THE SECOND MIDNIGHT
Andrew Taylor

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the United Kingdom by Collins 1988

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Lydmouth Ltd 1987

Cover design by www.mulcaheydesign.com © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images (boy looking over city), Shutterstock.com (all other images)

Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008341831

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008341848

Version: 2019-07-16

Dedication

For C. and L.T.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

I: Pre-War 1939

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

II: War 1939–45

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

III: Postwar 1945–46

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

IV: Cold War 1955–56

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

I

Prologue

George Farrar had his first inkling that something was wrong when he collected his room key from reception.

The manager himself was behind the desk. He was a plump Viennese, almost as small as Farrar himself, and he always wore a flower in the lapel of his black coat. He was also a compulsive talker.

Tonight, however, he produced the key as soon as Farrar reached the desk and slapped it down on the counter between them. Immediately afterwards he bent his head over the register, as if the pressure of work prevented him from exchanging pleasantries with his guests.

‘Any messages?’ Farrar said. He was hoping that William McQueen might have telephoned.

The manager didn’t raise his head. ‘No, Herr Farrar.’

Farrar noticed that the white carnation was beginning to wilt. He also noticed that the manager’s face was shiny with sweat. Still, it was uncomfortably warm in the foyer.

He said goodnight and took the lift up to his floor. A tall man wearing a camelhair overcoat came up with him. He was smoking a cigar and had small, sad eyes.

They both wanted the same floor. The tall man gave a polite little bow when they reached it, indicating that Farrar should leave the lift first. Farrar smiled his thanks.

The long corridor was empty. Farrar walked quickly to his door; behind him he could hear the soft, slow pad of the other man’s footsteps. He unlocked the door and opened it; his hand brushed against the light switch.

Everything happened very suddenly. A hand slammed into the small of his back, propelling him into the room. Simultaneously, he saw that the carpet was strewn with his belongings. Another man was lying on the bed, with his hands behind his head. He was smiling. When Farrar tripped over his own upturned suitcase, the smile became a chuckle.

Behind him, Farrar heard a click as the tall man locked the door.

The man on the bed stopped chuckling. Farrar’s stomach lurched as he recognized the Bavarian he had met last night.

The Bavarian raised his heavy black eyebrows. ‘And how is our lovely Gretl this evening?’

Farrar groped for his glasses, which had slid to the foot of the bed. Camelhair brushed his cheek. A large brown shoe stamped on the glasses and twisted them into the carpet.

The tall man sucked in his breath. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘I am so clumsy.’

‘What a pity,’ said the man on the bed. ‘Still, accidents happen.’

Farrar got slowly to his feet; his muscles tightened, ready to receive a blow from the tall man. He moved more slowly than he needed, pretending the fall had winded him. His own stupidity angered him: last night he had assumed that the man on the bed was nothing more than a tourist who had had too much to drink; he should have known better. He remembered the manager’s behaviour and realized that his visitors must be police of some sort: German, not Austrian. He was a fool to have run any unnecessary risks before he had seen William McQueen.

‘Gretl,’ the man on the bed said conversationally, ‘won’t be lovely for much longer.’ Without any change of tone he added, ‘This room is a pigsty. Tidy it up, Farrar.’

Did they know? Had they found it?

Farrar had the answer to the second question as soon as he picked up the suitcase: it was appreciably lighter than it should have been. He scooped up a pile of shirts and threw them into the case.

Sweet Jesus, he thought. Please not the Gestapo.

‘Neatly, Farrar. You get so much more in if you pack neatly, don’t you?’

‘Look, I’m sorry about last night,’ Farrar said quickly. His German was fast and fluent, and he had a salesman’s confidence in the power of his own voice. ‘I’d had a bit to drink and the girl—’

The tall man slapped him. ‘Silence, please,’ he said politely.

Farrar picked himself up again. Some clothes went in the suitcase, others in the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. Meanwhile, the man on the bed leafed through Farrar’s order book. Farrar noticed that the thieving bastards had even been at his brandy: the bottle, nearly empty, was on the bedside table; beside it was a tumbler with a couple of inches of brandy still in it.

The man on the bed looked up. ‘Business has not been good lately?’

Farrar nodded. There wasn’t much demand for boxed sets of British Grenadiers in the Third Reich. That was one reason why he had taken the other job when they offered it to him.

‘I expect you find it hard to make ends meet.’

Again, Farrar nodded. It seemed safer to agree. Besides, the man on the bed was quite right. He wondered whether they were going to beat him up before they arrested him, or wait until they had him in custody.

Escape was out of the question. His captors’ combined weight was three or four times his own; and both men would be armed. The door was locked. Even if he could open the window and dive through, he doubted if he would survive the drop of fifty or sixty feet to the street below. Shouting for help would be useless, for it was obvious that they had the cooperation of the manager.

But they wouldn’t kill him – he was sure of that. A murdered British citizen would lead to awkward questions, even in Vienna. They would interrogate him, of course, and if he was dead he couldn’t tell them anything. But the worst he had to fear was a jail sentence and perhaps a little preliminary suffering. They might not realize the significance of what they had found.

The man on the bed tore a blank page from the order book and wrote something on it with a silver pencil.

Farrar bundled a pair of shoes into the bottom of the wardrobe. At last the room was clear.

The man in the camelhair coat patted his shoulder. ‘Gut,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Sehr gut.’

‘Have a drink,’ said the man on the bed. He beckoned Farrar closer and jerked his head towards the tumbler. ‘Go on, drink,’ he said irritably. ‘It may be your last chance for some time.’

Farrar picked up the glass. The probable consequences of throwing its contents into the Bavarian’s face chased through his mind.

The Bavarian shook his head. ‘Don’t be silly, Farrar. There are two of us.’

‘Hurry, please,’ the man in the camelhair coat said. He looked ostentatiously at his watch.

Farrar shrugged. He picked up the glass and had his last drink.

George Farrar died on Wednesday 15 February 1939.

The fact that he had died was more important than how and why, at least to Michael. But, much later, Michael became curious about all aspects of the little man’s death. This was because he came to see the murder of Farrar as the starting point for what came afterwards. He realized that this was an arbitrary choice – equally logically, he might have chosen Farrar’s birth, or the Anschluss, or even (to stretch a point) the Great War.

