The Human Factor

‘I’ve done my best. I spoke to C.’

‘You’re a good chap, Castle. Thank you, whatever happens.’

‘Go back to bed and rest.’

‘I think I will.’ But he continued to stand there looking down while Castle turned away.

Castle and Daintry arrived last at the registry office and took seats in the back row of the grim brown room. They were divided by four rows of empty chairs from the other guests of whom there were about a dozen, separated into rival clans as in a church marriage, each clan regarding the other with critical interest and some disdain. Only champagne might possibly lead to a truce later between them.

‘I suppose that’s Colin,’ Colonel Daintry said, ‘indicating a young man who had just joined his daughter in front of the registrar’s table. He added, ‘I don’t even know his surname.’

‘Who’s the woman with the handkerchief? She seems upset about something.’

‘That’s my wife,’ Colonel Daintry said. ‘I hope we can slip away before she notices.’

‘You can’t do that. Your daughter won’t even know you’ve come.’

The registrar began to speak. Someone said ‘Shhh, as though they were in a theatre and the curtain had risen.’

‘Your son-in-law’s name is Clutters,’ Castle whispered. ‘Are you sure?’

‘No, but it sounded like that.’

‘The registrar gave the kind of brief Godless good wishes which are sometimes described as a lay sermon and a few people left, looking at watches as an excuse. ‘Don’t you think we could go too?’ Daintry asked.

‘No.’

All the same no one seemed to notice them as they stood in Victoria Street. The taxis came winging in like birds of prey and Daintry made one more effort to escape.

‘It’s not fair to your daughter,’ Castle argued.

‘I don’t even know where they’re all going,’ Daintry said. ‘To a hotel, I suppose.’

‘We can follow.’

And follow they did all the way to Harrods and beyond through a thin autumnal mist.

‘I can’t think what hotel…’ Daintry said. ‘I believe we’ve lost them.’ He leant forward to examine the car ahead. ‘No such luck. I can see the back of my wife’s head.’

‘It’s not much to go by.’

‘All the same I’m pretty sure of it. We were married for fifteen years.’ He added gloomily, ‘And we haven’t spoken for seven.’

‘Champagne will help,’ Castle said.

‘But I don’t like champagne.’

‘It’s awfully good of you, Castle, to come with me. I couldn’t have faced this alone.’

‘We’ll just have one glass and go away.’

‘I can’t imagine where we are heading. I haven’t been down this way for years. There seem to be so many new hotels.’

They proceeded in fits and starts down the Brompton Road.

‘One generally goes to the bride’s home,’ Castle said, ‘if it’s not to a hotel.’

‘She hasn’t got a home. Officially she shares a flat with some girl-friend, but apparently she’s been living quite a while with this chap Clutters. Clutters! What a name!’

‘The name may not have been Clutters. The registrar was very indistinct.’

The taxis began to deliver the other guests like gift wrapped parcels at a small too-pretty house in a crescent. It was lucky there were not many of them the houses here had not been built for large parties. Even with two dozen people one felt the walls might bend or the floors give way.

‘I think I know where we are-my wife’s flat,’ Daintry said. ‘I heard she’d bought something in Kensington.’

They edged their way up the overloaded stairs into a drawing-room. From every table, from the bookshelves, the piano, from the mantel, china owls gazed at the guests, alert, predatory, with cruel curved beaks. ‘Yes, it is her flat,’ Daintry said. ‘She always had a passion for owls but the passion’s grown since my day.’

They couldn’t see his daughter in the crowd which clustered before the buffet. Champagne bottles popped intermittently. There was a wedding cake, and a plaster owl was even balanced on the top of the pink sugar scaffolding. A tall man with a moustache trimmed exactly like Daintry’s came up to them and said, ‘I don’t know who you are, but do help yourselves to the champers.’ Judging by the slang he must have dated back nearly to the First World War. He had the absent-minded air of a rather ancient host. ‘We’ve saved on waiters,’ he explained.

‘I’m Daintry.’

‘Daintry?’

‘This is my daughter’s marriage,’ Daintry said in a voice as dry as a biscuit.

‘Oh, then you must be Sylvia’s husband?’

‘Yes. I didn’t catch your name.’

‘The man went away calling, Sylvia! Sylvia!’

‘Let’s get out,’ Daintry said in desperation.

‘You must say hello to your daughter.’

A woman burst her way through the guests at the buffet. Castle recognised the woman who had wept at the registrar’s, but she didn’t look at all like weeping now. She said, ‘Darling, Edward told me you were here. How nice of you to come. I know how desperately busy you always are.’

‘Yes, we really have to be going. This is Mr Castle. From the office.’

‘That damned office. How do you do, Mr Castle? I must find Elizabeth-and Colin.’

‘Don’t disturb them. We really have to be going.’

‘I’m only up for the day myself. From Brighton. Edward drove me up.’

‘Who’s Edward?’

‘He’s been awfully helpful. Ordering the champagne and things. A woman needs a man on these occasions. You haven’t changed a bit, darling. how long is it?’

‘Six-seven years?’

‘How time flies.’

‘You’ve collected a lot more owls.’

‘Owls?’ She went away calling, ‘Colin, Elizabeth, come over here.’ They came hand in hand. Daintry didn’t associate his daughter with child-like tenderness, but she probably thought hand-holding a duty at a wedding.

Elizabeth said, ‘How sweet of you to make it, Father. I know how you hate this sort of thing.’

‘I’ve never experienced it before.’ He looked at her companion, who wore a carnation and a very new pinstripe suit. His hair was jet black and well combed around the ears.

‘How do you do, sir. Elizabeth has spoken such a lot about you.’

‘I can’t say the same,’ Daintry said. ‘So you are Colin Clutters?’

‘Not Clutters, Father. Whatever made you think that? His name’s Clough. I mean our name’s Clough.’

A surge of latecomers who had not been at the registry office had separated Castle from Colonel Daintry. A man in a double-breasted waistcoat told him, I don’t know a soul here-except Colin, of course.’

There was a smash of breaking china. Mrs Daintry’s voice rose above the clamour. ‘For Christ’s sake, Edward, is it one of the owls?’

‘No, no, don’t worry, dear. Only an ashtray.’

‘Not a soul,’ repeated the man with the waistcoat. ‘My name’s Joiner, by the way.’

‘Mine’s Castle.’

‘You know Colin?’

‘No, I came with Colonel Daintry.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘The bride’s father.’

Somewhere a telephone began to ring. No one paid any attention.

‘You ought to have a word with young Colin. He’s a bright lad.’

‘He’s got a strange surname, hasn’t he?’

‘Strange?’

‘Well… Clutters…’

‘His name’s Clough.’

‘Oh, then I heard it wrong.’

Again something broke. Edward’s voice rose reassuringly above the din. ‘Don’t worry, Sylvia. Nothing serious. All the owls are safe.’

‘He’s quite revolutionised our publicity.’

‘You work together?’

‘You might say I am Jameson’s Baby Powder.’

The man called Edward grasped Castle’s arm. He said, ‘Is your name Castle?’

‘Yes.’

‘Somebody wants you on the telephone.’

‘But no one knows I’m here.’

‘It’s a girl. She’s a bit upset. Said it was urgent.’

Castle’s thoughts went to Sarah. She knew that he was attending this wedding, but not even Daintry knew where they were going to end up. Was Sam ill again? He asked, ‘Where’s the telephone?’

‘Follow me,’ but when they reached it-a white telephone beside a white double bed, guarded by a white owl-the receiver had been put back. ‘Sorry,’ Edward said, ‘I expect she’ll ring again.’

‘Did she give a name?’

‘Couldn’t hear it with all this noise going on. Had an impression that she’d been crying. Come and have some more champers.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here near the phone.’

‘Well, excuse me if I don’t stay here with you. I have to look after all these owls, you see. Sylvia would be heartbroken if one of them got damaged. I suggested we tidied them away, but she’s got more than a hundred of them. The place would have looked a bit bare without them. Are you a friend of Colonel Daintry?’

‘We work in the same office.’

‘One of those hush-hush jobs, isn’t it? A bit embarrassing for me meeting him like this. Sylvia didn’t think he’d come. Perhaps I ought to have stayed away myself. Tactful. But then who would have looked after the owls?’

Castle sat down on the edge of the great white bed, and the white owl glared at him beside the white telephone as if it recognised him as an illegal immigrant who had just perched on the edge of this strange continent of snow-even the walls were white and there was a white rug under his feet. He was afraid-afraid for Sam, afraid for Sarah, afraid for himself-fear poured like an invisible gas from the mouth of the silent telephone. He and all he loved were menaced by the mysterious call. The clamour of voices from the living-room seemed now no more than a rumour of distant tribes beyond the desert of snow. Then the telephone rang. He pushed the white owl to one side and lifted the receiver.

To his relief he heard Cynthia’s voice. ‘Is that M.C.?’

‘Yes, how did you know where to find me?’

‘I tried the registry office, but you’d left. So I found a Mrs Daintry in the telephone book.’

‘What’s the matter, Cynthia? You sound odd.’

‘M.C., an awful thing has happened. Arthur’s dead.’

Again, as once before, he wondered for a moment who Arthur was.

‘Davis? Dead? But he was coming back to the office next week.’

‘I know. The daily found him when she went to-to make his bed.’ Her voice broke.

‘I’ll come back to the office, Cynthia. Have you seen Doctor Percival?’

‘He rang me up to tell me.’

‘I must go and tell Colonel Daintry.’

‘Oh, M.C., I wish I’d been nicer to him. All I ever did for him was-was to make his bed.’ He could hear her catch her breath, trying not to sob.

‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He rang off.

The living-room was as crowded as ever and just as noisy. The cake had been cut and people were looking for unobtrusive places to hide their portions. Daintry stood alone with a slice in his fingers behind a table littered with owls. He said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s be off, Castle. I don’t understand this sort of thing.’

Daintry, I’ve had a call from the office. Davis is dead.’

‘Davis?’

‘He’s dead. Doctor Percival…’

‘Percival!’ Daintry. exclaimed. ‘My God, that man. He pushed his slice of cake among the owls and a big grey owl toppled off and smashed on the floor.

‘Edward,’ a woman’s voice shrieked, ‘John’s broken the grey owl.’

‘Edward thrust his way towards them. I can’t be everywhere at once, Sylvia.’

Mrs Daintry appeared behind him. She said, ‘John, you damned old boring fool. I’ll never forgive you for this-never. What the hell are you doing anyway in my house?’

Daintry said, ‘Come away, Castle. I’ll buy you another owl, Sylvia.’

‘It’s irreplaceable, that one.’

‘A man’s dead,’ Daintry said. ‘He’s irreplaceable too.’

‘I had not expected this to happen,’ Doctor Percival told them.

To Castle it seemed an oddly indifferent phrase for him to use, a phrase as cold as the poor body which lay in crumpled pyjamas stretched out upon the bed, the jacket wide open and the bare chest exposed, where no doubt they had long since listened and searched in vain for the least sound of a heartbeat. Doctor Percival had struck him

hitherto as a very genial man, but the geniality was chilled in the presence of the dead, and there was an incongruous note of embarrassed apology in the strange phrase he had uttered.

The sudden change had come as a shock to Castle, when he found himself standing in this neglected room, after all the voices of strangers, the flocks of china owls and the explosion of corks at Mrs Daintry’s. Doctor Percival had fallen silent again after that one unfortunate phrase and nobody else spoke. He stood back from the bed rather as though he were exhibiting a picture to a couple of unkind critics, and was waiting in apprehension for their judgement. Daintry was silent too. He seemed content to watch Doctor Percival as if it were up to him to explain away some obvious fault which he was expected to find in the painting.

Castle felt an urge to break the long silence.

‘Who are those men in the sitting-room? What are they doing?’

Doctor Percival turned with reluctance away from the bed. ‘What men? Oh, those. I asked the Special Branch to take a look around.’

‘Why? Do you think he was killed?’

‘No, no. Of course not. Nothing of that kind. His liver was in a shocking state. He had an X-ray a few days ago.’

‘Then why did you say you didn’t expect…?’

‘I didn’t expect things to go so rapidly.’

‘I suppose there’ll be a post mortem?’

‘Of course. Of course.’

The ‘of courses’ multiplied like flies round the body.

Castle went back into the sitting-room. There was a bottle of whisky and a used glass and a copy of Playboy on the coffee table.

‘I told him he had to stop drinking,’ Doctor Percival called after Castle. ‘He wouldn’t pay attention.’

There were two men in the room. One of them picked up Playboy and ruffled and shook the pages. The other was going through the drawers of the bureau. He told his companion, ‘Here’s his address book. You’d better go through the names. Check the telephone numbers in case they don’t correspond.’

‘I still don’t understand what they are after,’ Castle said.

