suppose it's understandable. When we make mistakes we put their lives on the line."

The older man frowned. He was the one who delivered such judgments, and he did not like his audience to weigh in with opinions of its own. "Perhaps," he said grudgingly.

"But why doesn't he like his code name?"

"He says it has a meaning, and a code word with a meaning can give a man away. Von Braun wouldn't listen."

"A meaning? The Needle? What does it mean?"

But at that moment the old-timer's radio chirped, and he returned quickly to his station, so the explanation never came.