But, being an artist of sorts, he considered that human beings had a fundamental need to create patterns from the chaos of history and from their own messy lives. A pattern had to start somewhere: even the author of Genesis had had to face up to this problem: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

So Michael’s pattern began with Farrar’s death. If Farrar had reached London the following weekend, a World War might have taken a slightly different course; his death sent ripples even further into the future; it touched, perhaps marginally, on the rise and fall of empires.

In the final analysis, however, Michael was more concerned with the effects of Farrar’s death on himself and on people he was later to know. That was where it mattered. Michael took things personally, which was why he was never particularly successful at his job. Uncle Claude never made that mistake.

Despite the fact that Michael had never met Farrar, he came to feel an almost proprietorial interest in him. In the years to come, he collected information about him.

At the time of his death, Farrar was thirty-five. He was five feet two and reputed to be hot-tempered. He had a widowed mother who lived in Worthing. Some time afterwards, Michael checked to see if His Majesty’s Government had seen fit to grant Mrs Farrar a pension. He was not surprised to find that it hadn’t. HMG, probably in the person of Uncle Claude, had used a Gestapo lie to avoid spending a few hundred pounds on an old lady who could give nothing in return. That was typical.

Farrar had worked as a travelling salesman on the Continent since 1936. He was employed by a struggling British toy firm which had built its reputation on the manufacture of toy soldiers. Z Organization had recruited him as a courier in Zurich on 8 December 1938.

Those were the salient facts about Farrar’s life. The facts about the manner of his death were more difficult to establish. Michael had access to Z Organization’s files; but these were sketchy at the best of times and they were particularly bad for Vienna after the Nazis took over. Later he was able to use the SIS Registry, but here the facts were even thinner on the ground. It was true that the Vienna Station had more or less recovered from the disruption of the Anschluss by this time. The problem was that no one there had any interest in Farrar; they had no reason to disbelieve the official story, and hence no reason to investigate it. In 1939, few people in the service were aware that SIS was operating in tandem with a changeling half-brother called Z.

Eventually Michael was able to consult the Vienna police file, though that was useful more for what it omitted than for what it included. According to the civil police, George Farrar died around midnight in room 47 of the Hotel Franz Josef on the Plosslgasse. The body was found the following morning by the chambermaid. Farrar was fully dressed and lying supine on his bed; there were cherry-pink patches on his skin. The gas was on but unlit, and the cracks around the door and the window had been clumsily sealed with newspapers and towels. The chambermaid turned off the gas and fetched the manager; the manager called the police.

The police found the remains of a bottle of brandy, an empty glass, the room key and a scrap of paper on the bedside table. Four English words had been scrawled in pencil on the paper: I can’t go on. There was no reason to doubt that they had been written by the dead man, though the only standards of comparison were a few notes in Farrar’s order book and his entry in the hotel register.

Further investigation showed that Farrar’s financial affairs were in a bad way. The manager and the chambermaid testified that Herr Farrar had seemed distraught and depressed. Another witness came forward – a public-spirited Bavarian tourist, who claimed to have met Farrar in a café on the Ringstrasse a few hours before he died. According to the obliging Bavarian, Farrar had been drunk and talking of suicide; he blamed his problems on the international Jewish conspiracy.

Michael didn’t dispute the evidence in the police file, except perhaps the testimonies about Farrar’s state of mind. Of course it was curious that no one had thought to test the body for traces of cyanide – for cyanide, like carbon monoxide, left patches of lividity on a corpse. It was curious but not necessarily significant. The Viennese police sent Farrar’s belongings to the British Embassy, which transmitted them to Worthing. They were itemized with Teutonic thoroughness on the file – right down to Handkerchiefs, 6, Pair of Glasses (Broken) and Book Entitled The Black Gang by Sapper.

But someone had been careless: there was no mention of a pencil.

Z Organization had a man in Vienna – indeed, William McQueen had intended to contact Farrar on the Thursday to pick up the gold. McQueen’s cover was at risk, but he made cautious enquiries after Farrar’s death. He found a waiter from the Franz Josef who admitted, when suitably primed with alcohol, that something odd had gone on that night. The manager had taken over the receptionist’s evening shift. There was a rumour among the staff that two men from the Hotel Metropole had been seen in the Franz Josef on Wednesday night.

The Hotel Metropole was the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo.

The gold was no longer among Farrar’s belongings, but that was only to be expected. Uncle Claude and everyone else drew the obvious inference: the Gestapo had somehow identified Farrar as a courier; they had killed him and taken the gold. The fact that they had killed him – rather than used him as bait – suggested that they already knew for whom the gold was intended. Perhaps Farrar had talked before he died. As a result, Uncle Claude decided his resources were better used elsewhere: McQueen was transferred to Basel, and the Z network in Vienna never amounted to much.

The real irony only became apparent years later, when Michael was interrogating a Gestapo officer who had made something of a name for himself in wartime Holland. Knowing that his prisoner had previously served in Vienna, Michael threw in a question about the Farrar affair.

The officer, who was in the talkative, confiding phase of his interrogation, remembered it well, because of the gold. Farrar, it seemed, had been a womanizer whose bravado was in inverse proportion to his height. On the Tuesday night he had quarrelled with a man he believed to be a German tourist. The cause of the dispute was the favours of a prostitute; and the scene of it was that bar on the Ringstrasse. Farrar had won.

The following evening, the plainclothes man and a colleague had paid a visit to the Franz Josef, intending merely to teach Farrar a lesson. Farrar was out, but the manager gave them a passkey to his room. While they were waiting, they discovered the gold concealed in his suitcase. The presence of undeclared gold marks worth nearly a thousand pounds sterling didn’t suggest to the two policemen that Farrar was engaged in espionage. Why should it have done? In those days, plenty of people were trying to move hard currency out of Austria for the most personal of reasons, and foreigners, with their relative freedom to cross the frontiers of the Reich, were often used for the purpose.

