Watchman

One

Miles Flint wore glasses: they were his only distinguishing feature. Billy Monmouth could not help smiling as he watched Miles leave the club and head off toward his car, which would be parked some discreet distance away. Miles and Billy had joined the firm around the same time, and it had seemed inevitable that, over the years, they would become friends, though friends, in the strictest sense of the word, were never made in their world.

Miles was feeling a little heavy from the drinks. Billy had insisted on buying — ‘the prerogative of the bachelor’s paycheck, old boy’ — and Miles had not refused. He fumbled now at the buttons of his coat, feeling a slight and unseasonal chill in the London air, and thought of the evening ahead. He had one more visit to pay, a few telephone calls to make, but apart from that, Sheila and he would have their first full evening together for a whole week.

He did not relish the prospect.

As suspected, his car had collected a parking ticket. He ripped it from the windscreen, walked around the car once as though he were a potential and only half-informed buyer, and bent down as if checking for a bald tire or broken muffler. Then, satisfied, he unlocked the passenger door. The Jaguar’s interior, pale hide complementing the cream exterior, looked fine. He slid across into the driver’s seat and slipped the key into the ignition, turning it quickly. The engine coughed once, then roared into life. He sat back, letting it idle, staring into space.

That was that, then. He was not about to be blown up today. He knew that the younger men in the firm, and even the likes of Billy Monmouth, smiled at him behind his back, whispering words like ‘paranoia’ and ‘nerves,’ going about their own business casually and without fear, as though there were invisible barriers between them and some preordained death. But then Miles was a cautious man, and he knew that in this game there was no such thing as being too careful.

He sat for a few more minutes, reflecting upon the years spent inspecting his car, checking rooms and telephones and even the undersides of restaurant tables. People thought him clumsy because he would always drop a knife or a fork before the meal began, bowing his head beneath the tablecloth to pick it up. All he was doing was obeying another of the unwritten rules: checking for bugs.

The car was sounding good, though it was a luxury much detested by Sheila. She drove about in a battered Volkswagen Beetle, which had once been orange but was now a motley patchwork of colors. Sheila did not think it worthwhile paying a garage to do repairs, when all one needed was a handbook and some tools. Miles forgave her everything, for he too had a quiet liking for her car, not so much for its performance as for its name.

Miles Flint’s hobby was beetles, not the cars but the insects. He loved to read about their multifarious lifestyles, their ingenuity, their incalculable species, and he charted their habitats on a wall map in his study, a study filled with books and magazine articles, and a few glass cases containing specimens that he had caught himself in earlier days. He no longer killed beetles, and had no desire to exhibit anyone else’s killings. He was content now to read about beetles and to look at detailed photographs and diagrams, for he had learned the value of life.

He had one son, Jack, who built up tidy overdrafts during each term at the university, then came home pleading poverty. Miles had flipped through the stubs in one of Jack’s famished checkbooks: payments to record stores, bookshops, restaurants, a wine bar. He had returned the checkbook to Jack’s secondhand tweed jacket, replacing it carefully between a diary and a letter from a besotted (and jilted) girlfriend. Later, he had asked Jack about his spending and had received honest answers.

Miles knew that his kind did not deal in honesty. Perhaps that was the problem. He examined the large-paned windows along the quiet street, the car’s interior warming nicely. Through one ground-floor window he could watch the silent drama of a man and a woman, both on the point of leaving the building, while by running the car forward a yard or two, he might glance into another lit interior. The choice was his. For once, and with a feeling of abrupt free will, he decided to drive away completely. He had, after all, to visit the watchmen.

Somewhere behind him, in the early-evening twilight, came the sound of an explosion.

Miles stopped outside the Cordelia, a popular nouveau riche hotel off Hyde Park. The receptionist was listening to her pocket radio.

‘Has there been a news flash?’ he asked.

‘Yes, isn’t it awful? Another bomb.’

Miles nodded and headed for the lifts. The lift was mirrored, and riding it alone to the fifth floor, he tried not to catch a glimpse of himself. Another bomb. There had been one last week, in a car parked in Knightsbridge, and another had been defused just in time. London had taken on a siege mentality, and the security services were running around like so many ants in a glass case. Miles could feel a headache coming on. He knew that by the time he reached home, he would be ready for a confrontation. It was not a good sign, and that was part of the reason for this short break in his journey. He also wanted to make a few phone calls on the firm’s bill. Every little bit helped.

He knocked twice on the door of room 514, and it was opened by Jeff Phillips, looking tired, his tie hanging undone around his neck.

‘Hello, Miles,’ he said, surprised. ‘What’s up?’

Inside the room, Tony Sinclair was busy listening to something on a headset. The headset was attached to a tape recorder and a small receiver. He nodded in greeting at Miles, seeming interested in the conversation on which he was eavesdropping.

‘Nothing,’ said Miles. ‘I just wanted to check, that’s all. There’s been another bomb.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. I heard it go off as I was driving here. Somewhere near Piccadilly.’

Jeff Phillips shook his head. He poured some coffee from a thermos, gesturing with the cup toward his superior, but Miles waved away the offer.

He flicked through his tiny notebook, which was filled with telephone numbers and initials, nothing more. Yes, he did have a couple of calls to make, but they were not that important. He realized now that his reason for coming here was simply to defer his going home. There did not seem to be any good nights at home now, and mostly, he supposed, that was his fault. He would be irritable, persnickety, finding fault with small, unimportant things, and would store up his irritation deep within himself like the larva of a dung beetle, warm and quickening within its womb of dung. Jack had given him a year’s adoption of a dung beetle at London Zoo as a birthday present, and Miles had never received a more handsome gift in his life. He had visited the glass case, deep in the subdued light and warmth of the insect house, and had watched the beetle for a long time, marveling at the simplicity of its life.

What his colleagues did not know was that Miles Flint had found counterparts for them all in the beetle world.

He felt the pulse of the headache within him. A few whiskeys often did that. So why did he drink them? Well, he was a Scot after all. He was supposed to drink whiskey.

‘Do you have any aspirin, Jeff?’

‘Afraid not. Been on the bottle, have we?’

‘I’ve had a couple, yes.’

‘Thought I could smell it.’ Phillips sipped his tepid coffee.

Miles was thinking of James Bond, who was a Scot but drank martinis. Not very realistic, that. The resemblance between Miles and James Bond, as Miles was only too aware, stopped at their country of origin. Bond was a comic book hero, a superman, while he, Miles Flint, was flesh and blood and nerves.

And headache.

‘It’s been quiet here,’ said Phillips. ‘A few phone calls to his embassy, made in Arabic, just asking about the situation back home and if they had any of this week’s newspapers, and a call to Harrods, made in English, to ask what time they close. He went out for an hour and a half. Bought the Telegraph, would you believe, and a dirty magazine. Tony knows the name of it. I don’t go in for them myself. He also purchased two packets of Dunhill’s and one bottle of three-star brandy. That’s about it. Came back to his room. Telephoned to the States, to one of those recorded pornographic message services. Again Tony has the details. You can listen to the recording we made if you like. Tony reckons our man got the number from the magazine he bought.’

‘Who’s he speaking to just now?’

Phillips went across to check the notepad that lay on Tony Sinclair’s knees.

‘To Jermyn Street. Arranging a fitting. These people.’ Phillips shook his head in ironic disbelief.

Miles knew what he meant. The watchmen seemed to spend half their lives trailing men and women who did little more than buy expensive clothes and gifts for their families back home.

‘He’s making another call,’ said Tony Sinclair, the section’s most recent recruit. Miles was watching him for any signs of weakness, of hesitation or misjudgment. Tony was still on probation.

‘Speaking Arabic again,’ he said now, switching on the tape recorder. As he began to scribble furiously with his ballpoint pen, Jeff Phillips went to his shoulder to watch.

‘He’s arranging a meeting,’ Phillips murmured. ‘This looks a little more promising.’

Miles Flint, attuned to such things, doubted it, but it gave him a good excuse not to go home just yet. He would phone Sheila and tell her.

‘Mind if I come along on this one?’ he asked. Phillips shrugged his shoulders.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Your Arabic is as good as mine, I’m sure. But isn’t this supposed to be your night off?’

‘I’d like to stick with this one,’ lied Miles. ‘I’ll just make a quick call home.’

‘Fine,’ said Phillips. ‘I’ll go downstairs and fetch the car.’

Two

Having put his car into the hotel’s basement garage, Miles began to unwind in the firm’s gleaming Rover.

Miles Flint was a watchman. It was his job to look and to listen, and then report back to his section chief, nothing more. He did not mind such a passive role in life, but was aware that others did not share his meticulous pleasure in sifting through the daily affairs of those he was sent to watch. Once or twice, to his certain knowledge, Billy Monmouth had tried to induce his promotion laterally through a word in the right ear. Miles did not want promotion. It suited him to be a watchman.

Billy and he had been invited to join the firm back in 1966, when it was just beginning to recover from a devastating few years of defection, rumor, and counter-rumor. It was said that a super-mole had confessed to wartime subversion, but was being kept under wraps, and that a more dangerous double agent had been active, too, in later years. Much soul-searching and navel-gazing had been taking place back then, and really, that sense of suspicion had never blown away, like rotting leaves left too long in a garden.

And now there were new scandals, new stories to be foisted on the same old public. One could choose to ignore it all, of course, and get on with life. Nevertheless, Billy and he had talked about these things over lunch.

The more Miles thought about Billy, the more it struck him how odd he had seemed at the club. He had laughed, but not with his usual timbre. Billy had been worried about something, but could not bring himself to speak of it. He was a longhorn beetle, the self-sufficient predator of the family. Miles wasn’t so sure about his own classification: most of the time he settled for the quiet life of the museum beetle. Jeff Phillips, on the other hand, driving the car with effortless grace, belonged to Buprestidae, the splendor beetles. They loved warmth and sunshine, were brightly colored, and spent their days sipping pollen and nectar. Ah yes, that was Jeff Phillips, with his silk ties and his noisy Italian shoes. Looking across at Phillips now, Miles remembered that despite the splendor beetle’s airs and graces, its young fed upon rotten wood and old vegetables. For some reason, the thought cheered him up immensely.

They drove slowly. Phillips really was an excellent driver, unshowy but never losing his prey. He had been a watchman for just over a year, but was already busy, Miles knew, trying for one of those ‘lateral promotions’ so beloved by Billy Monmouth.

‘Turning into the Strand.’

The Arab’s code name was Latchkey. Miles wondered just who was responsible for these absurdities. Someone had to sit at a desk all day doing nothing else but inventing code names. In the past few months, Miles had been detailed to watch a real rogues’ gallery: Ivanhoe, Possum, Conch, Tundish, Agamemnon. And now Latchkey, who was perhaps the main assassin for a group of lesser-known oil-producing states in the Gulf. Conceivably, however, he might be merely what his public image and his passport showed, a well-placed civil engineer, in London to advise his embassy on possible contracts for British companies in the Gulf. Some very high-tech refineries were about to be built — were, as Billy had put it, ‘in the pipeline’ — in order to extract every last drop of commercial goodness from the crude natural product. And that was why no toes were to be stepped on, no possible evidence of interference left lying around. Discretion was paramount if the contracts were not to be endangered, and the burden belonged to Miles.

‘Taxi signaling and stopping,’ said Phillips. ‘I’ll drop you and park the car.’

Miles slipped out of the car and followed Latchkey into the Doric, one of the capital’s grandest hotels, feeling uncomfortably shabby. His shoes were scuffed and unpolished, his trousers just a little too creased. Well, he could always pretend to be American. In Philly, we always dress down for dinner, he thought to himself as he pushed through the revolving door. The Arab was gliding into the cocktail bar, smoothing down his tie as he went.

‘Would you have a light?’

The girl who barred his way was blond, petite and very pretty, with a trained voice and a trained smile. Everything about her looked trained, so that her movements told the prospective customer that she was a professional girl. Miles had no time to waste.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, moving past her.

She was not about to waste time herself, time being money in her world. She smiled again, drifting off toward another tired-looking traveler.

The bar was busy with early-evening drinkers, not those who leave their offices tired and thirsty, but those who feel it a duty to consume a few expensive drinks before an expensive meal. Miles pushed an earpiece into his ear as he walked, the slender cord curving down his neck and into his top pocket. He found a chair with his back to Latchkey, who was seated alone at a table for two. Having ordered a whiskey, miming to the waiter that he was partially deaf, Miles took a notebook from his pocket and produced a silver pen from the same place. He looked like the perfect accountant, ready to jot down a few calculations of profit margins and tax contributions.

In poising the pen, an expensive-looking fountain model, Miles angled its top toward Latchkey, and through his earpiece came the chaotic sounds of the bar. He cursed silently the fact that there were so many people around. Latchkey, having coughed twice, ordered a fresh orange juice from the waiter — ‘as in freshly squeezed, you understand’ — while Miles, appearing to mull over his figures, listened.

Jeff Phillips would be calling for assistance, though it still seemed unlikely that anything important was about to take place. The really important meetings always occurred either in obscure, well-guarded rooms or else in parks and on heaths, preferably with a storm raging in the background. Nothing that the constantly ingenious technical-support experts could rig up in their dark chambers was of much help on a windswept hill.

The pen, however, was superb, a tiny transmitter inside the cap sending information to the receiver inside his pocket, and from there to the earpiece. It was as close to James Bond as the firm’s scientists ever came, but it was not perfect. Miles was hard pressed to hear what Latchkey was saying to the waiter who had brought him his drink. A couple nearby, thinking themselves involved in the most intimate dialogue, kept interrupting, the woman’s voice of just sufficient flutedness to block out the Arab’s soft inflections. Miles, listening to their conversation, hoped that they would turn words into deeds and slip upstairs to their room. But then Latchkey wasn’t saying anything yet, so where was the harm in trying out the equipment on other couples in the vicinity? No one, however, as a quick sweep revealed, was saying the sorts of thing that the fluted woman was saying to her partner.

Miles’s great fear was that Latchkey and his contact would speak together in Arabic, for he knew that his Arabic, despite Phillips’s protestations, was a little rusty. The meeting had been arranged in Arabic, but with English pleasantries at the end of the dialogue. Tony Sinclair had worked quickly and accurately on the transcription, and Miles would remember that. He tried to ignore the niggling feeling that he had been stupid to come here tonight, stupid to have insisted on playing a role in what was not his drama. He should have gritted his teeth and gone home. His own fears for his marriage had caused him to make an error of professional judgment. That was the most worrying thing of all.

The woman shrieked suddenly, laughing at her partner’s lubricious joke, and looking up, Miles saw that Phillips was standing in the doorway, looking around as though for a friend. Their eyes met for less than a second, and Miles knew that the backup had arrived. At that moment, a swarthy man brushed past Phillips and walked across to Latchkey’s table. Miles, nodding as a drink was laid before him by the sweating waiter, concentrated hard on the table behind him.

‘Salaam alaikum.’

‘Alaikum salaam.’

‘It’s good to see you again. How is the refinery project progressing?’

‘There have been some difficulties.’

As their conversation continued — in English, praise Allah — it became obvious to Miles that he was wasting his time. The two men discussed what introductions were to be made to what companies. They even spoke about bribes that might be offered to them by certain work-hungry corporations in return for a slice of this or that contract. It was all very businesslike and aboveboard. The contact was Latchkey’s man in the City, nothing more. They drank little and spoke slowly and clearly.

It was just after ten o’clock when they rose to shake hands. Both seemed pleased with the money that would be slipped into their hands sub rosa in the days to follow. Latchkey told his friend to wait for him outside, and then went into the toilet, looking back and smiling as he did so.

‘Drinking alone?’

It was the girl again, not having much luck tonight, but determined to keep on trying. Miles tucked the earpiece back into his pocket while she pulled a chair across from where the Arab’s contact had been sitting.

‘Just finishing,’ he said, watching her cross her legs as she sat down.

‘What a pity,’ she said, her bottom lip full. ‘What else are you doing tonight then?’

