Our Game

FOUR

"TIM."

"Marjorie."

"Am I right in suggesting that Larry was at odds with us by the time he left?" A harder, clotted voice. A faster glance.

"He was always at odds with us, Marjorie."

"But by the end quite specifically, I gather."

"He thought we weren't worthy of the luck that history had dealt us."

"Luck how?"

"As the winners in the Cold War. He regretted the unreality of it all."

"Of what all?" Acidly.

"Of the Cold War. Of two discredited ideologies fighting for a peace neither wanted, with weapons that didn't work. That's another Larry quote."

"Did you agree with him?"

"To a point."

"Do you think he felt we owed him something? We the Office. Something he was entitled to help himself to, for example?"

"He wanted his life back. That was rather more than we could do for him."

"Do you think he felt the Russians owed him something?”

“Quite the reverse. He owed them. He does a pretty good line in guilt too."

She gave an impatient toss of her head, as if guilt were not her responsibility. "And you are saying that throughout the last four years of his operational life for us, Larry had no financial dealings with Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev? Or none that you reported?"

"I am saying that if he had them I wasn't aware of them and therefore I didn't report any."

"What about you?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Did you have any financial dealings with Checheyev you did not report?"

"No, Marjorie, I have not had any financial dealings with Checheyev or any other member of Russian intelligence past or present."

"Not with Volodya Zorin."

"Not with Zorin."

"And not with Pettifer either."

"Apart from keeping him out of bankruptcy, no.”

“But you do have private means, of course."

"I have been fortunate, Marjorie. My parents died when I was young, so I had money instead of love."

"Will you please give me some idea of your personal expenditure over the last twelve months?"

* * *

Did I say Merriman had joined us? Perhaps not, for I am not sure at what point he did so, though his entry must have followed quite soon upon Marjorie's return. He was a big man, a floater, very light on his feet, the way large men often are, and I suppose the door he came in by must have been ajar, left that way by Marjorie. Yet it puzzled me that I had not noticed this, for like many people in my trade, I have a thing about unclosed doors. I could only suppose that in the internal mayhem brought on by Marjorie Pew's assault, I had failed to observe the displacement of air and light as Merriman soundlessly lowered his ample rump onto the convenient arm of Bamey's sofa. I had turned in indignation to Barney, protesting the enormity of her question. Instead I found myself looking at Merriman. He was wearing a stiff white collar, a silver tie, and a red carnation. Merriman was always dressed for someone's wedding.

"Tim. How nice."

"Hullo, Jake. You're just in time. I'm being asked to say how much money I've spent this year."

"Yes, how much have you? There's the Bechstein for a start. That cost a bomb. Then there's your little pilgrimages to Mr. Appleby's nice jeweller's shop in Wells, never cheap—you've dropped thirty grand there—not to mention all the fillies and smart frocks you've bought her. Must be quite a gal. Lucky she disapproves of motorcars, or I can see a Bentley with mink-lined seats. I know you inherited early from your parents, I know your uncle Bob left you Schloss and contents, but what about the rest? Or is it all from naughty Aunt Cecily, who died so conveniently in Portugal a few years back? For a fellow who never cared about money, you certainly know how to pick a relative."

"If you don't believe me, check with my solicitors."

"My dear boy, they bear you out entirely. Half a million quids' worth of the best, added to what you've already got, paid in two instalments from a nice Channel Islands trust fund. The solicitors never met the aunt, mind. They were instructed by a firm in Lisbon. The firm in Lisbon never met her either. They were instructed by her business manager, a lawyer in Paris. I mean really, Tim, I've seen money laundered before, but never lawyers." He turned to Marjorie Pew and spoke as if I weren't in the room. "We're still checking, so he needn't think he's in the clear. If Aunt Cecily turns up in a pauper's grave, Cranmer's for the high jump."

"Tim?"

It was Marjorie again. She would like to go back to the logic of my behaviour last night, she said. She wondered whether she might run it by me one more time to make sure she had it straight, Tim.

"Be my guest," I said, using a phrase I had never used in my life.

"Tim, why did you telephone us from your house? You said it was in your mind that the police might have been running illegal taps and that they'd made up the story about Larry's vigilant Scottish landlady as cover. Mightn't they have been tapping your phone too? I'd have thought that with your training and experience, you'd have driven to the village and used the public box."

"I used the established procedure."