On balance, it was safer to kill Farrar if they wanted to take the gold. The manager of the Franz Josef was persuaded to cooperate; he didn’t want to lose his job and possibly his liberty. The officers had to give Michael’s captive a percentage of the proceeds, because his authority was needed to ensure that the civil police drew the right conclusions.

The police did as they were told. It was, they were informed, a political matter which concerned the security of the Reich. And there was the irony: the lie was perfectly true.

George Farrar was murdered in Vienna on the 15 February 1939: that was the beginning of Michael’s pattern.

It was an arbitrary choice, yes: but at least it made the whole affair seem personal – and therefore easier to bear. It showed that affairs of state were ultimately dependent on the motives and actions of apparently insignificant individuals. What happened after Farrar’s death was made somehow more intelligible by the idea that it could be traced back to the greed of two secret policemen, the whim of a Viennese whore and the libido of a commercial traveller in toys.

One

The ivory ruler snapped in two as it hit the top of the desk. Three inches of it ricocheted off the polished oak and landed on Hugh’s shoe. He jumped backward. The remaining nine inches stayed in Alfred Kendall’s hand.

His father’s knuckles, Hugh noticed, were the same colour as the ruler.

Alfred Kendall turned slowly in his chair. He was still dressed in his City clothes, which lent an odd formality to the proceedings.

‘Do you mean to tell me that the headmaster is lying?’

‘No, Father.’ Hugh’s hands clenched behind his back. His body was treacherously determined to tremble. ‘Mr Jervis was mistaken. I—’

‘Don’t lie to me, boy. I’ve known Mr Jervis for a good ten years. He isn’t a fool.’ Kendall tapped the letter in front of him. ‘Nor is he the sort of man to fling around wild accusations.’

Hugh’s vision blurred. ‘I didn’t do it.’

The words came out more loudly than he had intended. For a moment his father stared contemptuously at him. Hugh tried to look away. It was almost with relief that he saw his father begin to gnaw his lower lip with a long, yellow tooth. This was almost invariably a preliminary to speech.

‘Never did I think I should read such a letter about a son of mine.’ Kendall’s voice hardened. ‘You don’t seem to realize that you’ve brought shame on the entire family.’

Hugh shrugged. It was a gesture of discomfort, not insolence, but his father interpreted it otherwise. Kendall’s slap caught Hugh unawares: he reeled back against the table.

‘That,’ his father said slowly, ‘is just a foretaste of what you should expect. Don’t snivel. Listen to what Mr Jervis has to say about you. “Dear Captain Kendall, It is with deep regret that I have been forced to expel your son Hugh from the school, with immediate effect. One of his classmates had foolishly brought a ten-shilling note to school. Just before luncheon, the boy reported it had been stolen. It was subsequently found in the pocket of Hugh’s overcoat. Hugh, I am afraid, made matters worse by trying to dissemble his guilt. For the sake of the other boys in my charge, I cannot permit a pupil who has proved to be both a thief and a liar to remain for a moment longer than necessary. I will forward the termly account at a later date.”

‘The termly account, you note. In the circumstances, Mr Jervis is quite within his rights to charge for the entire Lent term. Have you any idea what the fees are like for a first-rate prep school like Thameside College? Your brother used his time there to win a scholarship. But you have wantonly wasted your opportunities from the first. I scrimp and save to give you the finest education available in England – and this is how you repay me. Do you think that’s fair? Do you think that’s reasonable? Answer me, boy.’

Hugh’s eyes were heavy with tears. Humiliation bred anger, which in turn created a brief and desperate courage. ‘I … I thought—’

‘Don’t mumble at me. And don’t you know that tears are unmanly?’

‘I thought Aunt Vida was paying my fees.’

Purple blotches appeared on Kendall’s face. He jerked himself out of his chair and towered over Hugh.

‘You impudent little wretch,’ he said softly. ‘You will regret that, I promise you.’

Hugh’s courage evaporated. He had been stupid to mention Aunt Vida. None of the children was supposed to know that she paid their school fees. But Stephen had found out years ago from their aunt’s housekeeper.

This time the blow was a back-hander. The edge of Kendall’s wedding ring cut into the skin over Hugh’s cheekbone. He cannoned into the table and fell to the ground.

‘Get up. And don’t you dare bleed on the carpet.’

Hugh got slowly to his feet. He touched his cheek and looked at the smear of blood on his fingers.

‘Handkerchief.’

Hugh pulled out the grubby ball of linen from his trouser pocket. He dabbed his face, conscious that his father was still looming over him. Adults were so unfairly large.

‘You despicable little animal,’ Kendall whispered.

Hugh held back a sob with difficulty. He knew he would cry sooner or later, but he was determined to put it off for as long as possible. What was happening to him was unjust; yet for some reason that didn’t seem important beside the fact that he disgusted his father. He was bitterly ashamed of himself. He wished he were dead.

‘Bring me the cane. The thinner one.’

The two canes were kept in the corner between the wall and the end of the bookcase. Hugh sometimes daydreamed of burning them. The thicker one, curiously enough, was less painful. The thin one was longer and more supple; it hissed in the air, gathering venom as it swung.

He handed it to his father. It was part of the ritual that the victim should present the means of punishment to the executioner.

Alfred Kendall tapped the cane against one pin-striped trouser leg. ‘You know what to do. Waiting won’t make it easier. I can promise you that.’

Hugh turned away and unhooked the S-shaped metal snake that held up his trousers. His fingers groped at the buttons. When the last one was undone, the trousers fell to his ankles. He shuffled across the room to the low armchair where his mother sat in the evenings. He could feel a draught from somewhere on the back of his knees.

The chair had a low back. Hugh stretched over it, extending his arms along the chair’s arms for support. His mother’s knitting bag was on the seat of the chair. He could see the purple wool of the jersey she was knitting for Stephen.

His father’s heavy footsteps advanced towards him and then retreated. This, too, was part of the ritual: Alfred Kendall was a man who liked to take measurements. Hugh knew there were four paces between the desk and the chair. To be precise, there were three paces and a little jump. After the jump, his father would grunt like someone straining on a lavatory. Then would come the pain.

The footsteps returned and Hugh held his breath. The first blow caught him by surprise, as it always did. In the interim between beatings, you forgot that it hurt so much.