‘Going home to my wife, that’s all.’

‘You don’t sound very happy about it. Why not stay here and keep me company? I’d make you happy.’

Miles shook his head.

‘Not tonight,’ he said.

‘Which night then?’

‘A year next Saturday.’

She laughed at this.

‘I’ll hold you to that. You see if I don’t.’

‘It’ll be my pleasure.’

He was beginning to enjoy this little game, signaling as it did the end of his evening’s work. At the same time, however, Latchkey was taking a long time, considering that he had a friend waiting for him outside, and when the door of the gentlemen’s toilet opened and Latchkey’s dark suit, white shirt, and pale tie emerged, the man wearing them was not Latchkey.

Aghast, Miles recalled that a bearded businessman, a little the worse for drink, had entered the toilet before Latchkey, and that the same bearded businessman had emerged during his conversation with the girl. Something was very, very wrong, for it was that bearded businessman who now wore Latchkey’s clothes.

Miles rose to his feet a little shakily, the girl forgotten, and walked quickly from the bar. Phillips was seated in the foyer, flicking uninterestedly through a newspaper. When he saw the look on his superior’s face, he jumped to his feet.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Everything. We’ve been sold a dummy. There was a bearded man, a bit drunk, gray suit, glasses. Did you see him leave?’ Miles felt queasy. It had been an old trick, fairly clumsy in execution. Nevertheless, it had caught him dead.

‘Yes, he left a couple of minutes ago, but he looked as sober as the proverbial judge to me.’

‘I’ll bet he did. It was Latchkey. And there’s a ringer in the bar just now wearing Latchkey’s clothes.’

‘Hook, line, and bloody sinker. Where would he be going?’

‘Well, you can bet he’s not off for a late-night fitting in Jermyn Street. Has someone taken the contact?’

‘He’s being tailed.’

‘Right, stay here and keep a tab on the one still in the bar. I’d better phone in with the happy news.’

‘OK. Anything else?’

‘Yes. Pray that nothing happens in London tonight. Not a bombing or a break-in or a single solitary mugging, because if it does, we’re all in trouble.’ He looked back toward the bar. ‘Double bloody trouble.’

As the whirligig of his thoughts slowed and began spinning in the right direction, Miles saw how perfectly everything had been underplayed by the Arab. His own error had been in under-estimating every single move. Would a younger man have done that? Probably. What he could not deny, however, was that his mind had been on other things throughout. He had been only half interested. And there was something else, something at the edge of his vision. What was it? It had something to do with the girl. Yes, she had approached just as Latchkey was disappearing into the toilet, and Latchkey had turned and, seeming to sum up the situation, smiled toward him. No, not toward him, directly at him. There could have been many reasons for that smile. The most obvious now was that Latchkey had known who Miles was. He had known.

And he hadn’t even bothered to hide the fact.

Three

All in all, thought the Israeli, it had been a successful if not an enjoyable evening. He did not enjoy mixing with people. They could be such treacherous animals, their claws hidden by smiles and bows, handshakes and pats on the back. A pat on the back usually heralded some conspiracy or other, one’s opponent touching one for luck. The alcohol had been very pleasant, however, and Nira had been there, flaunting her beauty as though she were a display case and it her precious diadem. Ah, but she would not believe that he could know such words as ‘diadem,’ or have such cultured thoughts. His outward appearance bespoke a large, earthy, and vaguely unpleasant appetite, and this had aided him in his life’s work, if not in love. He might be all things to all women, if only they would allow him the opportunity of pleasuring them. He knew the most intricate paths of delight, but to taste them alone was to taste nothing.

The taxi dropped him at the end of his street so that he could catch a few gulps of brisk night air before retiring. There had been talk tonight both during and after dinner which he should file in his memory before going to sleep, but it could wait until morning. Not an interesting night then, but successful insofar as he had met Nira again, and had spoken with her alone for a few moments, and had registered in the strongest terms his interest in her. She had been embarrassed, of course, and had walked away at the first possible and excusable moment, but it was done. He could afford to take his time over such a challenging seduction, when the prize would be so wondrously sweet.

He was fumbling for the bunch of keys in his trouser pocket when, staggering backwards, he began to choke, his tongue swelling to fill his throat, brain squeezed with blood. The professional within him knew in a final moment of lucidity that he did not have time to resist the wire that now melted through his neck. Spinning toward a blackening vertigo of spirit, he hoped instead for heaven and redemption.

The Arab, job done, did not even smile this time.

Sheila Flint rose early, not surprised to find that she had been sleeping alone. She found Miles still at his desk in the downstairs study, his head lying across folded arms. September sun, milk-warm, poured through the window. Sheila stood in the doorway, watching him sleep, his face puffy like that of a well-fed child, his breath quiet with stealth.

He had always been something of a mystery to her, even in sleep. She had been attracted to him in the beginning because his long silences and half-aware eyes had betokened some kind of inner calm and, even, genius. But he had quickly shown her another face, brawling with other students after drinking binges, fiercely jealous of her other friends. Well, he had changed over the years, had come to have a genius only for passivity, and for a decade and a half she had pretended to herself that she too liked the quiet life. Then she had set about educating herself in life, going to night classes, attending the cinema and the opera — alone, or with Moira, her clever, trustworthy, and only slightly too good-looking ally — and enrolling for Open University courses that kept her mind moving. Miles showed little interest. Nothing, it seemed, could push him back into his younger self. He was growing old, and oh God, she was growing old too.

She liked her job in the civil service, but hated London. To her continual surprise, it did not hate her back. It seemed to her a city without love or compromise, and she was forever finding examples of both to confound her feelings. The same ambivalence existed in her marriage. Despite a lack of real communication and, at times, even animosity, Miles and she had lasted longer than any of the other couples they had known, and they had a son who had grown into a normal, mistrustful, and unloving young man. People called theirs ‘the perfect marriage.’

Watching Miles now as a trickle of saliva left the corner of his mouth, she was reminded of Jack as a baby, spluttering food and monosyllables, tying her to him with chains of guilt and dependence. She remembered, too, that Jack was due home in the next week or two, gracing them with his presence for a few days until university term started.

On the wall above Miles’s desk was mounted the certificate from London Zoo reminding him that he was the adoptive parent of a dung beetle. Jack’s gift had infuriated her, for it showed that even he knew more about Miles than she did. Miles had been delighted with the present. So original, so unusual. I’m original, too, she had wanted to cry, as father and son had burrowed deep into each other’s embrace. I want to be part of your bloody little conspiracy. She had a mind, didn’t she? She had inspired ideas. Everyone at work came to her with their problems, thinking her a genius at lateral thinking. She would have liked to tell Miles this, to have him see her more clearly, but they never talked about work. Miles bloody Flint and his ‘internal security.’ She knew who he worked for; he worked for the Ministry of Euphemisms.

So be it.

She was far too early yet for work, but would not sleep again, and had no intention of waking Miles, so she tiptoed through to the kitchen and made coffee. Waiting for the kettle to boil (percolated coffee would be too noisy), she studied her kitchen. Yes, hers. She had chosen every detail, every last cup and spoon. Miles had nodded at each purchase, sometimes not even noticing that he was eating off new crockery. She sat on her stool at the breakfast bar and set her mind to the previous day’s crossword. ‘Finally does creep slowly forward to watch.’ Three letters. Sleep while you can, Miles. I have my secrets, too, a whole chest full of them.

Reaching for a pen, she folded back the paper and filled in the three empty boxes with the word ‘spy.’

The telephone call from Colonel Denniston served only to bring into the waking world all of Miles Flint’s nightmares.

‘Flint? Denniston here. There’s a meeting in my office in one hour. Be there.’

‘Yes, sir. Has anything happened?’

‘Too bloody right it has. Some Israeli official’s been decapitated outside his own house. Sounds like your man Latchkey, doesn’t it? See you in an hour.’

Lying in his hot bath, stiff from an uncomfortable sleep, Miles closed his eyes for a few precious moments. Of course there had been an assassination, and a crude one by the sound of it. What else could he have expected? There was a knocking at the door. Miles never locked the bathroom door, but Sheila didn’t come in anymore if he was there.

‘I’m going now,’ she called.

‘I might be back late again tonight,’ he answered. ‘So I may as well apologize now. Sorry.’

There was silence as she moved away. Then the front door slammed shut, leaving the house somehow colder. As far as Sheila was concerned, Miles worked for internal security, and that was that. Security, yes, but now Miles had evidence of a leak somewhere in the firm, for how else could the Arab have known about him? Then again, what sort of evidence was a smile? It seemed inadmissible.

Looking around the bathroom, Miles appeared to see everything anew. The shapes of sink, toilet bowl, bath seemed strange to him, and even the bathwater felt curiously new as he ran his hands through it. In this reverie, he let his mind go blank until an internal alarm system reminded him of his appointment, and the world fell back upon him like the last wall of some condemned building.

Four

Colonel ‘H’ Denniston, section chief of the Watcher Service, MI5’s surveillance and report unit, liked the simple life. His apartment near to Victoria Street was rented, renting giving so many less complications to one’s life. Denniston didn’t like to feel tied, and disliked the niggling difficulties of life, like shopping, shaving, changing lightbulbs. The widow upstairs from his flat, taking pity on him perhaps, would buy a few things for him if he wished, and if he decided to decline her offer, then Denniston would plan his own shopping trips like military maneuvers.

Denniston had been in charge of the watchmen for only three years, but already had built around himself a reputation for severe correctness and efficiency. He used this reputation like a shield, and he was as angry as hell that a dent had been made in it. He sat at his teak desk and studied some papers from a slim folder. In front of him sat Flint, Phillips, and young Sinclair, lined up in a row like schoolboy truants. Sinclair had his hands in his lap as though he might be needing to urinate, while Flint made a show of cleaning his glasses. Phillips, though, arms folded, legs crossed, looked relaxed and a little too confident. His pink tie outraged Denniston, an army man of thirty-one years with a military dislike of the flamboyant.

‘You were the responsible agent at the time Latchkey went missing, weren’t you, Phillips?’

Denniston saw his question have the immediate and hoped-for impact. Phillips unfolded his arms and gripped his thighs with his hands, perhaps to stop them from shaking.

‘Well... no, sir, not really. You see, I... ahm...’

‘You were, at the time, acting under orders given by a senior officer?’

‘Yes, yes, actually, I was.’

‘Hmm.’ Denniston looked at the papers again, rearranging them, sifting through as though in search of something specific.

Miles Flint coughed.

‘What do we know, sir,’ he said, ‘about the dead man?’

‘We know, Flint, that he was garrotted around midnight, and that the Israelis kept it to themselves until five this morning.’

‘Do we know when he was actually found?’

‘No, but it seems that he was found by his own people, so there were no cries of foul murder in the streets.’

Staring past the colonel’s bowed head, Miles watched the windows of the office block across the way. Government offices too, of course. He saw secretaries hurrying past, weighed down with sheaves of paper.

‘We know, too,’ the colonel was saying, ‘that the dead man, though attached to the embassy, was no ordinary aide, though that may be his official title. He seems to have been working on the periphery. Something of an arms dealer in an earlier incarnation. All very discreet, of course, but he was on our files.’

‘Any links with Mossad, sir?’ asked Phillips.

‘Again, no.’ Denniston looked across to Tony Sinclair. ‘That’s Israeli security, you know.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Sinclair in hushed tones. ‘I know.’

‘Best outfit in the business as far as I’m concerned.’

Denniston was about to go back to his reading when the door opened and the deputy director came hurrying into the room.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said crisply, drawing a chair over to the desk and seating himself beside a now flushed Colonel Denniston. ‘Briefing your men, Colonel? Very wise, I should think. There will be an investigation, of course.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

‘And the old boy himself wants to see us in fifteen minutes. But I thought I’d say my piece first.’

‘Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.’

Miles hated to see a grown man cry, and that was just what the colonel was doing. Not outwardly, of course. His tears were directed inward, but all the more pitiful for that. He was crying from the soul.

Employees of the firm, at every level, called the deputy director ‘Partridge’ or, more often, ‘Mr. Partridge.’ He seemed to have no known Christian name and no military title. The ‘Mr.,’ Miles assumed, came from his gentlemanly dress sense and expensive manners. Butlers, too, were called ‘Mr.’ by the menials of the household, weren’t they? But Partridge was no butler.

Miles had met him many times before, when being assigned to surveillance cases for which he was the senior watchman. The last of these occasions had been only eight days ago, when ‘Latchkey’ had come into being. Partridge, looking across the table and seeing Miles watching him, smiled quickly, the smile, thought Miles, of the tiger beetle. It was Denniston, however, whom he had termed the department’s tiger beetle. He had marked Partridge down, perhaps wrongly, as Platyrhopalopsis melyi.

Platyrhopalopsis melyi was a small beetle, not much more than a centimeter long, which lived in ants’ nests, and was sustained by the ants, who in turn licked a sweet secretion from the beetle’s body. Miles had never been able to find out as much as he would have liked about this faintly arousing symbiosis. The first time Partridge and he had met, Partridge had reminded him of the tiny beetle, something in the man’s attitude prompting the comparison.

Perhaps, though, this had been a rash decision, for the more Miles saw of Partridge, the more there was in him of the tiger beetle, Cicindelidae, a ferocious and powerful predator. Partridge had managed to turn Denniston into a weak, glandular schoolboy. It was quite a feat.

‘I suppose you have spoken of the murder, Colonel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And have filled in what we know of the victim’s background?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Turning to the three guilty-looking men on the other side of the table, Partridge placed his hands delicately in front of him as though he were counsel for the defense in a difficult case, anxious to reassure his doomed clients.

‘This is a serious matter, gentlemen, of that there’s no question. But it’s not quite as serious as it might have been. The murdered man’s employers want everything kept quiet, or as quiet as possible under the circumstances. There were, it seems, certain visa irregularities which neither they nor we would wish to have to pursue. Moreover, they do not know that we were keeping an eye on Latchkey, which gives us a decided advantage in the matter. I can now tell you that Latchkey did not return to his room last night. He left behind all of his things, including a fairly good bottle of brandy and several new suits. Even his passport was left behind, though I think we can assume it is a forgery and that he will by now have left the country.’

Miles saw now that the switch had been very cleverly planned. The phone calls to Harrods and Jermyn Street, the purchase of a bottle of spirits and some reading matter, and even the meeting with the contact — all had been designed to make anyone think that a long surveillance was in progress, lulling the watchmen into a false sense of being in medias res. Clever, clever, clever.

‘Yes,’ Partridge was saying, ‘I’m afraid that, in soccer terminology, we’ve been caught a bit square. Their man has scooted past us to score.’ He allowed a smile to form on the palimpsest of his face, then to melt away again as if it had never existed. Nobody in the room had dared smile back. Their futures were being decided, and it was no joke. ‘We’ve got Special Branch onto the man with whom, as one of us was not quite quick enough to spot, Latchkey changed clothes. We don’t think they’ll get much from him. This was probably a strictly one-off job for him, and he’ll have nothing to fear. Likewise, Latchkey’s contact, who went back last night to his fairly substantial apartment in NW1. He’s been on our files for some time actually, though we won’t be acting against him at this time. So, gentlemen’ — Partridge gave each of them a two-second glance — ‘we’ve been bloody lucky in one respect, in that this is not going to damage our reputation or our standing with a friendly nation. In another respect, however, we’ve thoroughly botched a resolutely straightforward surveillance operation, and a man is dead as a result. There will be a full internal inquiry.’

Miles wondered how long it had taken Partridge to prepare his speech, which now ended with a reshuffling of papers. Phillips, Sinclair, and Colonel Denniston, who had been sitting bolt upright, shifted in their seats, lecture over.

‘Well,’ said Partridge, rising, ‘I’ve had my say. Let’s see what the boss has to add, shall we?’

And they followed him in near-reverential silence to the lift.

The director was, so the office gossip went, close to retirement. Certainly, as they entered his curiously small office, Miles scented a world-weariness, an old man’s smell, as though oxygen were being pumped out, leaving a vacuum.

