The Human Factor

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t. I have an instinct, that’s all. I’m trying to remember what gave me the idea.’

‘We aren’t in the Stone Age. Nobody can tell nowadays when a phone’s tapped.’

‘Unless they’re careless. Or unless they want you to know.’

‘Why should they want me to know?’

‘To scare you perhaps. Who can tell?’

‘Anyway, why tap me?’

‘A question of security. They don’t trust anyone. Especially people in our position. We are the most dangerous. We are supposed to know those damned Top Secrets.’

‘I don’t feel dangerous.’

‘Put on the gramophone,’ Castle said.

Davis had a collection of pop music which was kept more carefully than anything else in the apartment. It was catalogued as meticulously as the British Museum library, and the top of the pops for any given year came as readily to Davis’s memory as a Derby winner. He said, ‘You like something really old-fashioned and classical, don’t you?’ and put on A Hard Day’s Night.

‘Turn it louder.’

‘It shouldn’t be louder.’

‘Turn it up all the same.’

‘It’s awful this way.’

‘I feel more private,’ Castle said.

‘You think they hug us too?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘You certainly have caught the disease,’ Davis said.

‘Percival’s conversation with you-it worries me I simply can’t believe it… it smells to heaven. I think they are on to a leak and are trying to check up.’

‘OK by me. It’s their duty, isn’t it? But it doesn’t seem very clever if one can spot the dodge so easily.’

‘Yes-but Percival’s story might he true just the same. True and already blown. An agent, whatever he suspected, would feel bound to pass it on in case…’

‘And you think they think we are the leaks?’

‘Yes. One of us or perhaps both.’

‘But as we aren’t who cares?’ Davis said.

‘It’s long past bedtime, Castle. If there’s a mike under the pillow, they’ll only hear my snores.’ He turned the music off.

‘We aren’t the stuff of double agents, you and me.’

Castle undressed and put out the light. It was stuffy in the small disordered room. He tried to raise the window, but the sash cord was broken. He stared down into the early morning street. No one went by: not even a policeman. Only a single taxi remained on a rank a little way down Davies Street in the direction of Claridge’s. A burglar alarm sent up a futile ringing from somewhere in the Bond Street area, and a light rain had begun to fall. It gave a black glitter to the pavement like a policeman’s raincoat. He drew the curtains close and got into bed, but he didn’t sleep. A question mark kept him awake for a long while: had there always been a taxi rank so close to Davis’s flat? Surely once he had to walk to the other side of Claridge’s to find one? Before he fell asleep another question troubled him. Could they possibly, he wondered, be using Davis to watch him? Or were they using an innocent Davis to pass him on a marked hank note? fie had small belief in Doctor Percival’s story of Porton, and yet, as he had told Davis, it might be true.

Castle had begun to be really worried about Davis. True, Davis made a joke of his own melancholy, but all the same the melancholy was deeply there, and it seemed a bad sign to Castle that Davis no longer chaffed Cynthia. His spoken thoughts too were becoming increasingly irrelevant to any work they had in hand. Once when Castle asked him, ‘69300/4, who’s that?’ Davis said, ‘A double room at the Polana looking out to sea.’

All the same there could be nothing seriously wrong with his health-he had been given his check-up recently by Doctor Percival.

‘As usual we are waiting for a cable from Zaire,’ Davis said. ‘59800 never thinks of us, as he sits there on a hot evening swilling his sundowners without a care in the world.’

‘We’d better send him a reminder,’ Castle said. He wrote out on a slip of paper ‘Our 185 no repeat no answer received,’ and put it in a tray for Cynthia to fetch.

Davis today had a regatta air. A new scarlet silk handkerchief with yellow dice dangled from his pocket like a flag on a still day, and his tie was bottle-green with a scarlet pattern. Even the handkerchief he kept for use which protruded from his sleeve looked new-a peacock blue. He had certainly dressed ship.

‘Had a good weekend?’ Castle asked.

‘Yes, oh yes. In a way. Very quiet. The pollution boys were away smelling factory smoke in Gloucester: A gum factory.’

A girl called Patricia (who had always refused to be known as Pat) came in from the secretaries’ pool and collected their one cable. Like Cynthia she was army offspring, the niece of Brigadier Tomlinson: to employ close relations of men already in the department was considered good for security, and perhaps it eased the work of tracing, since many contacts would naturally be duplicated.

‘Is this all?’ the girl asked as though she were accustomed to work for more important sections than 6A.

‘I’m afraid that’s all we can manage, Pat,’ Castle told her, and she slammed the door behind her.

‘You shouldn’t have angered her,’ Davis said. ‘She may speak to Watson and we’ll all be kept in after school writing telegrams.’

‘Where’s Cynthia?’

‘It’s her day off.’

Davis cleared his throat explosively like a signal for the regatta to begin-and ran up a Red Ensign all over his face.

‘I was going to ask you… would you mind if I slipped away at eleven? I’ll be back at one, I promise, and there’s nothing doing. If anyone wants me just say that I’ve gone to the dentist.’

‘You ought to be wearing black,’ Castle said, ‘to convince Daintry. Those glad rags of yours don’t go with dentists.’

‘Of course I’m not really going to the dentist. The fact of the matter is Cynthia said she’d meet me at the Zoo to see the giant pandas. Do you think she’s beginning to weaken?’

‘You really are in love, aren’t you, Davis?’

‘All I want, Castle, is a serious adventure. An adventure indefinite in length. A month, a year, a decade. I’m tired of one-night stands. Home from the King’s Road after a party at four with a bloody hangover. Next morning-I think oh, that was fine, the girl was wonderful, I wish I’d done better though, if only I hadn’t mixed the drinks… and then I think how it would have been with Cynthia in Lourenco Marques. I could really talk to Cynthia. It helps John Thomas when you can talk a bit about your work. Those Chelsea birds, directly the fun’s over, they want to find out things. What do I do? Where’s my office? I used to pretend I was still at Aldermaston, but everyone now knows the bloody place is closed down. What am I to say?’

‘Something in the City?’

‘No glamour in that and these birds compare notes.’ He began arranging his things. He shut and locked his file of cards. There were two typed pages on his desk and he put them in his pocket.

‘Taking things out of the office?’ Castle said. ‘Be careful of Daintry. He’s found you out once.’

‘He’s finished with our section. 7 are catching it now. Anyway this is only the usual hit of nonsense: For your information only. Destroy after reading. Meaning damn all. I’ll “commit it to memory” while I’m waiting for Cynthia. She’s certain to be late.’

‘Remember Dreyfus. Don’t leave it in a rubbish bin for the cleaner to find.’

‘I’ll burn it as an offering in front of Cynthia.’ He went out and then came quickly back. I wish you’d wish me luck, Castle.’

‘Of course. With all my heart.’

The hackneyed phrase came warm and unintended to Castle’s tongue. It surprised him, as though, in penetrating a familiar cave, on some holiday at the sea, he had observed on a familiar rock the primeval painting of a human face which he had always mistaken before for a chance pattern of fungi.

Half an hour later the telephone rang. A girl’s voice said, ‘J.W. wants to speak to A.D.’

‘Too bad,’ Castle said. ‘A.D. can’t speak to J.W.’

‘Who’s that?’ the voice asked with suspicion. ‘Someone called M.C.’

‘Hold on a moment, please.’ A kind of high yapping came back to him over the phone. Then Watson’s voice emerged unmistakably from the canine background, ‘ I say, is that Castle?’

‘Yes.’

‘I must speak to Davis.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’ll be back at one.’

‘That’s too late. Where is he now?’

‘At his dentist,’ Castle said with reluctance. He didn’t like being involved in other men’s lies: they complicated things.

‘We’d better scramble,’ Watson said. There was the usual confusion: one of them pressing the right button too soon and then going back to normal transmission just when the other scrambled. When their voices were at last sorted out, Watson said, ‘Can you fetch him hack? He’s wanted at a conference.’

‘I can’t very well drag him out of a dentist’s chair. Anyway I don’t know who his dentist is. It’s not on the files.’

‘No?’ Watson said with disapproval. ‘Then he ought to have left a note with the address.’

Watson had tried once to be a barrister and failed. His obvious integrity perhaps offended judges; a moral tone, most judges seemed to feel, should be reserved for the Bench and not employed by junior counsel. But in ‘a department of the Foreign Office’ he had risen quickly by the very quality which had served him so ill at the Bar. He easily outdistanced men like Castle of an older generation.

‘He ought to have let me know he was going out,’ Watson said.

‘Perhaps it was a very sudden toothache.’

‘C specially wanted him to the present. There’s some report he wanted to discuss with him afterwards. He received it all right, I suppose?’

‘He did mention a report. He seemed to think it was the usual average nonsense.’

‘Nonsense? It was Top Secret. What did he do with it?’ I suppose he left it in the safe.’

‘Would you mind checking up?’

‘I’ll ask his secretary-oh, I’m sorry, I can’t, she’s off today. Is it all that important?’

‘C must think so. I suppose you’d better come to the conference if Davis isn’t there, but it was Davis’s pigeon. Room 121 at twelve sharp.’

The conference did not seem of pressing importance. A member of MI5 whom Castle had never seen before was present because the main point on the agenda was to distinguish more clearly than in the past between the responsibilities of MI5 and MI6. Before the last war MI6 had never operated on British territory and security there was left to MI5. The system broke down in Africa with the fall of France and the necessity of running agents from British territory into the Vichy colonies. With the return of peace the old system had never been quite re-established. Tanzania and Zanzibar were united officially as one state, a member of the Commonwealth, but it was difficult to regard the island of Zanzibar as British territory with its Chinese training camps. Confusion had arisen because MI5 and MI6 both had representatives in Dar-es-Salaam, and relations between them had not always been close or friendly.

‘Rivalry,’ C said, ‘as he opened the conference, ‘is a healthy thing up to a point. But sometimes there has been a lack of trust. We have not always exchanged traces of agents. Sometimes we’ve been playing the same man, for espionage and counter-espionage.’ He sat back to let the MI5 man have his say.

There were very few there whom Castle knew except Watson. A lean grey man with a prominent Adam’s apple was said to be the oldest man in the firm. His name was Chilton. He dated back to before Hitler’s war and surprisingly he had made no enemies. Now he dealt principally with Ethiopia. He was also the greatest living authority on tradesmen’s tokens in the eighteenth century and was often called in for consultation by Sotheby’s. Laker was an ex-guardsman with ginger hair and a ginger moustache who looked after the Arab republics in North Africa.

The MI5 man stopped talking about the crossed lines. C said, ‘Well, that’s that. The treaty of Room 121. I’m sure we all understand our positions better now. It was very kind of you to look in, Puller.’

‘Pullen.’

‘Sorry. Pullen. Now, if you won’t think us inhospitable, we have a few little domestic things to discuss…’ When Pullen had closed the door he said, ‘I’m never quite happy with those MI5 types. Somehow they always seem to carry with them a kind of police atmosphere. It’s natural, of course, dealing as they do with counter-espionage. To me espionage is more of a gentleman’s job, but of course I’m old-fashioned.’

Percival spoke up from a distant corner. Castle hadn’t even noticed that he was there. ‘I’ve always rather fancied MI9 myself.’

‘What does MI9 do Laker asked, brushing up his moustache. He was aware of being one of the few genuine military men among all the MI numerals.

‘I’ve long forgotten,’ Percival said, ‘but they always seem more friendly.’ Chilton barked briefly-it was the way he always laughed.

Watson said, ‘Didn’t they deal with escape methods in the war, or was that II? I didn’t know they were still around.’

‘Oh well, it’s true I haven’t seen them in a long time,’ Percival said with his kindly encouraging doctor’s air. He might have been describing the symptoms of flu. ‘Perhaps they’ve packed up.’

‘By the way,’ C asked, ‘is Davis here? There was a report I wanted to discuss with him. I don’t seem to have met him in my pilgrimage around Section 6.’

‘He’s at the dentist’s,’ Castle said.

‘He never told me, sir,’ Watson complained.

‘Oh well, it’s not urgent. Nothing in Africa ever is. Changes come slowly and are generally impermanent. I wish the same were true of Europe.’ He gathered his papers and slipped quietly away, like a host who feels that a house party will get on much better without him.

‘It’s odd,’ Percival said, ‘when I saw Davis the other day his crackers seemed to be in good shape. Said he never had any trouble with them. No sign even of tartar. By the way, Castle, you might get me the name of his dentist. Just for my medical files. If he’s having trouble we like to recommend our own men. It makes for better security.’

Doctor Percival had invited Sir John Hargreaves to lunch with him at his club, the Reform. They made a habit of lunching alternately at the Reform and the Travellers once a month on a Saturday, when most members had already gone into the country. Pall Mall, a steely grey, like a Victorian engraving, was framed by the long windows. The Indian summer was nearly over, the clocks had all been altered, and you could feel the approach of winter concealed in the smallest wind. They began with smoked trout which led Sir John Hargreaves to tell Doctor Percival that he was now seriously thinking of trying to stock the stream which divided his park from the agricultural land. ‘I’ll need your advice, Emmanuel,’ he said. They were on Christian-name terms when they were safely alone.