"I'm not certain you did. Rule One is to make sure it's safe."

I glanced at Merriman, but he had adopted the posture of a hostile audience, eyeing me as he might a prisoner in the dock.

"The police could have put a tap on the village box as well," I said. "Not that they'd have got much joy of it. It's usually bust."

"I see," she said, implying once again that she didn't.

"It would have looked pretty damned odd, at eleven at night, if I had driven a mile into the village to make a call. Particularly if the police were watching my house."

She looked at the tips of her groomed fingers, then at me again, as she began counting off the points that were troubling her. Merriman had decided he preferred the ceiling. Waldon the floor.

"You cut yourself off from Pettifer. You think his disappearance may be perfectly normal. But it worries you so much you can't wait to tell us about it. You know Checheyev has retired. You know Pettifer has. But you suspect they're up to something, though you don't know what or why. You think the police may be tapping your phone. But you use it to ring us. You spend twenty minutes staring at this building before you pluck up the courage to enter it. One could therefore be forgiven for assuming that ever since the police called on you last night, you have been in a state of stress quite disproportionate to Pettifer's disappearance. One might even suppose that you had something very weighty on your mind. So weighty that even a person as overcontrolled as yourself makes a string of tradecraft errors at odds with his training."

My apprehensions had given way to outright rejoicing. I forgave her everything: her courtroom pomposity, her shrouded savagery, her description of me as overcontrolled. Angel choirs were singing in my ears, and as far as I was concerned, Marjorie Pew as in church was one of the angels. I had told her nothing. Never mind that she couldn't or wouldn't tell me the date of Checheyev's last visit. She had told me something even more important: They didn't know about Emma and Larry.

They knew about Emma and me, because under Office rules I had been obliged to tell them. But they hadn't drawn the third line of the triangle. And that, as we used to say, was three-star intelligence: worth the whole journey.

I selected a sentimental, wounded tone. "Larry was more than my agent, Marjorie," I said. "He was my friend for quarter of a century. On top of that, he was the best live source we had. He was one of those joes who make their own luck. In the beginning, the KGB recruited him on spec. He wasn't big enough to be an agent of influence; he didn't have access worth a hoot. They gave him a small salary and let him loose on the international conference circuit, armed with a bunch of briefs written by Moscow Centre, and they hoped that in time he would amount to somebody. He did. He became their man, talent-spotting left-wing students, earmarking tomorrow's friendlies for the Kremlin, and flying kites at world conferences. After a few years, thanks to Larry, this office had put together its own cast of tame Communist agents, some Brit, some foreign, but all wholly owned by this service, who between them fed Moscow some of the most sophisticated disinformation of the Cold War, and the KGB never rumbled it. He attracted subverts like flypaper. He worked the Third World fence-sitters till he had blisters on his backside. He had a memory that most of us would kill for. He knew every bought MP in Westminster, every suborned British journalist, lobbyist, and agent of influence on Moscow Centre's London payroll. There were people in the KGB and people in the Office who owed him their living and their promotion. I was one of them. So yes, I was concerned. I still am."

* * *

In the respectful silence that followed this peroration, I realized that I knew what H/IS stood for. If Jake Merriman was Head of Personnel and Barney Waldon was Office liaison at Scotland Yard, Marjorie Pew was that hated jackal of the Service, formerly known to the lower orders as the Polit-Commissar and now dignified by the title Head of Internal Security. Her job involved everything from unemptied wastepaper baskets to thinking dirty about the love lives of past and present employees and reporting her suspicions to Jake Merriman. Why else would Merriman and Waldon defer to her like this? Why else would she now be asking me to describe—in my own words, as if I were about to use someone else's—how I had succeeded in acquiring Larry for the Office in the first place? Marjorie Pew wanted to test some cockeyed conspiracy theory that Larry and I had been in calhoots from the beginning; that I had not recruited Larry but Larry had recruited himself; or, better, that Larry and Checheyev between them had recruited me in some crooked and self-serving enterprise.

I trod cautiously all the same. In our trade, theories like hers had wrecked good men's lives on both sides of the Atlantic before being laid sheepishly to rest. I answered her with care and accuracy, even if, to demonstrate my ease of mind, I allowed myself occasional flights of flippancy.

"When I first met him he was a total gypsy," I said.

"That was at Oxford?"