‘Sit down, please.’

It was not that the old boy was old, not particularly, though to the likes of Phillips and Sinclair he might appear so. Responsibility always made people look older than their years, and in that respect the director looked about a hundred and twenty. He had plenty of hair, albeit of a distinguished silver and yellow coloring, and his face was relatively unwrinkled. But Miles could sense the aging process upon the man: his clothes were old and his movements were old.

He was standing, staring from his uncleaned window onto the street below. Rather than sitting down himself, Miles felt that he should be offering a chair to the elder statesman. But then he remembered the old boy’s reputation as a tenacious and quick-witted administrator, and his links with the all-powerful, and Miles sat down with as much respect as he could muster.

‘When you leave this office, gentlemen, I would like you to go and draft full reports on this matter, and I do mean full. Security will be along to see you in due course, and will cross-check everything.’ He turned from the window and examined them, seeming to photograph them with his clear blue eyes. ‘This,’ he said, ‘has been a bloody farce from start to finish. I had thought of suspending every one of you, of asking for resignations even.’ He paused, letting his words sink in. It was as if Partridge had set them up for this kill.

‘Colonel Denniston,’ he continued, ‘you have led your section efficiently for several years. It’s a pity this had to happen. There has to be a tightening-up of procedure. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Denniston was making a good showing. He had his pride, that was sure. His eyes met those of the director without blinking.

‘Good.’

Miles noticed that Jeff Phillips had gone very pale, as if he had just realized that he, too, would have to suffer the caning, and was afraid that he would not accept it with the same strength as his friends. The director’s eyes met those of Phillips and Sinclair, then came to rest on Miles.

‘If there’s anyone to blame, Flint, it’s you.’ With the slow drama of a Shakespearean actor, the old boy took his seat, placing his hands on the leather-topped desk. ‘You are to blame. You were careless, sloppy even. We don’t expect that of you, and we cannot accept it of you. Perhaps you should take a long hard look at yourself and your future here. It may be that you need a change of scenery, who knows?’

‘With respect, sir, I like the scenery here.’

‘Do you?’ whispered the director. He leaned forward confidentially, his eyes filling with a malign humor. ‘Flint, you’re a bloody fool. You should never have been in that hotel in the first place. You should have been at home with your family.’

Partridge turned to look at Miles now, as though to indicate that he was in agreement with his superior’s words. His eyes were like tunnels burrowing deep underground. You are a tiger beetle, thought Miles.

‘If it hadn’t been me, sir, it would have been someone else.’

‘And which would you have preferred?’

There was another silence while Miles, looking as though he were considering this, thought about nothing in particular.

‘That will be all,’ said the director. ‘Partridge, I’d like a word, please.’

When Partridge rose, they all did. Miles, his legs unsteady for the first few seconds, noticed the relief on Colonel Denniston’s face. Perhaps the old boy was right. Perhaps Miles did need a change, something to challenge him. He had made an error of judgment, and that very error had already jolted him part of the way back into place. Something was askew, was very wrong about this whole thing, and, with his watchman’s mind, he needed to find out — for himself this time — what it was.

Five

With two fingers, and with multiple mistakes, corrections, and additions, Miles worked on his report, wishing that the section had a word processor, and knowing that he would not, in any case, have had the guts to use it. He mentioned the visit to the Cordelia, the scene and situation there, his wish to become involved in the surveillance, and then the scene in the Doric. He mentioned his conversation with the girl, but not his speculations as to her possible involvement in the case. There were one or two things that, for the moment, he would keep to himself. After all, if there was a mole in the firm, then he would need to be more careful than he had been up till now, and certainly more careful than the poor Israeli. Although the office was stuffy, he felt himself becoming encircled by a cold, icy wasteland of his own creation. Silence was his best defense now, silence and surveillance.

Of course he did not mention the Arab’s smile. Over and over again he played back that moment in his memory, trying to freeze the frame to see if he had missed something. But already the picture was losing its clarity. The edges were fading away, leaving only the smile, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

Moreover, the Arab’s smile led him back to the previous afternoon and his extended lunch with Billy Monmouth, his friend’s laughter just a shade off normal. Such subtle shades were Miles’s preoccupation now, and he gave the lunch more attention. What had been worrying him? He scribbled Billy’s name onto a piece of paper, thought better of it, and decided on a coded series of letters instead. Thoughtfully, he began to assign a letter to every person he could think of who might be the mole, including, after much hesitancy, his wife.

Billy Monmouth bought his lunch at a sandwich bar and carried it back to his apartment, which wasn’t far from the office. In the lift, he peeled the wrapping away from what was supposed to be a tuna fish roll. All he could see was mayonnaise.

A piece of string lay on the coffee table in his lounge, meaning that he had had a visitor. He put down the roll and, wiping his hands, went over to one wall, along which was arranged a large and catholic selection of record albums. The stereo itself sat in a corner of the room, cruelly underused. Many of the albums he had never played and never would. He had bought them only for the names of their artists.

He crouched and examined the spines of the record sleeves. The first four albums were by Andy Williams, Paul Anka, Janis Ian, and Tchaikovsky. The message contained in their arrangement was simple: W-A-I-T. Nothing more, for the record that came after Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker was by Miles Davis, and an album by Miles Davis, they had agreed, would mean ‘message delivered.’ He had his instructions.

Skipping lunch, Miles decided to calm himself by visiting his favorite shop, a grimy jazz emporium on the edge of Soho. On the way, he encountered a routine London car crash. A Rover had gone into the side of a spanking new Renault 5, and the driver of the Renault was being helped, shakily, from his crumpled car, while the driver of the Rover explained to a bored-looking young constable that it really was not his fault.

A crowd had gathered, as was customary, and Miles embedded himself in it. Having satisfied himself that there was no blood on view, he turned his attention to the crowd itself. What kind of person was attracted to a car crash? There were a few old ladies, a couple of young girls who chewed gum casually as though to say that they had seen it all before, some derelicts who were trying to cadge money from those around them, and then there were the other, blank faces, the faces of those anonymous souls who kept locked within themselves dreams of violence.

And, of course, Miles himself, his own dreams of violence kept under lock and key, watching it all with the reserve of an expert witness, should such be needed.

‘He’s famous, he is,’ said one old woman. ‘I seen him on the telly.’

‘Get away,’ said one of the girls. ‘Which one?’

‘The posh one talking to the policeman.’

The woman made sure that her whispered conversation was loud enough to be heard all around. The Rover driver, trying to ignore the woman’s voice, examined his watch testily, late for some appointment. The constable, as was his privilege, began to take things more slowly than ever.

‘Is he an actor then?’

‘No, it was the news he was on.’

‘The news?’

‘Not so long ago either. Last night, night before.’

‘Is he a newsreader, then?’

‘No, he’s a politician.’

Miles began pushing his way out of the thinning crowd, to whom not even this was newsworthy enough in a city under siege, and made his way the hundred yards or so to the shop, where Dave, the proprietor, was playing some new early recordings by the Miles Davis Quintet.

‘He’s the boss,’ he called to Miles, jerking a thumb toward the turntable. ‘You can say what you like, but Miles is the boss.’

Miles was not about to argue with that.

He went off to the racks to browse, finding this a good way to concentrate. With his fingers walking through the packed record sleeves, his mind was free, and time seemed to vanish. He had rejected an offer to lunch with Jeff Phillips, and wondered whether he might start to gain a reputation for frugality or even downright meanness within the firm. Billy had told him that one or two people in the past had tried to give him the nickname ‘Skinflint’ but it had never stuck.

Miles preferred his other nickname — The Invisible Man. As an undergraduate, he had joined his university’s Officers’ Training Corps and had enjoyed some of the weekend exercises. He was very good at these for the simple reason that he never got caught, and he never got caught for the more complex reason that, as other trainees told him, he ‘seemed to disappear,’ though in reality all he had done was to make himself as innocuous as possible.

Nowadays, he was aware of a beetle which did that too, an expert in camouflage. It was called the tortoise beetle, and its larvae carried lumps of excrement around on their backs, beneath which they could not be seen. Perhaps Miles was a bit like the tortoise beetle. But no, for he had been found out by a smiling Arab, and all because he would not go home to his wife.

He had first met her at Edinburgh University. They were both undergraduates, invited to a certain party where Miles had become roaring drunk and had wormed his way into a fight from which Sheila had rescued him. The following Monday, having put the weekend and his bruises behind him as a lost forty-eight hours, Miles had gone into the lecture hall yawning and ready for the fresh week’s work. A girl had slid into the row beside him.

‘Good morning, Miles,’ she had said, squeezing his arm. Shocked, he had tried to recall her face, pretending all the time that of course he knew who she was. He was bemused to find that, apparently, he had found himself a girlfriend without any of the long, painful searching which he had assumed would precede the event.

And that had been that, more or less: Miles’s first girlfriend had become his wife.

‘I wouldn’t have put you down as a jazz fan, Miles.’

Miles turned from the rack of records to find Richard Mowbray standing beside him.

‘Oh, hello, Richard.’

Billy referred to him as ‘Tricky Dicky’ because of his slight American accent, but Miles knew that Richard Mowbray was as English as his name suggested. He had been schooled for five years in the States while his father had worked in a university there, and those five crucial years had left him with a slight mid-Atlantic inflection to his otherwise thoroughly orthodox voice.

Mowbray was looking around him. He wore tinted glasses — an affectation — and looked older than his thirty-five years — another affectation. He, too, was a watchman.

‘I’ve heard the news, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Miles. Was this a coincidental meeting? He thought not. Mowbray was supposed to be watching a suspected IRA cell in Forest Hill. He was well out of his territory.

‘What do you think of it all, Miles?’ Mowbray’s face had the sincerity of a president and the teeth of an alligator. Miles could not help asking himself what he wanted.

‘What do you want, Richard?’

‘I want to talk.’

‘Shouldn’t you be somewhere else?’

‘It’s not my shift. Besides, it looks like another dead end, surprise surprise.’

‘So what is it you want to talk about?’

‘The CIA, of course.’

Miles looked for a smile, for some acknowledgment that a joke was being made. None came.

‘OK,’ said Miles as a trumpet strained its way toward climax behind him, ‘let’s talk.’

‘Great. There’s a coffee shop across the road. Advertising execs mostly. That do you?’

‘Fine.’

And Mowbray led him across the street and into a sweet-smelling café where Jeff Phillips was already waiting for them.

‘What is this?’ said Miles.

‘Milk and sugar?’ asked Mowbray, pouring the coffee.

‘No thanks. I think I’ll take it black and bitter.’

‘Suit yourself. Jeff?’

‘White, no sugar, thank you.’

Miles checked his watch. He was tired of these games of protocol. It seemed that business could not be discussed without a preamble of sham courtesies and responses. Phillips sipped his coffee just a little too appreciatively: this, too, was part of the game. Miles felt his patience ebb, leaving only wrack and salt.

‘You mentioned the CIA, Richard.’

‘Yes, I did. I’ve got a little theory about our cousins. I’d like to hear your reaction to it. You see, it struck me a while back that the cousins are every bit as interested in our activities as are the Russians. Agreed?’

Miles nodded.

‘So,’ continued Mowbray, ‘why does it never occur to us that there may be CIA moles inside the firm, eh? Or Israeli moles, or Australian?’

‘In fact,’ interrupted Phillips, ‘any country you care to mention.’

‘Madagascar?’ countered Miles, remembering some textbook geography. ‘Mali? Mauritania? Mongolia?’

Richard Mowbray held open his arms, a smile just evident on his face.

‘Why the hell not?’ he said.

Yes, thought Miles, everything but British moles. He had dropped a teaspoon on the floor at the beginning of this conversation, and picking it up, had checked beneath the table for bugs.

‘What do you think, Miles?’ asked Phillips now.

‘I think it’s banal.’

‘Do you?’ This from Mowbray, leaning forward in his chair now, taking on the pose of the thinker. ‘Then maybe I shouldn’t tell you the rest.’

‘The rest of what?’

‘What about if I told you that the U.S. embassy in Moscow has all the parts for a small nuclear device located in different sections of the building? The wolf already in the fold: what would you say?’

‘I’d say you were mad.’

‘Maybe he’s not as ready as we suspected,’ Phillips said to Mowbray.

‘Look, Richard, what is all this about?’ Miles was concerning himself with Mowbray. Phillips was wet behind the ears, hardly out of nappies. He’d go along with anything that might mean a commendation or the chance to make a fast reputation. But Mowbray was different: Miles had no doubt that it was Mowbray’s baby in the pram, for it was Mowbray who had looked disconsolate when Miles said what an ugly child it was.

If possible, Mowbray leaned forward even farther.

‘I’m compiling a sort of list, Miles, a dossier of, well, let’s just say the slightly odd, the irregular. You know, those hiccups in certain operations, the occasional slip-ups which appear to occur for no good reason. I’d like, quite unofficially, to have your version of last night’s events on paper. If there are moles in this department, then we — and I would have thought you’d be included, Miles — want to gas them once and for all.’

Miles looked to Phillips.

‘Jeff is part of my little team. There are others, too. What do you say, Miles?’

‘I say you’re off your trolley, Richard. Sorry, but there it is. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ He had already risen to his feet, coffee untouched, and now waved back as he went, went back out into the sanity of the unchanged street.

He breathed deeply as he walked. There was madness everywhere. The bottom fell out of a woman’s carrier bag and tins of food went rolling across the road. Miles dodged them and kept on walking. He noticed that passers-by were wary of parked cars, and rightly so. Any one of them might contain another bomb. People glanced in windows, searching for anonymous packages, or steered well clear of any driverless cars by the roadside. Well, on a day like this, thought Miles, I may as well cut through Oxford Street. Having encountered so much madness, a little more could do no harm. What was Richard Mowbray’s game?

The pavements were packed with lunchtime shoppers, seeking those items without which they would not last the afternoon. Insect life. Miles was about to shake his head slowly when in front of him a large window exploded silently into the street, followed a split second later by earth-rending thunder. Silence reigned as shards of glass poured down like silver, and then there were the first screams, and Miles checked himself for cuts. No, he was all right. He was all right. But only yards ahead of him was chaos.

Later, he would wonder why it was that he veered away from it all and back into Soho, not wanting to get involved. A ten-pound bomb it had been, easy, planted inside one of the garish shops while the pedestrians had been checking out the cars only. Later, he would wonder, too, why he found the go-go bar and paid his money and watched the show for ten minutes, why he went to the peep show and crouched in a rank cubicle, where he could watch from a slit not much bigger than the mouth of a postbox. The peep show was of circular design, and instead of watching the parody of lust, he had concentrated on the pairs of eyes he could see past the two girls. Dear God, they looked sad. He thought that he might even recognize one pair of eyes, but, too late, the slat came down like a judgment upon him, and only the reality of the cubicle remained, replacing for a time that much greater and much more incomprehensible reality: Oxford Street had been bombed.

A young boy, running past, screaming with joy, brought Miles awake. He was in Hyde Park, seated on a damp bench beside an old woman surrounded by black plastic bags. The bags were tied with thick string and were arranged about her like a protective wall. She was staring at Miles, and he smiled toward her.

Slowly it came back to him: the car accident, meeting Mowbray and Phillips, and the bomb, dear God, the bomb. It was half past five, and his lunchtime had turned into another afternoon off. A sort of panic had overtaken him this afternoon, so that he had felt less in charge of his life than usual. Yes, he remembered a similar sensation from his student days: those weekend blackouts, the anger and frustration, the fights... But in those days he would not have walked away from an explosion, would he? He would have stayed to help the injured, the survivors. But not now, not now that he was a watchman.

The old woman rose slowly from the bench and began to gather together her bags. Somehow she managed to heave them onto her back, and Miles felt a sudden impulse to help her.

‘I can bleedin’ manage!’ she growled at him. Then, moving away through the park, ‘Watch out for yourself, dearie, just you watch out.’