For a long while they talked of fishing for trout, or rather Doctor Percival talked-it was a subject which always appeared a limited one to Hargreaves, but he knew Doctor Percival would be quite capable of enlarging on it until dinner. However, he was shifted from trout to another favourite topic by a chance diversion to the subject of his club. ‘If I had a conscience,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘I would not remain a member here. I’m a member because the food and the smoked trout too if you will forgive me, John is the best in London.’

‘I like the food at the Travellers just as much,’ Hargreaves said.

‘Ah, but you are forgetting our steak-and-kidney pudding. I know you won’t like me saying so, but I prefer it to your wife’s pie. Pastry holds the gravy at a distance. Pudding absorbs the gravy. Pudding, you might say, cooperates.’

‘But why would your conscience be troubled, Emmanuel, even if you had one-which is a most unlikely supposition?’

‘You must know that to be a member here I had to sign a declaration in favour of the Reform Act of 1866. True, that Act was not so bad as some of its successors, like giving the vote at eighteen, but it opened the gates to the pernicious doctrine of one man one vote. Even the Russians subscribe to that now for propaganda purposes, but they are clever enough to make sure that the things they can vote for in their own country are of no importance at all.’

‘What a reactionary you are, Emmanuel. I do believe, though, there’s something in what you say about pudding and pastry. We might try out a pudding next year-if we are still able to afford a shoot.’

‘If you can’t, it will be because of one man one vote. Be honest, John, and admit what a hash that stupid idea has made of Africa.’

‘I suppose it takes time for true democracy to work.’

‘That kind of democracy will never work.’

‘Would you really like to go back to the householder’s vote, Emmanuel?’ Hargreaves could never tell to what extent Doctor Percival was really serious.

‘Yes, why not? The income required for a man to vote would be properly adjusted, of course, each year to deal with inflation. Four thousand a year might be the proper level for getting a vote today. That would give the miners and dockers a vote, which would save us a lot of trouble.’

After coffee they walked, by common consent, down the great Gladstonian stairs out into the chill of Pall Mall. The old brickwork of St James’s Palace glowed like a dying fire through the grey weather, and the sentry flickered scarlet a last doomed flame. They crossed into the park and Doctor Percival said, ‘Returning for a moment to trout. They chose a bench where they could watch the ducks move with the effortlessness of magnetic toys across the surface of the pond. They both wore the same heavy tweed overcoats, the overcoats of men who live by choice in the country. A man wearing a bowler hat passed them; he was carrying an umbrella and he frowned at some thought of his own as he went by. ‘That’s Browne with an e,’ Doctor Percival said.

‘What a lot of people you know, Emmanuel.’

‘One of the PM’s economic advisers. I wouldn’t give him a vote whatever he earned.’

‘Well, let’s talk a little business, shall we? Now we are alone. I suppose you are afraid of being bugged at the Reform.’

‘Why not? Surrounded by a lot of one man one vote fanatics. If they were capable of giving the vote to a bunch of cannibals.

You mustn’t run down cannibals,’ Hargreaves said, ‘some of my best friends have been cannibals, and now that Browne with an e is out of earshot…’

‘I’ve been going over things very carefully, John, with Daintry, and personally I’m convinced that Davis is the man we are looking for.’

‘Is Daintry convinced too?’

‘No. It’s all circumstantial, it has to be, and Daintry’s got a very legalistic mind. I can’t pretend that I like Daintry. No humour but naturally very conscientious. I spent an evening with Davis, a few weeks ago. He’s not an advanced alcoholic like Burgess and Maclean, but he drinks a lot-and he’s been drinking more since our check started, I think. Like those two and Philby, he’s obviously under some sort of strain. A bit of a manic depressive and a manic depressive usually has that touch of schizoid about him essential for a double agent. He’s anxious to get abroad. Probably because he knows he’s being watched and perhaps they’ve forbidden him to try and bolt. Of course he’d be out of our control in Lourenco Marques and in a very useful spot for them.’

‘But what about the evidence?’

‘It’s a bit patchy still, but can we afford to wait for perfect evidence, John? After all we don’t intend to put him on trial. The alternative is Castle (you agreed with me that we could rule out Watson), and we’ve gone into Castle just as thoroughly. Happy second marriage, first wife killed in the blitz, a good family background, the father was a doctor-one of those old-fashioned GPs, a member of the Liberal Party, but not, please note, of the Reform, who looked after his patients through a lifetime and forgot to send in bills, the mother’s still alive-she was a head warden in the blitz and won the George Medal. A bit of a patriot and attends Conservative rallies. Pretty good stock, you’ll admit. No sign of heavy drinking with Castle, careful about money too. Davis spends a good deal on port and whisky and his Jaguar, bets regularly on the tote pretends to be a judge of form and to win quite a lot-that’s a classic excuse for spending more than you earn. Daintry told me he was caught once taking a report from 59800 out of the office. Said he meant to read it over lunch. Then you remember the day we had the conference with MI5 and you wanted him to be present. Left the office to see his dentist-he never went to his dentist (his teeth are in perfect condition I know that myself) and then two weeks later we got evidence of another leak.’

‘Do we know where he went?’

‘Daintry was already having him shadowed by Special Branch. He went to the Zoo. Through the members’ entrance. The chap who was following him had to queue up at the ordinary entrance and lost him. A nice touch.’

‘Any idea whom he met?’

‘He’s a clever one. Must have known he was followed. It turned out that he’d confessed to Castle that he hadn’t gone to the dentist. Said he was meeting his secretary (it was her day off) at the pandas. But there was that report you wanted to talk to him about. It was never in the safe-Daintry checked that.’

‘Not a very important report. Oh, it’s all a bit shady, I admit, but I wouldn’t call any of it hard evidence, Emmanuel. Did he meet the secretary?’

‘Oh, he met her all right. He left the Zoo with her, but what happened in between?’

‘Have you tried the marked note technique?’

‘I told him in strict confidence a bogus story about researches at Porton, but nothing’s turned up yet.’

‘I don’t see how we can act on what you’ve got at present.’

‘Suppose he panicked and tried to make a bolt for it?’

‘Then we’d have to act quickly. Have you decided on how we should act?’

‘I’m working on rather a cute little notion, John. Peanuts.’

‘Peanuts!’

‘Those little salted things you eat with cocktails.’

‘Of course I know what peanuts are, Emmanuel. Don’t forget I was a Commissioner in West Africa.’ ‘Well, they’re the answer. Peanuts when they go bad produce a mould. Caused by aspergillus flavus-but you can forget the name. It’s not important, and I know you were never any good at Latin.’

‘Go on, for heaven’s sake.’

‘To make it easy for you I’ll concentrate on the mould. The mould produces a group of highly toxic substances known collectively as aflatoxin. And aflatoxin is the answer to our little problem.’

‘How does it work?’

‘We don’t know for certain about human beings, but no animal seems immune, so it’s highly unlikely that we are. Aflatoxin kills the liver cells. They only need to be exposed to the stuff for about three hours. The symptoms in animals are that they lose their appetites and become lethargic. The wings of birds become weak. A post mortem shows haemorrhage and necrosis in the liver and engorgement of the kidneys, if you’ll forgive me my medical jargon. Death usually occurs within a week.’

‘Damnation, Emmanuel, I’ve always liked peanuts. Now I’ll never be able to eat them again.’

‘Oh, you needn’t worry, John. Your salted peanuts are handpicked-though I suppose an accident might just possibly happen, but at the rate you finish a tin they are not likely to go bad.’

‘You seem to have really enjoyed your researches. Sometimes, Emmanuel, you give me the creeps.’

‘You must admit it’s a very neat little solution to our problem. A post mortem would show only the damage done to the liver, and I expect the coroner would warn the public against the danger of over-indulgence in port.’

‘I suppose you’ve even worked out how to get this aero-‘

‘Aflatoxin, John. There’s no serious difficulty. I have a fellow at Porton preparing some now. You only need a very small quantity, Point 0063 milligrams per kilogram body-weight. Of course I’ve weighed Davis. 0.5 milligrams should do the trick, but to be quite sure let’s say .75. Though we might test first with an even smaller dose. One side advantage of all this, of course, is that we should gain valuable information on how aflatoxin works on a human being.’

‘Do you never find that you shock yourself, Emmanuel?’

‘There’s nothing shocking about this, John. Think of all the other deaths Davis might die. Real cirrhosis would be much slower. With a dose of aflatoxin he’ll hardly suffer at all. Increasing lethargy, perhaps a bit of leg trouble as he doesn’t have wings, and of course a certain amount of nausea is to be expected. To spend only a week dying is quite a happy fate, when you think what many people suffer.’

‘You talk as though he were already condemned.’

‘Well, John, I’m quite convinced he’s our man. I’m only waiting for the green light from you.’

‘If Daintry were satisfied…’

‘Oh, Daintry, John, we can’t wait for the kind of evidence Daintry demands.’

‘Give me one piece of hard evidence.’

‘I can’t yet, but better not wait for it too long. You remember what you said that night after the shoot-a complaisant husband is always at the mercy of the lover. We can’t afford another scandal in the firm, John.’

Another bowler-hatted figure went by, coat collar turned up, into the October dusk. The lights were coming on one by one in the Foreign Office.

‘Let’s talk a little more about the trout stream, Emmanuel.’

‘Ah, trout. Let other people boast about salmon-gross oily stupid fellows with that blind urge of theirs to swim upstream which makes for easy fishing. All you need are big boots and a strong arm and a clever gillie. But the trout-oh, the trout-he’s the real king of fish.’

Colonel Daintry had a two-roomed flat in St James’s Street which he had found through the agency of another member of the firm. During the war it had been used by MI6 as a rendezvous for interviewing possible recruits. There were only three apartments in the building, which was looked after by an old housekeeper, who lived in a room somewhere out of sight under the roof. Daintry was on the first floor above a restaurant (the noise of hilarity kept him awake until the small hours when the last taxi ground away). Over his head were a retired businessman who had once been connected with the rival wartime services SOE, and a retired general who had fought in the Western Desert. The general was too old now to be seen often on the stairs, but the businessman, who suffered from gout, used to get as far as the Carlton Club across the road. Daintry was no cook and he usually economised for one meal by buying cold chipolatas at Fortnum’s. He had never liked clubs; if he felt hungry, a rare event, there was Overton’s just below. His bedroom and his bathroom looked out on a tiny ancient court containing a sun dial and a silversmith. Few people who walked down St James’s Street knew of the court’s existence. It was a very discreet flat and not unsuitable for a lonely man.

For the third time with his Remington Daintry went over his face. Scruples of cleanliness grew with loneliness like the hairs on a corpse. He was about to have one of his rare dinners with his daughter. He had suggested giving her dinner at Overton’s where he was known, but she told him she wanted roast beef. All the same she refused to go to Simpson’s where Daintry was also known because she said the atmosphere was too masculine. She insisted on meeting him at Stone’s in Panton Street, where she would expect him at eight. She never came to his flat-that would have shown disloyalty to her mother, even though she knew there was no woman sharing it. Perhaps even Overton’s was tainted by the proximity of his flat.

It always irritated Daintry to enter Stone’s and to be asked by a man in a ridiculous topper if he had booked a table. The former old-fashioned chophouse which he remembered as a young man had been destroyed in the blitz and been rebuilt with an expense-account decor. Daintry thought with regret of the ancient waiters in dusty black tails and the sawdust on the floor and the strong beer specially brewed at Burton-on-Trent. Now all the way up the stairs there were meaningless panels of giant playing cards more suited to a gambling house, and white naked statues stood under the falling water of a fountain which played beyond the plate glass at the end of the restaurant. They seemed to make the autumn strike colder than the air outside. His daughter was already waiting there.

‘I’m sorry if I’m late, Elizabeth,’ Daintry said. He knew he was three minutes early.

‘It’s all right. I’ve given myself a drink.’

‘I’ll have a sherry too.’

‘I’ve got news to give you. Only Mother knows as yet.’

‘How is your mother?’ Daintry asked with formal politeness. It was always his first question and he was glad when he had disposed of it.

‘She’s quite well considering. She’s spending a week or two at Brighton for a change of air.’

It was as if they were speaking of an acquaintance whom he hardly knew-it was odd to think there had ever been a time when he and his wife were close enough to share a sexual spasm which had produced the beautiful girl who sat so elegantly opposite him drinking her Tio Pepe. The sadness which was never far away from Daintry when he met his daughter descended as always-like a sense of guilt. Why guilt? He would argue with himself. He had always been what was called faithful. I hope the weather will be good,’ he said. He knew that he had bored his wife, but why should that he a cause of guilt? After all she had consented to marry him knowing all; she had voluntarily entered that chilling world of long silences. He envied men who were free to come home and talk the gossip of an ordinary office.