‘Just a security check,’ Doctor Percival explained. I tried to get hold of you, Daintry, because it’s really your pigeon, but apparently you were away at some wedding or other.’

‘Yes.’

‘There seems to have been some carelessness recently at the office. C’s away but he would have wanted us to be sure that the poor chap hadn’t left anything lying about.’

‘Like telephone numbers attached to the wrong names?’ Castle asked. I wouldn’t call that exactly carelessness.’

‘These chaps always follow a certain routine. Isn’t that so, Daintry?’

But Daintry didn’t reply. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom looking at the body.

One of the men said, ‘Take a squint at this, Taylor.’ He handed the other a sheet of paper. The other read aloud, ‘Bonne chance, Kalamazoo, Widow Twanky.’

‘Bit odd, isn’t it?’

Taylor said, ‘Bonne chance is French, Piper. Kalamazoo sounds like a town in Africa.’

‘Africa, eh? Might be important.’

Castle said, ‘Better look in the Evening News. You’ll probably find that they are three horses. He always bet on the tote at the weekend.’

‘Ah,’ Piper said. He sounded a little discouraged.

‘I think we ought to leave our friends of the Special Branch to do their job in peace,’ Doctor Percival said.

‘What about Davis’s family?’ Castle asked.

‘The office has been seeing to that. The only next of kin seems to be a cousin in Droitwich. A dentist.’

Piper said, ‘Here’s something that looks a bit off-colour to me, sir.’ He held out a book to Doctor Percival, and Castle intercepted it. It was a small selection of Robert Browning’s poems. Inside was a book plate with a coat of arms and the name of a school, the Droitwich Royal Grammar School. Apparently the prize had been awarded in 1910 to a pupil called William Davis for English Composition and William Davis had written in black ink in a small finicky hand, Passed on to my son Arthur from his father on his passing First in Physics, June 29, 1953: Browning and physics and a boy of sixteen certainly seemed a bit strange in conjunction, but presumably it was not this that Piper meant by off-colour ‘.

‘What is it?’ Doctor Percival asked.

‘Browning’s poems. I don’t see anything off-colour about them.’

All the same he had to admit that the little book didn’t go with Aldermaston and the tote and Playboy, the dreary office routine and the Zaire bag; does one always discover clues to the complexity even of the most simple life if one rummages enough after death? Of course, Davis might have kept the book from filial piety, but it was obvious that he had read it. Hadn’t he quoted Browning the last time Castle saw him alive?

‘If you look, sir, there are passages marked,’ Piper said to Doctor Percival. You know more about book codes than I do. I thought I ought to draw attention.’

‘What do you think, Castle?’

‘Yes, there are marks.’ He turned the pages. The book belonged to his father and of course they might be his father’s marks-except that the ink looks too fresh: he puts a ” c ” against them.’

‘Significant?’

Castle had never taken Davis seriously, not his drinking, not his gambling, not even his hopeless love for Cynthia, but a dead body could not be so easily ignored. For the first time he felt real curiosity about Davis. Death had made Davis important. Death gave Davis a kind of stature. The dead are perhaps wiser than we are. He turned the pages of the little book like a member of the Browning Society keen on interpreting a text.

Daintry dragged himself away from the bedroom door. He said, ‘There isn’t anything, is there… in those marks?’

‘Anything what?’

‘Significant.’ He repeated Percival’s question.

‘Significant? I suppose there might be. Of a whole state of mind.’

‘What do you mean?’ Percival asked. ‘Do you really think…?’ He sounded hopeful, as if he positively wished that the man who was dead next door might have represented a security risk and, well, in a way he had, Castle thought. Love and hate are both dangerous, as he had warned Boris. A scene came to his mind: a bedroom in Lourenco Marques, the hum of an air conditioner, and Sarah’s voice on the telephone, ‘Here I am’, and then the sudden sense of great joy. His love of Sarah had led him to Carson, and Carson finally to Boris. A man in love walks through the world like an anarchist, carrying a time bomb.

‘You really mean there is some evidence…?’ Doctor Percival went on. You’ve been trained in codes. I haven’t.’

‘Listen to this passage. It’s marked with a vertical line and the letter “c”.’

‘ “Yet I will but say what mere friends say, Or only a thought stronger: I will hold your hand but as long as all may…” ‘

‘Have you any idea what ” c ” stands for?’ Percival asked and again there was that note of hope which Castle found irritating. It could mean, couldn’t it, “code “, to remind him that he had already used that particular passage? In a book code I suppose one must be careful not to use the same passage twice.’

‘True enough. Here’s another marked passage.’

“Worth how well, those dark grey eyes, That hair so dark and dear, how worth, That a man should strive and agonise,”

‘And taste a veriest hell on earth . .” ‘

‘It sounds to me like poetry, sir,’ Piper said.

‘Again a vertical line and a “c “, Doctor Percival.’ -You really think then…?’

‘Davis said to me once, ” I can’t be serious when I’m serious.” So I suppose he had to go to Browning for words.’

‘And “c”?’

‘It only stands for a girl’s name, Doctor Percival. Cynthia. His secretary. A girl he was in love with. One of us. Not a case for the Special Branch.’

Daintry had been a brooding restless presence, silent, locked in thoughts of his own. He said now with a sharp note of accusation, There should be a post mortem.’

‘Of course,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘if his doctor wants it. I’m not his doctor. I’m only his colleague though he did consult me, and we have the X-rays.’

‘His doctor should be here now.’

‘I’ll have him called as soon as these men have finished their work. You of all people, Colonel Daintry, will appreciate the importance of that. Security is the first consideration.’

‘I wonder what a post mortem will show, Doctor Percival.’

‘I think I can tell you that his liver is almost totally destroyed.’

‘Destroyed?’

‘By drink, of course, Colonel. What else? Didn’t you hear me tell Castle?’

Castle left them to their subterranean duel. It was time to have a last look at Davis before the pathologist got to work on him. He was glad that the face showed no indication of pain. He drew the pyjamas together across the hollow chest. A button was missing. Sewing on buttons was not part of a daily woman’s job. The telephone beside the bed gave a small preliminary tinkle which came to nothing. Perhaps somewhere far away a microphone and a recorder were being detached from the line. Davis would no longer be under surveillance. He had escaped.

Castle sat over what he meant to be his final report. Davis being dead the information from the African section must obviously cease. If the leaks continued there could be no doubt whose was the responsibility, but if the leaks stopped the guilt would be attributed with certainty to the dead man. Davis was beyond suffering; his personal file would be closed and sent to some central store of records, where no one would bother to examine it. What if it contained a story of treachery? Like a Cabinet secret it would be well guarded for thirty years. In a sad way it had been a providential death.

Castle could hear Sarah reading aloud to Sam before packing him off for the night. It was half an hour after his usual bedtime, but tonight he had needed that extra childish comfort for the first week of school had passed unhappily.

What a long slow business it was transcribing a report into book code. He would never now get to an end of War and Peace. The next day he would burn his copy for security in a bonfire of autumn leaves without waiting for the Trollope to arrive. He felt relief and regret relief because he had repaid as far as he could his debt of gratitude to Carson, and regret that he would never be able to close the dossier on Uncle Remus and complete his revenge on Cornelius Muller.

When he had finished his report he went downstairs to wait for Sarah. Tomorrow was Sunday. He would have to leave the report in the drop, that third drop which would never be used again; he had signalled its presence there from a call box in Piccadilly Circus before he caught his train at Euston. It was an inordinately slow business, this way of making his last communication, but a quicker and more dangerous route had been reserved for use only in a final emergency. He poured himself a triple J. & B. and the murmur of voices upstairs began to give him a temporary sense of peace. A door was closed softly, footsteps passed along the corridor above; the stairs always creaked on the way down he thought how to some people this would seem a dull and domestic, even an intolerable routine. To him it represented a security he had been afraid every hour he might lose. He knew exactly what Sarah would say when she came into the sitting-room, and he knew what he would answer. Familiarity was a protection against the darkness of King’s Road outside and the lighted lamp of the police station at the corner. He had always pictured a uniformed policeman, whom he would probably know well by sight, accompanying the man from the Special Branch when the hour struck.

‘You’ve taken your whisky?’

‘Can I give you one?’

‘A small one, darling.’

‘Sam all right?’

‘He was asleep before I tucked him in.’

As in an unmutilated cable, there was not one numeral wrongly transcribed.

He handed her the glass: he hadn’t been able to speak until now of what had happened.

‘How was the wedding, darling?’

‘Pretty awful. I was sorry for poor Daintry.’

‘Why poor?’

‘He was losing a daughter and I doubt if he has got any friends.’

‘There seem to be such a lot of lonely people in your office.’

‘Yes. All those that don’t pair off for company. Drink up, Sarah.’

‘What’s the hurry?’

‘I want to get both of us another glass.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got bad news, Sarah. I couldn’t tell you in front of Sam. It’s about Davis. Davis is dead.’

‘Dead? Davis?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Doctor Percival talks of his liver.’

‘But a liver doesn’t go like that-from one day to another.’

‘It’s what Doctor Percival says.’

‘You don’t believe him?’

‘No. Not altogether. I don’t think Daintry does either.’ She gave herself two fingers of whisky he had never seen her do that before. ‘Poor, poor Davis.’

Daintry wants an independent post mortem. Percival was quite ready for that. He’s obviously quite sure his diagnosis will be confirmed.’

If he’s sure, then it must be true?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. They can arrange so many things in our firm. Perhaps even a post mortem.’

‘What are we going to tell Sam?

‘The truth. It’s no good keeping deaths from a child. They happen all the time.’

‘But he loved Davis so much. Darling, let me say nothing for a week or two. Until he finds his feet at school.’

‘You know best.’

‘I wish to God you could get away from all those people.’

‘I shall in a few years.’

‘I mean now. This minute. We’d take Sam out of bed and go abroad. The first plane to anywhere.’

‘Wait till I’ve got my pension.’

‘I could work, Maurice. We could go to France. It would be easier there. They’re used to my colour.’

‘It isn’t possible, Sarah. Not yet.’

‘Why? Give me one good reason…’

‘He tried to speak lightly. ‘Well, you know a man has to give proper notice.’

‘Do they bother about things like notice?’

‘He was scared by the quickness of her perception when she said, ‘Did they give Davis notice?’

‘He said, ‘If it was his liver…’

‘You don’t believe that, do you? Don’t forget that I worked for you once-for them. I was your agent. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the last month how anxious you’ve been-even about the meter man. There’s been a leak, is that it? In your section?’

‘I think they think so.’

‘And they pinned it on Davis. Do you believe Davis was guilty?’

‘It may not have been a deliberate leak. He was very careless.’

‘You think they may have killed him because he was careless?

‘I suppose that in our outfit there’s such a thing as criminal carelessness.’

‘It might have been you they suspected, not Davis. And then you’d have died. From too much J. & B.’

‘Oh, I’ve always been very careful,’ and he added as a sad joke, Except when I fell in love with you.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I want a breath of air and so does Buller.’

On the other side of the long ride through the Common known for some reason as Cold Harbour the beech woods began, sloping down towards the Ashridge road. Castle sat on a bank while Buller rummaged among last year’s leaves. He knew he had no business to linger there. Curiosity was no excuse. He should have made his drop and gone. A car came slowly up the road from the direction of Berkhamsted and Castle looked at his watch. It was four hours since he had made his signal from the call box in Piccadilly Circus. He could just make out the number plate of the car, but as he might have expected it was just as strange to him as the car, a small red Toyota. Near the lodge at the entrance to Ashridge Park, the car stopped. No other car was in sight and no pedestrian. ‘The driver turned off his lights, and then as though he had second thoughts turned them on again. A noise behind Castle made his heart leap, but it was only Buller bumbling through the bracken.

Castle climbed away through the tall olive-skinned trees which had turned black against the last light. It was over fifty years since he had discovered the hollow in one trunk… four, five, six trees back from the road. In those days he had been forced to stretch almost his full height to reach the hole, but his heart had knocked in the same erratic fashion as it did now. At ten years old he was leaving a message for someone he loved: the girl was only seven. He had shown her the hiding-place when they were together on a picnic, and he had told her he would leave something important there for her the next time he came.

On the first occasion he left a large peppermint humbug wrapped in greaseproof paper, and when he revisited the hole it had gone. Then he left a note which declared his love in capital letters because she had only just begun to read but when he came back the third time he found the note was still there but disfigured by a vulgar drawing. Some stranger, he thought, must have discovered the hiding-place; he wouldn’t believe that she was responsible until she put her tongue out at him, as she went by on the other side of the High Street, and he realised she was disappointed because she had not found another humbug. It had been his first experience of sexual suffering, and he never returned to the tree until almost fifty years later he was asked by a man in the lounge of the Regent Palace, whom he never saw again, to suggest another safe drop.