Yes, that reminded him, there was a puzzle he had to solve. He hadn’t got very far, had he? Well, he knew just the cure for that now: send in a mole to catch a mole.

Everybody who knew him thought that Pete Saville had just a little too much love for his computer. He seemed to be at his desk before everyone else in the mornings, and he was always — always — the last to leave. Didn’t he have any social life? A girlfriend? But Pete just shrugged his shoulders and told them that they should know better than to interfere with a man who loved his work. So no one paid him much attention nowadays, and no one asked him to the pub or out to a party, which was just fine by Pete Saville.

It meant that he could forge ahead with Armorgeddon 2000.

Armorgeddon was going to make Pete Saville’s fortune. He had only to iron out a few bugs, and then the whole package would be ready. It was hacker-proof, it was easy to learn and to play, and above all, it was addictive. Yes, Armorgeddon 2000 was the computer game to beat them all...

‘Hello, Pete.’

He almost leaped out of his chair. Recovering quickly, the first thing he did was switch off the screen.

‘Sorry, did I startle you?’

‘No, it’s just, well, I didn’t hear you come in, that’s all.’

‘Ah.’

Miles walked around the room, inspecting the individual consoles, while Pete watched him.

‘Working late again, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘You work late a lot, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lots to do, I suppose, being a processor?’

Approaching Pete’s desk, Miles crouched slightly, gazing into the blank screen. Reflected there he saw his own face, and, in profile, the face of one very anxious young man.

‘Am I disturbing you, Pete?’

‘No, not really.’

‘I couldn’t help noticing you switch off the screen when I came in. Something top secret, I suppose?’

Pete smiled.

‘You could put it like that.’

With a quick movement, knowing exactly which button to press, Miles brought the screen back to life. A green space zombie was obliterating the Orgone commander.

‘Haven’t you added the soundtrack yet?’

Pete Saville was silent.

‘Have you found the bug yet?’

What color there was in Pete Saville’s face fell away. Miles was smiling now. He began his tour of the room all over again.

‘I’d like a favor, Pete.’

‘How did you know?’

‘It’s my job to know. Everything. I’ve stood here behind you and watched you work. What’s it called again? Armageddon 2000?’

‘Armorgeddon,’ Pete was quick to correct. ‘It’s a pun.’

‘Is it now?’ Miles nodded his head thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I can see that. But I’ll tell you what else it is. It’s an abuse of your position here. R2 is not your toy to play with.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Peter, I’m only here for a favor, and I want to know if you will do me that favor, that’s all.’

‘How could you stand behind me and watch me work without my seeing you?’

‘What’s my nickname, Pete? What is it they all call me?’

Pete remembered, and swallowed hard.

‘What’s this favor?’ he asked through dry lips.

‘I need to look at some personnel files, and a few other bits and pieces. Nothing sensitive or classified... well, not really.’

‘It’s no problem then—’

‘But I don’t want to leave any record on the computer that I’ve been through the files. That is possible, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Pete thought again of Armorgeddon. All he needed were a few quiet weeks, perhaps three more months at the outside, and then he could leave this place forever. ‘I’m not sure it’s been done before,’ he said, ‘not on this system. So I’m not sure that it can be done. Tampering with the memory... getting past the codes... I don’t know.’

‘If anyone can do it, Pete... I have faith in your ability to worm your way inside the system. Will you have a go?’

Pete’s head felt as light as helium. He touched the computer screen, touched the place where the Orgone commander had been standing.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I’ll give it a try.’

‘I thought you might,’ said Miles, pulling a chair over toward the desk.

Six

No one had been killed, that was the miracle. But over the next ten days everyone became more cautious than ever. An empty shoebox could not sit for long in an open rubbish bin without one of the bomb disposal teams being summoned. It was a busy time for them. A busy time, too, for Miles Flint, sifting through what information he could find. He asked discreet questions of a few uninvolved colleagues, tracked as far as was possible the daily affairs of those closest to the Latchkey case, and was himself interviewed on three occasions by men from internal security.

He had been assigned to the Harvest surveillance, working with Richard Mowbray and his team in Forest Hill. This gave Miles the chance to apologize to Mowbray, then to pick his brains about what dirty dealings he thought he had uncovered. Most of these were simple paranoia.

Then one day, having driven the Jag home, Miles opened the door of his study and saw, jumping across his desk, the largest beetle he had ever set eyes on. Astonishment turned into panic when he noticed that the beetle was a joke-shop affair, with plastic tubing trailing from its rear to a point beneath the desk. Looking down, he saw a man there, bundled up like a fetus so as to squeeze into the space beneath the desk.

The man was grinning, and, letting go of the rubber beetle, he began to extricate himself from his cramped position. For a moment Miles wondered, who the hell is it? And he even considered the possibility of some outlandish execution before realizing that the tall young man was Jack, who now rubbed his shoulders as he stretched.

‘Christ, Dad,’ he said, laughing. ‘The look on your face!’

‘Ha bloody ha!’

Miles hesitated, wondering whether to reach out and shake his son’s hand. The dilemma was resolved when Jack came forward and gave him a brief hug.

‘So, what brings you home? Broke again, I suppose?’

‘Summer hols, you know.’ Jack walked around the room like an investigating policeman, or, thought Miles, like a caged big cat, impatient, larger than his surroundings. ‘I just thought I’d give you the benefit of my company for a week or so before I head back to Edinburgh.’

‘What have you been up to all summer?’

‘The usual.’ He studied one set of beetles, trapped behind glass. ‘I worked for a few weeks in a café during the Festival, and before that I was on the dole. I took off up north for a while actually, wandering about the Highlands. If it weren’t all cliché, I’d say it was a consciousness-raising experience. You know, you can start walking across the hills up there and never see a soul from one day to the next. No houses, no electric pylons even. Lots of birds and animals, but not another human being. When I got back to Edinburgh, I nearly went mad. I was seeing everything differently, you see.’

Yes, Miles could see.

‘How did the exams go?’

‘Fine. A cinch, actually.’

‘I don’t suppose Edinburgh’s changed?’

‘You’d be surprised. New hotels and shopping complexes. A big drug problem in the housing estates. High incidence of AIDS. Child murderers running around everywhere.’

‘I meant the university.’

‘Oh.’ Jack laughed. ‘It’s the same as ever. Nothing happening. Departments full of drunks and half-wits.’

‘Do you mean the students or the lecturers?’

‘Both.’

Miles had been surprised — pleasantly so — when Jack had decided to go to Edinburgh University, while the majority of his school friends had stuck to Oxbridge. But Miles could guess why Jack had not followed them: he was independent, stubbornly so, and he was just a little proud of his Scottish roots.

Miles had not set foot in Edinburgh for fifteen years, but he had a vivid memory of the city and its people, and he remembered the weather above all else, the relentless wind which chilled to the marrow, and dark winter afternoons that drove one indoors to study. Sheila and he had gone back just that once. It had been enough.

‘It hasn’t been too quiet down here of late, has it?’ said Jack now.

‘You mean the bombings?’

‘Yes. The IRA, isn’t it?’

‘Apparently. It hasn’t affected us, though. Life has to go on, et cetera.’

Of course Miles had told no one of his proximity to the Oxford Street bomb. He would have been unable to justify his running away. That was what it had been, after all — running away. He told no one, and found flakes of glass in his hair and his clothes for days afterward.

‘Have you seen your mother?’

‘How else could I have got in?’

‘Don’t you still have a key?’

‘I lost it last term. God knows how. I thought it was on my key ring, but then one day it vanished. I’ll get another one cut.’

I’ll have to change the lock now, thought Miles. It was better to be safe than sorry. One could never tell...

‘I will replace it.’ Jack said this in such a way that Miles knew his thoughts had been showing. He smiled.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s have a drink.’

‘Is there any tequila in the house?’

‘Certainly not. Why?’

‘Slammers are all the rage up north. What about bourbon?’

‘You’ll drink best malt whiskey, my lad, and you’ll thank me for it. Do you know what they add to bourbon to give it that flavor?’

‘No.’

‘Neither do I. That’s reason enough to stick to whiskey, don’t you agree?’

They were laughing as they entered the living room, where Sheila sat with an Open University textbook on her lap and a pencil gripped hard between her teeth. She had been listening to their laughter as it left the study and came toward her, rumbling like some ancient beast. Her teeth bit through wood toward lead, and she could almost taste blood in her mouth. Did she want anything to drink? No, she did not want anything to drink. They seemed massive, father and son, filling her space and her peace and her thoughts with their bulk. When they turned their backs to her at the drinks table, she stuck out her tongue at them and felt better for it. Then they sat down, expecting no doubt that she would put away her work and listen to their conversation, rising only to make tea and sandwiches. She held the pencil fast, sucking back the saliva that threatened to drip from the sides of her mouth. She was the wolf, hungry, angry, and she watched as they sat in their woolly smugness, cradling their glasses as though protecting the tribal fire.

Then Miles asked her a question, and she had to choose whether to ignore him, answer with a grunt, or take the pencil from her mouth. She grunted.

‘Yes,’ said Miles, raising the glass to his lips, ‘I thought you’d agree.’

‘What OU course are you doing, Mum?’ asked Jack. She slipped the pencil from between her teeth.

‘A bit of everything,’ she said.

He nodded and turned back to his father. Their questions were politeness, she knew. The sort of things one would say to a child so that it wouldn’t feel excluded from the general conversation. She felt more isolated than ever. Then she remembered her secret.

To his eternal chagrin, Harold Sizewell had not been born in England. His father had been a professor of history, and while on a sabbatical teaching year in Paris, had found his wife to be rather more fecund than the expensive doctors back in London had diagnosed.

So Harry Sizewell was born French and educated outside Windsor, and though he had never, so to speak, had a French thought in his life, it was hard — devilish hard — to throw off the tag.

For one thing, the media could always use it against him. Not that this bothered him particularly; there was little that could, to an MP, be termed ‘bad publicity,’ even the nickname ‘Harry the Frog.’ He had entered politics solely because his father had forbidden him to do so, and it was his misfortune to have been left an orphan before he gained his seat in the House. Still, he had it now, and his father would have been appalled by his quick and unhindered success. Appalled, the old socialist. The thought pleased Harry Sizewell, and he toasted himself with his breakfast tomato juice.

The morning mail — heavy as usual — gave little succor. Once, he had employed a secretary to open his mail for him and to send out the acknowledgments of receipt, but that had proved unsatisfactory: one could never be sure how open to misinterpretation or potentially incriminatory one’s mail could be. And so he had decided to start opening his own mail, most of which, however, consisted of bills.

The damage to his Rover was estimated at nine hundred pounds. Nine hundred pounds for a couple of dents and a scraping of paint. That bloody fool of a Renault driver, hurtling away from the lights like that when all he had wanted to do was squeeze through his own red light so as not to be late at the House.

The day ahead promised little; Parliament was still in recess and the conference season had ended. He loathed conferences, and spent too much time shaking hands with complete strangers and listening to tittle-tattle.

‘I hear you’re on this committee that’s looking into defense funding,’ someone had said over a cocktail at some grandee’s party.

‘How did you hear that?’

‘A little birdie told me. Well, one just does hear, doesn’t one?’

Yes, one did. It was surprising just how many strangers had known so much about him. Who were they all? Defense was a touchy subject these days. He would rather as few people as possible knew of his involvement, especially when one considered what else the committee was investigating. Political dynamite, it was.

‘Oh yes, Sizewell, of course. I knew your father at university.’

‘Did you, sir? You must be older than you look.’

‘Flattery, Sizewell, flattery. Your father was known for it, too. A bit of a success with the young ladies when we were undergraduates together. I suppose you are too, eh? Chip off the old block.’

A success with the ladies... Hardly. The PM had dropped a hint, by way of an equerry, that marriage would improve Harry Sizewell’s standing within both the community and the party. It had not been a threat, just a suggestion...

Ah, but there had been other threats to deal with, real threats, not just the rumblings of disgruntled constituents. Yes, real threats, lucid, cogent, to the point. The telephone rang, and, his mind elsewhere, he answered it.

‘Remember this, Sizewell,’ the voice hissed. ‘I’m going to have you if you don’t listen to me. I really am going to have you.’

In horror, Harry Sizewell slammed down the receiver and stared at it, then lifted it off the hook quickly and set it down on the table. But the voice was still there, loud and clear as though from the next room, spitting out from the earpiece.

‘You can’t hide forever, Sizewell. You can’t hide from me.’

‘Go away!’ screamed Harry Sizewell, running into the next room, slamming the door shut. ‘Just go away.’

Seven

Pete Saville had a recurring dream, and in this dream he was trapped within Armorgeddon 2000, really trapped, twisted up in circuitry and flashing lights. The screen was there, real to the touch, and through it he could see the outside world, operating as normal. No one noticed that he was trapped within his console, that the game held him while the auto-play mode sent him reeling around his own set of maps and scenarios, trying to stop the ultimate war.

He never won.

Today’s dream, however, had a twist, for someone was sitting at the console playing the game. This was worse even than auto-mode, for the player made mistakes that sent Pete roaring out of existence or careering around the most deadly battle zones. Dragging himself up to the screen during a lull, he looked out onto the smiling face of Miles Flint, then collapsed.

He woke to utter exhaustion. It seemed to him that he was sacrificing his sanity for a game. It was all he lived for, night and day, day after night.

The phone rang, and he stumbled through the cold hallway.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Peter Saville?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Peter, some of the security chaps would like a word.’

Pete felt his life crumbling like a crashed computer program. He held on to the telephone with both hands, his voice becoming a whisper.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Nothing very important, I daresay. They’ll be along about eleven.’

‘What, here?’

‘Of course not.’ The voice seemed amused. ‘They’ll send for you at your office. You are going in today?’

‘Yes, oh yes.’

‘Good.’

And the telephone went dead. Only then did it occur to Pete that he had not asked who was calling; had not the faintest idea whose voice had brought him to this standstill. One movement, he felt, and he would flake away to nothing but dust, like a wall with dry rot. He was worried now all right, worried and mentally exhausted. It was a bad combination.

Miles and Jack made a weekend of it. On Saturday they watched Chelsea playing in a friendly. It was years since Miles had been to watch a football match, and he yelled with gusto, enjoying the catharsis. Jack watched in amazement as his father swapped banter with the fans next to them and gave vent to raucous indignation when Chelsea’s penalty claim was refused.

On Sunday, they visited the zoo. It was wet, and not many people were about. A nice change, thought Jack, from football. He had taken along a couple of apples and some old vegetables from the kitchen, which he fed to the pigs in the children’s area.

Later, following his father into the underpass, Jack thought about how the years had brought them closer together. He understood nowadays, as he had not when he was younger, that his father had achieved the right temperament for his own lines of work and life. Friends in Edinburgh might have attributed some Zen-like quality to Miles’s attitude. And Sheila? Well, too much yin, they would have said, too, too much.

‘Not brought any excreta for your offspring, Dad?’

Miles had smiled, but seemed preoccupied. He was thinking not of beetles, but of moles. Moles and bugs, to be precise. A zoo seemed the perfect setting for his metaphors.

‘I would think there would be enough of that lying around here already, wouldn’t you?’

Jack, sniffing the air, his nose wrinkled, nodded agreement.

Miles had made two visits to the hotel, and had not happened to meet the girl, which seemed to point to her complicity. His investigation was proceeding slowly — when it was proceeding at all — and he was becoming less sure of his suspicions. The smile had all but vanished now, as had the Latchkey case. He had been interviewed three times, Phillips and Sinclair twice. Miles, of course, was more suspect than they, for he had had no reason to be there, and it was he who had let Latchkey slip out into the night. There had been another meeting with Partridge and the old boy. The investigation’s findings had been read out, and, while pointing out that human negligence had resulted in a death, there were no recommendations regarding further action or reprimands. Even the media had walked over the whole thing without seeing it.

And that had been that. So why didn’t he just let the whole thing drop? Because his own trust in his intuition was at stake. It was as simple as that.