The cane wrapped around his buttocks. It felt like a branding iron. Despite himself, Hugh yelped. He pressed himself forward against the back of the chair. His hands dug into the arms.

The footsteps slowly retreated. Once again, they advanced.

The cane seemed to land on precisely the same spot. This time, Hugh cried out. His father said nothing, though his breathing was more laboured than usual; he never spoke when administering punishment.

Hugh tried to concentrate on counting. You never knew in advance how many strokes you were going to get. Four was probably the average, at least for himself and Stephen, though it was at least a year since Stephen had been beaten; Meg usually had three, but then she was a girl. Five was by no means unknown. Stephen boasted that he had been given six on two occasions.

Five – Six. Hugh stirred, but even the slightest movement made the pain worse. His arms and legs were trembling. To his horror, he realized that the footsteps were again coming towards him.

Seven.

Eight.

Hugh’s legs buckled. He was crying now – the pain was so great that he no longer cared. His tears glistened on the purple wool.

‘Stand up,’ snapped his father. ‘Can’t you even take your punishment like a man?’

There was a clatter as his father returned the cane to its corner. Metal and flint rasped together and the smell of tobacco filled the air.

Hugh levered himself into an upright position. For a few seconds he stared stupidly at the trousers which shackled his ankles. He bent down with difficulty and tugged them up to his waist. The pain was no longer blindingly acute; it had softened, if that was the right word, to a dull, angry throb. Every movement made it worse.

Alfred Kendall was leaning on the desk; he held the Gold Flake in his left hand. His thumb and forefinger were stained yellow, like the ragged fringe of his military moustache.

He exhaled a lungful of smoke in the direction of his son. ‘Well?’

Hugh had missed his cue. The ritual demanded that the victim should thank the executioner. It was an exquisite refinement: you thanked someone for inflicting pain on you, thereby implying you deserved or even desired it. It suddenly became very important to Hugh that he should not make the required response.

‘I am waiting, Hugh.’

His father walked slowly towards him. With him he brought his characteristic smell – a compound of stale tobacco, hair oil and a musty, sooty odour which Hugh associated with suburban trains. Without warning, Kendall nipped the lobe of Hugh’s ear between finger and thumb and twisted it through ninety degrees.

Hugh gasped and tried to pull his head away.

‘You always were a weakling,’ his father observed. His grip tightened on the lobe. ‘A real boy of your background would have learned to stand punishment years ago. I’m still waiting.’

It was at this moment that Hugh decided never to forgive his father in any circumstance. Aloud he said: ‘Thank you, sir.’

Alfred Kendall released the ear and nodded towards the door. Hugh, who was expert at interpreting his father’s nods, opened the door and stood aside to allow his father to pass through first. Kendall set great store by the courtesy that men owed to women and the young to their elders and betters. It was a sign, he often remarked, of good breeding.

His father flung open the kitchen door and motioned to Hugh to stand beside him in the doorway.

They were all in there. The opening of the door had cut off both their conversation and their movements, leaving a strained, still silence. Hugh’s mother was standing by the gas cooker, stirring the contents of a saucepan; the rich smell of mutton stew made his mouth water. Meg, still in her school uniform, was at the kitchen table doing her homework. Stephen sat opposite her; he had changed since he returned from the bank, and the Star was spread open in front of him. Hugh was sure that they had been talking about him. He knew from experience that the sound of a caning was clearly audible from the hall.

Kendall sucked on his cigarette. ‘Hugh will go straight to bed. He will have nothing to eat tonight and no one will visit him. Do I make myself clear?’

Mrs Kendall covered the saucepan with its lid. ‘Alfred, perhaps I should—’

‘I’ve made up my mind, Muriel. The boy’s enough of a namby-pamby as it is, without you trying to make it worse. We’ll have dinner at the usual time.’

He laid a heavy hand on Hugh’s shoulder, turned him around and pushed him towards the stairs.

The stairs were a form of torture. Hugh climbed slowly, clinging to the banister; his body protested at every step. He heard his father go back into the dining room and close the door.

From the landing another flight of stairs wound upward to the attic where Meg slept. Hugh could just remember the time when the room had belonged to a maid. On the right was the big bedroom at the front, where his parents slept; Stephen had the room opposite. Hugh’s was farther down the landing towards the back of the house, next to the bathroom over the scullery.

His room was small and cold, but at least it was his alone. He shut the door behind him and closed the curtains. He was crying again now no one could see him – softly and wearily. His body ached. As he shrugged himself out of his jacket, his teeth began to chatter.

Usually his mother gave him a hot-water bottle when he came to bed; such luxuries were out of the question tonight. His pyjamas felt clammy. He pulled them on and rolled gingerly into bed.

It was obviously impossible to lie on his back. He discovered that lying on his side was almost as bad. The problem with lying on his front was that it brought the weight of the bedclothes on to his back. On the other hand, without the blankets he stood no chance whatsoever of warming up.

Hugh had forgotten to switch out the light, but for the moment he lacked the energy to get out of bed again. There was a line of lead soldiers deployed on the mantelpiece. Soldiers were a little babyish, but he still enjoyed playing with them in private. Major Hugh Kendall (VC and bar) was leading a daring patrol through no man’s land, attended by his faithful batman, Hiawatha the Red Indian. Hiawatha was Hugh’s oldest soldier; most of his paint was gone and his costume looked a little incongruous beside the Great War uniforms of the rest of the patrol. But Hiawatha always had to be included. Perhaps he was working as a secret agent and was therefore in disguise; Major Kendall’s job was to infiltrate him through the enemy lines.

Hugh tried to make the story continue in his mind, but it was no use. Instead he found himself thinking about the war his father had said was coming. With luck his father might get killed. He hugged the thought guiltily to himself.

The hours slipped slowly by. Every quarter of an hour, chimes from the clock in the drawing room filled the house. His mother spent hours cleaning that clock. It was in the form of a black marble triumphal arch, upon which two modestly attired cupids were frolicking; it had been a wedding present to his parents.