He put Buller on his lead and watched from his hiding-place in the bracken. The man from the car had to use a torch to find the hole. Castle saw his lower half outlined for a moment as the torch descended the trunk: a plump belly, an open fly. A clever precaution he had even stored up a reasonable amount of urine. When the torch turned and lit the way back towards the Ashridge road, Castle started home. He told himself, ‘This is the last report,’ and his thoughts went back to the child of seven. She had seemed lonely at the picnic, where they had first met, she was shy and she was ugly, and perhaps he was drawn to her for those reasons.

Why are some of us, he wondered, unable to love success or power or great beauty? Because we feel unworthy of them, because we feel more at home with failure? He didn’t believe that was the reason. Perhaps one wanted the right

The nights after Davis died were full of dreams for Castle, dreams formed out of broken fragments of a past which pursued him till the daylight hours. Davis played no part in them perhaps because the thought of him, in their now reduced and saddened sub-section filled many waking hours. The ghost of Davis hovered over the bag from Zaire and the telegrams which Cynthia encoded were now more mutilated than ever.

So at night Castle dreamt of a South Africa reconstructed with hatred, though sometimes the bits and pieces were jumbled up with an Africa which he had forgotten how much he loved. In one dream he came on Sarah suddenly in a litter-strewn Johannesburg park sitting on a bench for blacks only: he turned away to find a different bench. Carson separated from him at a lavatory door and chose the door reserved for blacks, leaving him on the outside ashamed of his lack of courage, but then quite another sort of dream came to him on the third night.

When he woke he said to Sarah, ‘It’s funny. I dreamt of Rougemont. I haven’t thought of him for years.’

‘Rougemont?’

‘I forgot. You never knew Rougemont.’

‘Who was he?’

‘A farmer in the Free State. I liked him in a way as much as I liked Carson.’

‘Was he a Communist? Surely not if he was a farmer.’

‘No. He was one of those who will have to die when your people take control.’

‘My people?’

‘I meant of course “our people “,’ he said with sad haste as though he had been in danger of breaking a promise.

Rougemont lived on the edge of a semi-desert not far from an old battlefield of the Boer War. His ancestors, who were Huguenot, had fled from France at the time of the persecution, but he spoke no French, only Afrikaans and English. He had been, before he was born, assimilated to the Dutch way of life but not to apartheid. He stood aside from it he wouldn’t vote Nationalist, he despised the United Party, and some undetermined sense of loyalty to his ancestors kept him from voting for the small band of progressives. It was not a heroic attitude, but perhaps in his eyes, as in his grandfather’s, heroism began where politics stopped. He treated his labourers with kindness and understanding, with no condescension. Castle listened to him one day as he debated with his black foreman on the state of the crops-they argued with each other as equals. The family of Rougemont and the tribe of the foreman had arrived in South Africa at much the same time. Rougemont’s grandfather had not been an ostrich millionaire from the Cape, like Cornelius Muller’s: when he was sixty years old grandfather Rougemont had ridden with De Wet’s commando against the English invaders and he had been wounded there on the local kopje, which leaned with the winter clouds over the farm, where the Bushmen hundreds of years earlier had carved the rocks with animal forms.

Fancy climbing up that under fire with a pack on your back,’ Rougemont had remarked to Castle. He admired the British troops for their courage and endurance far from home rather as though they were legendary marauders in a history book, like the Vikings who had once descended on the Saxon coast. He had no resentment against those of the Vikings who remained, only perhaps a certain pity for a people without roots in this old tired beautiful land where his family had settled three hundred years ago. He had said to Castle one day over a glass of whisky, ‘ You say you are writing a study of apartheid, but you’ll never understand our complexities. I hate apartheid as much as you do, but you are much more a stranger to me than any of my labourers. We belong here you are as much an outsider as the tourists who come and go.’ Castle felt sure that, when the time for decision came, he would take the gun on his living-room wall in defence of this difficult area of cultivation on the edge of a desert. He would not die fighting for apartheid or for the white race, but for so many morgen which he called his own, subject to drought and floods and earthquakes and cattle disease and snakes which he regarded as a minor pest like mosquitoes.

Was Rougemont one of your agents?’ Sarah asked.

‘No, but oddly enough it was through him that I met Carson.’ He might have added, ‘And through Carson I have joined Rougemont’s enemies.’ Rougemont had hired Carson to defend one of his labourers accused by the local police of a crime of violence of which he was innocent.

Sarah said, ‘I sometimes wish I was still your agent. You tell me so much less than you did then.’

‘I never told you much-perhaps you thought I did, but I told you as little as I could, for your own safety, and then it was often lies. Like the book I intended to write on apartheid.’

‘I thought things would be different,’ Sarah said, ‘in England. I thought there would be no more secrets.’ She drew in her breath and was again immediately asleep, but Castle lay awake a long time. He had at such moments an enormous temptation to trust her, to tell her everything, much as a man who has had a passing affair with a woman, an affair which is finished, wants suddenly to trust his wife with the whole sad history to explain once and for all the unexplained silences, the small deceptions, the worries they haven’t been able to share, and in the same way as that other man he came to the conclusion, Why worry her when it’s all over?’ for he really believed, if only for a while, that it was over.

It seemed very strange to Castle to be sitting in the same room he had occupied for so many years alone with Davis and to see, facing him across the table, the man called Cornelius Muller-a Muller curiously transformed, a Muller who said to him, I was so sorry to hear the news when I got back from Bonn… I hadn’t met your colleague, of course… but to you it must have been a great shock…’

a Muller who began to resemble an ordinary human being, not an officer of BOSS but a man whom he might have met by chance in the train on the way to Euston. He was struck by the note of sympathy in the tone of Muller’s voice it sounded oddly sincere. In England, he thought, we have become increasingly cynical about all deaths which do not concern us closely, and even in those cases it is polite to fit on quickly a mask of indifference in the presence of a stranger; death and business don’t go together. But in the Dutch Reformed Church to which Muller belonged, a death, Castle remembered, was still the most important event in family life. Castle had attended a funeral once in the Transvaal, and it was not the sorrow which he recalled but the dignity, even the protocol, of the occasion. Death remained socially important to Muller, even though he was an officer of BOSS.

‘Well,’ Castle said, ‘it was certainly unexpected.’ He added, ‘ I’ve asked my secretary to bring me in the Zaire and Mozambique files. For Malawi we have to depend on MI5, and I can’t show you their material without permission.’

‘I’ll be seeing them when I’ve finished with you,’ Muller said.

He added, ‘I enjoyed so much the evening I spent at your house. Meeting your wife…’ He hesitated a little before he continued, ‘and your son.’

Castle hoped that these opening remarks were only a polite preparation before Muller took up again his enquiries about the route Sarah had taken into Swaziland. An enemy had to remain a caricature if he was to be kept at a safe distance: an enemy should never come alive. The generals were right no Christmas cheer ought to be exchanged between the trenches.

He said, ‘Of course Sarah and I were very happy to see you.’ He rang his bell. I’m sorry. They’re taking the hell of a long time over those files. Davis’s death has a bit upset our routine.’

‘A girl he didn’t know answered the bell. I telephoned five minutes ago for the files,’ he said. ‘Where’s Cynthia?’

‘She isn’t in.’

‘Why isn’t she in?

The girl looked at him with stone-cold eyes. ‘She’s taken the day off.’

‘Is she sick?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Penelope.’

‘Well, will you tell me, Penelope, what exactly you mean by not exactly?’

‘She’s upset. It’s natural, isn’t it? Today’s the funeral. Arthur’s funeral.’

‘Today? I’m sorry. I forgot.’ He added, ‘All the same, Penelope, 1 would like you to get us the files.’

When she had left the room he said to Muller, ‘I’m sorry for all this confusion. It must give you a strange impression of the way we do things. I really had forgotten-they’re burying Davis today-they’re having a funeral service at eleven. It’s been delayed because of the post mortem. The girl remembered. I forgot.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Muller said, ‘I would have changed our date if I’d known.’

‘It’s not your fault. The fact is I have an official diary and a private diary. Here I have you marked, you see, for 10 Thursday. The private diary I keep at home, and I must have written the funeral down in that one. I’m always forgetting to compare the two.’

‘All the same… forgetting the funeral… isn’t that a bit odd?’

‘Yes, Freud would say I wanted to forget.’

‘Just fix another date for me and I’ll be off. Tomorrow or the next day?’

‘No, no. Which is more important anyway? Uncle Remus or listening to prayers being said over poor Davis? Where was Carson buried by the way?’

‘At his home. A small town near Kimberley. I suppose you’ll be surprised when I tell you that I was there?’

‘No, I imagine you had to watch and observe who the mourners were.’

‘Someone-you’re right-someone had to watch. But I chose to go.’

‘Not Captain Van Donck?’

‘No. He would have been easily recognised.’

‘I can’t think what they are doing with those files.’

‘This man Davis perhaps he didn’t mean very much to you?’ Muller asked.

‘Well, not as much as Carson. Whom your people killed. But my son was fond of him.’

‘Carson died of pneumonia.’

‘Yes. Of course. So you told me. I had forgotten that too.’

When the files at last came Castle went through them, seeking to answer Muller’s questions, but with only half of his mind. ‘We have no reliable information about that yet,’ he found himself saying for the third time. Of course it was a deliberate lie-he was protecting a source from Muller-for they were approaching dangerous ground, working together up to that point of non-cooperation which was still undetermined by either of them.

He asked Muller, Is Uncle Remus really practicable? I can’t believe the Americans will ever get involved again I mean with troops in a strange continent. They are just as ignorant of Africa as they were of Asia-except, of course, through novelists like Hemingway. He would go off on a month’s safari arranged by a travel agency and write about white hunters and shooting lions-the poor half-starved brutes reserved for tourists.’

‘The ideal that Uncle Remus has in mind,’ Muller said, ‘is to make the use of troops almost unnecessary. At any rate in great numbers. A few technicians, of course, but they’re already with us. America maintains a guided missile tracking station and a space tracking station in the Republic, and they have over-flying rights to support those stations you certainly know all that. No one has protested, no one has marched. There have been no student riots in Berkeley, no questions in Congress. Our internal security so far has proved excellent. You see, our race laws have in a way been justified: they prove an excellent cover. We don’t have to charge anyone with espionage-that would only draw attention. Your friend Carson was dangerous but he’d have been more dangerous still if we had had to try him for espionage. A lot is going on now at the tracking stations-that’s why we want a close cooperation with your people. You can pinpoint any danger and we can deal with it quietly. In some ways you’re much better placed than we are to penetrate the liberal elements, or even the black nationalists. Take an example. I’m grateful for what you’ve given me on Mark Ngambo-of course we knew it already. But now we can he satisfied that we’ve missed nothing important. There’s no danger from that particular angle-for the time anyway. The next five years, you see, are of vital importance I mean for our survival.’

‘But I wonder, Muller-can you survive? You’ve got a long open frontier too long for minefields.’

‘Of the old-fashioned kind, yes,’ Muller said. ‘It’s as well for us that the hydrogen bomb made the atom bomb just a tactical weapon. Tactical is a reassuring word. No one will start a nuclear war because a tactical weapon has been used in almost desert country very far away.’

‘How about the radiation?’

We are lucky in our prevailing winds and our deserts. Besides, the tactical bomb is reasonably clean. Cleaner than the bomb at Hiroshima and we know how limited the effect of that was. In the areas which may for a few years be radioactive there are few white Africans. We plan to canalise any invasions there are.’

‘I begin to see the picture,’ Castle said. He remembered Sam, as he remembered him when he looked at the newspaper photograph of the drought-the spread-eagled body and the vulture, but the vulture would be dead too of radiation.

‘That’s what I came here to show you the general picture we needn’t go into all the details so that you can properly evaluate any information you obtain. The tracking stations are at this moment the sensitive point.’

‘Like the race laws they can cover a multitude of sins?’

‘Exactly. You and I needn’t go on playing with each other. I know you’ve been instructed to keep certain things from me, and I quite understand. I’ve received just the same orders as you have. The only important thing is we should both look at identically the same picture; we shall be fighting on the same side, so we’ve got to see the same picture.’

‘In fact we’re in the same box?’ Castle said, ‘making his private joke against them all, against BOSS, against his own service, even against Boris.

‘Box? Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.’ He looked at his watch. Didn’t you say the funeral was at eleven? It’s ten to eleven now. You’d better be off.’

‘The funeral can go on without me. If there’s an afterlife Davis will understand, and if there isn’t…’

‘I’m quite sure there is an afterlife,’ Cornelius Muller said.

‘You are? Doesn’t the idea frighten you a bit?’ Why should it? I’ve always tried to do my duty.’

‘But those little tactical atomic weapons of yours. Think of all the blacks who will die before you do and be there waiting for you.’

‘Terrorists,’ Muller said. ‘I don’t expect to meet them again.’

‘I didn’t mean the guerrillas. I mean all the families in the infected area. Children, girls, the old grannies.’