‘Don’t you want to know my news, Father?’

Over her shoulder he suddenly noticed Davis. Davis sat alone at a table laid for two. He was waiting, drumming with his fingers, his eyes on his napkin. Daintry hoped he wouldn’t look up.

‘News?’

‘I told you. Only Mother knows. And the other, of course,’ she added with an embarrassed laugh. Daintry looked at the tables on either side of Davis. He half expected to see Davis’s shadow there, but the two elderly couples, well advanced in their meal, certainly didn’t look like members of the Special Branch.

‘You don’t seem in the least interested, Father. Your thoughts are miles away.’

‘I’m sorry. I just saw someone I know. What is the secret news?’

‘I’m getting married.’

‘Married?’ Daintry exclaimed. ‘Does your mother know?’

‘I’ve just said that I told her.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why should you be sorry that I’m getting married?’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant… Of course I’m not sorry if he’s worthy of you. You are a very pretty girl, Elizabeth.’

‘I’m not up for sale, Father. I suppose in your day good legs put up the market price.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s in an advertising agency. He handles the Jameson’s Baby Powder account.’

‘Is that a good thing?’

‘It’s very good. They are spending a huge amount trying to push Johnson’s Baby Powder into second place. Colin’s arranged wonderful television spots. He even wrote a theme song himself.’

‘You like him a lot? You’re quite sure…?’

Davis had ordered a second whisky. He was looking at the menu-but he must have read it many times already.

‘We are both quite sure, Father. After all, we’ve been living together for the past year.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Daintry said again it was turning into an evening of apologies.

‘I never knew. I suppose your mother did?’

‘She guessed, naturally.’

‘She sees more of you than I do.’

He felt like a man who was departing into a long exile and who looks hack from the deck of a ship at the faint coastline of his country as it sinks below the horizon.

‘He wanted to come tonight and be introduced, but I told him this time I wanted to be alone with you.’

‘This time’: it had the sound of a long goodbye; now he could see only the hare horizon, the land had gone.

‘When are you getting married?’

‘On Saturday the twenty-first. At a registry office. We aren’t inviting anybody, except of course Mother. And a few of our friends. Colin has no parents.’

Colin, he wondered, who’s Colin? But of course he was the man at Jameson’s.

‘You’d be welcome-but I always have the feeling that you’re frightened of meeting Mother.’

Davis had given up whatever hope he may have had. As he paid for the whiskies, he looked up from the bill and saw Daintry. It was as though two emigrants had come on deck for the same purpose, to look their last on their country, saw each other and wondered whether to speak. Davis turned and made for the door. Daintry looked after him with regret-but after all there was no need to get acquainted yet, they were sailing together on a long voyage.

Daintry put his glass sharply down and spilt some sherry. He felt a sudden irritation against Percival. The man had no evidence against Davis which would stand up in a court of law. He didn’t trust Percival. He remembered Percival at the shoot. Percival was never lonely, he laughed as easily as he talked, he knew about pictures, he was at ease with strangers. He had no daughter who was living with a stranger in a flat he had never seen-he didn’t even know where it was.

‘We thought afterwards we’d have some drinks and sandwiches at a hotel or perhaps at Mother’s flat. Mother has to get back to Brighton afterwards. But if you’d like to come.’

‘I don’t think I can. I’m going away that weekend,’ he lied.

‘You do make engagements a long time ahead.’

‘I have to.’ He lied again miserably, ‘There are so many of them. I’m a busy man, Elizabeth. If I’d known…’

‘I thought I’d give you a surprise.’

‘We ought to order, oughtn’t we? You’ll take the roast beef, not the saddle of mutton?’

‘Roast beef for me.’

‘Are you having a honeymoon?’

‘Oh, we’ll just stay at home for the weekend. Perhaps when the spring comes… At the moment Colin’s so busy with Jameson’s Baby Powder.’

‘We ought to celebrate,’ Daintry said. ‘A bottle of champagne?’ He didn’t like champagne, but a man must do his duty.

‘I’d really rather just have a glass of red wine.’

‘There’s a wedding present to think about.’

‘A cheque would be best-and easier for you. You don’t want to go shopping. Mother’s giving us a lovely carpet.’

‘I haven’t got my cheque book on me. I’ll send the cheque round on Monday.’

After dinner they said goodbye in Panton Street-he offered to take her home in a taxi, but she said she preferred to walk. He had no idea where the flat was that she shared. Her private life was as closely guarded as his own, but in his case there had never been anything much to guard. It was not often that he enjoyed their meals together because there was so little for them to talk about, but now, when he realised that they would never again be alone, he felt a sense of abandonment. He said, ‘Perhaps I could put off that weekend.’

‘Colin would be glad to meet you, Father.’

‘Could I perhaps bring a friend with me?’

‘Of course. Anyone. Who will you bring?’

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps someone from the office.’

‘That would be fine. But you know you really needn’t he scared. Mother likes you.’ He watched as she made her way east in the direction of Leicester Square-and after?-he had no idea-before he turned west for St James’s Street.

The Indian summer had returned for a day, and Castle agreed to a picnic-Sam was growing restive after the long quarantine and Sarah had a fanciful notion that any lingering last germ would be whisked away among the beech woods with the leaves of autumn. She had prepared a thermos of hot onion soup, half a cold chicken to be dismembered in the fingers, some rock buns, a mutton bone for Buller, and a second thermos of coffee. Castle added his flask of whisky. There were two blankets to sit on, and even Sam had consented to take an overcoat in case the wind rose.

‘It’s crazy to have a picnic in October,’ Castle said with pleasure at the rashness of it. The picnic offered escape from office caution, a prudent tongue, foresight. But then, of course, the telephone rang, clanging away like a police alarm while they packed the bags on their bicycles.

Sarah said, ‘It’s those men with masks again. They’ll spoil our picnic. I’ll be wondering all the time what’s happening at home.’

Castle replied gloomily (he had his hand over the receiver), ‘No, no, don’t worry, it’s only Davis.’

‘What does he want?’

‘He’s at Boxmoor with his car. It was such a fine day he thought he’d look me up.’

‘Oh, damn Davis. Just when everything’s prepared. There’s no other food in the house. Except our supper. And there’s not enough of that for four.’

‘You go off alone if you like with Sam. I’ll lunch at the Swan with Davis.’

‘A picnic wouldn’t be any fun,’ Sarah said, ‘without you.’

Sam said, ‘Is it Mr Davis? I want Mr Davis. We can play hide-and-seek. We aren’t enough without Mr Davis.’

Castle said, ‘We could take Davis with us, I suppose.’

‘Half a chicken among four…?’

‘There are enough rock buns already for a regiment.’

‘He won’t enjoy a picnic in October unless he’s crazy too.’

But Davis proved as crazy as the rest of them. He said that he loved picnics even on a hot summer’s day when there were wasps and flies, but he much preferred the autumn. As there was no room in his Jaguar he met them at a chosen rendezvous on the Common, and at lunch he won the wishbone of the half chicken with an agile turn of the wrist. Then he introduced a new game. The others had to guess his wish by asking questions, and only if they failed to guess could he expect his wish to he granted. Sarah guessed it with a flash of intuition. He had wished that one day he would become ‘top of the pops ‘.

‘Oh well, I had little hope of my wish coming true anyway. I can’t write a note.’

By the time the last rock buns had been eaten the afternoon sun was low above the gorse bushes and the wind was rising. Copper leaves floated down to lie on last year’s mast. ‘Hide-and-seek,’ Davis suggested, and Castle saw how Sam gazed at Davis with the eves of a hero-worshipper.

They drew lots to decide which of them should hide first, and Davis won. He went loping away among the trees huddled deep in his camel-hair overcoat, looking like a strayed bear from a zoo. After counting sixty the rest set off in pursuit, Sam towards the edge of the Common, Sarah towards Ashridge, Castle into the woods where he had last seen Davis go. Buller followed him, probably in hope of a cat. A low whistle guided Castle to where Davis hid in a hollow surrounded by bracken.

‘It’s bloody cold hiding,’ Davis said, ‘in the shade.’

‘You suggested the game yourself. We were all ready to go home.

‘Down, Buller. Down, damn you.’

‘I know, but I could see how much the little bastard wanted it.’

‘You seem to know children better than I do. I’d better shout to them. We’ll catch our death…’

‘No, don’t do that yet. I was hoping you’d come by. I want a word with you alone. Something important.’

‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow at the office?’

‘No, you’ve made me suspicious of the office. Castle, I really think I’m being followed.’

‘I told you I thought your phone was tapped.’

‘I didn’t believe you. But since that night… On Thursday I took Cynthia out to Scott’s. There was a man in the lift as we went down. And later he was in Scott’s too drinking Black Velvet. And then today, driving down to Berkhamsted-I noticed a car behind me at Marble Arch-only by chance because for a moment I thought I knew the man-I didn’t, but I saw him again behind me at Boxmoor. In a black Mercedes.’

‘The same man as at Scott’s?’

‘Of course not. They wouldn’t be as stupid as that. My Jaguar’s got a turn of speed and there was Sunday traffic on the road. I lost him before Berkhamsted.’

‘We’re not trusted, Davis, nobody is, but who cares if we’re innocent?’

‘Oh yes, I know all that. Like an old theme song, isn’t it? Who cares? “I’m innocent. Who cares? If they take me unawares, I’ll say I only went, to buy some golden apples and some pears…” I might he top of the pops yet.’

‘Did you really lose him before Berkhamsted?’

‘Yes. As far as I can tell. But what’s it all about, Castle? Is it just a routine check, like Daintry’s seemed to be? You’ve been in this bloody show longer than any of us. You ought to know.’

‘I told you that night with Percival. I think there must have been a leak of some kind, and they suspect a double agent. So they’re putting on a security check, and they don’t much mind if you notice it. They think you may lose your nerve, if you are guilty.’

‘Me a double agent? You don’t believe it, Castle?’

‘No, of course not. You don’t have to worry. Just be patient. Let them finish their check and they won’t believe it either. I expect they’re checking me too and Watson.’

In the distance Sarah was calling out, We give up. We give up.’ A thin voice came from further away, ‘Oh no, we don’t. Keep hiding, Mr Davis. Please, Mr Davis.

Buller barked and Davis sneezed. ‘Children are merciless,’ he said.

There was a rustle in the bracken around their hiding-place and Sam appeared. ‘Caught,’ he said, ‘and then he saw Castle. ‘Oh, but you cheated.’

‘No,’ Castle said, ‘I couldn’t call out. He held me up at the point of a gun.’

‘Where’s the gun?’

‘Look in his breast pocket.’

‘There’s only a fountain-pen,’ Sam said.

‘It’s a gas gun,’ Davis said, ‘disguised as a fountain-pen. You see this knob. It squirts what looks like ink-only it’s not really ink, it’s nerve gas. James Bond was never allowed one like this it’s too secret. Put up your hands.’

Sam put them up. ‘Are you a real spy?’ he asked.

‘I’m a double agent for Russia,’ Davis said, ‘and if you value your life, you must give me fifty yards start.’ He burst through the bracken and ran clumsily in his heavy overcoat through the beech woods. Sam pursued him up one slope, down another. Davis reached a bank above the Ashridge road where he had left his scarlet Jaguar. He pointed his fountain-pen at Sam and shouted a message as mutilated as one of Cynthia’s cables, ‘Picnic… love… Sarah,’ and then he was gone with a loud explosion from his exhaust.

‘Ask him to come again,’ Sam said, ‘please ask him to come again.’

‘Of course. Why not? When the spring comes.’

‘The spring’s a long way off,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll be at school.’

‘There’ll always be weekends,’ Castle replied but without conviction. He remembered too well how slowly time limps by in childhood. A car passed them, heading towards London, a black car-perhaps it was a Mercedes, but Castle knew very little about cars.

‘I like Mr Davis,’ Sam said.

‘Yes, so do I.’

‘Nobody plays hide-and-seek as well as he does. Not even you.’

‘I find I’m not making much headway with War and Peace, Mr Halliday.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear. It’s a great book if you only have the patience. Have you reached the retreat from Moscow?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a terrible story.’

‘It seems a lot less terrible to us today, doesn’t it? After all, the French were soldiers-and snow isn’t as bad as napalm. You fall asleep, so they say-you don’t burn alive.’

‘Yes, when I think of all those poor children in Vietnam… I wanted to join some of the marches they used to have here, but my son would never let me. He’s nervous of the police in that little shop of his, though what harm he does with a naughty book or two I can’t see. As I always say-the men that buy them-well, you can’t very well do much harm to them, can you?’

‘No, they are not clean young Americans doing their duty like the napalm bombers were,’ Castle said. Sometimes he found it impossible not to show one splinter of the submerged iceberg life he led.