On a wall in the insect house was posted a list of adopters and their adopted, and there was his name. Jack chuckled, patting his shoulder, and then they made for the glass case itself. There were around four thousand species of beetle in Britain alone, and this specimen was all his. The dung beetle, or dor beetle, dor being Anglo-Saxon for drone — the noise the beetle made in flight. Miles took off his glasses to study the case. Well, a ball of dung was there all right, but there was no sign of life. Miles knew that the beetle would be in there. No one would see it until it wanted to be seen. He nodded thoughtfully and turned away, while Jack tapped at the glass, attempting to coax the creature out of its darkness.

Back home, two messages awaited Miles on the answering machine. Sheila had gone out for the day with Moira. They were visiting an exhibition. Miles traced Sheila’s likes and dislikes by going around after her, examining what she had just been reading or otherwise studying. She had taken an interest in Francis Bacon, birdwatching, and Marxism, and in all these things she was aided and abetted by Moira, her old school friend. Moira was actually cleverer than Sheila, as well as being the more attractive. She was a bit of a splendor beetle, and whenever he was in her company, Miles felt like some old museum beetle again, bedded down in stuffed animals and relics of the past.

Sheila visited exhibitions often when Jack was at home. It was no coincidence. She did not shun him physically, but placed a sort of veil over herself when he was around, treating him like the son of an acquaintance rather than her own. She would give him everything except the acknowledgment of kinship. They had fallen out once five years ago when he had been in the midst of an adolescent fit. They hadn’t spoken to one another for days afterward, and their relationship had never really recovered.

‘This is Partridge here, Miles. We’d like to see you tomorrow if that’s convenient. King’s Cross, platform four. Get yourself a platform ticket. See you at ten-thirty sharp.’

Partridge: that meant trouble, but of what sort? And why King’s Cross? Was Partridge going somewhere? And who might that ‘we’ include within its wide parameters? It was all very mysterious, very cloak and dagger.

The second message was from a less than sober Billy, asking if they might meet for lunch tomorrow. Jack, entering from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee, a packet of biscuits between his teeth, was motioned to listen.

‘Billy here, Miles. Hate these bloody machines. Inhuman. Can’t talk to them.’

Technology worried Miles, too. It used to be the case that when someone died, for example, all that was left were memories and perhaps a few faded photographs. But now there were tape recordings and video recordings, and so memory became less important to the process. That was a dangerous phenomenon, for machines could be manipulated, could go wrong, could forget.

Just as the Arab’s smile was slipping away from him forever.

His private line, the messages always came by way of his private line. Ever more regularly, and despite two changes of number, they came. A trace had been put on the calls, but they were always too succinct.

‘I’m going to have you, Sizewell, really I am.’

Partridge had sent some fool around to interview him. Did he know who could be responsible for the calls? No, of course he didn’t. Did he know why someone should want to ‘get him’? Oh yes, he knew that all right, but he wasn’t about to say anything to anyone about it. Except perhaps to Partridge himself.

The telephone rang again, and was answered by the man whose job it now was to do so. Harry Sizewell was no coward. He had brought in Partridge and his men not out of weakness, but as part of his strategy. He was trying to show his tormentor that he would not give in to threats, that he would be strong. But what if the man wouldn’t play any longer? What if he did have something from Sizewell’s past? Everyone had skeletons in their closet, didn’t they? Everyone had something which would be best left to rot away in secrecy and in darkness.

I’m going to have you, Sizewell, really I am.

It was the bully’s pointed promise to everyone who would not stand up for themselves. Well, he, Harry Sizewell, would not shrink from such a challenge. Bullies were there to be beaten; it was their only purpose in life. And when Sizewell suspected that Partridge and his gang were not taking the whole thing seriously enough, he made a complaint that sent Partridge himself scurrying out of the woodwork.

‘What else can we do?’

‘You tell me, Partridge. I thought that was your job.’ Sizewell was standing, Partridge seated. The latter’s appearance of total calm made Sizewell angrier still.

‘We could change your number again.’

‘You’ve tried already. He still bloody well gets through.’

‘Yes, that is interesting.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it cuts down the number of possible culprits. Not everyone has immediate access to VIP ex-directory numbers. We’re making inquiries in that direction.’

‘Good of you, I’m sure.’

‘If we could do more we would. Don’t you believe that?’

‘I’m not sure if I do.’

Partridge smoothed his hands over his knees. ‘How long have we known each other, Harry?’

‘Look, it’s quite simple. All I’m asking—’

‘How long?’

Sizewell glanced toward him, then away. He crossed to the window and stared out through the heavy net curtain. The curtaining came with the job. It was bomb-resistant, there to catch shards of glass and trap them. But he was not bomb-resistant. He turned.

‘Look, Partridge, I happen to be friendly with the PM, and—’

Partridge had already risen to his feet and was approaching the telephone. He bent down toward the wall socket and pulled out the connector.

‘Satisfied?’ he asked with a smile.

Sizewell strode over toward him. ‘No, I’m bloody not, and if that’s your attitude—’

Harry Sizewell’s cheeks were a strong color of red already, partly natural, partly from anger and frustration. They grew even redder when Partridge, seeming hardly to move at all, struck him with first the palm and then the back of his hand. Sizewell’s mouth opened, and his eyes grew foggy like a botched piece of double glazing.

‘You’re acting like a child,’ Partridge said. ‘For God’s sake, that’s no way for someone in your position to behave. We all have to deal with these sorts of thing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more pressing matters.’

‘I’ll report this, Partridge, don’t think that I won’t!’

But the door was already closing. Sizewell touched his face with his fingers, feeling the soft red of the slap and behind it the fierce burning of humiliation.

‘Don’t think I won’t,’ he muttered, reconnecting the telephone.

Eight

King’s Cross on a Monday morning had the scowling face of a spoiled child. Partridge liked railway stations for their human- interest value. Low-life scoundrels rubbed shoulders with haughty businessmen, while Pavlovian clusters of travelers sipped gray tea and watched the flickering departures board.

A ragged creature shuffled his feet to a tune played on the harmonica, while his free hand jostled for money from the restless commuters. He was not having much luck, and moved along quickly with a sideways, crablike motion, while the conspiracy to ignore his existence held fast.

While Partridge watched this circus, the old boy watched the trains themselves. It was a hobby he had held dear for over forty years. He was standing at the very farthest tip of the platform, beside two other spotters, one a teenager, unhandsome and dressed in the perennial duffel coat, the other a man in his thirties, who looked like an off-shift station employee. The director seemed to know this man, for they had swapped notes at one point, while Partridge, halfway down the platform and looking for all the world like a civil servant, watched. Partridge had taken up train spotting only after having discovered that it was the one real passion in his superior’s life. He checked his sleek watch now. It was ten-seventeen.

‘Miles,’ Partridge said affably, ‘good of you to come. The old boy would like a word.’

The dung beetle comes of a very good family, Scarabeidae, among which sits on high the sacred scarab. The ancient Egyptians worshipped it like some deity. Silent, black, the scarab seemed to hold within itself the power and the meaning of the universe.

And for this reason, Miles liked to think of his most superior officer as the sacred scarab, most honored of all the beetles.

‘Good morning, sir.’

Miles’s greeting went unanswered as the director busied himself jotting down an engine number.

‘I only collect the engine numbers, you know,’ he said at last, as the train pulled to a stop. ‘Some enthusiasts collect carriage numbers, too. But there’s such a thing as being over-enthusiastic, don’t you agree?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Some spotters, well, they always need to know more. Their curiosity can never be satisfied. Then there are others like me, like Mr. Partridge here, who are interested in only the one part of the hobby, and we stick to that. Do you see?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Miles, not seeing at all.

‘Miles, I’m not famous for circumlocution. You’ve been doing some hunting within the department. I want to know why.’

‘Well...’ began Miles.

A woman was having trouble opening the door of her carriage, and Partridge rushed forward to help her. She seemed impressed, and glanced back at him as she walked up the platform, a heavy bag hanging from one arm. Partridge came to rejoin them, seeming pleased with himself. More than ever he reminded Miles of Platyrhopalopsis melyi. Mel, Latin for honey. Partridge’s smile oozed from his face.

‘Well, sir,’ Miles began again, ‘I was just a little worried by the Latchkey business, that’s all.’

‘Worried?’ said Partridge.

‘Yes. You see, there was something about that operation which struck a wrong chord.’

‘Your own bungling, perhaps?’

‘All right, I fell for a very old trick, but it’s more than that. I’m not just trying to cover up my mistakes.’

‘Then just what exactly are you trying to do?’ asked Partridge.

‘I merely wanted to be sure that my own mistake had been the only one made.’

‘And that involved checking on Mr. Partridge and myself?’ The old boy was fingering his dog-eared notebook. It looked for all the world like a coded series, all those columns of numbers.

‘It was routine, sir. I was looking at everyone.’

‘We know that,’ snapped the director. ‘You’d be surprised what we know. But you have to admit that your investigation has been anything but “routine.” You must realize that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Now let’s get some tea and talk about cynegetics.’

‘You were a classics man, weren’t you, Flint?’

Miles watched the Earl Grey being poured, while Partridge stared from the window of the hotel’s morning room. A few turnings had lifted them out of the immediate squalor of King’s Cross and dropped them in this backwater of tranquility. Miles felt that this would be where the interrogation really started.

‘I was, yes.’

‘Then you’ve probably heard the word “cynegetic”?’

‘I know that kynegetes means hunter.’

‘Quite so. There is, and this is for your ears only, a very small unit within the department. Someone somewhere decided to call it the Cynegetic Section. Someone with a classics degree, perhaps.’ The director smiled to himself. ‘Anyway, Cynegetics is involved with the rooting out of, well, let’s just say of anyone who might be acting in a suspicious manner. Especially, it is interested in those who appear to be hunting within the department.’

‘I see.’

‘As you were doing,’ added Partridge, turning from the window to add just a touch of milk to his tea, stirring it slowly. ‘Very ably, I might add.’

‘And,’ said the director, ‘as others seem to be doing. You met with Richard Mowbray recently?’

‘I’ve been assigned to the same case.’

‘Yes, but before that. He followed you to a record shop. Cynegetics were following him.’

‘I’ve got nothing to do with Mowbray, sir.’

‘We’re aware of that,’ answered Partridge. God, thought Miles, what a double-act they make. Such timing.

‘But it does seem rather a large coincidence,’ the old boy said on cue. ‘Doesn’t it?’

Miles decided not to answer. Through the morning-room doors he could see a whispered commotion in the lobby. A suitcase had been left unattended, and the staff didn’t want to touch it.

‘Miles,’ began the director solicitously, ‘I’m retiring soon. Perhaps as soon as the end of this year. And I don’t want to find, as some of my predecessors have found, any blemish staining the last days of my public career, or of my ensuing retirement, come to that. You understand? A fairly substantial honor is not too far away.’

Miles understood.

‘So,’ the old boy continued, not looking so old now, his eyes as hard as diamonds, ‘I would be... perturbed if anything were to come to light, especially without my knowing about it. You’ve read the newspapers lately, you know that Fleet Street has more than a few daggers drawn against us. We need to be... what’s the phrase again? Ah, yes, we need to be a “clean machine.” An American friend of mine is very keen on that phrase.’

‘At the same time,’ Partridge interrupted, his voice low with sincerity, ‘if I should happen to be promoted to director—’

‘As seems likely,’ explained the director.

‘—then I should not want to find myself faced with a first duty of investigating my own service. Nor should I like to think that I were being spied upon by my own officers. There has been too much of that in the past by the — what do the press term them? — the Young Turks. Too much of it, Miles, and too much of it of late. The service is secure, Miles. Believe that. The service is secure.’

What could he say? Could he tell them that, no, the service was not secure, all because of a smile that might not have been directed at him? Their faces bespoke the sublime, like monks who know no sin. In their most upper echelon of the firm, ignorance was indeed bliss. Cynegetics had been set up to keep the place nice and tidy, as though for an inspection. Push all the dust under the carpets. Miles realized that, quite simply, these men did not want to know, and if they did not want to know, then to all intents and purposes there was nothing to know. No knowledge could exist unless they accepted it.

‘I see,’ he said, lifting his cup. ‘Is that all?’

‘Well,’ said Partridge, ‘I for one would like to know just what your suspicions were.’

‘Yes, good point,’ said the director.

Miles sipped his tea. He paused for a moment, then swallowed.

‘Whatever it was,’ he said, ‘it’s history now.’

They seemed pleased with this, like schoolboys whose gofer was not going to report a roasting at their hands.

‘I am enjoying this tea,’ said the director brightly. ‘It’s rare to find a good cup of tea these days, even in London.’

‘I quite agree,’ said Partridge, smiling at Miles.

The fracas in the lobby seemed to have ended. Someone had come forward and claimed the case as his. Miles caught a glimpse of a young woman as she walked past the reception desk. He wondered where he had seen her before. Then he remembered. Only two weeks ago, in the cocktail bar, with Latchkey grinning toward him. Here she was, delivered into his hands in one of the firm’s ‘safe’ hotels. Coincidence? Miles thought not. He was beginning to believe in kismet.

When the occasional customer, all social conscience and guilt reflex, asked Felicity why she did what she did, when she had — in their tired old phrasing — ‘so much going for her,’ she usually just shrugged, and they would let it rest. Of late, however, she had given the question some thought. The money was good, of course, and often she would be involved in little more than escort work. Her clients were businessmen, desperate for success, and a pretty, intelligent companion for the evening was, to them, a sign of that success. She tried not to think about the other nights, the tough ones, when she took on the lechers and the heavyweight drinkers. She cried after those engagements, and bathed, soaking them out of her system. It was hard work, too hard sometimes.

The hotel management never troubled her. If they became suspicious, well, her appearance and her accent were usually enough to see them off, and there were other ways, too, of course. She did it for the money. She was saving up to open her own boutique, or — last month’s notion — a bookshop. She had changed her mind so often. But she had a good bank manager, who advised her on possible investments and never asked about taxes and such. She was just waiting for the day when he, too, would become a customer. There was a sordid glimmer to his smile. But one day she would put all this behind her and become a celebrity. Her shop, whatever it was, would be the place to be seen. Her photograph would appear in the magazines, and she might even be seen on TV... Seen by all her old clients, who would recognize her. And then one of them would sell the story of her past life to a newspaper, out of spite. Sheer spite...

‘Hello, miss.’

And she had saved her money so well, and had fought off the competition. (God, some of those girls were tough.) She had not given in to the many pimps who had tried to threaten her. She was not stupid. She would not have succeeded if she were. Her mother had taught her all she had needed to know about survival. All those dark, cold nights of fireside horror stories about how life could suck you as dry as a beached bone. All those lessons...

‘Excuse me.’

‘Yes?’ She looked up from her reverie into the smiling eyes of a small, middle-aged man.

‘We’ve met before,’ he said. ‘At least I think we have. Yes, I’m sure of it. Though I’m a bit early for our appointment.’

‘Appointment?’

‘Yes, we met two weeks ago. In the Doric. Just off the Strand. You asked me if I had a light, and then we met again in the cocktail bar. I said we could arrange to meet there again in a year’s time.’

Felicity laughed.

‘I remember now,’ she said. ‘You ran away from me. I have to tell you that men don’t often do that. I was a bit startled.’

‘Well, that evening, I was a bit unsettled myself.’

‘Won’t you join me?’

She was seated at a small table in the reception area. Miles had watched her for a minute or two, Partridge and the old boy having left for the office. As he sat down, Felicity thought to herself, he’s actually quite tall. Why did I think he was short?

‘You remember that night?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes. You seemed to be just about the only unattached person in the place, apart from me. Birds of a feather, I thought, but I was wrong, it seems.’

‘That was why you approached me twice?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was steady, but Miles detected something. It had been a while ago now, and she had allowed herself the luxury of forgetting all the details. But something about that evening had just come back to her, and she was trying to think about it at the same time as she spoke to him. He decided to attack.