‘I expect they’ll have their own kind of heaven,’ Muller said.

‘Apartheid in heaven?’

‘Oh, I know you are laughing at me. But I don’t suppose they’d enjoy our sort of heaven, do you? Anyway I leave all that to the theologians. You didn’t exactly spare the children in Hamburg, did you?

‘Thank God, I didn’t participate as I’m doing now.’

‘I think if you aren’t going to the funeral, Castle, we should get on with our business.’

‘I’m sorry. I agree.’ Indeed he was sorry; he was even afraid, as he had been in the offices of BOSS that morning in Pretoria. For seven years he had trodden with unremitting care through the minefields, and now with Cornelius Muller he had taken his first wrong step. Was it possible that he had fallen into a trap set by someone who understood his temperament?

‘Of course,’ Muller said, ‘I know that you English like arguing for the sake of arguing. Why, even your C pulled my leg about apartheid, but when it comes to Uncle Remus… well, you and I have to be serious.’

‘Yes, we’d better get back to Uncle Remus.’

‘I have permission to tell you-in broad lines, of course how things went with me in Bonn.’

‘You had difficulties?’

‘Not serious ones. The Germans-unlike other ex-colonial powers-have a lot of secret sympathy for us. You could say that it goes back as far as the Kaiser’s telegram to President Kruger. They are worried about South-West Africa; they would rather see us control South-West Africa than a vacuum there. After all they ruled the South-West more brutally than we have ever done, and the West needs our uranium.’

‘You brought back an agreement?’

‘One shouldn’t talk of an agreement. We are no longer in the days of secret treaties. I only had contact with my opposite number, not with the Foreign Secretary or the Chancellor. Just the same way as your C has been talking with the C I A in Washington. What I hope is that we’ve all three reached a clearer understanding.’

‘A secret understanding instead of a secret treaty?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And the French?’

‘No trouble there. If we are Calvinist they’re Cartesian. Descartes didn’t worry about the religious persecution of his time. The French have a great influence on Senegal, the Ivory Coast, they even have a fair understanding with Mobutu in Kinshasa. Cuba won’t seriously interfere in Africa again (America has seen to that), and Angola won’t be a danger for a good many years. No one is apocalyptic today. Even a Russian wants to die in his bed, not in a bunker. At the worst, with the use of a few atomic bombs small tactical ones, of course-we shall gain five years of peace if we are attacked.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘That’s the real point of our understanding with Germany. We need a technical revolution and the latest mining machines, although we’ve gone further than anyone realises on our own. In five years we can more than halve the labour force in the mines: we can more than double wages for skilled men and we can begin to produce what they have in America, a black middle class.’

‘And the unemployed?’

‘They can go back to their homelands. That is what the homelands were for. I’m an optimist, Castle.’

‘And apartheid stays?’

‘There’ll always be a certain apartheid as there is here between the rich and the poor.’

Cornelius Muller took off his gold-rimmed glasses and polished the gold till it gleamed. He said, ‘I hope your wife liked her shawl. You know you will always be welcome to come back now that we realise your true position. With your family-too, of course. You may be sure they will be treated as honorary whites.’

Castle wanted to reply, ‘But I am an honorary black,’ but this time he showed a little prudence. Thank you.’

Muller opened his briefcase and took out a sheet of paper. He said, ‘I have made a few notes for you on my meetings in Bonn.’ He produced a ball-point pen gold again. You might have some useful information on these points when we next meet. Would Monday suit you? The same time?’ He added, ‘Please destroy that when you’ve read it. BOSS wouldn’t like it to go on even your most secret file.’

‘Of course. As you wish.’

When Muller had gone he put the paper in his pocket.

There were very few people at St George’s in Hanover Square when Doctor Percival arrived with Sir John Hargreaves, who had only returned from Washington the night before.

A man with a black band around his arm stood alone by the aisle in the front row; presumably, Doctor Percival thought, he was the dentist from Droitwich. He refused to make way for anyone it was as though he were safeguarding his right to the whole front row as the nearest living relative. Doctor Percival and C took their seats near the back of the church. Davis’s secretary, Cynthia, was two rows behind them. Colonel Daintry sat beside Watson on the other side of the aisle, and there were a number of faces only half known to Doctor Percival. He had glimpsed them once perhaps in a corridor or at a conference with MI5, perhaps there were even intruders a funeral attracts strangers like a wedding. Two tousled men in the last row were almost certainly Davis’s fellow lodgers from the Department of the Environment. Someone began to play softly on the organ.

‘Doctor Percival whispered to Hargreaves, Did you have a good flight?’

‘Three hours late at Heathrow,’ Hargreaves said. ‘The food was uneatable.’ He sighed-perhaps he was remembering with regret his wife’s steak-and-kidney pie, or the smoked trout at his club. The organ breathed a last note and fell silent. A few people knelt and a few stood up. There was a lack of certainty about what to do next.

‘The Vicar, who was probably known to nobody there, not even to the dead man in the coffin, intoned Take Thy plague away from me; I am even consumed by means of Thy heavy hand.’

‘What plague was it that killed Davis, Emmanuel?’

‘Don’t worry, John. The post mortem was all in order.’

The service seemed to Doctor Percival, who had not attended a funeral for many years, full of irrelevant information. The Vicar had begun reading the lesson from the First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.’ The statement was undeniably true, Doctor Percival thought. The coffin did not contain a fish; he would have been more interested in it if it had-an enormous trout perhaps. He took a quick look round. There was a tear caged behind the girl’s lashes. Colonel Daintry had an angry or perhaps a sullen expression which might bode ill. Watson too was obviously worried about something probably he was wondering whom to promote in Davis’s place. I want to have a word with you after the service,’ Hargreaves said, ‘and that might be tiresome too.

‘Behold I show you a mystery,’ the Vicar read. The mystery of whether I killed the right man? Doctor Percival wondered, but that will never be solved unless the leaks continue that would certainly suggest he had made an unfortunate mistake. C would be very upset and so would Daintry. It was a pity one couldn’t throw a man back into the river of life as one could throw a fish. The Vicar’s voice, which had risen to greet a familiar passage of English literature, ‘0 Death, where is thy sting?’ as a bad actor playing Hamlet picks out from its context the famous soliloquy, fell to a drone again for the dull and academic conclusion, The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.’ It sounded like a proposition of Euclid.

‘What did you say?’ C whispered.

‘QED’ Doctor Percival replied.

‘What exactly did you mean by QED?’ Sir John Hargreaves asked when they managed to get outside.

‘It seemed a more suitable response to what the Vicar was saying than Amen.’

They walked after that in a near silence towards the Travellers Club. By a mute consent the Travellers seemed a spot more suited for lunch that day than the Reform-Davis had become an honorary traveller by this voyage of his into unexplored regions and he certainly had lost his claim to one man one vote.

‘I don’t remember when I last attended a funeral,’ Doctor Percival said. ‘An old great-aunt, I think, more than fifteen years ago. A rather stiff ceremony, isn’t it?’

‘I used to enjoy funerals in Africa. Lots of music-even if the only instruments were pots and pans and empty sardine tins. They made one think that death after all might be a lot of fun. Who was the girl I saw crying?’

‘Davis’s secretary. Her name is Cynthia. Apparently he was in love with her.’

‘A lot of that goes on, I suppose. It’s inevitable in an outfit like ours. Daintry checked on her thoroughly, I suppose?’

‘Oh yes, yes. In fact-quite unconsciously she gave us some useful information you remember that business at the Zoo.’

‘The Zoo?’

‘When Davis…’

‘Oh yes, I remember now.’

As usual at the weekend, the club was almost empty.

They would have begun lunch it was an almost automatic reflex with smoked trout, but it was not available. Doctor Percival reluctantly accepted as a substitute smoked salmon. He said, ‘I wish I had known Davis better. I think I might have come to like him quite a lot.’

‘And yet you still believe he was the leak?’

‘He played the role of a rather simple man very cleverly. I admire cleverness and courage too. He must have needed a lot of courage.’

‘In a wrong cause.’

‘John, John! You and I are not really in a position to talk about causes. We aren’t Crusaders we are in the wrong century. Saladin was long ago driven out of Jerusalem. Not that Jerusalem has gained much by that.’

‘All the same, Emmanuel… I can’t admire treachery.’

‘Thirty years ago when I was a student I rather fancied myself as a kind of Communist. Now…? Who is the traitor me or Davis? I really believed in internationalism, and now I’m fighting an underground war for nationalism.’

‘You’ve grown up, Emmanuel, that’s all. What do you want to drink-claret or burgundy?’

‘Claret, if it’s all the same to you.’

Sir John Hargreaves crouched in his chair and buried himself deep in the wine list. He looked unhappy perhaps only because he couldn’t make up his mind between St Emilion and Medoc. At last he made his decision and his order. I sometimes wonder why you are with us, Emmanuel.’

‘You’ve just said it, I grew up. I don’t think Communism will work in the long run any better than Christianity has done, and I’m not the Crusader type. Capitalism or Communism? Perhaps God is a Capitalist. I want to be on the side most likely to win during my lifetime. Don’t look shocked, John. You think I’m a cynic, but I just don’t want to waste a lot of time. The side that wins will be able to build the better hospitals, and give more to cancer research when all this atomic nonsense is abandoned. In the meanwhile I enjoy the game we’re all playing. Enjoy. Only enjoy. I don’t pretend to be an enthusiast for God or Marx. Beware of people who believe. They aren’t reliable players. All the same one grows to like a good player on the other side of the board it increases the fun.’

‘Even if he’s a traitor?’

‘Oh, traitor that’s an old-fashioned word, John. The player is as important as the game. I wouldn’t enjoy the game with a bad player across the table.’

‘And yet… you did kill Davis? Or didn’t you?’

‘He died of his liver, John. Read the post mortem.’

‘A happy coincidence?’

‘The marked card-you suggested it turned up, you see the oldest trick of all. Only he and I knew of my little fantasy about Porton.’

‘You should have waited till I came home. Did you discuss it with Daintry?’

‘You had left me in charge, John. When you feel the fish on the line you don’t stand waiting on the bank for someone else to advise you what to do.’

‘This Chateau Talbot does it seem to you quite up to the mark?’

‘It’s excellent.’

‘I think they must have ruined my palate in Washington. All those dry martinis.’ He tried his wine again. ‘Or else it’s your fault. Does nothing ever worry you, Emmanuel?

‘Well, yes, I am a little worried about the funeral service you noticed they even had an organ and then there’s the interment. All that must cost a lot, and I don’t suppose Davis left many pennies behind. Do you suppose that poor devil of a dentist has paid for it all or did our friends from the East? That doesn’t seem quite proper to me.

‘Don’t worry about that, Emmanuel. The office will pay. We don’t have to account for secret funds.’ Hargreaves pushed his glass on one side. He said, ‘This Talbot doesn’t taste to me like ‘71.’

‘I was taken aback myself, John, by Davis’s quick reaction. I’d calculated his weight exactly and I gave him what I thought would be less than lethal. You see, aflatoxin had never been tested before on a human being, and I wanted to be sure in case of a sudden emergency that we gave the right dose. Perhaps his liver was in a bad way already.’

‘How did you give it to him?’

‘I dropped in for a drink and he gave me some hideous whisky which he called a White Walker. The flavour was quite enough to drown the aflatoxin.’

‘I can only pray you got the right fish,’ Sir John Hargreaves said.

Daintry turned gloomily into St James’s Street, and as he passed White’s on the way to his flat a voice hailed him from the steps. He looked up from the gutter in which his thoughts had lain. He recognised the face, but he couldn’t for the moment put a name to it, nor even remember in what circumstances he had seen it before. Boffin occurred to him. Buffer?

‘Got any Maltesers, old man?’

Then the scene of their encounter came back to him with a sense of embarrassment.

‘What about a spot of lunch, Colonel?’

‘Buffy was the absurd name. Of course, the fellow must certainly possess another, but Daintry had never learnt it. He said, ‘ I’m sorry. I’ve got lunch waiting for me at home.’ This was not exactly a lie. He had put out a tin of sardines before he went to Hanover Square, and there remained some bread and cheese from yesterday’s lunch.

‘Come and have a drink then. Meals at home can always wait,’ Buffy said, ‘and Daintry could think of no excuse not to join him.

As it was still early only two people were in the bar. They seemed to know Buffy a thought too well, for they greeted him without enthusiasm. Buffy didn’t seem to mind. He waved his hand in a wide gesture that included the barman. ‘This is the Colonel.’ Both of them grunted at Daintry with weary politeness. Never caught your name,’ Buffy said, ‘at that shoot.’

‘I never caught yours.’

‘We met,’ Buffy explained, at Hargreaves’ place. The Colonel is one of the hush-hush boys. James Bond and all that.’