"No, at Winchester. Larry was a new boy the same term I became a prefect. He was an exhibitioner of some sort. The school paid half his fees, the Church of England provided him with a bursary for being impoverished and picked up the rest. The school was still in the dark ages. Fagging, flogging, bullying galore, the whole Arnoldian package. Larry didn't fit, and he didn't want to. He was sloppy and clever, he refused to learn his Notions but couldn't keep his mouth shut which made him unpopular in some quarters and a bit of a hero in others. He got beaten blue. I tried to protect him."

She smiled tolerantly, acknowledging the homosexual undertone but too shrewd to articulate it. "Protect him how, exactly, Tim?"

"Help him curb his tongue. Stop him making himself so damned unpopular. It worked for a few halves, then he got caught smoking, then he got caught drinking. Then he got caught at St. Swithin's girls' school doing the other thing, which excited the envy of less brave souls—"

"Such as yourself?"

"—and cut him off from the homosexual mainstream," I went on, with a nice smile for Merriman. "When flogging didn't have the desired effect, the school expelled him. His father, who was canon of some big cathedral, washed his hands of him; his mother was dead. A distant relative stumped up the money to send him to school in Switzerland, but after one term the Swiss said no thanks and sent him back to England. How he got his scholarship to Oxford is a mystery, but he did, and Oxford duly fell in love with him. He was very good-looking; the girls rolled over for him in droves. He was a beautiful, lawless"—I felt suddenly embarrassed—"extrovert," I said, using a word I thought would please her.

Jake Merriman chimed in. "And he was a Marxist, bless him."

"And a Trotskyist and an atheist and a pacifist and an anarchist and anything else so long as it scared the rich," I retorted. "For a while he favoured a conjunction of Marx and Christ, but it fell apart for him when he decided he couldn't believe in Christ. And he was a voluptuary." I threw this out carelessly and was pleased to observe a tautening of Marjorie Pew's undecorated lips. "By the end of his second year the university had to decide whether to send him down or give him a fellowship to All Souls. They sent him down."

"For what, precisely?" Pew said, in an effort to limit my fusion.

"Being too much. Too much drink, too much politics, too little work, too many women. He was too free. He was excessive. He must go. The next time I saw him was in Venice."

"By which time you were married, of course," she said, contriving to insinuate that my marriage was somehow a betrayal of my friendship with Larry. And I saw Merriman's head go back once more and his eyes resume their watch on the ceiling.

"Yes, and in the Office," I agreed. "Diana was in the Office too. We were on our honeymoon. And suddenly there Larry was, in St. Mark's Square, dressed in a Union Jack and holding up his Winchester straw hat on the point of a rolled umbrella." No smiles anywhere, except from me. "He was playing tour guide to a group of American matrons, and as usual every one of them in love with him. And so they should have been. He knew everything there was to know about Venice, he was inexhaustibly enthusiastic, he had good Italian and talked English like a lord, and he couldn't make up his mind whether to convert to Catholicism or light a bomb under the Vatican. I yelled, 'Larry!' He saw me, flung his hat and brolly in the air, and embraced me. Then I introduced him to Diana."

I said this, but my mind was on the subtext: the aching monotony and unhappy lovemaking of our honeymoon, by then in its second week, the sheer relief—to Diana too, as she later told me—of having a third person in our lives, one as wild as Larry into the bargain, even if he made fun of her conventional ways. I saw Larry in his red-white-and-blue T-shirt kneeling dramatically at Diana's feet, one hand clutched to his heart, the other holding out his hat, the hat, his Wykehamist strat, the same miraculous survivor that he had worn for our grape harvest at Honeybrook just a year ago. Its lid taped down, varnished, and enamelled, then, as now, its basket life long over. And around its crown, tattered but victorious, our sacred House hatband. I heard his mellow voice with its bogus Italian accent ripping theatrically through the Venice sunlight as he yells his crazy salutation: It's a-Timbo! The Boy-a Bishop himself! And you're his a-lovely bride-a!

"We took him to restaurants, visited his awful digs—he was living with a Pomeranian countess, naturally—and one morning I woke up and had this inspiration: He's exactly what we're looking for, the one we've been talking about at the Friday seminars. We'll sign him up and take him all the way through."

"And it didn't bother you that he was your friend?" she suggested.

At the word friend, a different pain swept over me. Friend? I never came near him, I thought. Familiar maybe, but friend never. He was the risk I would never take.