‘Who put you up to it?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ The blood began to color her already flushed cheeks. She was pretty, there was no doubting that. Even Partridge had given her more than cursory attention before leaving.

‘I asked who put you up to it. The whole thing was a setup, wasn’t it? I can see it in your face, Miss...?’

‘Felicity,’ she whispered.

‘Look, Felicity, it was a long time ago, wasn’t it? But you do remember? It’s hardly going to hurt you now to tell me who it was, is it? Who put you up to it, Felicity?’

‘I...’ She was just a little frightened now, and Miles did not want to frighten her.

‘Do you know what it was all about?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you, it was a joke arranged by some friends of mine. I was waiting there for them, you see, and I think they put you up to it, so that they could have a laugh when they finally did come along and find us together. Is that it, Felicity?’

‘Well, he never said exactly...’ She stopped, but had already said too much. It would be easy now to prize the rest from her, now that she had taken the first, irretrievable step.

‘Yes?’ he prompted.

‘But you told me when you left that you were on your way home.’

‘I was lying.’ The smile never left Miles’s face. ‘I was onto you, you see. So I went off elsewhere.’

‘Did you find your friends?’

‘Yes, but neither of them would own up to the joke. That’s why it’s been niggling me.’

Felicity nodded her head. What the hell, it was nothing to do with her. She was free to talk about it, wasn’t she? This was a free country. She made herself more comfortable in her seat. Business, she thought to herself, that was what this had become.

‘I don’t usually give away that sort of information, you know. It’s bad for my reputation. I do have my reputation to consider.’

Miles was ready for this. He reached for his wallet and produced two ten-pound notes, hoping it would not seem derisory. She stared at the cash, then lifted it swiftly and stuffed it into her clutch-purse, black and shining like a beetle.

The duty manager was in front of them like a shot, his voice colder than his eyes and his eyes as cold as icicles.

‘Out, please, both of you. I’ve been watching, and this is not that kind of establishment.’

Miles, despite the laughter he could feel rising within him, saw that this was a dangerous situation. Felicity, flaring her nostrils, was ready for remonstrance and, perhaps, physical action. The manager would not tolerate that, would telephone for the police. A couple at reception were already watching the scene with interest. Miles could not afford this, could not afford to be noticed. He grabbed Felicity’s arm.

‘Come on,’ he said.

‘How dare you!’ Felicity shouted toward the impassive figure as Miles steered her toward the door. ‘Just what the hell do you think—’

But by then they were outside, and the fresh air seemed to calm her immediately. She giggled.

‘Now then,’ said Miles, ‘what was it you were about to tell me?’

‘I was about to tell you,’ she said, her bottom lip curling, ‘that twenty pounds will get you more than conversation.’

But conversation was what he wanted, and she gave him five minutes’ worth. It wasn’t much, but it was just about enough. Afterward, he coaxed her telephone number out of her by suggesting that he might one day want to give her some escort work. The number was scribbled in his notebook, a 586 prefix: northwest London. He could find her address easily enough back at the office.

What was important was that she had substantiated his fragile theory. He had been set up. A man had motioned to her from the door of the hotel and, when she was outside, had given her a description of Miles. Could she describe this man? Tallish, good-looking, a bit suave even, nicely spoken.

And that was it. She had been paid to talk to Miles, probably to distract his attention ever so slightly. Well, it had worked like a charm. The question now was, who was it? Phillips seemed the obvious choice, but Phillips had been smartly attired, and the man who had approached her had been casually dressed.

He thought to himself for the hundredth time, so what if there is a conspiracy? Who cares? It’s over, nobody wants to know about it with the possible exception of Richard Mowbray. So why bother? Why not just go back to square one?

Because, he knew, if he did not solve the mystery, there could be no ‘going back.’ It was as though the first square had been removed from the board.

‘Dad!’

Jack came loping toward him, a pair of headphones clamped to his head.

‘Where the hell did you spring from?’

Jack slipped the headphones down around his neck.

‘Oh,’ he said, switching off the tape, ‘I’ve just been wandering about. I was supposed to meet someone for lunch at that little Greek place near the British Museum. They didn’t turn up.’

‘Oh Christ, what time is it?’ Miles looked at his Longines, left to him by his father. It was ten past one. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Billy at one. Damn.’ He turned to Jack. ‘Would you like to join us?’ Miles hoped that his tone would hint that this was politeness only, that Jack would not be welcome. Jack smiled, touching his father on the shoulder.

‘Thanks but no thanks,’ he said. ‘Things to see, people to do. You know how it is.’

‘Well,’ said Miles in mitigation, ‘we must arrange to have lunch together in town before you leave. A proper lunch, just the two of us.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Jack, already moving away. And with a wave he was gone, putting distance between them.

Miles watched him go, then made for a nearby pub, the King and Country. He would telephone Billy at the restaurant. Billy would understand.

It was two when he arrived, but Billy had contented himself with four or five drinks meantime, and was now in a malleable state.

‘Bloody glad you could make it, Miles.’

‘I’m just sorry I’m late, Billy.’

A businessman, dripping gold, led a quite stunning young woman to one of the restaurant’s better tables. At once, Billy’s antennae caught the scent, and he stared at the woman even after she had settled down with the menu.

‘Christ, Miles, isn’t that superb?’

Checking in the mirrored wall behind Billy, Miles was forced to agree.

‘Yes,’ said Billy, ‘I wouldn’t mind, I can tell you.’

Miles thought again of the longhorn beetle, with its long and sensitive antennae, antennae that could pinpoint a female thousands of yards away. Billy could actually sense when a beautiful woman was nearby. It was quite a talent. At the same time, though, it seemed to Miles that Billy, for all his bravado, was afraid of women, taking lovers the way Mithridates had taken poison: sip by sip to make himself immune against them.

‘So what’s been happening, Miles?’

‘You know bloody well what’s been happening. You’re a magnet for office gossip.’

‘Well, I know some of it, but probably not all. You lost Latchkey?’

‘The very evening I’d been having a drink with you.’

‘Yes, a curious coincidence.’

The waiter came then, and they ordered, Miles sticking to dishes he knew: minestrone, fettuccine.

‘I take it there has been an inquiry?’ said Billy after the waiter had gone.

Miles fingered his soup spoon, wondering whether to drop it. He decided no, what the hell. Let them listen.

‘Of sorts. It was all very low-key.’

‘Funny,’ said Billy as the first course arrived, ‘I was thinking of Philip Hayton the other day. Do you remember him?’

‘No.’

‘He was one of the older boys. A headhunter. He was on my first interview panel, I recall.’

‘Of course, yes, Philip Hayton. He was killed in an accident, wasn’t he?’

‘Over in Ireland, yes. A boating accident. Except, of course, that there were rumors to the effect that he had been executed.’

‘Oh?’

‘Mmm. By the IRA, I suppose, though there wasn’t much of an IRA back then. Funny business...’

There was no more talk of the firm until they were sipping nicely bitter espresso coffee and Billy was debating whether he could manage another portion of cheese with his last crumbly biscuit.

‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘what you thought of this Latchkey business?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, who’s to blame?’

‘I’m to blame, of course.’

‘Oh yes, well, as far as the record goes, but you said yourself that you’ve had your wrists slapped and that’s about it. No retribution, no demotion, nothing.’

‘They want it kept quiet.’

‘So as not to rile the Israelis? Yes, I can imagine.’

‘And I’ve been punished in another sense.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, they’ve sent me to work beside Richard Mowbray.’

Billy smiled. He knew Mowbray, whom he irritated by insisting on calling him ‘Mauberley.’

‘The Mauberley Barmy Army, eh? Now there’s a man who has his sights quite firmly fixed on nothing but the top slot. He wants the old boy’s job, and one of these years, God help us, he may just get it.’

‘It’s a frightening prospect.’

‘So you’re working on Harvest, eh?’

‘That’s right.’

‘It looks promising. Are you day watchman or night watchman?’

‘Richard has a roster.’

‘I’ll bet he has. Be careful of Mauberley, Miles. He could drag you down with him. Have you heard his latest one?’

‘About the cousins having a bomb in their Moscow embassy?’

‘No, I’d not heard that. I was referring to his theory that the Belgrano was torpedoed by an American midget submarine.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘In F Branch they have a new name for him: Meltdown Mowbray.’

Miles, feeling the lightness of the wine inside him, was beginning to laugh at this when a large, well-dressed man approached the table.

‘Billy Monmouth!’

‘Andrew.’ Billy rose from his chair, holding on to his napkin with one hand and shaking with the other. ‘Where have you been hiding?’

‘I’ve been in France. A company-funded shopping trip.’ The man called Andrew smiled down on Miles, full of self- satisfaction and wanting others to share in it. Miles wondered why, being so full already, the man needed to eat at all.

‘Andrew, this is Miles Flint, a colleague of mine.’

They shook hands. Andrew’s hand was warm and slightly damp. He radiated well-being and charm, and could probably afford another Rolex should he lose the one he was wearing.

‘Andrew is a salesman,’ explained Billy.

‘That’s right, and a damned good one. What do you do, Miles?’

‘I’m just a civil servant.’

‘Same game as Billy here, eh? Well, don’t think I don’t know who wields the power in this country. I’ve watched Yes, Prime Minister. In fact, I do a lot of dealing with the civil service. Hard but fair, would you agree?’

‘What’s fair about us?’ said Billy, causing all three to laugh.

‘Well, I’d better be getting to my table. We must get together for a drink, Billy, really we must. Keep in touch. Nice to have met you, Miles.’ And with that the man was off, walking to the corner table and joining his friends. He kissed the beautiful woman on the hand, laying custodial fingers on her neck, motioning across toward Billy and Miles. The woman smiled at them, then pecked Andrew on the cheek while he picked up a menu.

Billy, who had smiled back like an addict to his fix, now said from behind his smile, ‘What a shit,’ and decided on another portion of Brie to go with his whiskey.

‘He’s a slight acquaintance,’ he said. ‘We see one another at dinner parties, where we inevitably get drunk and end up promising ourselves this mythical get-together.’

‘He seems nice, though.’

Billy laughed.

‘Come on, our man Flint, Andrew Gray is a proper little shit and you know it. Your voice may be without irony, my friend, but your eyes betray you.’ Billy paused. ‘You know, Miles, you’re quite cunning in your way. I mean, you sit there all silent, watching, and people tend to forget that you’re there at all, but you are. Oh, you are. I admire that, though I also find it just faintly disturbing.’

As before, there seemed an unspoken meaning behind Billy’s words. Miles was wondering why Philip Hayton’s name had been brought into play, and remembered that Billy was on his list of suspects. In fact, he was at the top.

‘I suppose I am faintly disturbing, Billy,’ said Miles. ‘It’s one of my most appealing features.’

And Billy laughed loudly this time, catching the attention of the beautiful woman. He smiled at her, antennae twitching, a hunter intent on the chase.

Nine

Sheila, Listening to Mozart in the living room, thought of Miles. Although she abhorred physical violence, a pleasant shivery feeling came to her when she remembered the way he had fought for her as a student. He had been wild as a teenager, trying to prove something to himself and to the world. No longer... They had enjoyed themselves back then, but now they had grown so far apart. It was like being married to an amnesiac.

The base of her neck prickled as the Requiem Mass washed over her, full of its own violence. She had seen the film Amadeus with Moira, and they had fallen out about whether or not it was far-fetched. It never did to fall out with Moira. She was such a good friend, useful for all sorts of things, and she knew so much. Miles liked her, too. Sheila could see that, for all his subtlety. He would risk a glance at Moira whenever he felt safe, taking in her legs with one sweep, maybe her breasts at a later opportunity. His concealed admiration bordered on the perverse. Why didn’t he just come out and say he found her attractive? Sheila wouldn’t mind; she wouldn’t be jealous. One afternoon last week, walking past a building site, a crowd of workmen had whistled at her, and she had smiled back at them rather than giving them her usual snarl. Did she miss praise so much that she had to accept it from strangers?

Yes, she thought to herself, smiling again.

‘Hello, Mother.’

She had not heard Jack come in, had not even heard him closing the door. He had been noisy as a youngster, banging doors shut with a healthy disrespect for them. But nowadays he cultivated his father’s habits of stealth and secrecy. She felt the conspiracy ripening between them, unspoken but definitely there.

‘What’s this?’ Standing in front of her, Jack shouted this aloud, his thumb held toward the stereo.

‘Mozart,’ she said softly, turning the record down. ‘What are you doing home so early?’

Jack shrugged, then lifted a peach from the fruit bowl. Once he would have asked for her permission, which she would always have given.

‘What are you doing home?’ he mimicked.

‘I took a half day. I’ve got a lot of leave still to take. Have you eaten lunch?’

‘No, actually. I was supposed to meet a friend, but she didn’t show. Then I bumped into Dad, but he had a prior engagement.’

‘Oh?’ Sheila thought she could see the slightest chink in Jack’s armor. ‘I’ve not eaten either,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we have something together?’

Jack, finishing the peach noisily, looked at her, trying to find some barb, some catch: there was none. So, smiling, nodding, he graciously accepted her invitation, and suggested that they open a bottle of wine for starters.

Turning into Marlborough Place that evening, Miles wondered how Partridge and the old boy had found out about his use of the computer. Pete Saville must have left something for them to find, something he should not have left. They had probably questioned him, and he would have talked straightaway. He had no defense, after all.

Whoever it was that had talked to Felicity on that night, he was a goliath beetle. Miles was clear enough about that. Goliath beetles were very fragile indeed, and therefore very hard to collect. They flew through their forest terrain at great height, rarely alighting on the ground, where predators and collectors awaited them. This was the figure of the enemy: hard to catch, soaring above the mundane world, and when captured, brittle as spun sugar.

He opened the door to his house, wondering again, with slight vertigo, how much it must be worth. Sheila and he had bought it in the sixties, and even then it had been an expensive ruin, albeit an expensive ruin in St. John’s Wood. A fortuitous inheritance on Sheila’s part had ensured that they could buy two floors’ worth, and Sheila had loved it from the first tentative visit. Dry rot in one of the walls a few years ago had cost a thousand pounds to fix, and Miles feared more incursions, more deterioration. It was in the nature of buildings to fall down; all one ever did was shore them up.

There were voices in the living room, loudly conversational. He listened at the door for a moment.

‘Come in, Miles, for Christ’s sake,’ called Sheila. ‘Why do you always have to skulk at the door? I can always hear you, you know.’

Inside, Sheila lay along the sofa, a glass of tawny wine in one hand. From the tawniness, he guessed that one of his better clarets had been opened. But, to his dismay, he saw on the floor not one but two empty bottles: the last of his ’70. Sheila smiled toward him with catlike superiority. Jack, legs dangling over the arm of his chair, let a long-stemmed glass play between his fingers. It was empty.

‘Good evening, Miles,’ said Sheila. ‘Is it that time already? It seems like only half an hour since we finished lunch, doesn’t it, Jack?’

Jack merely nodded, enough of his wits left to know that to speak would be to betray his all-too-evident condition.

‘Mind if I join you?’ Miles made to sit on the sofa, and Sheila shifted her legs helpfully. Clearly, she thought that some kind of victory had been won over Miles, and that she could now claim Jack as an ally in her struggle. They had eaten lunch together. Miles could see the whole sequence unfold, compounded by his own earlier rejection of his son.

He felt sick to his stomach. It was impossible these days when there were three of them in the house. He wondered why Jack bothered to come home at all. There could be no halfway house, no no-man’s-land. Always it had to be two against one.

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Sheila, ‘Jack thinks there’s wet rot in the larder.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ said Sheila. Lying half along the sofa, her legs curved toward the floor, she was like an insect, her body divided into abdomen, thorax and head. The aroma of her drunkenness was all around, cutting Jack off from him, bringing the conspiracy to fruition.

‘Maybe we should sell the place then.’

Sheila shook her head loosely.

‘House values continue to rise,’ she said with absolute clarity, ‘at a higher rate in areas like this than anywhere else in Britain. If we wait just a few more years, Miles, we can sell up and buy a palace elsewhere. We’ve been through all this.’