‘And yet there wasn’t a thing any of us could have done,’ Halliday said. The Government talk about democracy, but what notice did the Government ever take of all our banners and slogans? Except at election time. It helped them choose which promises to break, that’s all. Next day we used to read in the paper how another innocent village had been wiped out in error. Oh, they’ll be doing the same thing in South Africa before long. First it was the little yellow babies-no more yellow than we are-and then it will be the little black babies…’

‘Let’s change the subject,’ Castle said. ‘Recommend me something to read that isn’t about war.’

‘There’s always Trollope,’ Mr Halliday said. ‘My son’s very fond of Trollope. Though it doesn’t really go with the kind of things he sells, does it?’

‘I’ve never read Trollope. Isn’t he a bit ecclesiastical? Anyway, ask your son to choose me one and post it home.’

‘Your friend didn’t like War and Peace either?’

‘No. In fact he got tired of it before I did. Too much war for him too perhaps.’

‘I could easily slip across the road and have a word with my son. I know he prefers the political novels-or what he calls the sociological. I’ve heard him speak well of The Way We Live Now. A good title, sir. Always contemporary. Do you want to take it home tonight?’

‘No, not today.’

‘It will be two copies as usual, sir, I suppose? I envy you having a friend with whom you can discuss literature. Too few people nowadays are interested in literature.’

After Castle had left Mr Halliday’s shop he walked to Piccadilly Circus station and went to find a telephone. He chose an end box and looked through the glass at his only neighbour: she was a fat spotty girl who giggled and sucked a gum while she listened to something gratifying. A voice said, ‘Hello,’ and Castle said, ‘I’m sorry, wrong number again,’ and left the box. The girl was parking her gum on the back of the telephone directory while she got down to a long satisfactory conversation. He waited by a ticket machine and watched her for a little while to make sure she had no interest in him.

‘What are you doing?’ Sarah asked. ‘Didn’t you hear me call?’

She looked at the book on his desk and said, ‘War and Peace. I thought you were getting tired of War and Peace.’

He gathered up a sheet of paper, folded it and put it in his pocket.

‘I’m trying my hand at an essay.’

‘Show me.’

‘No. Only if it comes off.’

‘Where will you send it?’

‘The New Statesman… Encounter… who knows?’ It’s a very long time since you wrote anything. I’m glad you are starting again.’

‘Yes. I seem doomed always to try again.’

Castle helped himself to another whisky. Sarah had been upstairs a long time with Sam, and he was alone, waiting for the bell to ring, waiting… His mind wandered to that other occasion when he had waited for at least three-quarters of an hour, in the office of Cornelius Muller. He had been given a copy of the Rand Daily Mail to read an odd choice since the paper was the enemy of most things that BOSS, the organisation which employed Muller, supported. He had already read that day’s issue with his breakfast, but now he reread every page with no other purpose than just to pass the time. Whenever he looked up at the clock he met the eyes of one of the two junior officials who sat stiffly behind their desks and perhaps took it in turn to watch him. Did they expect him to pull out a razor blade and slit open a vein? But torture, he told himself, was always left to the Security Police-or so he believed. And in his case, after all, there could be no fear of torture from any service he was protected by diplomatic privilege; he was one of the untorturables. No diplomatic privilege, however, could be extended to include Sarah; he had learned during the last year in South Africa the age-old lesson that fear and love are indivisible.

Castle finished his whisky and poured himself another small one. He had to be careful.

Sarah called down to him, ‘What are you doing, darling?’

‘Just waiting for Mr Muller,’ he replied, ‘and drinking another whisky.’

‘Not too many, darling.’ They had decided that he should welcome Muller first alone. Muller would no doubt arrive from London in an embassy car. A black Mercedes like the big officials all used in South Africa? ‘Get over the first embarrassments,’ C had said, ‘and leave serious business, of course, for the office. At home you are more likely to pick up a useful indication… I mean of what we have and they haven’t. But for God’s sake, Castle, keep your cool.’ And now he struggled to keep his cool with the help of a third whisky while he listened and listened for the sound of a car, any car, but there was little traffic at this hour in King’s Road-all the commuters had long since arrived safely home.

If fear and love are indivisible, so too are fear and hate. Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates. When he had been allowed at last to drop the Rand Daily Mail and they interrupted his fourth reading of the same leading article, with its useless routine protest against the evil of petty apartheid, he was deeply aware of his cowardice. Three years of life in South Africa and six months of love for Sarah had turned him, he knew well, into a coward.

Two men waited for him in the inner office: Mr Muller sat behind a large desk of the finest South African wood which bore nothing but a blank blotting pad and a highly polished pen-stand and one file suggestively open. He was a man a little younger than Castle, approaching fifty perhaps, and he had the kind of face which in ordinary circumstances Castle would have found it easy to forget: an indoors face, as smooth and pale as a bank clerk’s or a junior civil servant’s, a face unmarked by the torments of any belief, human or religious, a face which was ready to receive orders and obey them promptly without question, a conformist face. Certainly not the face of a bully-though that described the features of the second man in uniform who sat with his legs slung with insolence over the arm of an easy chair as though he wanted to show he was any man’s equal; his face had not avoided the sun: it had a kind of infernal flush as though it had been exposed too long to a heat which would have been much too fierce for ordinary men. Muller’s glasses had gold rims; it was a gold-rimmed country.

‘Take a seat,’ Muller told Castle with just sufficient politeness to pass as courtesy, but the only seat left him to take was a hard narrow chair as little made for comfort as a chair in a church-if he should be required to kneel, there was no hassock available on the hard floor to support his knees. He sat in silence and the two men, the pale one and the heated one, looked back at him and said nothing. Castle wondered how long the silence would continue. Cornelius Muller had a sheet detached from the tile in front of him, and after a while he began to tap it with the end of his gold ball-point pen, always in the same place, as though he were hammering in a pin. The small tap tap tap recorded the length of silence like the tick of a watch. The other man scratched his skin above his sock, and so it went on, tap tap and scratch scratch.

At last Muller consented to speak. ‘I’m glad you found it possible to call, Mr Castle.’

‘Yes, it wasn’t very convenient, but, well, here I am.’ We wanted to avoid making an unnecessary scandal by writing to your ambassador.’

It was Castle’s turn now to remain silent, while he tried to make out what they meant by the word scandal.

‘Captain Van Donck-this is Captain Van Donck-has brought the matter to us here. He felt it would be more suitably dealt with by us than by the Security Police-because of your position at the British Embassy. You’ve been under observation, Mr Castle, for a long time, but an arrest in your case, I feel, would serve no practical purpose-your embassy would claim diplomatic privilege. Of course we could always dispute it before a magistrate and then they would certainly have to send you home. That would probably be the end of your career, wouldn’t it?’

Castle said nothing.

‘You’ve been very imprudent, even stupid,’ Cornelius Muller said, ‘but then I don’t myself consider that stupidity ought to be punished as a crime. Captain Van Donck and the Security Police, though, take a different view, a legalistic view-and they may be right. He would prefer to go through the form of arrest and charge you in court. He feels that diplomatic privileges are often unduly stretched as far as the junior employees of an embassy are concerned. He would like to fight the case as a matter of principle.’

The hard chair was becoming painful, and Castle wanted to shift his thigh, but he thought the movement might be taken as a sign of weakness. He was trying very hard to make out what it was they really knew. How many of his agents, he wondered, were incriminated? His own relative safety made him feel shame. In a genuine war an officer can always die with his men and so keep his self-respect.

‘Start talking, Castle,’ Captain Van Donck demanded. He swung his legs off the arm of his chair and prepared to rise-or so it seemed-it was probably bluff. He opened and closed one fist and stared at his signet ring. Then he began to polish the gold ring with a finger as though it were a gun which had to he kept well oiled. In this country you couldn’t escape gold. It was in the dust of the cities, artists used it as paint, it would be quite natural for the police to use it for beating in a man’s face.

‘Talk about what?’ Castle asked.

‘You are like most Englishmen who come to the Republic,’ Muller said, ‘you feel a certain automatic sympathy for black Africans. We can understand your feeling. All the more because we are Africans ourselves. We have lived here for three hundred years. The Bantu are newcomers like yourselves. But I don’t need to give you a history lesson. As I said, we understand your point of view, even though it’s a very ignorant one, but when it leads a man to grow emotional, then it becomes dangerous, and when you reach the point of breaking the law…’

‘Which law?’

‘I think you know very well which law.’

‘It’s true I’m planning a study on apartheid, the Embassy have no objection, but it’s a serious sociological one-quite objective-and it’s still in my head. You hardly have the right to censor it yet. Anyway it won’t be published, I imagine, in this country.’

‘If you want to fuck a black whore,’ Captain Van Donck interrupted with impatience, ‘why don’t you go to a whorehouse in Lesotho or Swaziland? They are still part of your so-called Commonwealth.’

Then it was that for the first time Castle realised Sarah, not he, was the one who was in danger.

‘I’m too old to be interested in whores,’ he said, ‘Where were you on the nights of February 4th and 7th? The afternoon of February 21St?’

‘You obviously know-or think that you know,’ Castle said, ‘I keep my engagement book in my office.’

He hadn’t seen Sarah for forty-eight hours. Was she already in the hands of men like Captain Van Donck? His fear and his hate grew simultaneously. He forgot that in theory he was a diplomat, however junior. ‘What the hell are you talking about? And you?’ he added to Cornelius Muller, ‘You too, what do you want me for?’

Captain Van Donck was a brutal and simple man who believed in something, however repugnant he was one of those one could forgive. What Castle could never bring himself to forgive was this smooth educated officer of BOSS. It was men of this kind-men with the education to know what they were about that made a hell in heaven’s despite. He thought of what his Communist friend Carson had so often said to him ‘Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel, our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt.’

Muller said, ‘You must know very well that you’ve broken the Race Relations Act with that Bantu girl-friend of yours.’ He spoke in a tone of reasonable reproach, like a bank clerk who points out to an unimportant customer an unacceptable overdraft. ‘You must be aware that if it wasn’t for diplomatic privilege you’d be in prison now.’

‘Where have you hidden her?’ Captain Van Donck demanded and Castle at the question felt immense relief.

‘Hidden her?’

Captain Van Donck was on his feet, rubbing at his gold ring. He even spat on it.

‘That’s all right, Captain,’ Muller said, ‘I will look after Mr Castle. I won’t take up any more of your time. Thank you for all the help you’ve given our department. I want to talk to Mr Castle alone.’

When the door closed Castle found himself facing, as Carson would have said, ‘the real enemy. Muller went on, ‘You mustn’t mind Captain Van Donck. Men like that can see no further than their noses. There are other ways of settling this affair more reasonably than a prosecution which will ruin you and not help us.’

‘I can hear a car.’ A woman’s voice called to him out of the present.

It was Sarah speaking to him from the top of the stairs. He went to the window. A black Mercedes was edging its way up the indistinguishable commuters’ houses in King’s Road. The driver was obviously looking for a number, but as usual several of the street lamps had fused.

‘It’s Mr Muller all right,’ Castle called back. When he put down his whisky he found his hand shaking from holding the glass too rigidly.

At the sound of the bell Buller began to bark, but, after Castle opened the door, Buller fawned on the stranger with a total lack of discrimination and left a trail of affectionate spittle on Cornelius Muller’s trousers. ‘Nice dog, nice dog,’ Muller said with caution.

The years had made a noticeable change in Muller-his hair was almost white now and his face was far less smooth. He no longer looked like a civil servant who knew only the proper answers. Since they last met something had happened to him: he looked more human-perhaps it was that he had taken on with promotion greater responsibilities and with them uncertainties and unanswered questions.

‘Good evening, Mr Castle. I’m sorry I’m so late. The traffic was bad in Watford-I think the place was called Watford.’

You might almost have taken him now for a shy man, or perhaps it was only that he was at a loss without his familiar office and his desk of beautiful wood and the presence of two junior colleagues in an outer room. The black Mercedes slid away the chauffeur had gone to find his dinner. Muller was on his own in a strange town, in a foreign land, where the post boxes bore the initials of a sovereign E II, and there was no statue of Kruger in any market place.

Castle poured out two glasses of whisky. ‘It’s a long time since we met last,’ Mullet said.

‘Seven years?’

‘It’s good of you to ask me to have dinner at your own home.’

‘C thought it was the best idea. To break the ice. It seems we have to work closely together. On Uncle Remus.’

Muller’s eyes shifted to the telephone, to the lamp on the table, to a vase of flowers.

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. If we are bugged here it’s only by my own people,’ Castle said, ‘and anyway I’m pretty sure we are not.’ He raised his glass. ‘To our last meeting. Do you remember you suggested then I might agree to work for you? Well, here I am. We are working together. Historical irony or predestination? Your Dutch church believes in that.’

‘Of course in those days I hadn’t an idea of your real position,’ Muller said, ‘If I’d known I wouldn’t have threatened you about that wretched Bantu girl. I realise now she was only one of your agents. We might even have worked her together. But, you see, I took you for one of those high-minded anti-apartheid sentimentalists. I was taken completely by surprise when your chief told me you were the man I was to see about Uncle Remus. I hope you don’t bear me any grudge. After all you and I are professionals, and we are on the same side now.’