"It would have bothered me a lot more if he had been my enemy, Marjorie," I heard myself replying silkily. "We're talking the depths of the Cold War. We were fighting for our survival. We believed in what we were doing." I could not resist the gibe: "I imagine these days that comes a little harder."

And then, in case the New Era had blurred her memory of the old one, I explained what it meant to take someone all the way through: how the agent-running section was constantly under pressure to find a young man—in those days it had to be a man—to trail his coat at the busy-bee Russian recruiters who were working the Oxbridge circuit from the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. And how Larry fitted in almost every possible way the profile we had drawn of the man we dreamed of finding, or they did—we could even send him back to Oxford to do a third year and sit his Finals.

"Blast the fellow, he landed an outright First against my rather shaky Second," I said with a sporting laugh, which no one shared: not Merriman, who was continuing his examination of the ceiling, or Waldon, who had set his jaw in such grim lock that you could have wondered whether he would ever speak again.

And how we would give the Russian recruiters precisely what they were looking for and had found for themselves in the past to such effect, I went on: a classy Englishman on the slide, an intellectual explorer, a Golden Boy Going Wrong, a God-seeker sympathetic to the Party but not compromised by formally belonging to it, unanchored, immature, unstable, politically omnivorous, crafty in a vague way, and, when he died to be, larcenous—

"So you propositioned him," Marjorie Pew interrupted, managing to make it sound as if I had picked Larry up in a public lavatory.

I laughed. My laughter was annoying her, so I was doing quite a lot of it.

"Oh my goodness, not for months, Marjorie. We had to fight it through the system first. A lot of people on the Top Floor said he'd never accept the discipline. His school reports were awful, university reports worse. Everyone said he was brilliant, but for what? Can I make a point here?"

"Please do."

"The recruitment of Larry was a group operation. When he agreed to take the veil, my section head decided I should have the handling of him. But only on the understanding that I report to him before and after every meeting with Larry."

"So why did he take the veil, as you call it?" she asked.

Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don't know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn't believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn't. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.

"He relished the challenge of it, I suppose," I said. "To be what you are, but more so. He liked the idea of being a free servant. It answered his sense of duty."

"A what?"

"It was a bit of German he had in his head. Frei sein ist Knecht. To be free is to be a vassal."

"Is that all?"

"All what?"

"Is that the full range of his motivation or were there more practical considerations?"

"He was lured by the glamour. We told him there wasn't any, but that only whetted his appetite. He saw himself as some sort of heretic Templar knight, paying his tribute to orthodoxy. He liked having two fathers, even if he never said so—the KGB and us. If you asked me to write it all down you'd have a string of contradictions. That's Larry. That’s joes. Motive doesn't exist in the abstract. It's not who people are. It's what they do."

"Thank you."

"Not at all."

"And the money?"

"I'm sorry?"

"The money that we paid him. The substantial tax-free income. What part did the money play in his calculations, do you suppose?"

"Oh, for God's sake, Marjorie, nobody worked for money in those days, and Larry never worked for money in his life. I told you. He called his pay Judas money. He's money illiterate. A financial Neanderthal."

"Nevertheless he got through an awful lot of it."

"He was feckless. Whatever he had he spent. He was a touch for everyone with a sob story. He had one or two expensive upper-class habits, which we encouraged because Russians are snobs, but in most ways he was totally unmaterialistic."

"Like what?"

"Like buying his wine from Berry's. Like having his shoes

"I don't call that unmaterialistic. I call it extravagant."

"That's just words," I flung back.

For a while no one spoke, which I took as a good omen. Marjorie was making yet another tour of her unvarnished fingernails. Barney was looking as if he would prefer to be safely back among his policemen. Finally Jake Merriman, emerging from his unnatural trance, straightened himself, smoothed his hands over his waistcoat, then ran a finger round the inside of his stiff white collar to free it from the ties of flesh that threatened to engulf it.

"Your Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev has milked the Russian government of thirty-seven million quid and rising," he said. "They're still counting. Friday last, the Russian ambassador here sought parley with the foreign secretary and presented him with a file of evidence. Why he chose a Friday when the secretary was just leaving for his dacha, God alone knows. But he did, and Larry's hoofprints are all over the file. Daylight, premeditated banditry, Tim Cranmer, by your ex-agent and his former KGB controller. Odds are, Checheyev got word that the balloon was about to go up and hightailed it to Bath to advise Larry to do a runner before the ambassador made his demarche Are you trying to say something? Don't."