Jack laughed, as Miles had hoped he would.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Sheila, annoyed.

‘Listen to you,’ said Jack. ‘The best part of three bottles of wine, and you can still spout economics like Milton Keynes.’

‘That should be Milton Friedman,’ corrected Miles. ‘Or do you mean Maynard Keynes?’

Jack looked at him, a little puzzled. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What did I say?’

‘You said Milton Keynes,’ said Sheila, bursting into laughter and throwing herself forward.

‘Is there any wine left?’ Miles asked now, sure that his wife and son were less of a combined force than he had at first feared. Sheila was still laughing, and Jack studied her in stilted horror.

‘Loads,’ said Sheila. ‘Get another bottle. And watch out for that rising damp.’

‘Wet rot,’ Jack corrected quickly, his voice stabbing the air.

‘Well, whatever,’ mumbled Sheila, all laughter gone.

‘Right,’ said Miles, examining the quietened room, ‘let’s have ourselves a little party, shall we?’

But the room remained silent after he left. The party had already finished.

He wondered whether Sheila could really always hear him outside the door. Until recently, he had thought himself infallible. Now he knew differently.

He brought another bottle of wine into the room. Sheila was reading, while Jack still played with his empty glass.

‘Here we are then. You could well be right, Jack. There does seem to be a patch of rot in the floor timbers. We’ll have it inspected.’

He opened the bottle and poured three generous glasses, then set his own aside for the moment, allowing the young wine at least a slender chance to breathe. Jack gulped his own down without tasting it.

‘Sorry about lunch, Jack. I had to see Billy Monmouth. It was all shoptalk.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘What was Billy saying, then?’ Sheila turned the page of her book.

‘You know Billy. Gossip mainly.’

‘We haven’t had him round for a while, have we?’

The fact was, they had no one round these days. Their friends — the married couples — had disintegrated like old houses.

‘No, we haven’t,’ said Miles, and the conversation stopped there. Dead.

Ten

He was being followed, and none too subtly. Already in a bookshop a man had approached him asking for a light, though no smoking was allowed. Then another man — different face, same eyes — had asked him the time. So Pete Saville was moving now, weaving through the narrow streets of the city, trying to lose the men. He didn’t want the streets to get too narrow though, or too quiet, for that would be asking for trouble. He had enough trouble as it was.

He didn’t recognize any of them, but that didn’t mean anything. Their accents were English, but that meant nothing either. He had counted four of them so far, four or just maybe five. Oh God, what had he done? He was sure that it had something, everything to do with Miles Flint. Mr. Partridge had warned him. Miles bloody Flint and his bloody snooping. He dived into another street, seeking a telephone box, not knowing who to ring. Perhaps he should turn and confront them. Yes, why not? Every reason in the world.

Pete Saville was scared.

This was no game, no Armorgeddon. It was real, and it was dangerous, perhaps lethal. He glanced back. Two following on one sidewalk, two on the other. Walking briskly. Hands by their sides. Almost casual.

What had he done?

He turned corner after corner. Saw a bus and made a run for it, but it moved off ahead of him, leaving him flailing at the wind. There were people about, some of them giving him curious looks. He could tell them, but tell them what?

Oh, he was scared, how he was scared.

So run, and keep on running. But they had decided to make their move. They were gaining effortlessly, coming nearer, nearer. And now a fifth man was calling out his name, patiently, as though paging him in a hotel. Pete Saville didn’t feel as though he were in a hotel.

The smell of the abattoir was in the air.

Pete’s heart was melting with the heat in his lungs. His brain was singed. He could taste cordite on his tongue. He stopped, leaning his head against a car. But when they were a few yards from him, he took to his heels again, willing himself on with the last of his being. He rounded a corner and was confronted by policemen. They were cordoning off an area of pavement, unraveling a length of red and white tape with which to make the road impassable. A small crowd had gathered on the other side of the tape, watching. It was being broken up by several uniformed policemen. Damn, it was a dead end. But the men would do nothing, not with the police here. No, Pete was safe.

He was safe!

He heard his name called again, and pushed his way past some onlookers, slipping under the cordon. Someone shouted at him, a different voice this time, then someone screamed. He thought he heard the word ‘bomb’ and stopped in his tracks. He was outside a small restaurant, and saw for the first time the soldiers, who were everywhere. And beyond them, his pursuers, watching with the rest of the crowd, smiling at him, not about to follow him past the cordon.

Bomb? Oh God, what had he done?

The police stood at the tape and told him to come back from the building. But no, he couldn’t do that. The building was his sanctuary. He could pass through it and out of the other side, could lose the men that way. Making up his mind, he headed into the restaurant, vaguely aware of two army men working at the back of the tables.

There was a sudden suction, a huge, dusty gust of hot wind, and the roar of jet engines, of thunder overhead. When the dust cleared and the screams abated, and people were blinking and shaking fragments from their clothes, Pete Saville wasn’t there anymore, and neither were the two bomb disposal experts. Even the hunters seemed to have disappeared, leaving behind them only the police and the civilians, most of them in shock, and the man called Andrew Gray, standing at a safe distance beside a lamppost, watching.

Eleven

‘You know about it, then?’

‘Cynegetics?’ Mowbray laughed. ‘Of course I do.’

‘Why am I always the last to hear about these things?’

Mowbray shrugged, looking more transatlantic than ever in tinted glasses and a sheepskin jacket. He was supposed to look like an estate agent who showed people around the large Forest Hill house which the firm had procured for Harvest. Harvest was supposed, so Billy Monmouth had said, to bring forth a ‘bumper crop’ of IRA sleepers, soon to be activated now that a full-scale campaign was under way. Three more poor bastards had been blown up, one a civilian. Nobody knew who he was. He had just run into a cordoned-off area at the wrong moment, and a bomb had gone off prematurely. There was nothing solid enough left to identify.

The Harvest cell had been under surveillance for weeks, three Irishmen and a woman in a house across the road from the watchmen. The occupants were, variously, an unemployed electrician, a groundskeeper, a mechanic, and a secretary on a building site. If they were sleepers, then they were sleeping soundly. It looked like yet another waste of time, but Miles knew that no one could afford to become complacent.

‘There isn’t even a bloody telephone in the house,’ said Mad Phil. ‘There’s never been a cell that didn’t have a phone in the house.’

Mad Phil enjoyed complaining and liked to think that he excelled in it. He was neither mad, nor was his name Phil, but those were the letters after his name: Graham Lockett, MA, D.Phil. Billy had coined the nickname, and it had stuck, just as ‘Tricky Dicky’ and ‘Mauberley’ had stuck for Richard Mowbray.

‘Doesn’t it worry you, Richard?’

‘What?’

‘That Cynegetics are on to you.’

‘Not in the least. What is it I’m doing that’s wrong?’

‘Have they been to see you?’

‘Yes, several times, and Partridge has had a word, too, but I repeat, what am I doing that’s wrong? If the firm is clean, then why should anyone worry about my little dossier?’

Suddenly Miles could see the beauty of Mowbray’s tactics: those who opposed him must have reasons for doing so, and so were suspects themselves, while those who aided him would be thought clean.

‘You’re right, Richard.’

‘Of course I am, Miles.’

‘Shift’s nearly over,’ said Mad Phil, checking his watch. For once, there was not a trace of complaint in his voice.

Jack had left London, off to visit friends in Oxford before heading north. Miles had slipped him fifty pounds as he left.

‘Bye then,’ he had said, and that had been that. They had not managed to agree on a time for their lunch together, and so it had never taken place. It hung between them in the air, just another broken promise.

‘Thank God,’ Mowbray said to Mad Phil. ‘What are you doing tonight?’

‘Nothing much. I thought I might try that new wine bar in Chelsea. The Lustra. Have you heard of it?’

‘I haven’t, no.’

‘Then I’ll probably finish up at the Cathay, since I’m in the area. Best Chinese food in London.’

‘Sounds good. What about you, Miles?’

Miles had thought of going back to the office, but knew now that his every move would be subject to Cynegetics’ scrutiny. He had not been in touch with Pete Saville, but a call to Billy had brought the gossip that Saville had been moved on, though nobody knew where.

‘What do you suggest, Richard?’

‘I suggest we go along with Phil here to this Lustra place. Sounds kinda fun.’

‘It’s a bit of a distance from here,’ said Miles.

‘A few miles,’ said Mad Phil grudgingly. He was seated at the window, a pair of high-powered binoculars in his hands. Everyone was at home across the road.

‘I suppose I could phone my wife,’ said Miles. Anything to keep him away from the house.

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Mowbray. ‘It’s settled then, Phil can drive us in the company car.’

Mad Phil didn’t look altogether happy. Perhaps, thought Miles, he liked to drink alone. Well, for this one evening, Phil would have an audience for his complaints against life.

The Lustra turned out to be everything Miles had expected, and it appalled him. There were mirrors everywhere, half hidden by various potted plants and creepers.

‘Great place, eh?’

The clientele were opening-night vampires, the chic underbelly of London whose sole intention in life was to ‘get noticed.’ It was not the place for an ‘invisible man.’ The clothes were loud, the music marginally less so, but everything was drowned out by the shrieking, vacuous voices of the young things. Miles’s whiskey had been drowned, too, scoop after scoop of the barman’s ice shoveled into it. It now resembled an iceberg looking for a disaster. Disaster, in fact, was all around.

‘Great place, eh, Richard?’

‘Absolutely, Phil, absolutely.’

Mowbray, slapping one hand against the table out of time with the music, looked almost as out of place as Miles.

‘My round,’ he said now, heading off to the distant bar. Mad Phil pointed to a figure somewhere at the back of the lounge.

‘She’s a celebrity,’ he said, ‘though I can’t remember why.’

‘Doesn’t that disqualify her from the title?’ asked Miles, loosening after the first two drinks.

But Mad Phil hadn’t heard him, and was surveying the crowd again.

Mowbray returned, his large hands cradling three tumblers. Miles was not surprised to see that they were doubles, and said nothing. Mad Phil did not seem to notice that the drinks were larger than his own round or Miles’s had been, and he polished off a sixth at one gulp. Miles waited. Mowbray’s kind could never remain quiet about their acts of generosity, for it was not generosity in itself, but rather a keen desire to impress; which was, in fact, the opposite of generosity.

‘This,’ said Mowbray, on schedule, ‘is what I call a drink. Cheers, Miles.’

‘Cheers,’ replied Miles, stifling a schoolboy smirk.

‘You know, up in Scotland they serve fifths or even quarter gills. No wonder they’re a nation of alcoholics.’

‘They’re not, actually, a race of alcoholics, Richard. And they possess the most civilized licensing laws I know of.’

Miles sounded hurt.

‘Sorry,’ said Mowbray, ‘I keep forgetting you’re Scottish. It was just a joke.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘This is quite a good place really,’ said Mad Phil, turning to them both.

Miles left the Lustra early, feigning tiredness, and walked to South Kensington station, changing onto the Jubilee Line at Green Park. He caught the mid-evening hiatus, and only a few washed-out businessmen sat in his carriage. Mowbray had started his speech about circles within circles, infiltration, double agents and double-double agents, and Miles had felt a need to leave.

‘Jeff Phillips believes me,’ Mowbray had said. ‘So do others in the firm. If anything goes wrong on a case, one of our cases, we’re suspicious.’

‘Then I would have thought, Richard,’ Miles had said, ‘that I would have been on your files as a potential double agent.’

‘But you are on our files, Miles. You’re under suspicion.’

Well, good luck to them. Good luck to the Mauberley Barmy Army and its witch hunt. Perhaps Mowbray thought this a speedy and efficient way to make his mark on the firm, and more important, on its overseers. But it was also going to make him an awful lot of enemies. He was staking all or nothing on plucking a fine, sharp needle from the haystack. Perhaps Miles should remind him that needles have a way of making people go to sleep for a very long time...

Darkness was falling, early and cool. His car was parked a distance from the house, not for security reasons but because parking spaces were so difficult to find. A bird had left a large token of its esteem on the roof of the Jag. His father had always said that birdshit was lucky. His father had nurtured some curious notions.

He was still a distance from his house when he saw a man emerge from the gate and walk confidently away in the opposite direction, toward Abbey Road. Through the dusk, Miles was uncertain for a moment whether it had been his gate or not, but as he neared the house he felt sure that it had been. The man had looked familiar, too, even from a distance. He had disappeared now, and Miles walked thoughtfully to his front door, opening it quietly, standing in the hall for a moment, sensing its warmth, seeking a scent, a presence.

He went to the living-room door and listened, then, remembering Sheila’s words, opened it quickly. The room was empty. There was a bottle of wine on the floor, and, quite correctly, a single glass beside it. The bottle was half empty, and a little of the missing half was still in the glass. Nothing was out of place. Leaving the room, he gave the hall scant attention, moving up the staircase silently. He could hear Sheila now. She was in the bedroom, humming a tune. But first he went to Jack’s room. Here, too, everything was as it should be. There were posters on the walls, curling, faded memories of adolescence, and paperback books on the floor and packed into a secondhand bookcase. Miles had studied this room before, curious as to its secrets. Nothing was wrong.

Except the fact that the low single bed was still warm with a slight musk of body heat.

Downstairs again, sweating, Miles opened the front door and slammed it shut. He opened the living-room door, looked in, then closed it again.

‘Miles? I’m up here.’

He took the stairs two at a time and entered the bedroom. Sheila was packing some clothes into a small case. Miles felt his insides jolt, as though they wanted suddenly to be his outsides.

‘Hello there,’ Sheila said, folding a cardigan.

‘What are you doing?’

‘This? Oh, I’m throwing a lot of my old clothes out. There’s a jumble sale at the church, and I thought they might be glad of... Miles? What’s wrong? You look ghastly.’

‘No, no, I’m all right. Been a busy day, that’s all.’ He sat down on the stool at the dressing table.

‘This doesn’t mean that I’m about to embark on a spending spree, you know,’ said Sheila, as though this might have been what was worrying him. But Great God, he had thought for a second that she was leaving him, he had really believed it.

‘You’re back early,’ she said now.

‘Am I?’ He checked his watch. ‘Yes, just a little, I suppose.’

‘What was wrong? Company not to your liking?’

‘Something like that.’

‘That’s always been your problem, Miles. You’ve never learned to adapt. You’d never make a diplomat.’

‘And what have you been up to?’ he asked quickly, giving her the chance to recall that someone had just left.

In reply, she picked up a green coat from the heap on the bed and studied it.

‘Do you remember this, Miles? You brought it home one day, said you’d bought it on impulse. The only coat you ever bought me. It’s well out of fashion now.’

‘You never liked it.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘I can’t remember you ever wearing it.’

Sheila just shrugged, perhaps thinking him a little drunk and edgy, and folded the coat into the case. The case was now full, and she pulled the clasps shut.

‘Shall we go downstairs?’ she suggested.

In the living room, he mentioned the wine.

‘Well,’ said Sheila, ‘if you can go slinking off to barrooms with your friends, what the hell, I can drink by myself.’

‘Fair comment.’

‘What was the pub like, anyway?’

‘It was a wine bar.’

‘Pardon my mistake. Why are you so snappy?’

‘Snappy?’

‘Yes, snap, snap.’ She clapped together her hands as though they were an alligator’s jaws. ‘Snap, snap.’

‘Well, the wine bar was bloody foul.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

He paused, swallowed, mumbled something about needing a glass of water. Sheila reminded him that there was plenty of wine left.

They finished the wine between them, listening to Shostakovich. Miles checked the kitchen, on the pretext of making a sandwich, but found no more evidence, no washed-up wineglass or recently emptied ashtray. At last he excused himself and went to his study. He remembered Jack’s practical joke, the beetle. It was in a drawer of his desk and he brought it out, making it jump at his command. Thank God there was something in his life he could control.