‘Yes, I suppose we are.’

‘I do wish though that you’d tell me it can’t matter any longer, can it? how you got that Bantu girl away. I suppose it was to Swaziland?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought we had that frontier closed pretty effectively-except for the real guerrilla experts. I never considered you were an expert, though I realised you did have some Communist contacts, but I assumed you needed them for that book of yours on apartheid which was never published. You took me in all right there. Not to speak of Van Donck. You remember Captain Van Donck? ‘

‘Oh, yes. Vividly.’

‘I had to ask the Security Police for his demotion over your affair. He acted very clumsily. I felt sure that, if we had the girl safe in prison, you’d consent to work for us, and he let her slip. You see don’t laugh-I was convinced it was a real love affair. I’ve known so many Englishmen who have started with the idea of attacking apartheid and ended trapped by us in a Bantu girl’s bed. It’s the romantic idea of breaking what they think is an unjust law that attracts them just as much as a black bottom. I never dreamt the girl Sarah Mankosi, I think that was the name? all the time was an agent of MI6.’

‘She didn’t know it herself. She believed in my book too. Have another whisky.’

‘Thank you. I will.’ Castle poured out two glasses, gambling on his better head.

‘From all accounts she was a clever girl. We looked pretty closely into her background. Been to the African University in the Transvaal where Uncle Tom professors always produce dangerous students. Personally, though, I’ve always found that the cleverer the African the more easily he can be turned-one way or another. If we’d had that girl in prison for a month I’m pretty sure we could have turned her. Well, she might have been useful to both of us now in this Uncle Remus operation. Or would she? One forgets that old devil Time. By now she’d be getting a bit long in the tooth, I suppose. Bantu women age so quickly. They are generally finished anyway to a white taste-long before the age of thirty. You know, Castle, I’m really glad we are working together and you are not what we in BOSS thought-one of those idealistic types who want to change the nature of human beings. We knew the people you were in touch with-or most of them, and we knew the sort of nonsense they’d be telling you. But you outwitted us, so you certainly outwitted those Bantu and Communists. I suppose they too thought you were writing a book which would serve their turn. Mind you, I’m not anti-African like Captain Van Donck. I consider myself a hundred per cent African myself.’

‘It was certainly not the Cornelius Muller of the Pretoria office who spoke now, the pale clerk doing his conformist job would never have spoken with such ease and confidence. Even the shyness and the uncertainty of a few minutes back had gone. The whisky had cured that. He was now a high officer of BOSS, entrusted with a foreign mission, who took his orders from no one under the rank of a general. He could relax. He could be an unpleasant thought himself, and it seemed to Castle that he began to resemble more and more closely, in the vulgarity and brutality of his speech, the Captain Van Donck whom he despised.

‘I’ve taken pleasant enough weekends in Lesotho,’ Muller said, ‘rubbing shoulders with my black brothers in the casino at Holiday Inn. I’ll admit once I even had a ‘Little well, encounter it somehow seemed quite different there-of course it wasn’t against the law. I wasn’t in the Republic.’

Castle called out, ‘Sarah, bring Sam down to say goodnight to Mr Muller.’

‘You are married?’ Muller asked.

‘Yes,’

‘I’m all the more flattered to be invited to your home. I brought with me a few, little presents from South Africa, and perhaps there’s something your wife would like. But you haven’t answered my question. Now that we are working together-as I wanted to before, you remember couldn’t you tell me how you got that girl out? It can’t harm any of your old agents now, and it does have a certain bearing on Uncle Remus, and the problems we have to face together. Your country and mine-and the States, of course-have a common frontier now.’

‘Perhaps she’ll tell you herself. Let me introduce her and my son, Sam.’ They came down the stairs together as Cornelius Muller turned.

‘Mr Muller was asking how I got you into Swaziland, Sarah.’

He had underestimated Muller. The surprise which he had planned failed completely. I’m so glad to meet you, Mrs Castle,’ Muller said and took her hand.

‘We just failed to meet seven years ago,’ Sarah said.

‘Yes. Seven wasted years. You have a very beautiful wife, Castle.’

‘Thank you,’ Sarah said, ‘Sam, shake hands with Mr Muller.’

‘This is my son, Mr Muller,’ Castle said. He knew Muller would be a good judge of colour shades, and Sam was very black.

‘How do you do, Sam? Do you go to school yet? ‘

‘He goes to school in a week or two. Run along up to bed now, Sam.’

‘Can you play hide-and-seek? ‘Sam asked.

‘I used to know the game, but I’m always ready to learn new rules.’

‘Are you a spy like Mr Davis?’

‘I said go to bed, Sam.’

‘Have you a poison pen?’

‘Sam! Upstairs!’

‘And now for Mr Muller’s question, Sarah,’ Castle said, ‘Where and how did you cross into Swaziland? ‘

‘I don’t think I ought to tell him, do you?’

Cornelius Muller said, ‘Oh, let’s forget Swaziland. It’s all past history and it happened in another country.’

Castle watched him adapting, as naturally as a chameleon, to the colour of the soil. He must have adapted in just that way during his weekend in Lesotho. Perhaps he would have found Muller more likeable if he had been less adaptable. All through dinner Muller made his courteous conversation. Yes, thought Castle, I really would have preferred Captain Van Donck. Van Donck would have walked out of the house at the first sight of Sarah. A prejudice had something in common with an ideal. Cornelius Muller was without prejudice and he was without an ideal.

‘How do you find the climate here, Mrs Castle, after South Africa?’

‘Do you mean the weather?’

‘Yes, the weather.’

‘It’s less extreme,’ Sarah said.

‘Don’t you sometimes miss Africa? I came by way of Madrid and Athens, so I’ve been away some weeks already, and do you know what I miss most? The mine dumps around Johannesburg. Their colour when the sun’s half set. What do you miss?’

Castle had not suspected Muller of any aesthetic feeling. Was it one of the larger interests which came with promotion or was it adapted for the occasion and the country like his courtesy?

‘My memories are different,’ Sarah said, ‘My Africa was different to yours.’

‘Oh come, we are both of us Africans. By the way, I’ve brought a few presents for my friends here. Not knowing that you were one of us, I brought you a shawl. You know how in Lesotho they have those very fine weavers-the Royal Weavers. Would you accept a shawl from your old enemy?’

‘Of course. It’s kind of you.’

‘Do you think Lady Hargreaves would accept an ostrich bag?’

‘I don’t know her. You must ask my husband.’

It would hardly be up to her crocodile standard, Castle thought, but he said, ‘I’m sure… coming from you…’

‘I take a sort of family interest in ostriches, you see,’ Muller explained. ‘My grandfather was what they call now one of the ostrich millionaires-put out of business by the 1914 war. He had a big house in the Cape Province. It was very splendid once, but it’s only a ruin now. Ostrich feathers never really came back in Europe, and my father went bankrupt. My brothers still keep a few ostriches though.’

Castle remembered visiting one of those big houses, which had been preserved as a sort of museum, camped in by the manager of all that was left of the ostrich farm. The manager was a little apologetic about the richness and the bad taste. The bathroom was the high spot of the tour visitors were always taken to the bathroom last of all a bath like a great white double bed with gold-plated taps, and on the wall a bad copy of an Italian primitive: on the haloes real gold leaf was beginning to peel off.

At the end of dinner Sarah left them, and Muller accepted a glass of port. The bottle had remained untouched since last Christmas a present from Davis. ‘Seriously though,’ Muller said, ‘ I wish you would give me a few details about your wife’s route to Swaziland. No need to mention names. I know you had some Communist friends-I realise now it was all part of your job. They thought you were a sentimental fellow traveller-just as we did. For example, Carson must have thought you one-poor Carson.’

‘Why poor Carson? ‘

‘He went too far. He had contacts with the guerrillas. He was a good fellow in his way and a very good advocate. He gave the Security Police a lot of trouble with the pass-laws.’

‘Doesn’t he still? ‘

‘Oh no. He died a year ago in prison.’

‘I hadn’t heard.’

Castle went to the sideboard and poured himself yet another double whisky. With plenty of soda the J.& B. looked no stronger than a single.

‘Don’t you like this port?’ Muller asked. ‘We used to get admirable port from Lourenco Marques. Alas, those days are over.’

‘What did he die of?’

‘Pneumonia,’ Muller said, ‘He added, Well, it saved him from a long trial.’

‘I liked Carson,’ Castle said.

‘Yes. It’s a great pity he always identified Africans with colour. It’s the kind of mistake second-generation men make. They refuse to admit a white man can be as good an African as a black. My family for instance arrived in 1700. We were early comers.’ He looked at his watch. ‘My God, with you I’m a late stayer. My driver must have been waiting an hour. You’ll have to excuse me. I ought to be saying goodnight.’

Castle said, ‘Perhaps we should talk a little before you go about Uncle Remus.’

‘That can wait for the office,’ Muller said.

At the door he turned. He said, ‘ I’m really sorry about Carson. If I’d known that you hadn’t heard I wouldn’t have spoken so abruptly.’

Buller licked the bottom of his trousers with undiscriminating affection. ‘Good dog,’ Muller said, ‘Good dog. There’s nothing like a dog’s fidelity.’

At one o’clock in the morning Sarah broke a long silence. ‘You are still awake. Don’t pretend. Was it as bad as all that seeing Muller? He was quite polite.’

‘Oh yes. In England he puts on English manners. He adapts very quickly.’

‘Shall I get you a Mogadon?’

‘No. I’ll sleep soon. Only there’s something I have to tell you. ‘Carson’s dead. In prison.’

‘Did they kill him?’

‘Muller said he died from pneumonia.’

She put her head under the crook of his arm and turned her face into the pillow. He guessed she was crying. He said, ‘I couldn’t help remembering tonight the last note I ever had from him. It was waiting at the Embassy when I came back from seeing Muller and Van Donck. “Don’t worry about Sarah. Take the first possible plane to LM and wait for her at the Polana. She’s in safe hands.”’

‘Yes. I remember that note too. I was with him when he wrote it.’

‘I was never able to thank him-except by seven years of silence and…’

‘And?’

‘Oh, I don’t know what I was going to say.’ He repeated what he had told Muller, ‘I liked Carson.’

‘Yes. I trusted him. Much more than I trusted his friends. During that week while you waited for me in Lourenco Marques we had time for a lot of argument. I used to tell him he wasn’t a real Communist.’

‘Why? He was a member of the Party. One of the oldest members left in the Transvaal.’

‘Of course. I know that. But there are members and members, aren’t there? I told him about Sam even before I told you.’

‘He had a way of drawing people to him.’

‘Most of the Communists I knew-they pushed, they didn’t draw.’

‘All the same, Sarah, he was a genuine Communist. He survived Stalin like Roman Catholics survived the Borgias. He made me think better of the Party.’

‘But he never drew you that far, did he?’

‘Oh, there were always some things which stuck in my throat. He used to say I strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel. You know I was never a religious man-I left God behind in the school chapel, but there were priests I sometimes met in Africa who made me believe again-for a moment-over a drink. If all priests had been like they were and I had seen them often enough, perhaps I would have swallowed the Resurrection, the Virgin birth, Lazarus, the whole works. I remember one I met twice-I wanted to use him as an agent as I used you, but he wasn’t usable. His name was Connolly-or was it O’Connell? He worked in the slums of Soweto. He said to me exactly what Carson said-you strain at a gnat and you swallow… For a while I half believed in his God, like I half believed in Carson’s. Perhaps I was born to be a half believer. When people talk about Prague and Budapest and how you can’t find a human face in Communism I stay silent. Because I’ve seen-once-the human face. I say to myself that if it hadn’t been for Carson, Sam would have been born in a prison and you would probably have died in one. One kind of Communism-or Communist saved you and Sam. I don’t have any trust in Marx or Lenin any more than I have in Saint Paul, but haven’t I the right to be grateful?’

‘Why do you worry so much about it? No one would say you were wrong to be grateful, I’m grateful too. Gratitude’s all right if.’

‘If…?’

‘I think I was going to say if it doesn’t take you too far.’

It was hours before he slept. He lay awake and thought of Carson and Cornelius Muller, of Uncle Remus and Prague. He didn’t want to sleep until he was sure from her breathing that Sarah was asleep first. Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on towards the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he might find a permanent home, in a city where he could he accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind.

Once a month on his day off Castle was in the habit of taking Sarah and Sam for an excursion into the sandy conifered countryside of East Sussex in order to see his mother. No one ever questioned the necessity of the visit, but Castle doubted whether even his mother enjoyed it, though he had to admit she did all she could to please them-according to her own idea of what their pleasures were. Invariably the same supply of vanilla ice-cream was waiting for Sam in the deep freeze he preferred chocolate-and though she only lived half a mile from the station, she ordered a taxi to meet them. Castle, who had never wanted a car since he returned to England, had the impression that she regarded him as an unsuccessful and impecunious son, and Sarah once told him how she felt-like a black guest at an anti-apartheid garden party too fussed over to be at ease.