I had shown no sign of this that I knew of, so shook my head, but he was already talking again.

"It's a simple enough racket they were working, but don't let's knock it for that. Very few Russian banks are empowered to transfer money abroad. Those that are tend to have close links with the former KGB. A U.K.-based accomplice sets up a bogus U.K. company—import, export, you name it—and bangs in bogus bills to his mates in Moscow. The bills are authenticated by crooked officials, mafia linked. Then they're paid. There's a gloss I like particularly. It seems the Russian legal code hasn't yet got round to addressing such modern eccentricities as bank fraud, so nobody gets hammered and everyone who might make a stink gets a cut instead. Russian banks are still in the ice age, profits are an abstraction nobody takes seriously, so in the immortal words of Noel Coward, whistle up the caviar and say, 'Thank God.'"

Another hiatus while Merriman raised his eyebrows at me in invitation, but I remained silent.

"Having landed the cash, Checheyev did what we'd all do. He buried it in a string of no-see-um accounts in Britain and abroad. In most of these enterprises your old friend Larry functioned as his intermediary, bagman, and red-toothed accomplice: registering the companies, opening the accounts, presenting the bills, stashing the loot. In a minute you're going to tell me it's all in Checheyev's weaselly imagination; he forged Larry's signature. You'll be wrong. Larry's in it up to his nasty neck, and for all we know, so are you. Are you?"

"No."

He turned to Barney. "How far down the line are the rozzers?"

"Commander, Special Branch, is reporting to the cabinet secretary at five this evening," Barney said, having first cleared his throat.

"Is that where Bryant and Luck come from?" I asked.

Barney Waldon was about to confirm this when Merriman cut rudely in: "That's for us to know and him to guess, Barney."

But I had my answer: yes.

"Rumour has it that their investigations are getting nowhere fast, but that may be bluff," Barney went on. "The last thing I can do is show undue interest. I've told Special Branch it's not our problem; I've put my hand on my heart to say it's not. I've told the Met, I've told the Somerset Constabulary. I've sold them the Lie Direct." It seemed to bother him.

Merriman again: "So don't you go spoiling our game, Tim Cranmer, do you hear? If they catch Larry and he claims he worked for us, we'll deny it and go on denying it right up to the trial and out the other end. If he says he worked for you, then Mr. Timothy Cranmer, ex-Treasury, gets dropped down a very deep hole. And in the new spirit of openness, dear boy: If you so much as open your mouth, God help you."

"Is their ambassador presenting Checheyev as a bona fide Diplomat?"

"Ex-diplomat. Yes, he is. And since we never raised a finger of complaint against Checheyev in the four years he was in London, for the obvious reason that we wanted to keep the intelligence flowing, we're taking the same position. If anyone breathes the word spook, the Foreign Office will have vapours."

"What about Checheyev's relationship with Larry?"

"What about it? It was legit. Checheyev was a cultural attaché, active, popular, and effective. Larry was a pinko intellectual has-been who accepted regular freebies to Mother Russia, Cuba, and other unsavoury corners of the globe. Now he's a quietly flowing don in Bath. Their relationship was mural and proper, and if it wasn't, no one's saying so." Merriman had not taken his eyes off me. "If the Russians ever get the idea that Larry Pettifer worked for this service—had been, for the last twenty and more years, as you have repeatedly reminded us, our most obedient servant—there will be an earthquake, do you follow me? They've already given your nice friend Zorin the summary heave-ho—alcoholism, passive conspiracy, having his head up his arse—he's under house arrest and by all accounts stands a good chance of being shot at dawn. It's extremely nice of us not to have done the same to you. If they ever take it into their tiny minds—the police, the Russians, either or both: it's the same thing in this situation, since the police are flying blind and we propose to keep them that way—that this service, in cahoots with one or other of the Russian mafias, elected at a time when the Russian economy is dying of the common cold to con it out of thirty-seven million quids' worth of the best ..." He gave up. "You can finish the sentence for yourself. Yes, what is it?"

It was the eternal refrain in me. Even in my turmoil, I could not hold it back: "When was Larry last seen?" I said.

"Ask the police, except don't."

"When did Checheyev last visit Britain?"