There were other sounds that signified the passage of time. Hugh’s room was directly over the kitchen. He could hear the clatter of pans and plates as the meal was prepared; and occasionally the scrape of a chair and the murmur of conversation. From half-past seven onwards, there was nearly half an hour of silence: everyone was in the dining room. Suddenly he felt very hungry.

Food would have warmed him, as well as satisfied his hunger. The cold seemed to be seeping into his bones. His muscles were stiffening up. With immense effort he wriggled out of bed, knowing that to leave his light on was to risk another beating. Before getting back into bed, he picked up Hiawatha. As he lay there shivering, the little lead figure grew warm in his hand.

At a quarter-past nine, he heard footsteps shuffling down the landing. It was Meg’s bedtime and she was coming to use the bathroom. There were familiar sounds – the running of water, the flushing of the cistern and the small explosion as she drew back the bolt.

Her steps paused outside his door. Hugh heard the faint creak of the door knob rotating. Meg came into the room and closed the door behind her with great care. She tiptoed slowly across the floor to the bed. Hugh tensed and then relaxed. He began to cry again, this time with relief: at least someone cared enough about him to come and see him.

The springs groaned as Meg sat on the edge of the bed. She bent down and her long dark hair brushed his cheek. Hugh stretched out his hand and felt the thick flannel of her dressing gown. Her breath was fresh with toothpaste.

‘Are you all right?’ she whispered. ‘How many did you get?’

‘Eight.’ Hugh felt a certain pride in this. ‘It hurts all over. And I’m starving.’

‘I managed to save you a bit of bread.’

He crammed the bread into his mouth. It tasted delicious. He also ate some fluff which the bread must have picked up from Meg’s pocket. He swallowed the last mouthful with regret.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘Father and Mother are in the dining room. Stephen’s gone out, the lucky devil. We haven’t been allowed to mention your name all evening.’

‘What’s going to happen to me?’

‘How should I know?’ Meg’s weight shifted on the mattress. ‘Can I come into bed with you? I’m freezing.’

Hugh made room for her. She slid into bed beside him. He felt embarrassed, which was odd because they had often cuddled up together to keep each other warm; but for some reason they hadn’t done it as much in the last couple of years. Meg used to want to play Mothers and Fathers, which he thought was a girlish game.

His sister gurgled with laughter. ‘Your feet are like ice. Here, put them against my legs.’ As she spoke, she put an arm around him. He felt the warmth spreading from her body to his.

‘It’s all right for Stephen,’ Meg said. ‘He can get away from it. He said he was going to the pictures, but I bet he’s going drinking. Father would kill him if he knew what Stephen gets up to. I wish I was a boy.’

Hugh sniffed. ‘It’s not much fun.’

‘Not like you, silly. Like Stephen. Did you know he started smoking? He buys those Turkish cigarettes, the oval ones. And since he started work at the bank he’s hardly ever at home. In the evening he usually goes out.’

‘Where does he go?’ Hugh didn’t really want to know, but it was comfortable to have Meg whispering in his ear. He didn’t want to give her an excuse for going.

‘I’m sure he goes to parties and shows and restaurants.’ Meg’s voice was bitter. ‘I know he sees a lot of people he knew at school. Especially Paul Bennet: you know the one – his father’s filthy rich and they’ve got a Rolls-Royce. The friends Stephen chooses always have pots of money – have you noticed that?’

Hugh snuggled closer to his sister. His shoulder was against her breasts. He was beginning to feel drowsy. When she spoke again, her whisper was so low he could hardly catch what she was saying.

‘You know Mary? She’s awfully nice – she’s in my form at school and we do everything together. She saw Stephen and Paul on Sunday, in Richmond Park. They were with girls. Mary said they had their arms around their waists. She said the girls looked terribly common and – you know – flashy.’

Hugh wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but he grunted encouragingly. Meg sounded strangely breathless, as if she found the subject absolutely fascinating. He forced himself to find a question to keep the conversation going.

‘Are you going to go out with chaps when you grow up?’

Meg wriggled beside him. ‘Of course I am. They’ll be rich, too – perhaps they’ll have titles. They’ll take me to nightclubs, you know, and we’ll drink champagne and dance very close to one another.’ She made a sound which was halfway between a sob and a sigh. ‘The trouble is, I never get a chance to meet anyone. Father keeps us cooped up like prisoners. He never lets us invite anyone home. Mary’s people are always having parties. And her brothers bring their friends. They had a tennis tournament last summer and Mark (that’s her elder brother) brought a friend from Oxford. He was called Gerald and looked like Robert Donat. He kissed Mary, in the summer-house. And it was a proper kiss, too, not just a peck on the cheek.’

Hugh wondered what a proper kiss was: presumably it was a peck on the mouth.

‘Sometimes,’ Meg hissed in his ear, ‘I feel so jealous of Mary I could burst. She knows such a lot about men already.’ Her arm tightened around Hugh. ‘I say,’ she said casually. ‘Eight must have hurt an awful lot. Can I see it?’

‘It’s dark,’ Hugh protested sleepily. ‘We can’t put the light on again. Besides—’

He stopped, aware he couldn’t put his other objection into words, even to himself. In any case, he didn’t want to offend Meg.

She seemed to understand what was in his mind. ‘Don’t be an idiot. You’re my little brother – I used to help bath you. Anyway if it’s dark, I wouldn’t see anything. I could just touch.’

‘If you like.’ Hugh tried to make himself sound indifferent. ‘But be careful: it’s jolly painful.’

Meg’s free hand moved slowly down his spine. She hesitated when she came to the top of his pyjama trousers. He had left the cord untied in the hope that it would be less painful. Her hand slipped underneath.

Hugh winced as her fingers gently touched the line of welts. His father’s aim had been good: most of the strokes had fallen on the same spot. She touched one of the scabs and sucked in her breath sharply.

‘It bled quite a lot,’ Hugh said proudly.

‘You poor darling.’

Meg’s hand moved on. It cupped one of his buttocks for an instant, and then stroked the top of his thighs. Where she touched the welts, it was painful; but elsewhere it made Hugh tingle. He felt a warmth growing inside him. Her hand slipped down between his legs.

Suddenly they both heard footsteps coming along the landing.