A further cause of nervous strain was Buller. Castle had given up arguing that they should leave Buller at home. Sarah was certain that without their protection he would be murdered by masked men, though Castle pointed out that he had been bought to defend them and not to be defended himself. In the long run it proved easier to give way, though his mother profoundly disliked dogs and had a Burmese cat which it was Buller’s fixed ambition to destroy. Before they arrived the cat had to be locked in Mrs Castle’s bedroom, and her sad fate, deprived of human company, would be hinted at from time to time by his mother during the course of the long day. On one occasion Buller was found spread-eagled outside the bedroom door waiting his chance, breathing heavily like a Shakespearian murderer. Afterwards Mrs Castle wrote a long letter of reproach to Sarah on the subject. Apparently the cat’s nerves had suffered for more than a week. She had refused to eat her diet of Friskies and existed only on milk a kind of hunger strike.

Gloom was apt to descend on all of them as soon as the taxi entered the deep shade of the laurel drive which led to the high-gabled Edwardian house that his father had bought for his retirement because it was near a golf course. (Soon after he had a stroke and was unable to walk even as far as the club house.)

Mrs Castle was invariably standing there on the porch waiting for them, a tall straight figure in an outdated skirt which showed to advantage her fine ankles, wearing a high collar like Queen Alexandra’s which disguised the wrinkles of old age. To hide his despondency Castle would become unnaturally elated and he greeted his mother with an exaggerated hug which she barely returned. She believed that any emotions openly expressed must be false emotions. She had deserved to marry an ambassador or a colonial governor rather than a country doctor.

‘You are looking wonderful, Mother,’ Castle said.

‘I’m feeling well for my age.’ She was eighty-five. She offered a clean white cheek which smelled of lavender water for Sarah to kiss. I hope Sam is feeling quite well again.’

‘Oh yes, he’s never been better.’

‘Out of quarantine?’

‘Of course.’

Reassured, Mrs Castle granted him the privilege of a brief kiss.

‘You’ll be starting prep school soon, I suppose, won’t you?’

Sam nodded.

‘You’ll enjoy having other boys to play with. Where’s Buller?’

‘He’s gone upstairs looking for Tinker Bell,’ Sam said with satisfaction.

After lunch Sarah took Sam into the garden along with Buller so as to leave Castle alone with his mother for a little while. That was the monthly routine. Sarah meant well, but Castle had the impression that his mother was glad when the private interview was over. Invariably there was a long silence between them while Mrs Castle poured out two more unwanted coffees; then she would propose a subject for discussion which Castle knew had been prepared a long time before just to cover this awkward interval.

‘That was a terrible air crash last week,’ Mrs Castle said, ‘and she dropped the lump sugar in, one for her, two for him.

‘Yes. It certainly was. Terrible.’ He tried to remember which company, where… TWA? Calcutta?

‘I couldn’t help thinking what would have happened to Sam if you and Sarah had been on board.’

He remembered just in time. ‘But it happened in Bangladesh, Mother. Why on earth should we?’

‘You are in the Foreign Office. They could send you anywhere.’

‘Oh no, they couldn’t. I’m chained to my desk in London, Mother. Anyway you know very well we’ve appointed you as guardian if anything ever happened.’

‘An old woman approaching ninety.’

‘Eighty-five, Mother, surely.’

‘Every week I read of old women killed in bus crashes.’

‘You never go in a bus.’

‘I see no reason why I should make a principle of not going in a bus.’

If anything should ever happen to you be sure we’ll appoint somebody reliable.’

‘It might be too late. One must prepare against simultaneous accidents. And in the case of Sam-well, there are special problems.’

‘I suppose you mean his colour.’

‘You can’t make him a Ward in Chancery. Many of those judges your father always said that-are racialist.’

‘And then has it occurred to you, dear, if we are all dead, there might be people-out there-who might claim him?’

‘Sarah has no parents.’

‘What you leave behind, however small, might be thought quite a fortune I mean by someone out there. If the deaths are simultaneous, the eldest is judged to have died first, or so I’m told. My money would then be added to yours. Sarah must have some relations and they might claim…’

‘Mother, aren’t you being a bit racialist yourself?’

‘No, dear. I’m not at all racialist, though perhaps I’m old-fashioned and patriotic. Sam is English by birth whatever anyone may say.’

‘I’ll think about it, Mother.’ That statement was the end of most of their discussions, but it was always well to try a diversion too. ‘I’ve been wondering, Mother, whether to retire.’

‘They don’t give you a very good pension, do they?’

‘I’ve saved a little. We live very economically.’

‘The more you’ve saved the more reason for a spare guardian just in case. I hope I’m as liberal as your father was, but I would hate to see Sam dragged back to South Africa…’

‘But you wouldn’t see it, Mother, if you were dead.’

‘I’m not so certain of things, dear, as all that. I’m not an atheist.’

It was one of their most trying visits and he was only saved by Buller who returned with heavy determination from the garden and lumbered upstairs looking for the imprisoned Tinker Bell.

‘At least,’ Mrs Castle said, ‘I hope I will never have to be a guardian for Buller.’

‘I can promise you that, Mother. In the event of a fatal accident in Bangladesh which coincides with a Grandmothers’ Union bus crash in Sussex I have left strict directions for Buller to be put away-as painlessly as possible.’

It’s not the sort of dog that I would personally have chosen for my grandson. Watchdogs like Buller are always very colour-conscious. And Sam’s a nervous child. He reminds me of you at his age-except for the colour of course.’

‘Was I a nervous child?’

‘You always had an exaggerated sense of gratitude for the least kindness.’

‘It was a sort of insecurity, though why you should have felt insecure with me and your father… You once gave away a good fountain-pen to someone at school who had offered you a bun with a piece of chocolate inside.’

‘Oh well, Mother. I always insist on getting my money’s worth now.’

‘I wonder.’

‘And I’ve quite given up gratitude.’ But as he spoke he remembered Carson dead in prison, and he remembered what Sarah had said.

He added, ‘Anyway, I don’t let it go too far. I demand more than a penny bun nowadays.’

‘There’s something I’ve always found strange about you. Since you met Sarah you never mention Mary. I was very fond of Mary. I wish you had had a child with her.’

‘I try to forget the dead,’ he said, but that wasn’t true. He had learnt early in his marriage that he was sterile, so there was no child, but they were happy. It was as much an only child as a wife who was blown to pieces by a buzz bomb in Oxford Street when he was safe in Lisbon, making a contact. He had failed to protect her, and he hadn’t died with her. That was why he never spoke of her even to Sarah.

‘What always surprises me about your mother,’ Sarah said, when they began to go over in bed the record of their day in the country, ‘is that she accepts so easily the fact that Sam’s your child. Does it never occur to her that he’s very black to have a white father?’

‘She doesn’t seem to notice shades.’

‘Mr Muller did. I’m sure of that.’

Downstairs the telephone rang. It was nearly midnight. ‘Oh hell,’ Castle said, ‘who would ring us at this hour? Your masked men again?’

‘Aren’t you going to answer?’

‘The ringing stopped.’

‘If it’s your masked men,’ Castle said, ‘we’ll have a chance to catch them.’

The telephone rang a second time. Castle looked at his watch.

‘For God’s sake answer them.’

‘It’s certain to be a wrong number.’

‘I’ll answer it if you won’t.’

‘Put on your dressing-gown. You’ll catch cold.’ But as soon as she got out of bed the telephone stopped ringing. ‘It’s sure to ring again,’ Sarah said.

‘Don’t you remember last month-three times at one o’clock in the morning?’ But this time the telephone remained silent. There was a cry from across the passage.

Sarah said, ‘Damn them, they’ve woken up Sam. Whoever they are.’

‘I’ll go to him. You’re shivering. Get back into bed.’

Sam asked, ‘Was it burglars? Why didn’t Buller bark?’

‘Buller knew better. There are no burglars, Sam. It was just a friend of ‘Was it that Mr Muller?’

‘No. He’s not a friend. Go to sleep. ‘The telephone won’t ring again.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know.’

‘It rang more than once.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you never answered. So how do you know it was a friend?’

‘You ask too many questions, Sam.’

‘Was it a secret signal?’

‘Do you have secrets, Sam?’

‘Yes. Lots of them.’

‘Tell me one.’

‘I won’t. It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you.’

‘Well, I have my secrets too.’

Sarah was still awake. ‘He’s all right now,’ Castle said. ‘He thought they were burglars ringing up.’

‘Perhaps they were. What did you tell him?’

‘Oh, I said they were secret signals.’

‘You always know how to calm him. You love him, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s strange. I never understand. I wish he were really your child.’

‘I don’t wish it. You know that.’

‘I’ve never really understood why.’

‘I’ve told you many times. I see enough of myself every day when I shave.’

‘All you see is a kind man, darling.’

‘I wouldn’t describe myself that way.’

‘For me a child of yours would have been something to live for when you are not there any more. You won’t live forever.’

‘No, thank God for that.’ He brought the words out without thinking and regretted having spoken them. It was her sympathy which always made him commit himself too far; however much he tried to harden himself he was tempted to tell her everything. Sometimes he compared her cynically with a clever interrogator who uses sympathy and a timely cigarette.

Sarah said, ‘I know you are worried. I wish you could tell me why-but I know you can’t. Perhaps one day… when you are free…’ She added sadly, ‘If you are ever free, Maurice.’

Castle left his bicycle with the ticket collector at Berkhamsted station and went upstairs to the London platform. He knew nearly all the commuters by sight he was even on nodding terms with a few of them. A cold October mist was lying in the grassy pool of the castle and dripping from the willows into the canal on the other side of the line. He walked the length of the platform and back; he thought he recognised all the faces except for one woman in a shabby rabbity fur women were rare on this train. He watched her climb into a compartment and he chose the same one so as to watch her more closely. The men opened newspapers and the woman opened a paper-bound novel by Denise Robins. Castle began reading in Book II of War and Peace. It was a breach of security, even a small act of defiance, to read this book publicly for pleasure. ‘One step beyond that boundary line, which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead, lies uncertainty, suffering and death. And what is there? Who is there? there beyond that field, that tree…’ He looked out of the window and seemed to see with the eyes of Tolstoy’s soldier the motionless spirit level of the canal pointing towards Boxmoor. That roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line…

When the train stopped at Watford, Castle was the only one to leave the compartment. He stood beside the list of train departures and watched the last passenger go through the harrier the woman was not among them. Outside the station he hesitated at the tail of the bus queue while he again noted the faces. Then he looked at his watch and with a studied gesture of impatience for any observer who cared to notice him walked on. Nobody followed him, he was sure of that, but all the same he was a little worried by the thought of the woman in the train and his petty defiance of the rules. One had to be meticulously careful. At the first post office to which he came he rang the office and asked for Cynthia-she always arrived half an hour at least before Watson or Davis or himself.

He said, ‘Will you tell Watson I shall be in a little late? I’ve had to stop at Watford on the way to see a vet. Buller’s got an odd sort of rash. Tell Davis too.’ He considered for a moment whether it would be necessary for his alibi actually to visit the vet, but he decided that taking too much care could sometimes be as dangerous as taking too little-simplicity was always best, just as it paid to speak the truth whenever possible, for the truth is so much easier to memorise than a lie. He went into the third coffee bar on the list which he carried in his head and there he waited. He didn’t recognise the tall lean man who followed him in an overcoat which had seen better days. The man stopped at his table and said, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you William Hatchard?’

‘No, my name’s Castle.’

‘I’m sorry. An extraordinary likeness.’

Castle drank two cups of coffee and read The Times. He valued the air of respectability that paper always seemed to lend the reader. He saw the man tying up his shoelace fifty yards down the road, and he experienced a similar sense of security to that which he had once felt while he was being carried from his ward in a hospital towards a major operation he found himself again an object on a conveyor belt which moved him to a destined end with no responsibility, to anyone or anything, even to his own body. Everything would be looked after for better or worse by somebody else. Somebody with the highest professional qualifications. That was the way death ought to come in the end, he thought, as he moved slowly and happily in the wake of the stranger. He always hoped that he would move towards death with the same sense that before long he would be released from anxiety for ever.

The road they were now in, he noticed, was called Elm View, although there were no elms anywhere in sight or any other trees, and the house to which he was guided was as anonymous and uninteresting as his own. There were even rather similar stained glass panels in the front door. Perhaps a dentist had once worked there too. The lean man ahead of him stopped for a moment by an iron gate to a front garden which was about the size of a billiard table, and then walked on. There were three bells by the door, but only one had an indicating card-very worn with illegible writing ending in the words ‘ition Limited’. Castle rang the bell and saw that his guide had crossed Elm View and was walking back on the other side. When he was opposite the house he took a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his nose. It was probably an all-clear signal, for Castle almost immediately heard a creak-creak descending the stairs inside. He wondered whether ‘they’ had taken their precautions in order to protect him from a possible follower or to protect themselves against his possible treachery-or both of course. He didn’t care he was on the conveyor belt.