One of the two said, ‘I never could read those books by Ian.’

‘Too sexy for me,’ the other one said. ‘Exaggerated. I like a good screw as much as the next man, but it’s not all that important, is it? Not the way you do it, I mean.’

‘What’ll you have?’ Buffy asked.

‘A dry martini,’ Colonel Daintry said, ‘and, remembering his meeting with Doctor Percival, he added, ‘ very dry.’

‘One large very dry, Joe, and one large pink. Really large, old chap. Don’t be stingy.’

A deep silence fell over the little bar as though each one was thinking of something different-of a novel by Ian Fleming, of a shooting party, or a funeral. Buffy said, ‘The Colonel and I have a taste in common Maltesers.’

One of the men emerged from his private thoughts and said, ‘Maltesers? I prefer Smarties.’

‘What the hell are Smarties, Dicky?’

‘Little chocolate things all different colours. They taste much the same, but, I don’t know why, I prefer the red and yellow ones. I don’t like the mauve.’

Buffy said, ‘ I saw you coming down the street, Colonel. You seemed to be having quite a talk with yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so. State secrets? Where were you off to?’

‘Only home,’ Daintry said. ‘I live near here.’

‘You looked properly browned off. I said to myself, the country must be in serious trouble. The hush-hush boys know more than we do.’

‘I’ve come from a funeral.’

‘No one close, I hope?’

‘No. Someone from the office.’

‘Oh well, a funeral’s always better to my mind than a wedding. I can’t bear weddings. A funeral’s final. A wedding well, it’s only an unfortunate stage to something else. I’d rather celebrate a divorce-but then that’s often a stage too, to just another wedding. People get into the habit.’

‘Come off it, Buffy,’ said Dicky, the man who liked Smarties, ‘you thought of it once yourself. We know all about that marriage bureau of yours. You were damned lucky to escape. Joe, give the Colonel another martini.’

Daintry, with a feeling of being lost among strangers, drank the first down. He said, ‘like a man picking a sentence from a phrase book in a language he doesn’t know, ‘ I was at a wedding too. Not long ago.’

‘Hush-hush again? I mean, one of your lot?’

‘No. It was my daughter. She got married.’

‘Good God,’ Buffy said, ‘I never thought you were one of those I mean one of those married fellows.’

‘It doesn’t necessarily follow,’ Dicky said.

The third man, who had hardly spoken up till then, said, ‘You needn’t be so damned superior, Buffy. I was one of those too once, though it seems the hell of a long time ago. As a matter of fact it was my wife who introduced Dicky to Smarties. You remember that afternoon, Dicky? We’d had a pretty gloomy lunch, because we sort of knew we were breaking up the old home. Then she said, “Smarties,” just like that, “Smarties”… I don’t know why. I suppose she thought we had to talk about something. She was a great one for appearances.’

‘I can’t say I do remember, Willie. Smarties seem to me to date back a long time in my life. Thought I’d discovered them for myself. Give the Colonel another dry, Joe.’

‘No, if you don’t mind… I’ve really got to get home.’

‘It’s my turn,’ the man called Dicky said. ‘Top up his glass, Joe. He’s come from a funeral. He needs cheering up.

‘I got used to funerals very early,’ Daintry said to his own surprise after he had taken a swig of the third dry martini. He realised he was talking more freely than he usually did with strangers and most of the world to him were strangers. He would have liked to pay for a round himself, but of course it was their club. He felt very friendly towards them, but he remained-he was sure of it in their eyes a stranger still. He wanted to interest them, but so many subjects were barred to him.

‘Why? Were there a lot of deaths in your family?’ Dicky asked with alcoholic curiosity.

‘No, it wasn’t exactly that,’ Daintry said, ‘his shyness drowning in the third martini. For some reason he remembered a country railway station where he had arrived with his platoon more than thirty years ago-the signs naming the place had all been removed after Dunkirk against a possible German invasion. It was as though once again he were delivering himself of a heavy pack, which he let drop resoundingly on the floor of White’s. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘my father was a clergyman, so I went to a lot of funerals when I was a child.’

‘I would never have guessed it,’ Buffy said. ‘Thought you’d come from a military family-son of a general, the old regiment, and all that cock. Joe, my glass is crying to be refilled. But, of course, when you come to think of it, your father being a clergyman does explain quite a lot.’

‘What does it explain?’ Dicky asked. For some reason he seemed to be annoyed and in the mood to question everything. The Maltesers?’

‘No, no, the Maltesers are a different story. I can’t tell you about them now. It would take too long. What I meant was the Colonel belongs to the hush-hush boys, and so in a way does a clergyman, when you come to think of it… You know, the secrets of the confessional and all that, they are in the hush-hush business too.’

‘My father wasn’t a Roman Catholic. He wasn’t even High Church. He was a naval chaplain. In the first war.’

‘The first war,’ said the morose man called Willie who had once been married, was the one between Cain and Abel.’ He made his statement flatly as though he wanted to close an unnecessary conversation.

‘Willie’s father was a clergyman too,’ Buffy explained. ‘A big shot. A bishop against a naval chaplain. Trumps.’

‘My father was in the Battle of Jutland,’ Daintry told them. He didn’t mean to challenge anyone, to set up Jutland against a bishopric. It was just another memory which had returned.

‘As a non-combatant, though. That hardly counts, does it?’ Buffy said. ‘Not against Cain and Abel.’

‘You don’t look all that old,’ Dicky said. ‘He spoke with an air of suspicion, sucking at his glass.

‘My father wasn’t married then. He married my mother after the war. In the twenties.’ Daintry realised the conversation was becoming absurd. The gin was acting like a truth drug. He knew he was talking too much.

‘He married your mother?’ Dicky asked sharply like an interrogator.

‘Of course he married her. In the twenties.’

‘She’s still alive?’

‘They’ve both been dead a long time. I really must be getting home. My meal will be spoilt,’ Daintry added, thinking of the sardines drying on a plate. The sense of being among friendly strangers left him. The conversation threatened to turn ugly.

‘And what has all this to do with a funeral? What funeral?’

‘Don’t mind Dicky,’ Buffy said. ‘He likes interrogating. He was in MI5 during the war. More gins, Joe. He’s already told us, Dicky. It was some poor bugger in the office.’

‘Did you see him properly into the ground?’

‘No, no. I just went to the service. In Hanover Square.’

‘That would be St George’s,’ said the son of the bishop. He held his glass out to Joe as though it were a communion cup.

It took quite a time for Daintry to detach himself from the bar at White’s. Buffy even conducted him as far as the steps. A taxi passed. You see what I mean,’ Buffy said. ‘Buses in St James’s. No one was safe.’ Daintry had no idea what he meant. As he walked down the street towards the palace he was aware that he had drunk more than he had drunk for years at this hour of the day. They were nice fellows, but one had to be careful. He had spoken far too much. About his father, his mother. He walked past Lock’s hat shop; past Overton’s Restaurant; he halted on the pavement at the corner of Pall Mall. He had overshot the mark he realised that in time. He turned on his heel and retraced his steps to the door of the flat where his lunch awaited him.

The cheese was there all right and the bread, and the tin of sardines which after all he had not yet decanted. He was not very clever with his fingers, and the small leaf of the tin broke before the tin was a third open. All the same he managed to fork out half the sardines in bits and pieces. He wasn’t hungry-that was enough. He hesitated whether he should drink any more after the dry martinis and then chose a bottle of Tuborg.

His lunch lasted for less than four minutes, but it seemed to him quite a long time because of his thoughts. His thoughts wobbled like a drunken man’s. He thought first of Doctor Percival and Sir John Hargreaves going off together down the street in front of him when the service was over, their heads bent like conspirators. He thought next of Davis. It wasn’t that he had any personal liking for Davis, but his death worried him. He said aloud to the only witness, which happened to be a sardine tail balanced on his fork, ‘A jury would never convict on that evidence.’ Convict? He hadn’t any proof that Davis had not died, as the post mortem showed, a natural death-cirrhosis was what one called a natural death. He tried to remember what Doctor Percival had said to him on the night of the shoot. He had drunk too much that night, as he had done this morning, because he was ill at ease with people whom he didn’t understand, and Percival had come uninvited to his room and talked about an artist called Nicholson.

Daintry didn’t touch the cheese; he carried it back with the oily plate to the kitchen-or kitchenette as it would be called nowadays there was only room for one person at a time. He remembered the vast spaces of the basement kitchen in that obscure rectory in Suffolk where his father had been washed up after the Battle of Jutland, and he remembered Buffy’s careless words about the confessional. His father had never approved of confession nor of the confessional box set up by a High Church celibate in the next parish. Confessions came to him, if they came at all, second-hand, for people did confess sometimes to his mother, who was much loved in the village, and he had heard her filter these confessions to his father, with any grossness, malice or cruelty removed. ‘I think you ought to know what Mrs Baines told me yesterday.’

Daintry spoke aloud the habit was certainly growing on him to the kitchen sink, There was no real evidence against Davis.’ He felt guilty of failure a man in late middle age near to retirement - retirement from what? He would exchange one loneliness for another. He wanted to be back in the Suffolk rectory. He wanted to walk up the long weedy path lined with laurels that never flowered and enter the front door. Even the hall was larger than his whole flat. A number of hats hung from a stand on the left and on the right a brass shell-case held the umbrellas. He crossed the hall and, very softly opening the door in front of him, he surprised his parents where they sat on the chintz sofa hand in hand because they thought they were alone. Shall I resign,’ he asked them, ‘or wait for retirement?’ He knew quite well that the answer would be ‘No’ from both of them from his father because the captain of his cruiser had shared in his eyes something of the divine right of kings-his son couldn’t possibly know better than his commanding officer the right action to take-and from his mother well, she would always tell a girl in the village who was in trouble with her employer, ‘Don’t be hasty. It’s not so easy to find another situation.’ His father, the ex-naval chaplain, who believed in his captain and his God, would have given him what he considered to be the Christian reply, and his mother would have given him the practical and worldly answer. What greater chance had he to find another job if he resigned now than a daily maid would have in the small village where they had lived?

Colonel Daintry went back into his sitting-room, forgetting the oily fork he carried. For the first time in some years he possessed his daughter’s telephone number she had sent it to him after her marriage on a printed card. It was the only link he had with her day-to-day life. Perhaps it would be possible, he thought, to invite himself to dinner. He wouldn’t actually suggest it, but if she made an offer…’

He didn’t recognise the voice which answered. He said, ‘Is that 6731075?’

‘Yes. Who do you want?’ It was a man speaking-a stranger.

He lost his nerve and his memory for names. He replied, ‘Mrs Clutter.’

‘You’ve got the wrong number.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He rang off. Of course he should have said, ‘I meant Mrs Clough,’ but it was too late now. The stranger, he supposed, was his son-in-law.

‘You didn’t mind,’ Sarah asked, that I couldn’t go?’

‘No. Of course not. I couldn’t go myself-I had a date with Muller.’

‘I was afraid of not being back here before Sam returned from school. He’d have asked me where I’d been.’

‘All the same, he has to know sometime.’

‘Yes, but there’s still a lot of time. Were there many people there?’

‘Not many, so Cynthia said. ‘Watson, of course, as the head of the section. Doctor Percival. C. It was decent of C to go. It wasn’t as though Davis was anyone important in the firm. And there was his cousin Cynthia thought it was his cousin, because he wore a black hand.’

‘What happened after the service?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I meant-to the body.’

‘Oh, I think they took it out to Golders Green to be burnt. That was up to the family.’

‘The cousin?’

‘Yes.’

‘We used to have better funerals in Africa,’ said Sarah. ‘Oh well… other countries, other manners.’

‘Yours is supposed to be an older civilisation.’

‘Yes, but old civilisations are not always famous for feeling deeply about death. We are no worse than the Romans.’

Castle finished his whisky. He said, ‘I’ll go up and read to Sam for five minutes-otherwise he may think something’s wrong.’

‘Swear that you won’t say anything to him,’ Sarah said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Of course I trust you, but…’ The ‘but’ pursued him up the stairs. He had lived a long time with ‘buts’-we trust you, but… Daintry looking in his briefcase, the stranger at Watford, whose duty it was to make sure he had come alone to the rendezvous with Boris. Even Boris. He thought: is it possible that one day life will be as simple as childhood, that I shall have finished with buts, that I will be trusted naturally by everyone, as Sarah trusts me and Sam?

Sam was waiting for him, his face black against the clean pillowcase. The sheets must have been changed that day, which made the contrast stronger like an advertisement for Black and White whisky. How are things?’ he asked because he could think of nothing else to say, but Sam didn’t reply -he had his secrets too.

‘How did school go?’

‘It was all right.’

‘What lessons today?’

‘Arithmetic.’

‘How did that go?’

‘All right.’

‘What else?’

‘English compo-‘

‘Composition. How was that?’

‘All right.’