Hugh and Meg held their breath. They knew it must be their mother – she walked slowly and lightly, while their father’s step was brisk and heavy. As his mother reached the door of his room, Hugh clutched Hiawatha so tightly that one of the Indian’s arms bent beneath the strain.

But the footsteps passed on to the bathroom. As soon as the bolt shot across, Meg began to wriggle out of bed. In her haste she scraped a fingernail across one of the scabs; Hugh nearly cried out. A long, bare leg rubbed against Hugh’s arm. Meg put on her slippers and bent down to Hugh.

‘Don’t make a sound. I’ll wait behind the door until she’s gone back downstairs.’

Next door, the lavatory flushed. His mother’s footsteps paused outside Hugh’s door, but moved on after a few seconds. Hugh didn’t know whether to be relieved or hurt: his mother’s fear of his father was greater than her desire to comfort him.

Meg waited a moment and then left without even saying goodnight. Hugh half-wished she would come back to bed, despite the risks. Her visit had made him both warmer and happier. He stirred in the bed; he was suddenly conscious of his body as something outside himself. He realized that other people could give it pleasure as well as pain.

‘We’ll survive, old fellow,’ he whispered to Hiawatha. ‘The enemy may have won the battle, but he hasn’t won the war.’

There would be a respectful grin on the usually impassive face of his batman. ‘Yes, sir. The men are all in good spirits. Permission to kip down?’

‘Granted,’ Hugh said. He laid Hiawatha beneath the pillow, but kept his hand on top of him.

Hiawatha may have gone to sleep at once, but it took Hugh much longer. His drowsiness seemed to have gone. He heard his parents come to bed just after eleven. Neither of them came in to see him.

The last thing he was aware of was the clock downstairs striking midnight.

Alfred Kendall always went into the office on Saturday mornings. The journey by train and bus from Twickenham to the City marked the transition from the problems of home to the problems of work. Sometimes he could distract himself from them with a newspaper or a thriller, but not today.

Kendall and Son occupied two rooms of a building in Sweetmeat Court; in palmier days they had rented the entire first floor. Miss Leaming, the angular secretary whom Kendall had inherited from his father, was in the outer office. She was the firm’s last employee: Kendall kept her on solely because a younger and more efficient secretary would have required a higher salary.

Miss Leaming fussed ineffectually over his wet overcoat.

‘I hope you’ve done the post,’ Kendall said.

She avoided his eyes. ‘Yes, sir. It’s on your desk.’

Kendall turned down the gas fire. ‘We’re not made of money, you know,’ he said over his shoulder as he went into the inner office.

The letters he found on his blotter soured his mood still further. The new director of the Nuranyo glass works at Pilsen announced that he was unable to fulfil some foreign orders, including Kendall’s, owing to a change in company policy. Kendall snorted: a lot of Czech companies had altered their policy since Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, the strip of Bohemia adjoining Germany, last September.

Kendall’s bank manager had written to remind him that the firm’s overdraft now stood at £343 6s 9d; he drew Mr Kendall’s attention to the fact that the original overdraft facility had been for £250, to be repaid at the end of January, nearly three weeks ago. A letter from Kendall’s solicitor discussed the bankruptcy of Kendall’s one important debtor; it looked as though Kendall and Son would be lucky to get three shillings in the pound.

Kendall and Son. Even the name of the firm was a reminder of failure. Kendall had always imagined that Stephen would follow him into the business one day. But one didn’t take passengers on board a sinking ship. Stephen was better off at the bank: at least his job was secure and he had prospects.

There was one more letter. As its envelope was marked Private and Confidential, Miss Leaming had not opened it. Kendall frowned when he saw the address at the head of the paper: his correspondent was a member of White’s.

Kendall would have given a great deal to be able to use that stationery himself. Every time he passed through St James’s Street he looked up at the club’s great bow window and yearned to be on the other side of the glass.

He glanced at the signature and tugged his moustache uneasily. He knew Sir Basil Cohen by repute, of course, and had met him briefly at one of the annual dinners of the British Glass Association. Sir Basil was Jewish, but Kendall was forced to admit that an unfortunate – well, ungentlemanly – racial background counted for little in comparison with the man’s immense wealth and influence. Cohen was not only chairman of Amalgamated British Glass: his business interests ranged from films to diamonds and extended over four continents.

The letter was short, but it took Kendall several minutes to decipher Cohen’s ornate but nearly illegible hand.

Dear Kendall,

You may recall that we met at the BGA dinner in ’37. I wonder if you could spare the time to see an acquaintance of mine, Michael Stanhope-Smith. He is looking for a man with your qualifications to undertake a small commission for him. His work is of national importance; and I fancy that he is in a position to offer some sort of honorarium, should you accept his proposition.

I understand that he intends to telephone you at your office on Saturday or Monday.

Yours sincerely,

Basil Cohen

Kendall’s hand trembled slightly as he lit a cigarette. He was in the grip of an unfamiliar emotion: it took him a moment to realize that it was hope.

Two

After church on Sundays, the Kendalls called on Aunt Vida. Stephen said it was just like their father to pay his respects to God and Mammon on the same morning.

Aunt Vida lived in Richmond. The Kendalls went there by train from Twickenham. Mr and Mrs Kendall walked together from the station, together but never arm in arm. The children trailed behind. Hugh always walked the short distance to Richmond Green with his head held unnaturally high. This was because his mother considered that a clean Eton collar was pleasing in the sight of the Lord and Aunt Vida; it chafed his neck mercilessly until it wilted.

Wilmot House was in a small street near Maid of Honour Row. Prim black railings and a narrow strip of flowerbed separated the pavement from the redbrick Georgian façade. A brass knocker shaped like a mermaid twinkled incongruously on the chaste, olive-green front door.

Hugh always enjoyed the change of atmosphere when he stepped into the house. Outside, everything was bright and regular; but the interior was dark and full of secrets. The hall was nearly a foot below ground level outside. It was stone-flagged and panelled in dark oak. The glass in the fanlight was green with age, which gave the hall the appearance of being under water.

Mrs Bunnings, the housekeeper, answered Alfred Kendall’s knock. She gave a nod and held the door open as the family trooped into the hall.