"No Checheyev entered Britain in the last six months. But since it was received wisdom that Checheyev was never his name in the first place, it would be fairly surprising if he came back as somebody he'd never been."

"Have you tried his aliases?"

"May I remind you that you're retired?" He had had enough of small talk. "You're to do nothing, young Tim Cranmer, d'you hear? You're to sit in your castle, perform your good works, churn out your vintage pipi, act natural and look innocent. You're not to leave the country without Mummy's permission, and we've got your passport, though these days that's not the guarantee it used to be, alas. Your not to make the smallest move towards Larry by word, deer gesture, or telephone. Not you, not your agents or instruments, not your delicious Emma. You're not to discuss Larry or his disappearance or any part of this conversation with anyone at all, and that includes colleagues and connections. Does Larry still flirt with Diana?"

"He never did. He just kept up with her to annoy me. And because they decided they hated the Office."

"Absolutely nothing has happened. Nobody is missing. You're an ex-Treasury boffin who lives with a neurotic child composer, or whatever she is, and grows bloody awful wine. Over and out. If you call us, make it a full-blown clandestine call from a safe phone. The number we're giving you has a rotating final digit for each day. Sunday's one, Monday's two. Do you think you can handle that?"

"Seeing that I invented the system, yes."

Marjorie Pew handed me a slip of paper with an 071 number typed on it. Merriman kept talking.

"If the rozzers want to talk to you again, you're to continue lying in your teeth. They're trying to find out what research you were doing at the Treasury, but Treasury is being anally retentive as Treasury usually is, and the rozzers will it nowhere. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. You were never here. Cranmer? Cramer? Never heard of him."

* * *

We were alone, Merriman and Cranmer, blood brothers as always. Merriman had taken my arm. He always took your arm to say goodbye.

"After all we've done for him," he said. "A pension, a fresh start, a good job after practically every university in England had turned him down, status. Now this."

"It's too bad," I agreed. There seemed nothing else worth saying.

Merriman smiled roguishly. "You haven't executive-actioned him, have you, Tim?"

"Why should I have done?"

For the first time that day, I came within an ace of losing the last of what Marjorie Pew had called my overcontrol.

"But why shouldn't you have done?" Merriman countered archly. "Isn't that rather what crooks do to each other, in preference to dividing up the loot?" A mirthless giggle. "And it is simply marvellous with Emma? Are you deliriously in love?"

"Yes, but she's away at the moment."

"I can't bear it. Where?"

"Attending a couple of performances of her stuff in the Midlands."

"Shouldn't you be there to chaperone her?"

"She prefers to do those things alone."

"Of course. Her independent streak. And she's not too young for you?"

"When she is, I've no doubt she'll tell me."

"Bully for you, Tim. Stout boy. Never withdraw your cavalry from the battle, I always say. The Emmas of this world require our constant attention. Look at her record."

"No, thank you."

But with Merriman you never score. "No, thank you? You haven't peeked?"

"No, and I don't intend to."

"But, my dear boy, you must! So full, so varied, quel courage! Change the names, you could write a blockbuster in your old age. Far more lucrative than Uncle Bobby's weasel's piss. Tim?"

"What is it?"

His fingers tightened round my biceps. "This long, long connection you had with dear Larry. Winchester, Oxford, the Office ... So fruitful at the time. So appropriate. But today. dear boy, a no-no."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"The image, dearie. The noble past, the old era. In the hands of Grub Street, dynamite. They'll be crying university spy rings and the love that dare not speak its name before you can say Kim Philby. And you weren't, were you?"

"Weren't what?" I replied, fighting off the memory of Emma standing naked at my bedroom window, asking me the same question.

"Well, you know. You and Larry. Any of that. Were you?'“

“If you're enquiring whether we were homosexuals and traitors, we were neither. Larry was that public school rarity the Compleat Heterosexual."

He gave my arm another lingering squeeze. "Poor you. What a disappointment for a healthy lad. Ah well, that's the way of it, isn't it? Punished for the crimes we never committed, while we get away with grand larceny somewhere else. So important that we're all terribly, terribly careful. The worst is scandal. Lie as much as you like, but spare me scandal. Very hard for the Office to find its niche these days. Lots of flies round the honey pot. Always here, dear boy. Anytime."

Munslow was hovering in the anteroom. Seeing me emerge, he fell in beside me. His hands dangled uncomfortably at his sides. Neither of them carried my passport.