Castle knew that the time had almost come when he would lose the child for ever. Each ‘all right’ fell on the ear like the sound of distant explosions that were destroying the bridges between them. If he asked Sam, ‘Don’t you trust me?’ perhaps he would answer, Yes, but . .

‘Shall I read to you?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘What would you like?’

‘That book about a garden.’

Castle for a moment was at a loss. He looked along the single shelf of battered volumes which were held in place by two china dogs that bore a likeness to Buller. Some of the books belonged to his own nursery days: the others had nearly all been chosen by himself, for Sarah had come late to books and her hooks were all adult ones. He took down a volume of verse which was one he had guarded from his childhood. There was no tie of blood between Sam and himself, no guarantee that they would have any taste in common, but he always hoped-even a hook could be a bridge. He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps. He had read in this one to Sam several times during the last two years, but the footprints of his own childhood had dug deeper and the book opened on a poem he had never read aloud before. After a line or two he realised that he knew it almost by heart. There are verses in childhood, he thought, which shape one’s life more than any of the scriptures.

‘Over the borders a sin without pardon,

Breaking the branches and crawling below, Out through the breach in the wall of the garden, Down by the banks of the river, we go.’

‘What are borders?’

‘It’s where one country ends and another begins.’ It seemed, as soon as he spoke, a difficult definition, but Sam accepted it.

‘What’s a sin without pardon? Are they spies?’

‘No, no, not spies. The boy in the story has been told not to go out of the garden, and…’

‘Who told him?’

‘His father, I suppose, or his mother.’

‘And that’s a sin?’

‘This was written a long time ago. People were more strict then, and anyway it’s not meant seriously.’

‘I thought murder was a sin.’

‘Yes, well, murder’s wrong.’

‘Like going out of the garden?’

Castle began to regret he had chanced on that poem, that he had trodden in that one particular footprint of his own long walk. ‘Don’t you want me to go on reading?’ He skimmed through the lines ahead they seemed innocuous enough.

‘Not that one. I don’t understand that one.’

‘Well, which one then?’

‘There’s one about a man…’

‘The lamplighter?’

‘No, it’s not that one.’

‘What does the man do?’

‘I don’t know. He’s in the dark.’

‘That’s not much to go by.’ Castle turned back the pages, looking for a ‘man in the dark.

‘He’s riding a horse.’

‘Is it this one?’

Castle read,

‘Whenever the moon and stars are set,

Whenever the wind is high,

‘All night long in the dark and wet…’

‘Yes, yes, that’s the one.’

‘A man goes riding by.

Late in the night when the fires are out,

Why does he gallop and gallop about?’

‘Go on. Why do you stop?’

‘Whenever the trees are crying aloud,

And ships are tossed at sea,

By, on the highway, low and loud,

By at the gallop goes he.

By at the gallop he goes, and then

By he comes back at the gallop again.’

‘That’s the one. That’s the one I like best.’

‘It’s a bit frightening,’ Castle said.

‘That’s why I like it. Does he wear a stocking mask?’

‘It doesn’t say he’s a robber, Sam.’

‘Then why does he go up and down outside the house? Has he a white face like you and Mr. Muller?’

‘It doesn’t say.’

‘I think he’s black, black as my hat, black as my cat.’

‘Why?’

‘I think all the white people are afraid of him and lock their house in case he comes in with a carving knife and cuts their throats. Slowly,’ he added with relish.

Sam had never looked more black, Castle thought. He put his arm round him with a gesture of protection, but he couldn’t protect him from the violence and vengeance which were beginning to work in the child’s heart.

He went into his study, unlocked a drawer and took out Muller’s notes. There was a heading: ‘A Final Solution’. Muller apparently had felt no hesitation at all in speaking that phrase into a German ear, and the solution, it was obvious, had not been rejected-it was still open for discussion. The same image recurred like an obsession-of the dying child and the vulture.

He sat down and made a careful copy of Muller’s notes. He didn’t even bother to type them. The anonymity of a typewriter, as the Hiss case indicated, was very partial and anyway he had no desire to take trivial precautions. As for the book code, he had abandoned that with his last message which ended in ‘goodbye’. Now as he wrote ‘Final Solution’ and copied the words which followed with exactitude he identified himself truly for the first time with Carson. Carson at this point would have taken the ultimate risk. He was, as Sarah had once put it, ‘going too far’.

At two o’clock in the morning Castle was still awake when he was startled by a cry from Sarah. ‘No!’ she cried, ‘No!’

‘What is it?’

There was no reply, but when he turned on the light, he could see that her eyes were wide with fear.

‘You’ve had another nightmare. It’s only a nightmare.’ She said, ‘It was terrible.’

‘Tell me. A dream never comes back if you tell it quickly before you forget.’

He could feel how she trembled against his side. He began to catch her fear. ‘It’s only a dream, Sarah, just tell me. Get rid of it.’

She said, ‘I was in a railway train. It was moving off.

You were left on the platform. I was alone. You had the tickets. Sam was with you. He didn’t seem to care. I didn’t even know where we were supposed to be going. And I could hear the ticket collector in the next compartment. I knew I was in the wrong coach, reserved for Whites.’

‘Now you’ve told it the dream won’t come back.’

‘I knew he’d say, Get out of there. You’ve no business there. This is a White coach.’

‘It’s only a dream, Sarah.’

‘Yes. I know. I’m sorry I woke you. You need your sleep.’

‘It was a bit like the dreams Sam had. Remember?’

‘Sam and I are colour conscious, aren’t we? It haunts us both in sleep. Sometimes I wonder whether you love me only because of my colour. If you were black you wouldn’t love a white woman only because she was white, would you?’

‘No. I’m not a South African off on a weekend in Swaziland. I knew you for nearly a year before I fell in love. It came slowly. All those months when we worked secretly together. I was a so-called diplomat, safe as houses. You ran all the risks. I didn’t have nightmares, but I used to lie awake, wondering whether you’d come to our next rendezvous or whether you’d disappear and I’d never know what happened to you. Just a message perhaps from one of the others saying that the line was closed.’

‘So you worried about the line.’

‘No. I worried about what would happen to you. I’d loved you for months. I knew I couldn’t go on living if you disappeared. Now we are safe.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. Haven’t I proved it over seven years?’

‘I don’t mean that you love me. I mean are you sure we are safe?’

To that question there was no easy answer. The last encoded report with the final word ‘goodbye’ had been premature and the passage he had chosen, ‘I have lifted my hand and let it fall,’ was no mark of freedom in the world of Uncle Remus.

Darkness had fallen early with the mist and the drizzle of November, when he left the telephone box. There had been no reply to any of his signals. In Old Compton Street the blurred red light of the sign ‘Books’, marking where Halliday Junior carried on his dubious trade, shone down the pavement with less than its normal effrontery; Halliday Senior in the shop across the way stooped as usual under a single globe, economising fuel. When Castle came into the shop the old man touched a switch without raising his head so as to light up on either side the shelves of outmoded classics.

‘You don’t waste your electricity,’ Castle said.

‘Ah! It’s you, sir. Yes, I do my little bit to help the Government, and anyway I don’t get many real customers after five. A few shy sellers, but their books are seldom in good enough condition, and I have to send them away disappointed-they think there’s value in any book that’s a hundred years old. I’m sorry, sir, about the delay over the Trollope if that’s what you are seeking. There’s been difficulty about the second copy-it was on television once, that’s the trouble-even the Penguins are sold out.’

‘There’s no hurry now. One copy will do. I came in to tell you that. My friend has gone to live abroad.’

‘Ah, you’ll miss your literary evenings, sir. I was saying to my son only the other day…’

‘It’s odd, Mr. Halliday, but I’ve never met your son. Is he in? I thought I might discuss with him some books I can spare. I’ve rather grown out of my taste for curiosa. Age, I suppose. Would I find him in?’

‘You won’t, sir, not now. To tell you the truth he’s got himself into a bit of trouble. From doing too well. He opened another shop last month in Newington Butts and the police there are far less understanding than those here-or more expensive if you care to be cynical. He had to attend the magistrate’s court all the afternoon about some of those silly magazines of his and he’s not back yet.’

‘I hope his difficulties don’t make trouble for you, Mr. Halliday.’

‘Oh dear me, no. The police are very sympathetic. I really think they’re sorry for me having a son in that way of business. I tell them, if I was young, I might he doing the same thing, and they laugh.’

It had always seemed strange to Castle that ‘they’ had chosen so dubious an intermediary as young Halliday, whose shop might be searched at any time by the police. Perhaps, he thought, it was a kind of double bluff. The Vice Squad would hardly be trained in the niceties of intelligence. It was even possible that Halliday Junior was as unaware as his father of the use to which he was being put. That was what he wanted very much to know, for he was going to entrust him with what amounted to his life.

He stared across the road at the scarlet sign and the girlie magazines in the window and wondered at the strange emotion that was driving him to take so open a risk. Boris would not have approved, but now he had sent ‘them’ his last report and resignation he felt an irresistible desire to communicate directly by word of mouth, without the intervention of safe drops and book codes and elaborate signals on public telephones.

‘You’ve no idea when he’ll return?’ he asked Mr. Halliday.

No idea, sir. Couldn’t I perhaps help you myself?’

‘No, no, I won’t bother you.’ He had no code of telephone rings to attract the attention of Halliday Junior. They had been kept so scrupulously apart he sometimes wondered whether their only meeting might be scheduled for the final emergency.

He asked, ‘Has your son by any chance a scarlet Toyota?’

‘No, but he sometimes uses mine in the country-for sales, sir. He helps me there now and then, for I can’t get about as much as I used to do. Why did you ask?’

‘I thought I saw one outside the shop once.’

‘That wouldn’t be ours. Not in town it wouldn’t. With all the traffic jams it wouldn’t be economic. We have to do our best to economise when the Government asks.’

‘Well, I hope the magistrate has not been too severe with him.’

‘It’s a kind thought, sir. I’ll tell him you called.’

‘As it happens I brought a note with me you might let him have. It’s confidential, mind. I wouldn’t want people to know the kind of books I collected when I was young.’

‘You can trust me, sir. I’ve never failed you yet. And the Trollope?’

‘Oh, forget the Trollope.’

At Euston Castle took a ticket to Watford-he didn’t want to show his season to and from Berkhamsted. Ticket collectors have a memory for seasons. In the train he read, to keep his mind occupied, a morning paper which had been left behind on the next seat. It contained an interview with a film star whom he had never seen (the cinema at Berkhamsted had been turned into a Bingo hall).

Apparently the actor had married for a second time. Or was it a third? He had told the reporter during an interview several years before that he was finished with marriage. So you’ve changed your mind?’ the gossip writer impudently asked.

Castle read the interview to the last word. Here was a man who could talk to a reporter about the most private things in his life: I was very poor when I married my first wife. She didn’t understand… our sex life went all wrong. It’s different with Naomi. Naomi knows that when I come back exhausted from the studio… whenever we can we take a week’s holiday all alone in some quiet spot like St Tropez and work it all off.’ I’m hypocritical to blame him, Castle thought: I am going to talk if I can to Boris: a moment arrives when one has to talk.

At Watford he went carefully through his previous routine, hesitating at the bus stop, finally walking on, waiting round the next corner for any followers. He reached the coffee shop, but he didn’t go in but walked straight on. Last time he had been guided by the man with the loose shoelace, but now he had no guide. Did he turn left or right at the corner? All the streets in this part of Watford looked alike-rows of identical gabled houses with small front gardens planted with rose trees that dripped with moisture-one house joined to another by a garage for one car.

He took another cast at random, and another, but he found always the same houses, sometimes in streets, sometimes in crescents, and he felt himself mocked by the similarity of the names Laurel Drive, Oaklands, The Shrubbery to the name he was seeking, Elm View. Once a policeman seeing him at a loss asked whether he could be of help. Muller’s original notes seemed to weigh like a revolver in his pocket and he said no, that he was only looking for a To Let notice in the area. The policeman told him that there were two of these some three or four turns to the left, and by a coincidence the third brought him into Elm View. He hadn’t remembered the number, but a lamp in the street shone on to the stained glass of a door and he recognised that. There was no light in any window, and it was without much hope that, peering closely, he made out the mutilated card ‘ition Limited’ and rang the bell. It was unlikely Boris would be here at this hour; indeed, he might not be in England at all. He had severed his connection with them, so why should they preserve a dangerous channel open? He tried the bell a second time, but there was no reply. He would have welcomed at that moment even Ivan who had tried to blackmail him. There was no one literally no one-left to whom he could speak.