Mrs Kendall said, with an apologetic twitter, ‘And how is Mrs Lane today?’

‘As well as can be expected, madam,’ Mrs Bunnings said grimly. ‘The mistress is in the drawing room.’

She disposed of the Kendalls’ hats and coats and announced them ceremoniously. In the unimaginably far-off days of her youth, Mrs Bunnings had been a parlour maid in the household of a baronet; an Edwardian stateliness still distinguished her public manner.

Aunt Vida awoke with a start as they filed into the drawing room. As usual, she was wearing a shapeless grey dress beneath a thick grey cardigan. Around her neck were three gold lockets, each with its own chain. Each contained a photograph and a lock of hair: one was a shrine to the late Mr Lane, the others to their sons, George and Harry, both of whom had been killed at Passchendaele.

Alfred Kendall shook her hand and mumbled a vague enquiry about her health into his moustache. She didn’t bother to reply. The rest of the family kissed her cheek; it smelled of lavender water and felt like tissue paper.

‘Run along to the kitchen,’ Aunt Vida said to Hugh and Meg. ‘Give them a glass of milk, Bunnings, and then you can bring in the sherry.’

Meg and Hugh followed Mrs Bunnings out of the room. Until last year, Stephen would have gone with them. But when he left school, Mrs Bunnings started to call him Mr Stephen rather than Master Stephen; she made it quite plain that he was now too grown-up to have the freedom of her kitchen.

In her own domain, Mrs Bunnings became a different person. She told jokes; she gossiped; she pried indefatigably into their lives. She also gave the children scones, which was contrary to Mr Kendall’s strict instructions that their appetites should not be spoiled.

She left them for a moment to take the sherry and biscuits into the parlour. When she got back, she tapped Hugh on the shoulder.

‘What’s all this, young man? I heard your dad saying you’d been expelled from that school of yours.’

Hugh flushed. ‘I have. Someone stole some money and they thought it was me. But it wasn’t – I promise.’

Meg dabbed at the rim of milk around her lips with a handkerchief. ‘Father gave him eight of the best,’ she said ghoulishly. ‘He had nothing to eat on Friday night and he was only allowed bread and water yesterday.’

Mrs Bunnings snorted. ‘I know who I’d beat if I had half a chance. Have another scone, you poor lamb.’

When alone with the children, the housekeeper never made any secret of her dislike of their father. Miss Muriel, Mrs Lane’s niece, had been as happy as the day was long before she married him: and look at her now. Their father only bothered with these weekly visits because he wanted to get his hands on Mrs Lane’s money. Mrs Bunnings didn’t know why he troubled to come since, when he got here, he just sat there and grunted.

‘What will he do with you now? Has he found you another school?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hugh avoided Mrs Bunnings’s eyes. His fingers traced the reassuring shape of Hiawatha in his trouser pocket.

‘Father says that if Hugh was a few years older he’d pack him off to Australia and have done with him.’ Under the table, Meg put her hand on Hugh’s knee; it made him shiver. ‘He really means it.’

Hugh shifted uneasily. Sitting down was still uncomfortable and he wished Meg would remove her hand. Mrs Bunnings might see. The long, low kitchen was like a hothouse; Mrs Bunnings had insisted on keeping the old-fashioned range. The heat, the food and even the sympathy combined to make him feel drowsy.

A bell jangled over the door. It was precisely twenty minutes after they had entered the house. Mr Kendall always timed their visits with meticulous care. At the end of the twenty minutes, he would stand up and announce they had to be going, usually when his wife was in mid-sentence.

Mrs Bunnings escorted the children back to the drawing room to say goodbye. Mr Kendall was waiting impatiently by the door. Hugh had often wondered why his father seemed always to be in a hurry to be somewhere else; when he reached the somewhere else, he was always in a hurry to leave there as well.

For once, Aunt Vida seemed reluctant to let them go. She made Mr Kendall make up the fire for her. She suddenly remembered that she wanted her niece to get her some wool; the commission involved a great deal of explanation, during which Mr Kendall jabbed angrily at the fire with the poker. He consulted his watch.

‘We shall miss the train if we don’t hurry.’

‘Off you go then.’ Aunt Vida paused. ‘Hugh, come over here. I want a word with you.’

Alfred Kendall turned in the doorway.

‘Hugh can run after you,’ Aunt Vida said firmly, before he could protest. ‘Please close the door behind you.’

Kendall gnawed his lower lip but said nothing. He shut the door behind him; with a little more force, it would have been a slam.

Aunt Vida beckoned Hugh towards her. ‘I hear you’ve been in hot water again.’

Hugh nodded. There was nothing he could say.

‘Bring me my handbag. It’s on the bureau.’

Like his father, Aunt Vida was always giving orders; Hugh found it odd that he wasn’t afraid of her. His parents and Meg were afraid of her – even Stephen was wary of what he said and did in her company. He fetched her the battered black bag and stood patiently while she rummaged in it. He watched her face with fascination: her skin was a maze of wrinkles; there were more cracks than surface.

Suddenly she glanced up at him. ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to stare at a lady? Hey?’

Hugh grinned. He heard the front door closing with a bang; Mrs Bunnings was glad to see the back of her visitors.

Aunt Vida nodded in the direction of the sound. ‘Don’t let it get on top of you,’ she said gruffly. ‘These things pass. Worse things happen at sea, not that that’s much consolation. When your father asks why I kept you, say I was telling you to be a better boy in future. Here, hold out your hand.’

Hugh looked down. On his palm was a half-crown.

‘Kendall?’ Colonel Dansey stared with distaste at his plate; it was difficult to tell whether it was the omelette or the name of Kendall that was responsible for the irritation in his voice. ‘Who the devil’s he?’

‘He’s a glass importer, sir.’ Michael Stanhope-Smith sipped his burgundy appreciatively. Early in their acquaintance, he had learned that it was a mistake to deluge Uncle Claude with information; Dansey himself never made that mistake and he expected those who worked for him to be equally sparing.

Michael glanced over his shoulder to make sure that no one was in earshot of their table. The dining room at the Savoy was still moderately crowded, but it had definitely passed the Sunday lunchtime peak.