The door opened on a familiar face he had not expected to see-eyes of a very startling blue over a wide welcoming grin, a small scar on the left cheek which he knew dated from a wound inflicted on a child in Warsaw when the city fell to Hitler.

‘Boris,’ Castle exclaimed, ‘I thought I was never going to see you again.’

‘It’s good to see you, Maurice.’

Strange, he thought, that Sarah and Boris were the only people in the world who ever called him Maurice. To his mother he was simply ‘dear’ in moments of affection, and at the office he lived among surnames or initials. Immediately he felt at home in this strange house which he had never visited before: a shabby house with worn carpeting on the stairs. For some reason he thought of his father. Perhaps when a child he had gone with him to see a patient in just such a house.

From the first landing he followed Boris into a small square room with a desk, two chairs and a large picture on rollers which showed a numerous family eating in a garden at a table laden with an unusual variety of food. All the courses seemed to be simultaneously displayed an apple pie stood beside a joint of roast beef, and a salmon and a plate of apples beside a soup tureen. There was a jug of water and a bottle of wine and a coffee pot. Several dictionaries lay on a shelf and a pointer leant against a blackboard on which was written a half-obliterated word in a language he couldn’t identify.

‘They decided to send me back after your last report,’ Boris said. ‘The one about Muller. I’m glad to be here. I like England so much better than France. How did you get on with Ivan?’

‘All right. But it wasn’t the same.’ He felt for a packet of cigarettes which was not there. ‘You know how Russians are. I had the impression that he didn’t trust me. And he was always wanting more than I ever promised to do for any of you. He even wanted me to try to change my section.’

‘I think it’s Marlboros you smoke?’ Boris said, ‘holding out a packet. Castle took one.

‘Boris, did you know all the time you were here that Carson was dead?’

‘No. I didn’t know. Not until a few weeks ago. I don’t even know the details yet.’

‘He died in prison. From pneumonia. Or so they say. Ivan must surely have known but they let me learn it first from Cornelius Muller.’

‘Was it such a great shock? In the circumstances. Once arrested there’s never much hope.’

‘I know that, and yet I’d always believed that one day I would see him again somewhere in safety far away from

‘South Africa perhaps in my home and then I would be able to thank him for saving Sarah. Now he’s dead and gone without a word of thanks from me.’

‘All you’ve done for us has been a kind of thanks. He will have understood that. You don’t have to feel any regret.’

‘No? One can’t reason away regret it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.’

He thought, with a sense of revulsion: The situation’s impossible, there’s no one in the world with whom I can talk of everything, except this man Boris whose real name even is unknown to me. He couldn’t talk to Davis-half his life was hidden from Davis, nor to Sarah who didn’t even know that Boris existed. One day he had even told Boris about the night in the Hotel Polana when he learned the truth about Sam. A control was a bit like a priest must be to a Catholic a man who received one’s confession whatever it might be without emotion. He said, ‘When they changed my control and Ivan took over from you, I felt unbearably lonely. I could never speak about anything but business to Ivan.’

‘I’m sorry I had to go. I argued with them about it. I did my best to stay. But you know how it is in your own outfit. It’s the same in ours. We live in boxes and it’s they who choose the box.’ How often he had heard that comparison in his own office. Each side shares the same clichés.

Castle said, ‘It’s time to change the book.’

‘Yes. Is that all? You gave an urgent signal on the phone. Is there more news of Porton?’

‘No. I’m not sure I trust their story.’

They were sitting on uncomfortable chairs on either side of the desk like a master and a pupil. Only the pupil in this case was so much older than the master. Well, it happened, Castle supposed, in the confessional too that an old man spoke his sins to a priest young enough to be his son. With Ivan at their rare meetings the dialogue had always been short, information was passed, questionnaires were received, everything was strictly to the point. With Boris he had been able to relax. Was France promotion for you?’ He took another cigarette.

‘I don’t know. One never does know, does one? Perhaps coming back here may be promotion. It may mean they took your last report very seriously, and thought I could deal with it better than Ivan. Or was Ivan compromised? You don’t believe the Porton story, but have you really hard evidence that your people suspect a leak?’

‘No. But in a game like ours one begins to trust one’s instincts and they’ve certainly made a routine check on the whole section.’

‘You say yourself routine.’

‘Yes, it could be routine, some of it’s quite open, but I believe it’s a bit more than that. I think Davis’s telephone is tapped and mine may be too, though I don’t believe so. Anyway we’d better drop those call-signals to my house. You’ve read the report I made on Muller’s visit and the Uncle Remus operation. I hope to God that’s been channelled differently on your side if there is a leak. I have a feeling they might be passing me a marked note.’

‘You needn’t be afraid. We’ve been most careful over that report. Though I don’t think Muller’s mission can be what you call a marked note. Porton perhaps, but not Muller. We’ve had confirmation of that from Washington. We take Uncle Remus very seriously, and we want you to concentrate on that. It could affect us in the Mediterranean, the Gulf, the Indian Ocean. Even the Pacific. In the long term…’

‘There’s no long term for me, Boris. I’m over retirement age as it is.’

‘I know.’

‘I want to retire now.’

‘We wouldn’t like that. The next two years may be very important.’

‘For me too. I’d like to live them in my own way.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Looking after Sarah and Sam. Going to the movies. Growing old in peace. ‘It would be safer for you to drop me, Boris.’

‘Why?’

‘Muller came and sat at my own table and ate our food and was polite to Sarah. Condescending. Pretending there was no colour bar. How I dislike that man! And how I hate the whole bloody BOSS outfit. I hate the men who killed Carson and now call it pneumonia. I hate them for trying to shut Sarah up and let Sam be born in prison. You’d do much better to employ a man who doesn’t hate, Boris.

Hate’s liable to make mistakes. It’s as dangerous as love. I’m doubly dangerous, Boris, because I love too. Love’s a fault in both our services.’

‘He felt the enormous relief of speaking without prudence to someone who, he believed, understood him. The blue eyes seemed to offer complete friendship, the smile encouraged him to lay down for a short time the burden of secrecy. He said, ‘Uncle Remus is the last straw-that behind the scenes we should be joining with the States to help those apartheid bastards. Your worst crimes, Boris, are always in the past, and the future hasn’t arrived yet. I can’t go on parroting, “Remember Prague! Remember Budapest!”-they were years ago. One has to be concerned about the present, and the present is Uncle Remus. I became a naturalised black when I fell in love with Sarah.’

‘Then why do you think you’re dangerous?’

‘Because for seven years I’ve kept my cool, and I’m losing it now. Cornelius Muller is making me lose it. Perhaps C sent him to me for that very reason. Perhaps C wants me to break out.’

‘We are only asking you to hold on a little longer. Of course the early years of this game are always the easiest, aren’t they? The contradictions are not so obvious and the secrecy hasn’t had time to build up like hysteria or a woman’s menopause. Try not to worry so much, Maurice. Take your Valium and a Mogadon at night. Come and see me whenever you feel depressed and have to talk to someone. It’s the lesser danger.’

‘I’ve done enough, haven’t I, by now to pay my debt to Carson?’

‘Yes, of course, but we can’t lose you yet because of Uncle Remus. As you put it, you’re a naturalised black now.’

Castle felt as though he were emerging from an anaesthetic, an operation had been completed successfully. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I made a fool of myself.’ He couldn’t remember exactly what he had said. ‘Give me a shot of whisky, Boris.’

Boris opened the desk and took out a bottle and a glass. He said, ‘I know you like J. & B.’ He poured out a generous measure and he watched the speed with which Castle drank. ‘You are taking a bit too much these days, aren’t you, Maurice?’

‘Yes. But no one knows that. Only at home. Sarah notices.’

‘How are things there?’

‘Sarah’s worried by the telephone rings. She always thinks of masked burglars. And Sam has had dreams because soon he will be going to prep school a white school. I’m worried about what will happen to both of them if something happens to me. Something always does happen in the end, doesn’t it?’

‘Leave all that to us. I promise you we’ve got your escape route very carefully planned. If an emergency…’

‘My escape route? What about Sarah’s and Sam’s?’

‘They’ll follow you. You can trust us, Maurice. We’ll look after them. We know how to show our gratitude too. Remember Blake-we look after our own.’ Boris went to the window. ‘All’s clear. You ought to be getting on to the office. My first pupil comes in a quarter of an hour.’

‘What language do you teach him?’

‘English. You mustn’t laugh at me.’

‘Your English is nearly perfect.’

‘My first pupil today is a Pole like myself. A refugee from us, not from the Germans. I like him he’s a ferocious enemy of Marx. You smile. That’s better. You must never let things build up so far again.’

‘This security check. It’s even getting Davis down-and he’s innocent.’

‘Don’t worry. I think I see a way of drawing their fire.’

‘I’ll try not to worry.’

‘From now on we’ll shift to the third drop, and if things get difficult signal me at once-I’m only here to help you. You do trust me?’

‘Of course I trust you, Boris. I only wish your people really trusted me. This book code it’s a terribly slow and old-fashioned way of communicating, and you know how dangerous it is.’

‘It’s not that we don’t trust you. It’s for your own safety. Your house might be searched any time as a routine check. At the beginning they wanted to give you a microdot outfit I wouldn’t let them. Does that satisfy your wish?’

‘I have another.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I wish the impossible. I wish all the lies were unnecessary. And I wish we were on the same side.’

‘We?’

‘You and I.’

‘Surely we are?’

‘Yes, in this case… for the time being. You know Ivan tried to blackmail me once?’

‘A stupid man. I suppose that’s why I’ve been sent back.’

‘It has always been quite clear between you and me. I give you all the information you want in my section. I’ve never pretended that I share your faith-I’ll never be a Communist.’

‘Of course. We’ve always understood your point of view. We need you for Africa only.’

‘But what I pass to you-I have to be the judge. I’ll fight beside you in Africa, Boris-not in Europe.’

‘All we need from you is all the details you can get of Uncle Remus.’

‘Ivan wanted a lot. He threatened me.’

‘Ivan has gone. Forget him.’

‘You would do better without me.’

‘No. It would be Muller and his friends who would do better,’ Boris said.

Like a manic depressive Castle had had his outbreak, the recurrent boil had broken, and he felt a relief he never felt elsewhere.

It was the turn of the Travellers, and here, where he was on the Committee, Sir John Hargreaves felt quite at home, unlike at the Reform. The day was much colder than at their last lunch together and he saw no reason to go and talk in the park.

‘Oh, I know what you are thinking, Emmanuel, but they all know you here only too well,’ he said to Doctor Percival. ‘They’ll leave us quite alone with our coffee. They’ve learned by this time that you talk about nothing except fish. By the way, how was the smoked trout?’

‘Rather dry,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘by Reform standards.’

‘And the roast beef?’

‘Perhaps a little overdone?’

‘You’re an impossible man to please, Emmanuel. Have a cigar.’

‘If it’s a real Havana.’

‘Of course.’

‘I wonder if you’ll get them in Washington?’

‘I doubt whether detente has got as far as cigars. Anyway, the question of laser beams will take priority. What a game it all is, Emmanuel. Sometimes I wish I was back in Africa.’

‘The old Africa.’

‘Yes. You are right. The old Africa.’

‘It’s gone for ever.’

‘I’m not so sure. Perhaps if we destroy the rest of the world, the roads will become overgrown and all the new luxury hotels will crumble, the forests will come back, the chiefs, the witch doctors there’s still a rain queen in the north-east Transvaal.’

‘Are you going to tell them that in Washington too?’

‘No. But I shall talk without enthusiasm about Uncle Remus.’

‘You are against it?’

‘The States, ourselves and South Africa we are incompatible allies. But the plan will go ahead because the Pentagon want to play war games now that they haven’t got a real war. Well, I’m leaving Castle behind to play it with their Mr Muller. By the way, he’s left for Bonn. I hope West Germany isn’t in the game too.’

‘How long will you be away?’

‘Not more than ten days, I hope. I don’t like the Washington climate in all senses of the word.’ With a smile of pleasure he tipped off a satisfactory length of ash.. ‘Doctor Castro’s cigars,’ he said, ‘are every bit as good as Sergeant Batista’s.’

‘I wish you weren’t going just at this moment, John, when we seem to have a fish on the line.’

‘I can trust you to land it without my help-anyway it may be only an old boot.’

‘I don’t think it is. One gets to know the tug of an old boot.’

‘I leave it with confidence in your hands, Emmanuel. And in Daintry’s too, of course.’

‘Suppose we don’t agree?’

‘Then it must be your decision. You are my deputy in this affair. But for God’s sake, Emmanuel, don’t do anything rash.’

‘I’m only rash when I’m in my Jaguar, John. When I’m fishing I have a great deal of patience.’