He had passed a telephone box on his way and now he returned to it. At a house across the road he could see through the uncurtained window a family sitting down to a high tea or an early dinner: a father and two teenage children, a boy and a girl, took their seats, the mother entered carrying a dish, and the father seemed to be saying Grace, for the children bowed their heads. He remembered that custom in his childhood but thought it had died out a long time ago-perhaps they were Roman Catholics, customs seemed to survive much longer with them. He began to dial the only number left for him to try, a number to be used only in the final emergency, replacing the receiver at intervals which he timed on his watch. After he had dialled five times with no response he left the box. It was as though he had cried aloud five times in the empty street for help-and he had no idea whether he had been heard. Perhaps after his final report all lines of communication had been cut for ever.

He looked across the road. The father made a joke and the mother smiled her approval and the girl winked at the boy, as much as to say ‘The old boy’s at it again.’ Castle went on down the road towards the station nobody followed him, no one looked at him through a window as he went by, nobody passed him. He felt invisible, set down in a strange world where there were no other human beings to recognise him as one of themselves.

He stopped at the end of the street which was called The Shrubbery beside a hideous church so new it might have been constructed overnight with the glittering bricks of a build-it-yourself kit. The lights were on inside and the same emotion of loneliness which had driven him to Halliday’s drove him to the building. He recognised from the gaudy bedizened altar and the sentimental statues that it was a Roman Catholic church. There was no sturdy band of bourgeois faithful standing shoulder to shoulder singing of a green hill far away. One old man slumbered over his umbrella knob not far from the altar, and two women who might have been sisters in their similar subfuse clothing waited by what he guessed was a confessional box. A woman in a macintosh came out from behind a curtain and a woman without one went in. It was like a weather house indicating rain. Castle sat down not far away. He felt tired-the hour had struck long past for his triple J. & B.; Sarah would be growing anxious, and as he listened to the low hum of conversation in the box the desire to talk openly, without reserve, after seven years of silence grew in him. Boris has been totally withdrawn, he thought, I shall never be able to speak again-unless, of course, I end up in the dock. I could make what they call a ‘confession’ there-in camera, of course, the trial would be in camera.

The second woman emerged, and the third went in. The other two had got rid briskly enough of their secrets-in camera. They were kneeling separately down before their respective altars with looks of smug satisfaction at a duty well performed. When the third woman emerged there was no one left waiting but himself. The old man had woken and accompanied one of the women out. Between a crack in the priest’s curtain he caught a glimpse of a long white face; he heard a throat being cleared of the November damp. Castle thought: I want to talk; why don’t I talk? A priest like that has to keep my secret. Boris had said to him, ‘Come to me whenever you feel you have to talk: it’s a smaller risk,’ but he was convinced Boris had gone for ever. To talk was a therapeutic act-he moved slowly towards the box like a patient who is visiting a psychiatrist for the first time with trepidation.

A patient who didn’t know the ropes. He drew the curtain to behind him and stood hesitating in the little cramped space which was left. How to begin? The faint smell of eau-de-cologne must have been left by one of the women. A shutter clattered open and he could see a sharp profile like a stage detective’s. The profile coughed, and muttered something.

Castle said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘What are you standing there for like that?’ the profile said. ‘Have you lost the use of your knees?’

‘I only want to talk to you,’ Castle said.

‘You aren’t here to talk to me,’ the profile said. There was a chink-chink-chink. The man had a rosary in his lap and seemed to be using it like a chain of worry beads. ‘You are here to talk to God.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m just here to talk.’

The priest looked reluctantly round. His eyes were bloodshot. Castle had an impression that he had fallen by a grim coincidence on another victim of loneliness and silence like himself.

‘Kneel down, man, what sort of a Catholic do you think you are?’

‘I’m not a Catholic.’

‘Then what business have you here?’

‘I want to talk, that’s all.’

‘If you want instruction you can leave your name and address at the presbytery.’

‘I don’t want instruction.’

‘You are wasting my time,’ the priest said.

‘Don’t the secrets of the confessional apply to non-Catholics?’

‘You should go to a priest of your own Church.’

‘I haven’t got a Church.’

‘Then I think what you need is a doctor,’ the priest said. He slammed the shutter to, and Castle left the box. It was an absurd end, he thought, to an absurd action. How could he have expected the man to understand him even if he had been allowed to talk? He had far too long a history to tell, begun so many years ago in a strange country.

Sarah came out to greet him as he was hanging his coat in the hall. She asked, ‘Has something happened?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve never been as late as this without telephoning.’

‘Oh, I’ve been going here and there, trying to see people. I couldn’t find any of them in. I suppose they are all taking long weekends.’

‘Will you have your whisky? Or do you want dinner straight away?’

‘Whisky. Make it a large one.’

‘Larger than usual?’

‘Yes, and no soda.’

‘Something has happened.’

‘Nothing important. But it’s cold and wet almost like winter. Is Sam asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s Buller?’

‘Looking for cats in the garden.’

He sat down in the usual chair and the usual silence fell between them. Normally he felt the silence like a comforting shawl thrown round his shoulders. Silence was relaxation, silence meant that words were unnecessary between the two of them their love was too established to need assurance: they had taken out a life policy in their love. But this night, with the original of Muller’s notes in his pocket and his copy of it by this time in the hands of young Halliday, silence was like a vacuum in which he couldn’t breathe: silence was a lack of everything, even trust, it was a foretaste of the tomb.

‘Another whisky, Sarah.’

‘You are drinking too much. Remember poor Davis.’

‘He didn’t die of drink.’

‘But I thought…’

‘You thought like all the others did. And you’re wrong. If it’s too much trouble to give me another whisky, say so and I’ll help myself.’

‘I only said remember Davis…’

‘I don’t want to be looked after, Sarah. You are Sam’s mother, not mine.’

‘Yes, I am his mother and you aren’t even his father.’

They looked at each other with astonishment and dismay. Sarah said, ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He said, ‘This is what the future will be like if we can’t talk. You asked me what I’d been doing. I’ve been looking for someone to talk to all this evening, but no one was there.’

‘Talk about what?’

The question silenced him.

‘Why can’t you talk to me?’

‘Because They forbid it, I suppose.’

‘The Official Secrets Act-all that stupidity.’

‘It’s not them.’

‘Then who?’

‘When we came to England, Sarah, Carson sent someone to see me. He had saved you and Sam. All he asked in return was a little help. I was grateful and I agreed.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘My mother told me that when I was a child I always gave away too much in a swap, but it wasn’t too much for the man who had saved you from BOSS. So there it is-I became what they call a double agent, Sarah. I rate a lifetime in jail.’

He had always known that one day this scene would have to be played out between them, but he had never been able to imagine the kind of words they would say to each other. She said, ‘Give me your whisky.’ He handed her his glass and she drank a finger from it. Are you in danger?’ she asked. ‘I mean now. Tonight.’

‘I’ve been in danger all our life together.’

‘But is it worse now?’

‘Yes. I think they’ve discovered there’s a leak and I think they thought it was Davis. I don’t believe Davis died a natural death. Something Doctor Percival said…’

‘You think they killed him?’

‘Yes.’

‘So it might have been you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you still going on with it?’

‘I wrote what I thought was my last report. I said goodbye to the whole business. But then-something else happened. With Muller. I had to let them know. I hope I have. I don’t know.’

‘How did the office discover the leak?’

‘I suppose they have a defector somewhere probably in place-who had access to my reports and passed them back to London.’

‘But if he passes back this one?’

‘Oh, I know what you are going to say. Davis is dead. I’m the only man at the office who deals with Muller.’

‘Why have you gone on, Maurice? It’s suicide.’

‘It may save a lot of lives of your people.’

‘Don’t talk to me of my people. I have no people any longer. You are “my people”.’ He thought, Surely that’s something out of the Bible. I’ve heard that before. Well, she’d been to a Methodist school.

She put her arm round him and held the glass of whisky to his mouth. ‘I wish you hadn’t waited all these years to tell me.’

‘I was afraid to-Sarah.’ The Old Testament name came back to him with hers. It had been a woman called Ruth who had said what she had said-or something very like it.

‘Afraid of me and not of Them?’

‘Afraid for you. You can’t know how long it seemed, waiting for you in the Hotel Polana. I thought you’d never come. While it was daylight I used to watch car numbers through a pair of binoculars. Even numbers meant Muller had got you. Odd numbers that you were on the way. This time there’ll be no Hotel Polana and no Carson. It doesn’t happen twice the same way.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘The best thing would be for you to take Sam and go to my mother’s. Separate yourself from me. Pretend there’s been a bad quarrel and you are getting a divorce. If nothing happens I’ll stay here and we can come together again.’

‘What should I do all that time? Watch car numbers? Tell me the next best thing.’

‘If they are still looking after me I don’t know whether they are-they promised me a safe escape route, but I’ll have to go alone. So that way too you must go to my mother with Sam. The only difference is we won’t he able to communicate. You won’t know what has happened-perhaps for a long time. I think I’d prefer the police to come-at least that way we’d see each other again in court.’

‘But Davis never reached a court, did he? No, if they are looking after you, go, Maurice. Then at least I’ll know you are safe.’

‘You haven’t said a word of blame, Sarah.’

‘What sort of word?’

‘Well, I’m what’s generally called a traitor.’

‘Who cares?’ she said. She put her hand in his: it was an act more intimate than a kiss-one can kiss a stranger. She said, ‘We have our own country. You and I and Sam. You’ve never betrayed that country, Maurice.’

He said, ‘It’s no good worrying any more tonight. We’ve still time and we’ve got to sleep.’

But when they were in bed, they made love at once without thinking, without speaking, as though it had been something they had agreed together an hour ago and all their discussion had only been a postponement of it. It had been months since they had come together in this way. Now that his secret was spoken love was released, and he fell asleep almost as soon as he withdrew. His last thought was: There is still time-it will be days, perhaps weeks, before any leak can be reported back. Tomorrow is Saturday. We have a whole weekend before us in which to decide.

Sir John Hargreaves sat in his study in the country reading Trollope. It should have been a period of almost perfect peace-the weekend calm, which only a duty officer was allowed to break with an urgent message, and urgent messages were of extreme rarity in the Secret Service-the hour of tea when his wife respected his absence, as she knew that Earl Grey in the afternoons spoilt for him the Cutty Sark at six. During his service in West Africa he had grown to appreciate the novels of Trollope, though he was not a novel reader. At moments of irritation, he had found The Warden and Barchester Towers reassuring books, they reinforced the patience which Africa required. Mr. Slope would remind him of an importunate and self-righteous District Commissioner, and Mrs Proudie of the Governor’s wife. Now he found himself disturbed by a piece of fiction which should have soothed him in England as he had been soothed in Africa. The novel was called The Way We Live Now-somebody, he couldn’t remember who it was, had told him the novel had been turned into a good television series. He didn’t like television, yet he had been sure he would like the Trollope.

So all that afternoon he felt for a while the same smooth pleasure he always received from Trollope-the sense of a calm Victorian world, where good was good and bad was bad and one could distinguish easily between them. He had no children who might have taught him differently he had never wanted a child nor had his wife; they were at one in that, though perhaps for different reasons. He hadn’t wanted to add to his public responsibilities private responsibilities (children would have been a constant anxiety in Africa), and his wife-well he would think with affection she wished to guard her figure and her independence. Their mutual indifference to children reinforced their love for each other. While he read Trollope with a whisky at his elbow, she drank tea in her room with equal content. It was a weekend of peace for both of them-no shoot, no guests, darkness falling early in November over the park-he could even imagine himself in Africa, at some rest house in the bush, on one of the long treks which he always enjoyed, far from headquarters. The cook would now be plucking a chicken behind the rest house and the pie-dogs would be gathering in the hope of scraps… The lights in the distance where the motorway ran might well have been the lights of the village where the girls would be picking the lice out of each other’s hair.

He was reading of old Melmotte-the swindler as his fellow members judged him. Melmotte took his place in the restaurant of the House of Commons-‘ It was impossible to expel him-almost as impossible to sit next him. Even the waiters were unwilling to serve him; but with patience and endurance he did at last get his dinner.’

Hargreaves, unwillingly, felt drawn to Melmotte in his isolation, and he remembered with regret what he had said to Doctor Percival when Percival expressed a liking for Davis. He had used the word ‘traitor’ as Melmotte’s colleagues used the word ‘swindler’. He read on, ‘They who watched him declared among themselves that he was happy in his own audacity; but in truth he was probably at that moment the most utterly wretched man in London.’ He had never known Davis-he wouldn’t have recognized him if he had met him in a corridor of the office. He thought: Perhaps I spoke hastily I reacted stupidly-but it was Percival who eliminated him-I shouldn’t have left Percival in charge of the case… He went on reading: ‘But even he, with all the world now gone from him, with nothing before him but the most extreme misery which the indignation of offended laws could inflict, was able to spend the last moments of his freedom in making a reputation at any rate for audacity.’ Poor devil, he thought, one has to grant him courage. Did Davis guess what potion Doctor Percival might be dropping into his whisky when he left the room for a moment?