That Sheila had made no mention of a visitor was damning enough in itself, but then there was also the bed, still warm. He thought of all the revenge tragedies Sheila had read, all the dark tales of cold, furtive couplings. Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a forked one. The beetle jumped. He heard Sheila begin to climb the stairs, calling down to him that she would see him up there.

‘I won’t be long!’ he called back.

Surely, he reasoned, Sheila was intelligent enough not to let a man come here. But, having considered this, he thought, too, how ideal the situation had been, with Jack out of the house again and he, Miles, out drinking. He knew that his telephoned excuses to her often resulted in a long night away from home. Everything had been perfectly set up for a deception, for a long-deferred meeting. For everything. The warm bed, which grew hotter in his memory, would be cold and neutral now. Just as the Arab’s smile had faded away to nothing. They seemed part of the same process of disintegration.

There was something more, though, something that bothered Miles much more. For he was in no doubt now that the man who had walked away from him had walked with Billy Monmouth’s gait and was wearing Billy Monmouth’s clothes.

Twelve

Jim Stevens was sucking mud. It was not a pleasant sensation. He should have taken the morning off, should have visited a dentist.

He was drinking coffee, trying to trickle the gray liquid into the good side of his mouth, the side where it didn’t hurt. Coffee dribbled onto his tie and his shirt, while the other customers in the café looked at him blankly.

Where was the man he was supposed to meet? He was late, that’s where he was. That was London for you. Time went to pieces here; the more you watched the clock, the later you were. Stevens had been in London only thirteen months. It really pissed him off. His new editor did not allow him much freedom, certainly not as much as old Jameson up in Edinburgh had. He had become a cog. They didn’t want him to use his initiative.

Take the murder of that embassy man, the Israeli. Everyone shrugged their shoulders. Just a robbery gone wrong. But then why was everyone being so careful to skirt around it? That was what interested Stevens; it was as if an unspoken D-Notice had been slapped on it. He wasn’t sure what he could smell, but he could smell something. Perhaps it was the poison in his mouth, but then again...

There were the phone calls, too, anonymous but regular. Keep at it, there’s a story there, and while you’re at it why not take a look at Harold Sizewell MP? A little birdie tells me he’s hot. Stevens called the voice on the telephone his ‘Deep Throat.’ He kept its existence secret from everyone around him. Maybe they all had something to hide.

The enemy tooth bunched up its fist and slammed it hard into the quivering root. Stevens threw half a cup of cold coffee over his trousers and clutched his jawbone, cursing.

‘Mr. Stevens?’

‘Yes, damn it.’

‘I telephoned you.’

‘Great, sit down. Do you have any aspirin?’

‘No.’

‘Fine.’

He looked at the man, younger than his voice, deferential in manner. A civil servant smell about him, but very junior. Still, they knew stories, too, didn’t they? They were crawling out of the woodwork these days with their tuppence worth of spite.

‘So what can I do for you, Mr....?’

‘Sinclair, Tony Sinclair. That’s my real name, I swear, but please call me Tim Hickey from now on.’

‘That’s fine by me, Tim. Well, what is it I can do?’

‘It’s more a case of what I think I can do for you.’

It was a cliché perhaps, but there was none sweeter to Stevens’s ear. They always liked to think of themselves as doing you a favor. It saved them feeling guilty about spilling the beans. God, Jim, there goes another cliché. All they were doing in fact, of course, was seeking revenge, sometimes out of spite, sometimes justifiably. Not that motive was any of his concern. Maybe it would be a tale of some philandering cabinet minister, a private secretary with pedophilic leanings, an administrator with occult powers and a coven in the Cotswolds. Surrogate revenge, thought Stevens, that’s what I am.

‘Go on,’ he said, stabbing at his cheek with a finger, goading the pain to life.

‘Well,’ said the lean young man, ‘you see, I’m a spy.’

Walking down a nervous Whitehall, Stevens recalled that when he had first arrived in London, a young graduate named Compton-Burnett had been given the job of acquainting him with the city. Since he had not known any decent pubs, he had been of little use to Stevens, but he still remembered their first meeting in the editor’s office, the young man laughing behind his executive spectacles.

‘No relation, I’m afraid,’ Compton-Burnett had said, as though Stevens were supposed to get some joke. He had looked toward the editor, who had looked away, baffled. Compton- Burnett had then walked him down Whitehall, pointing out the various government buildings.

‘What’s that one, then?’ Stevens had asked.

‘Ah, that’s the MoD.’

‘And what about that one?’

‘Ah, I think that’s the MoD, too.’

‘And the ugly one?’

‘Milk and fish.’

‘Milk and fish?’

‘Agriculture and fisheries,’ Compton-Burnett explained, laughing again, pushing his glasses back up the slippery slope of his nose.

‘And that one?’

‘Not sure. MoD possibly.’ But on closer inspection, the tiny building, towered over by its colleagues like a tiny dictator by his bodyguards, had turned out to be the Scottish Office. Nowadays, Stevens knew the identities of most of these buildings, and none of them interested him except the tiny little Scottish Office. He empathized with it, seeing something of his own situation mirrored there, and tried to look the other way whenever he passed it.

At the entrance to Downing Street, several thuggish-looking policemen had replaced the usual crew of friendly ‘bobbies.’ It was a bad time. Bombing campaigns were bad news for everyone, but then bad news was just what the press thrived on.

His tooth reminded him again that there were plenty of dental surgeries in the area. And he had wasted the whole morning. Nervous little Sinclair aka Hickey had wanted only to bite and scratch, having been kicked out of his little job, ready with his tiny fists to beat against the door of that which had been denied him. But Stevens had shut his eyes and his ears, had told Sinclair that there was another investigative journalist in London who would listen to him with a clearer notion of what he was talking about.

This had not pleased the young man. He had a story to tell. (Stevens wondered now whether he had said ‘tell’ or ‘sell.’) It was a tale of injustice, of underhanded dealing. It was a great big zero in Stevens’s book, a zero with not the faintest hope of any corroboration. Take it to Australia, pal. Write it up as a novel, sell a million.

‘Take me seriously, you bastard!’ And with that Tim Hickey aka Tony Sinclair had risen to his feet and walked out of the café. Which was just what Jim Stevens had wanted him to do.

He had problems of his own after all, didn’t he? And a column to write through the pain.

He met Janine in the Tilting Room. Happy Hour. His tooth no longer hurt. He had swallowed his fear, marched into the surgery, and, hissing that this was a national emergency, had been led into the little torture room.

And so, tooth numb, mouth half frozen, he found himself trying to drink whiskey and spilling it down his trousers. Nothing had changed. Only his pocket was lighter.

‘Hi,’ said Janine, squeezing in beside him.

‘You’re late.’

She ignored this.

‘What have you done to your face?’ she asked.

‘Don’t ask.’

She was a bright young girl with bright looks and a bright figure. Stevens was aware that they made an unlikely pair.

‘What have you got for me?’

She was already searching in her briefcase, drawing forth a red file. She opened it and began to read to herself, her usual ploy before telling him her findings. She said it was an exercise for her short-term memory. To Stevens, it was a long-term pain in the arse.

She was a bright girl. She wanted to work in the media. The media hadn’t existed in Stevens’s youth. But she was learning the hard way, because her family, though decent and hardworking, were nobodies, and so there was no ready-made niche for her in her chosen career. A friend had pleaded with Stevens to take her on as a lackey, and Stevens had agreed.

‘Not much up that particular avenue,’ she said. ‘It seems that Sizewell has shares in a dozen companies apart from those of which he’s a director, but there’s nothing to suggest that he has been involved in the maneuvering of contracts toward any of those companies.’

‘You’re telling me he’s clean. What about his personal life?’

‘What do you want me to do? Sleep with him?’

‘Not a bad idea,’ Stevens said, regretting it immediately as Janine threw him a ferocious look.

‘This case needs some dirty work if it’s to uncover any dirt on the Right Dishonorable Gentleman.’

‘Well, count me out,’ said Janine, smiling a superior smile. No fillings in her mouth.

The Sizewell investigation seemed to be leading nowhere. How could he ever have imagined it would, based as it was on crank phone calls and one sighting of the MP entering an exclusive gay club? It was never going to be front page, not unless he started beating up old queens or hiring rent boys. But the caller’s voice wasn’t the voice of a hoaxer. It was calm and articulate, and very sure of itself. It had told Stevens that Sizewell visited that club, the Last Peacock, now and again, and that ‘he has been a very naughty boy.’

He’d give it just a little longer, just a week or so more.

‘Hello, you’re a nice girl.’

It had been Janine’s idea, all Janine’s idea. They had left the Tilting Room, and ignoring the call of fast food to Stevens’s nostrils, had taken a cab (expenses! expenses!) to some new wine bar, the Lustra. This was well out of Jim Stevens’s territory, but seemed to please Janine with its wall-to-wall Porsche key rings and inherited fox stoles.

‘You are a very attractive girl.’

The voice was new money, and there was money in the smile and money in the clothes: tasteful no, but moneyed yes. The man, blond, half permed, slid into the seat beside Janine. She smiled, enjoying the attention.

‘Yes, far too nice for the likes of him. Your uncle, is he? Or a friend of your grandfather’s perhaps?’ Janine giggled at this, and Stevens felt betrayed. ‘Well,’ continued the oil monkey, ‘say good-bye to the nice old man and hello to your sugar daddy, babe.’

‘Butt out, pal.’ Stevens was only mildly surprised to find his voice becoming ridiculously Scottish all of a sudden.

‘No offense, Jock old boy.’ The man looked across to Stevens for the first time, his grin full of good teeth. That was almost the final straw. ‘You don’t mind, though, if I have a chat with your niece, do you?’

‘If you don’t butt out, pal, I’m going to butt in — your teeth.’ Oh yes, Jim, the macho act. This won’t help your position with Janine. Wit perhaps, some cutting riposte which would leave the opponent reduced to rubble. He was a journalist, after all, he should know a few comebacks. He racked his brain: none. His fists began to squeeze themselves into little bon mots beneath the table, and his temporary filling throbbed with a whole glucose-drip’s worth of adrenaline.

‘It’s OK, Jim,’ said Janine, trying to reason with the incoming tide. Stevens knew that if he used force, he would lose her, lose any kind of chance that he might ever have with her. But then what chance did he have anyway?

When golden boy put his hand on her knee, three things happened rather quickly. One was that Janine swiped the hand away expertly, with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of contempt. The second was that Jim Stevens leaned across the table, pulled golden boy across it by his skinny leather tie, and chopped him on the back of the neck as he fell, hoping that he had laid some kind of rabbit punch upon his opponent’s pale flesh.

The man crawled a little way across the room, then got to his knees, and finally, rubbing his neck, to his feet. His friends were there beside him, and money began changing hands, as though after a bet. The bar was quiet: some kind of ‘happening’ had just occurred, and everyone was humble with awe before the participants.

It was only then that the third thing registered upon Jim Stevens: someone had taken a flash photograph as he had tugged at the man. He stared at the crew before him. Although he did not recognize the blond, the others were definitely reporters. Reporters. Of course they were, or he was Bruce Lee.

‘Thanks, people,’ said golden boy, still rubbing his neck. ‘Let’s go.’ And with that the entourage left the bar, one of them packing away his camera and lenses as he went.

‘What was all that—’ began Janine, reddening as the clientele continued to stare at her. A bouncer of professional wrestler proportions was striding toward their table.

‘Don’t ask,’ growled Stevens, ‘and don’t, for Christ’s sake, buy a tabloid tomorrow.’

‘So you know about it then?’

‘Cynegetics?’ Billy Monmouth laughed. ‘Of course.’

‘Why am I always the last to hear about everything?’

For once, it was Miles who had insisted on lunch, and he had insisted, too, that he should pay. Billy had shrugged, smiling, briskly alive to the beginning of October, autumn seeming to bring out the hunter in him.

‘Well, it’s not the sort of thing I would gossip about normally. How did you find out about it?’

‘Luck, really,’ said Miles. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

They had eaten at a restaurant close to Holborn.

‘How many are there working on Harvest?’ Billy had asked.

‘Seven altogether,’ Miles had lied.

‘Seven, eh? A sort of combine Harvester, would you say?’ Billy had laughed at his joke.

‘Yes,’ Miles had said, his mouth dry despite the Pomerol, ‘and I for one don’t want to come a cropper this time.’

‘A cropper, that’s very good, Miles.’ But Billy had stopped laughing, faced with the steel in Miles’s voice and in his eyes.

‘What do you know about Cynegetics?’ Miles asked now, waiting for the coffee and Billy’s brandy.

‘Oh, not very much. Rumors mostly. Nobody’s really sure who’s in it, you see, but the whole thing is probably run under Partridge’s direction.’

‘Partridge?’

Billy nodded. He was being cagier than usual.

‘It was set up under his directive, apparently. It’s Partridge’s pear tree.’

‘But why?’

‘Paranoia, Miles. You know the firm.’

During lunch, a litany of facts about beetles had played in Miles’s head. He thought of the death watch beetle, ticking like a time bomb, and of the whirligig beetle, skating across the surfaces of ponds. Miles felt like a whirligig beetle, dizzy yet exhilarated. But he felt like a death watch beetle, too.

‘What was that, Billy? I was miles away.’

‘I said that Jeff Phillips is rumored to have been transferred to Cynegetics as from last week. Lateral promotion.’

‘Good God. But Phillips is in on Richard Mowbray’s little scheme.’

‘Then maybe the gossip is wrong. It sometimes happens.’

‘But not often.’

Billy smiled again, swirling the brandy around in his mouth before swallowing. He cleared his throat to speak.

‘There’s an exhibition on around the corner from here. I was thinking of paying a visit. The gallery’s run by one of our old girls. Do you fancy it, or are you in a hurry?’

Miles was in no hurry whatsoever.

It was a small gallery, brightly lit. The exhibition was of ‘Vorticist Painting, 1912–1916.’ Both Billy and Miles bought the catalog, Miles hoping to surprise Sheila with this evidence of culture, but then pulling himself up sharply when he remembered why he was here.

While Billy hung back to have a few words with the overdressed old lady by the door, Miles entered the Vorticist world. He found the paintings forbidding, and waited for Billy to catch up.

‘Oskar Kokoschka used to live around the corner from us,’ he told Billy, realizing too late how fatuous the remark must seem.

‘Really?’ said Billy. ‘Well, well.’

They stopped at a line drawing of Ezra Pound.

‘That’s where I got the name for Mowbray,’ said Billy. ‘Mauberley is a character created by Pound.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, old Pound was a bit of a fascist. Mad, too. Wrote some of his best stuff after the Allies had declared him insane.’

‘That probably says quite a lot about poetry,’ said Miles.

‘I agree. What is it Shakespeare says? “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.” Something like that.’

‘Speaking of madmen and lovers,’ said Miles, ‘I know about you and Sheila.’

Billy, studying the catalog with preternatural interest, glanced up at a large canvas that appeared to contain millions of tiny nuts and bolts, twisted together into a vaguely human shape.

‘Ah,’ he said at last, ‘so that’s what this is all about. What do you want me to say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What did Sheila say?’

‘Sheila doesn’t know. And I’m not going to tell her. You are.’ Billy looked ready to protest. ‘I’ve already moved a few things out of the house. I’m going to stay away for a while, to give us all time to make decisions.’

‘But, Miles, it wasn’t like that,’ hissed Billy. ‘I mean, there’s no need for—’

‘I don’t want to hear it, not any of it, not now.’ Miles checked his watch. ‘There’s just one more thing — I think you are the most complete bastard I’ve ever met. Knowing you, you’ll take that as a compliment. It’s not meant as one, believe me.’ He made to move away, but Billy clawed at his sleeve. Miles turned back toward him.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘and I forgot this.’

The catalog was heavy, and it hit Billy Monmouth’s jaw with a deafening crack. He staggered against the nuts and bolts painting, several visitors looking on in horror as blood began to ooze from his lip and his gum. Miles was walking away, and he did not look invisible at all now. He looked like the watched, not the watchman, while Billy Monmouth fumbled for a handkerchief and some self-esteem.