Castle’s train was forty minutes late at Berkhamsted. There were repairs to the line somewhere beyond Tring, and when he arrived at the office his room seemed empty in an unaccustomed way. Davis wasn’t there, but that hardly explained the sense of emptiness; Castle had often enough been alone in the room with Davis at lunch, Davis in the lavatory, Davis off to the Zoo to see Cynthia. It was half an hour before he came on the note in his tray from Cynthia: ‘Arthur’s not well. Colonel Daintry wants to see you.’ For a moment Castle wondered who the hell Arthur was; he was unused to thinking of Davis as anyone but Davis. Was Cynthia, he wondered, beginning to yield at last to the long siege? Was that why she now used his Christian name? He rang for her and asked, ‘What’s wrong with Davis?’

‘I don’t know. One of the Environment men rang up for him. He said something about stomach cramps.’

‘A hangover?’

‘He’d have rung up himself if it had been only that. I didn’t know what I ought to do with you not in. So I rang Doctor Percival.’

‘What did he say?’

‘The same as you-a hangover. Apparently they were together last night-drinking too much port and whisky. He’s going to see him at lunchtime. He’s busy till then.’

‘You don’t think it’s serious, do you?’

‘I don’t think it’s serious but I don’t think it’s a hangover. If it was serious Doctor Percival would have gone at once, wouldn’t he?’

‘With C away in Washington I doubt if he’s got much time for medicine,’ Castle said. ‘I’ll go and see Daintry. Which room?’

He opened the door marked 72. Daintry was there and Doctor Percival-he had the sense of interrupting a dispute.

‘Oh yes, Castle,’ Daintry said. ‘I did want to see you.’

‘I’ll be pushing off,’ Doctor Percival said.

‘We’ll talk later, Percival. I don’t agree with you. I’m sorry, but there it is. I can’t agree.’

‘You remember what I said about boxes-and Ben Nicholson.’

‘I’m not a painter,’ Daintry said, ‘and I don’t understand abstract art. Anyway, I’ll be seeing you later.’

Daintry was silent for quite a while after the shutting of the door. Then he said, ‘I don’t like people jumping to conclusions. I’ve been brought up to believe in evidence-real evidence.’

‘Is something bothering you?’

‘If it was a question of sickness, he’d take blood tests, X-rays… He wouldn’t just guess a diagnosis.’

‘Doctor Percival?’

Daintry said, ‘I don’t know how to begin. I’m not supposed to talk to you about this.’

‘About what?’

There was a photograph of a beautiful girl on Daintry’s desk. Daintry’s eyes kept returning to it. He said, ‘Don’t you get damned lonely sometimes in this outfit?’

Castle hesitated. He said, ‘Oh well, I get on well with Davis. That makes a lot of difference.’

‘Davis? Yes. I wanted to talk to you about Davis.’

Daintry rose and walked to the window. He gave the impression of a prisoner cooped up in a cell. He stared out morosely at the forbidding sky and was not reassured. He said, ‘It’s a grey day. The autumn’s really here at last.’

‘ “Change and decay in all around I see,” ‘ Castle quoted.

‘What’s that?’

‘A hymn I used to sing at school.’

Daintry returned to his desk and faced the photograph again. ‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘as though he felt the need of introducing the girl.’

‘Congratulations. She’s a beautiful girl.’

‘She’s getting married at the weekend, but I don’t think I shall go.’

‘You don’t like the man?’

‘Oh, I dare say he’s all right. I’ve never met him. But what would I talk to him about? Jameson’s Baby Powder?’

‘Baby powder?’

‘Jameson’s are trying to knock out Johnson’s-or so she tells me.’ He sat down and lapsed into an unhappy silence.

Castle said, ‘Apparently Davis is ill. I was in late this morning. He’s chosen a bad day. I’ve got the Zaire bag to deal with.’

‘I’m sorry. I’d better not keep you then. I didn’t know that Davis was ill. It’s nothing serious?’

‘I don’t think so. Doctor Percival is going to see him at lunchtime.’

‘Percival?’ Daintry said. ‘Hasn’t he a doctor of his own?’

‘Well, if Doctor Percival sees him the cost is on the old firm, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It’s only that working with us he must get a bit out of date-medically, I mean.’

‘Oh well, it’s probably a very simple diagnosis.’ He heard the echo of another conversation.

‘Castle, all I wanted to see you about was you are quite satisfied with Davis?’

‘How do you mean ” satisfied “? We work well together.’

‘Sometimes I have to ask rather silly questions over simple ones-but then security’s my job. They don’t necessarily mean a great deal. Davis gambles, doesn’t he?’

‘A little. He likes to talk about horses. I doubt if he wins much, or loses much.’

‘And drinks?’

‘I don’t think he drinks more than I do.’

‘Then you have got complete confidence in him?’

‘Complete. Of course, we are all liable to make mistakes.’

‘Has there been a complaint of some kind? I wouldn’t want to see Davis shifted, unless it’s to L’M.’

‘Forget I asked you,’ Daintry said. ‘I ask the same sort of thing about everyone. Even about you. Do you know a painter called Nicholson?’

‘No. Is he one of us?’

‘No, no. Sometimes,’ Daintry said, ‘I feel out of touch. I wonder if-but I suppose at night you always go home to your family?’

‘Well, yes… I do.’

‘If, for some reason, you had to stay up in town one night… we might have dinner together.’

‘It doesn’t often happen,’ Castle said.

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘You see, my wife’s nervous when she’s left alone.’

‘Of course. I understand. It was only a passing idea.’ He was looking at the photograph again. ‘We used to have dinner together now and then. I hope to God she’ll be happy. There’s nothing one can ever do, is there?’

Silence fell like an old-fashioned smog, separating them from each other. Neither of them could see the pavement: they had to feel their way with a hand stretched out.

Castle said, ‘My son’s not of marriageable age. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that.’

‘You come in on Saturday, don’t you? I suppose you couldn’t just stay up an hour or two longer… I won’t know a soul at the wedding except my daughter and her mother, of course. She said-my daughter, I mean-that I could bring someone from the office if 1 wanted to. For company.’

Castle said, ‘Of course I’d be glad…you really think…’ He could seldom resist a call of distress however it was encoded.

For once Castle went without his lunch. He didn’t suffer from hunger he suffered only from a breach in his routine. He was uneasy. He wanted to see that Davis was all right.

As he was leaving the great anonymous building at one o’clock, after he had locked all his papers in the safe, even a humourless note from Watson, he saw Cynthia in the doorway. He told her, ‘I’m going to see how Davis is. Will you come?’

‘No, why should I? I have a lot of shopping to do. Why are you going? It’s nothing serious, is it?’

‘No, but I thought I’d just look in. He’s all alone in that flat except for those Environment types. And they never come home till evening.’

‘Doctor Percival promised to see him.’

‘Yes, I know, but he’s probably gone by now. I thought perhaps you might like to come along with me… just to see…

‘Oh well, if we don’t have to stay too long. We don’t need to take flowers, do we? Like to a hospital.’ She was a harsh girl.

Davis opened the door to them wearing a dressing-gown. Castle noticed how for a moment his face lit up at the sight of Cynthia, but then he realised that she had a companion.

He commented without enthusiasm, ‘Oh, you are here.’

‘What’s wrong, Davis?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing much. The old liver’s playing it up.’

‘I thought your friend said stomach cramps on the telephone,’ Cynthia said.

‘Well, the liver’s somewhere near the stomach, isn’t it? Or is it the kidneys? I’m awfully vague about my own geography.’

‘I’ll make your bed, Arthur,’ Cynthia said, ‘while you two talk.’

‘No, no, please no. It’s only a bit rumpled. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Have a drink.’

‘You and Castle can drink, but I’m going to make your bed.’

‘She has a very strong will,’ Davis said, ‘What’ll you take, Castle? A whisky?’

‘A small one, thank you.’

Davis laid out two glasses.

‘You’d better not have one if your liver’s bad. What did Doctor Percival say exactly?’

‘Oh, he tried to scare me. Doctors always do, don’t they?’

‘I don’t mind drinking alone.

‘He said if I didn’t pull up a bit I was in danger of cirrhosis. I have to go and have an X-ray tomorrow. I told him that I don’t drink more than anyone else, but he said some livers are weaker than others. Doctors always have the last word.’

‘I wouldn’t drink that whisky if I were you.’

‘He said “Cut down “, and I’ve cut this whisky down by half. And I’ve told him that I’d drop the port. So I will for a week or two. Anything to please. I’m glad you looked in, Castle. D’you know, Doctor Percival really did scare me a bit? I had the impression he wasn’t telling me everything he knew. It would be awful, wouldn’t it, if they had decided to send me to L’M. and then he wouldn’t let me go. And there’s another fear-have they spoken to you about me?’

‘No. At least Daintry asked me this morning if I was satisfied with you, and I said I was-completely.’

‘You’re a good friend, Castle.’

‘It’s only that stupid security check. You remember the day you met Cynthia at the Zoo… I told them you were at the dentist, but all the same…’

‘Yes. I’m the sort of man who’s always found out. And yet I nearly always obey the rules. It’s my form of loyalty, I suppose. You aren’t the same. If I take out a report once to read at lunch, I’m spotted. But I’ve seen you take them out time after time. You take risks-like they say priests have to do. If I really leaked something-without meaning to, of course-I’d come to you for confession.’

‘Expecting absolution?’

‘No. But expecting a bit of justice.’

‘Then you’d be wrong, Davis. I haven’t the faintest idea what the word ” justice ” means.’

‘So you’d condemn me to be shot at dawn?’

‘Oh no. I would always absolve the people I liked.’

‘Why, then it’s you who are the real security risk,’ Davis said. ‘How long do you suppose this damned check is going on?’

‘I suppose till they find their leak or decide there was no leak after all. Perhaps some man in MI5 has misread the evidence.’

‘Or some woman, Castle. Why not a woman? It could be one of our secretaries, if it’s not me or you or Watson. The thought gives me the creeps. Cynthia promised to dine with me the other night. I was waiting for her at Stone’s, and there at the table next door was a pretty girl waiting for someone too. We half smiled at each other because we had both been stood up. Companions in distress. I’d have spoken to her-after all, Cynthia had let me down and then the thought came perhaps she’s been planted to catch me, perhaps they heard me reserve the table on the office phone. Perhaps Cynthia kept away under orders. And then who should come in and join the girl-guess who-Daintry.’

‘It was probably his daughter.’

‘They use daughters in our outfit, don’t they? What a damn silly profession ours is. You can’t trust anyone. Now I even distrust Cynthia. She’s making my bed, and God knows what she hopes to find in it. But all she’ll get are yesterday’s bread-crumbs. Perhaps they’ll analyse those. A crumb could contain a microdot.’

‘I can’t stay much longer. The Zaire hag is in.’

Davis laid down his glass. ‘I’m damned if whisky tastes the same, since Percival put ideas in my head. Do you think I’ve got cirrhosis?’

‘No. Just go easy for a while.’

‘Easier said than done. When I’m bored, I drink. You’re lucky to have Sarah. How’s Sam?’

‘He asks after you a lot. He says nobody plays hide-and-seek like you do.’

‘A friendly little bastard. I wish I could have a little bastard too-but only with Cynthia. What a hope!’

‘The climate of Lourenco Marques isn’t very good…’

‘Oh, people say that it’s OK for children up to six.’

‘Well, perhaps Cynthia’s weakening. After all, she is making your bed.’

‘Yes, she’d mother me, I daresay, but she’s one of those girls who are looking all the time for someone to admire. She’d like someone serious like you. The trouble is that when I’m serious I can’t act serious. Acting serious embarrasses me. Can you picture anyone ever admiring me?’

‘Well, Sam does.’

‘I doubt if Cynthia enjoys hide-and-seek.’

Cynthia came back. She said, ‘Your bed was in an unholy mess. When was it made last?’

‘Our daily comes in on Mondays and Fridays and today is Thursday.’

‘Why don’t you make it yourself?’

‘Well, I do sort of pull it up around me when I get in.’

‘Those Environment types? What do they do?’

‘Oh, they’re trained not to notice pollution until it’s brought officially to their notice.’

Davis saw the two of them to the door. Cynthia said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ and went down the stairs. She called over her shoulder that she had a lot of shopping to do.

‘“She should never have looked at me If she meant I should not love her.”’

Davis quoted. Castle was surprised. He would not have imagined Davis reading Browning-except at school, of course,

‘Well,’ he said, ‘back to the bag.’

‘I’m sorry, Castle. I know how that hag irritates you. I’m not malingering, really I’m not. And it’s not a hangover. It’s my legs, my arms-they feel like jelly.’

‘Go back to bed.’

‘I think I will. Sam wouldn’t find me any good now at hide-and-seek,’ Davis added, leaning over the banisters, watching Castle go. As Castle reached the top of the stairs he called out, ‘Castle!’

‘Yes?’ Castle looked up.

‘You don’t think, do you, this might stop me?’ Stop you?’

‘I’d be a different man if I could get to Lourenco Marques.’