It was then the telephone rang. He heard it intercepted by his wife in her room. She was trying to protect his peace better than Trollope had done, but all the same, owing to some urgency at the other end, she was forced to transfer the call. Unwillingly he lifted the receiver. A voice he didn’t recognise said, ‘Muller speaking.’

He was still in the world of Melmotte. He said, ‘Muller?’

‘Cornelius Muller.’

There was an uneasy pause and then the voice explained, ‘From Pretoria.’

For a moment Sir John Hargreaves thought the stranger must be calling from the remote city, and then he remembered. ‘Yes. Yes. Of course. Can I be of any help?’ He added, ‘I hope Castle…’

‘I would like to talk to you, Sir John, about Castle, be in the office on Monday. If you’d ring my secretary…’ He looked at his watch. ‘She will still be at the office.’

‘You won’t be there tomorrow?’

‘No. I’m taking this weekend at home.’

‘Could I come and see you, Sir John?’

‘Is it so very urgent?’

‘I think it is. I have a strong feeling I’ve made a most serious mistake. I do want badly to talk to you, Sir John.’

There goes Trollope, Hargreaves thought, and poor Mary-I try to keep the office away from us when we are here and yet it’s always intruding. He remembered the evening of the shoot when Daintry had been so difficult… He asked, ‘Have you a car?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

He thought, I can still have Saturday free if I’m reasonably hospitable tonight. He said, ‘It’s less than two hours drive if you’d care to come to dinner.’

‘Of course. It’s very kind of you, Sir John. I wouldn’t have disturbed you if I hadn’t thought it important. I…’

‘We may not be able to rustle up more than an omelette, Muller. Pot luck,’ he added.

He put down the receiver, remembering the apocryphal story he knew they told about him and the cannibals. He went to the window and looked out. Africa receded. The lights were the lights of the motorway leading to London and the office. He felt the approaching suicide of Melmotte-there was no other solution. He went to the drawing-room: Mary was pouring out a cup of Earl Grey from the silver teapot which she had bought at a Christie sale. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Mary. We’ve got a guest for dinner.’

‘I was afraid of that. When he insisted on speaking to you… Who is it?’

‘The man BOSS has sent over from Pretoria.’

‘Couldn’t he wait till Monday?’

‘He said it was too urgent.’

‘I don’t like those apartheid buggers.’ Common English obscenities always sounded strange in her American accent.

‘Nor do I, but we have to work with them. I suppose we can rustle up something to eat.’

‘There’s some cold beef.’

‘That’s better than the omelette I promised him.’

It was a stiff meal because no business could be talked, though Lady Hargreaves did her best, with the help of the Beaujolais, to find a possible subject. She confessed herself completely ignorant of Afrikaaner art and literature, but it was an ignorance which Muller appeared to share. He admitted there were some poets and novelists around and he mentioned the Hertzog Prize, but he added that he had read none of them. ‘They are unreliable,’ he said, ‘most of them.’

‘Unreliable?’

‘They get mixed up in politics. There’s a poet in prison now for helping terrorists.’ Hargreaves tried to change the subject, but he could think of nothing in connection with South Africa but gold and diamonds they were mixed up with politics too, just as much as the writers. The word diamonds suggested Namibia and he remembered that Oppenheimer, the millionaire, supported the progressive party. His Africa had been the impoverished Africa of the bush, but politics lay like the detritus of a mine over the south. He was glad when they could be alone with a bottle of whisky and two easy chairs it was easier to talk of hard things in an easy chair-it was difficult, he had always found, to get angry in an easy chair.

‘You must forgive me,’ Hargreaves said, ‘for not having been in London to greet you. I had to go to Washington. One of those routine visits that one can’t avoid. I hope my people have been looking after you properly.’

‘I had to go off too,’ Muller said, ‘to Bonn.’

‘But not exactly a routine visit there, I imagine? The Concorde has brought London so damnably close to Washington they almost expect you to drop over for lunch. I hope all went satisfactorily in Bonn-within reason, of course But I suppose you’ve been discussing all that with our friend Castle.’

‘Your friend, I think, more than mine.’

‘Yes, yes. I know there was a little trouble between you years ago. But that’s ancient history surely.’

‘Is there such a thing, sir, as ancient history? The Irish don’t think so, and what you call the Boer War is still very much our war, but we call it the war of independence. I’m worried about Castle. That’s why I’m bothering you tonight. I’ve been indiscreet. I let him have some notes I made about the Bonn visit. Nothing very secret, of course, but all the same someone reading between the lines…’

‘My dear fellow, you can trust Castle. I wouldn’t have asked him to brief you if he wasn’t the best man…’

‘I went to have dinner with him at his home. I was surprised to find he was married to a black girl, the one who was the cause of what you call a little trouble. He even seems to have a child by her.’

‘We have no colour bar here, Muller, and she was very thoroughly vetted, I can assure you.’

‘All the same, it was the Communists who organised her escape. Castle was a great friend of Carson. I suppose you know that.’

‘We know all about Carson-and the escape. It was Castle’s job to have Communist contacts. Is Carson still a trouble to you?’

‘No. Carson died in prison-from pneumonia. I could see how upset Castle was when I told him.’

‘Why not? If they were friends.’ Hargreaves looked with regret at his Trollope where it lay beyond the bottle of Cutty Sark. Muller got abruptly to his feet and walked across the room. He halted before the photograph of a black man wearing a soft black hat of the kind missionaries used to wear. One side of his face was disfigured by lupus and he smiled at whoever held the camera with one side of his mouth only.

‘Poor fellow,’ Hargreaves said, ‘he was dying when I took that photograph. He knew it. He was a brave man like all the Krus. I wanted something to remember him by.’

Muller said, ‘I haven’t made a full confession, sir. I gave Castle the wrong notes by accident. I’d made one lot to show him and one to draw on for my reports and I confused them. It’s true there’s nothing very secret-I wouldn’t have put anything very secret on paper over here-but there were some indiscreet phrases…’

‘Really, you don’t have to worry, Muller.’

‘I can’t help worrying, sir. In this country you live in such a different atmosphere. You have so little to fear compared with us. That black in the photograph-you liked him?’

‘He was a friend-a friend I loved.’

‘I can’t say that of a single black,’ Muller replied. He turned. On the opposite side of the room, on the wall, hung an African mask.

‘I don’t trust Castle.’ He said, ‘I can’t prove anything, but I have an intuition… I wish you had appointed someone else to brief me.’

‘There were only two men dealing with your material. Davis and Castle.’

‘Davis is the one who died?’

‘Yes.’

‘You take things so lightly over here. I sometimes envy you. Things like a black child. You know, sir, in our experience there is no one more vulnerable than an officer in secret intelligence. We had a leak a few years back from BOSS-in the section which deals with the Communists. One of our most intelligent men. He too cultivated friendships and the friendships took over. Carson was concerned in that case too. And there was another case-one of our officers was a brilliant chess player. Intelligence became to him just another game of chess. He was interested only when he was pitted against a really first-class player. In the end he grew dissatisfied. The games were too easy so he took on his own side. I think he was very happy as long as the game lasted.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He’s dead now.’

Hargreaves thought again of Melmotte. People talked of courage as a primary virtue. What of the courage of a known swindler and bankrupt taking his place in the dining-room of the House of Commons? Is courage a justification? Is courage in whatever cause a virtue? He said, ‘We are satisfied that Davis was the leak we had to close.’

‘A fortunate death?’

‘Cirrhosis of the liver.’

‘I told you Carson died of pneumonia.’

‘Castle, I happen to know, doesn’t play chess.’

‘There are other motives too.

‘Love of money.’

‘That certainly doesn’t apply to Castle.’

‘He loves his wife,’ Muller said, ‘and his child.’

‘What of that?’

‘They are both black,’ Muller replied with simplicity, looking across the room at the photograph of the Kru chief upon the wall as though, thought Hargreaves, even I am not beyond his suspicion, which, like some searchlight on the Cape, swept the unfriendly seas beyond in search of enemy vessels.

Muller said, ‘I hope to God you are right and the leak really was Davis. I don’t believe it was.’

Hargreaves watched Muller drive away through the park in his black Mercedes. The lights slowed down and became stationary; he must have reached the lodge, where since the Irish bombings began, a man from the Special Branch had been stationed. The park seemed no longer to be an extension of the African bush-it was a small parcel of the Home Counties which had never been home to Hargreaves. It was nearly midnight. He went upstairs to his dressing-room, but he didn’t take off his clothes further than his shirt. He wrapped a towel round his neck and began to shave. He had shaved before dinner and it wasn’t a necessary act, but he could always think more clearly when he shaved. He tried to recall exactly the reasons Muller had given for suspecting Castle-his relations with Carson-those meant nothing. A black wife and child Hargreaves remembered with sadness and a sense of loss the black mistress whom he had known many years ago before his marriage. She had died of blackwater fever and when she died he had felt as though a great part of his love for Africa had gone to the grave with her. Muller had spoken of intuition ‘I can’t prove anything, but I have an intuition…’ Hargreaves was the last man to laugh at intuition. In Africa he had lived with intuition, he was accustomed to choose his boys by intuition not by the dirty notebooks they carried with illegible references. Once his life had been saved by an intuition.

He dried his face, and he thought: I’ll ring up Emmanuel. Doctor Percival was the only real friend he had in the whole firm. He opened the bedroom door and looked in. The room was in darkness and he thought his wife was asleep until she spoke. ‘What’s keeping you, dear?’

‘I won’t be long. I just want to ring up Emmanuel.’

‘Has that man Muller gone?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t like him.’

‘Nor do I.’

Castle woke and looked at his watch, though he believed that he carried time in his head-he knew it would be a few minutes to eight, giving him just long enough to go to his study and turn on the news without waking Sarah. He was surprised to see that his watch marked eight five-the inner clock had never failed him before, and he doubted his watch, but by the time he reached his room the important news was over there were only the little scraps of parochial interest which the reader used to fill the slot: a bad accident on the M4, a brief interview with Mrs Whitehouse welcoming some new campaign against pornographic books, and perhaps as an illustration of her talk, a trivial fact, that an obscure bookseller called Holliday-I’m sorry, Halliday-had appeared before a magistrate in Newington Butts for selling a pornographic film to a boy of fourteen. He had been remanded for trial at the Central Criminal Court, and his bail had been set at two hundred pounds.

So he was at liberty, Castle thought, with the copy of Muller’s notes in his pocket, presumably watched by the police. He might be afraid to pass them on at whatever drop they had given him, he might be afraid even to destroy them; what seemed his most likely choice was to keep them as a bargaining asset with the police. ‘I’m a more important man than you think: if this little affair can be arranged, I can show you things… let me talk to someone from the Special Branch.’ Castle could well imagine the kind of conversation which might he going on at that moment: the sceptical local police, Halliday exposing the first page of Muller’s notes as an inducement.

Castle opened the door of the bedroom: Sarah was still asleep. He told himself that now the moment had arrived which he had always expected, when he must think clearly and act decisively. Hope was out of place just as much as despair. They were emotions which would confuse thought. He must assume Boris had gone, that the line was cut, and that he must act on his own.

He went down to the sitting-room where Sarah wouldn’t hear him dial and rang a second time the number he had been given to use only for a final emergency. He had no idea in what room it was ringing the exchange was somewhere in Kensington: he dialled three times with an interval of ten seconds between and he had the impression that his SOS was ringing out to an empty room, but he couldn’t tell… There was no other appeal for help which he could make, nothing left for him to do but clear the home ground. He sat by the telephone and made his plans, or rather went over them and confirmed them, for he had made them long ago. There was nothing important left to he destroyed, he was almost sure of that, no books he had once used for coding… he was convinced there were no papers waiting to be burned… he could leave the house safely, locked and empty… you couldn’t, of course, burn a dog… what was he to do with Buller? How absurd at this moment to be bothered by a dog, a dog he had never even liked, but his mother would never allow Sarah to introduce Buller into the Sussex house as a permanent lodger. He could leave him, he supposed, at a kennels, but he had no idea where… This was the one problem he had never worked out. He told himself that it was not an important one, as he went upstairs to wake Sarah. Why this morning was she so deeply asleep? He remembered, as he looked at her, with the tenderness one can feel even for an enemy who sleeps, how after making love he had fallen into the deepest nullity he had known for months, simply because they had talked frankly, because they had ceased to have secrets. He kissed her and she opened her eyes and he could tell she knew at once there was no time to be lost; she couldn’t, in her usual fashion, wake slowly, and stretch her arms and say, ‘I was dreaming’ He told her, ‘You must ring my mother now. It will seem more natural for you to do it if we’ve had a quarrel. Ask if you can stay a few days with Sam. You can lie a little. All the better if she thinks you are lying. It will make it easier, when you are there, to let the story out slowly. You can say that I’ve done something unforgivable… We talked about it all last night.’