Dansey arranged his knife and fork neatly on his empty plate. He adjusted the dark-rimmed pebble glasses on his large, curved nose. ‘You know that I don’t encourage people to indulge in recruiting off their own bat. Recruit in haste and repent at leisure.’

Michael flushed. He was twenty-five; he was two stone heavier and six inches taller; but Uncle Claude could still make him feel like a schoolboy who hadn’t washed behind the ears.

‘I haven’t actually interviewed him yet. I telephoned him yesterday; we’ve arranged to meet tomorrow.’

‘I see. And why this unseemly haste, may I ask?’

‘You haven’t heard? Farrar’s dead. Apparently he killed himself – sealed the draughts and turned on the gas in his hotel room. The signal came in from Vienna on Friday night.’

Dansey said nothing. He appeared to be concentrating on adjusting the red carnation in the buttonhole of his dark blue suit.

Michael swallowed. ‘William McQueen talked to a waiter at the hotel. He said that Farrar might have had a couple of visitors in his room the evening before he died. Probably Gestapo, though we’ve had no confirmation of that. You know how difficult it is to get hard information out of Austria these days.’

Dansey gave a scarcely perceptible shrug. ‘It’s immaterial. Farrar couldn’t have told them anything. He hadn’t been briefed.’

In the pause which followed, Michael sipped his wine to cover his confusion. It was brutally obvious to him that Dansey didn’t care that Farrar had in all likelihood been killed. It was at most an inconvenience. A newly-recruited courier was of little weight in Uncle Claude’s professional scale of values. If this was professionalism, Michael thought bitterly, he wished he was an amateur.

‘Do go on,’ Dansey suggested. ‘You were about to explain why you found it necessary to circumvent the standard recruitment procedure.’

‘Farrar was due to return to London and then go on to Prague at the end of the week. You said the Prague trip was vital, sir. I would have contacted you, but you were on a train somewhere between Zurich and London. I thought I’d better act on my own initiative.’

‘And how did your initiative lead you to this man Kendall?’

‘We need someone with a bona fide reason to go to Prague – preferably a commercial one. I thought Prague – Bohemia – glass; and then I remembered Sir Basil Cohen.’

‘You know Basil?’ Dansey said sharply. ‘How did that come about?’

‘I was at Cambridge with his younger son. I stayed with his people down in Gloucestershire once or twice.’

‘I see.’ For once Dansey sounded almost amiable.

Michael’s mind immediately made a connection. Cohen had been very helpful, right from the start. Dansey had been cultivating the friendship of the wealthy and the powerful for nearly half a century. Many of them were now unobtrusively helping Dansey’s Z Organization in a variety of ways. It was not inconceivable that Cohen was among them. In that case, Sir Basil must have derived a great deal of private amusement from Michael’s claim that he was working for the Foreign Office trade section.

A muscle twitched in Dansey’s cheek. In a lesser man, it might have been a grin.

‘I telephoned him – luckily he was in town. He was dining at White’s, but he said he could spare me a few minutes there after dinner.’ Michael glanced quickly at Dansey and hurriedly continued: ‘I – well – implied I had some sort of FO connection. I said we needed an unofficial trade representative in Prague – someone who made regular trips there and could combine his own work with a little confidential work for us. Sir Basil asked a few questions, of course, but I was as discreet as possible.’

A waiter moved tentatively towards the table. Dansey waved him away. ‘What do you know about Kendall?’

‘He works from an office in the City. He buys mainly from Czechoslovakia. His main customers in this country are provincial department stores. It’s an old-fashioned firm, run on pre-war lines. Apparently Kendall’s in a bad way financially – Sir Basil reckons he must be on his last legs.’

‘Does Basil know him personally?’

‘They’ve met, sir, but that’s about all. I rather gathered that Kendall isn’t quite …’ Michael’s voice trailed away. He believed that all men were equal but had long since discovered that most of his friends and colleagues paid only lip-service to the notion. He despised snobbery; but he was intelligent enough to realize that it couldn’t be ignored.

Dansey nodded understandingly. ‘Any war record?’

‘Yes, sir; I checked with the War Office. Enlisted in the Pay Corps in 1915 as a private. Commissioned in 1918. He ended the war as an acting captain, after four years behind a desk in Whitehall.’ Michael made his voice as neutral as possible. ‘It seems that he likes to be called Captain Kendall.’

Dansey’s eyebrows rose. ‘Despite the fact he never held a regular commission?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The eyebrows fell back into place. Dansey poured out the last of the burgundy and signalled to the waiter to bring their coffee. He was not in the mood for pudding or cheese and he assumed, correctly, that Michael would be content to follow his lead. By now they were almost alone in the big dining room, except for tail-coated waiters who swooped like swallows among the empty tables, clearing them with deft, darting movements. Michael could feel the hard edges of his sketchbook in the pocket of his jacket. He had a sudden urge to draw what he could see, to record an instant in the life of the Savoy in black and white. He would use lots of heavy shading and soften the outlines as much as possible.

He grinned into his burgundy at the thought of what Dansey would say if he started to draw. It was well known that Dansey considered that the chief purpose of art was to be a tool of espionage: it was a convenient means of creating a visual record of enemy installations. The old man knew that Michael had once wanted to be an artist. What he didn’t know was that Michael still did.

The waiter brought their coffee and withdrew. Dansey produced a cigarette case and offered it to Michael. As Michael lit their cigarettes, he noticed that Dansey’s hand was speckled with brown liver spots and trembled slightly. The hand reminded him that Dansey had already reached the age when most men were thinking of retirement.

‘I’m dining with your godfather tonight,’ Dansey said abruptly.

It was not a social observation. Michael’s godfather, Admiral Sinclair, was head of SIS, the sponsor of Z Organization. If it hadn’t been for Sinclair, it was unlikely that Michael would now be at the Savoy with a decent suit on his back. In all probability he would have been teaching history, art and games at some godforsaken little prep school. Sometimes Michael wished he was.

‘Do give him my regards,’ Michael said.

As always, Dansey’s words had at least two layers of meaning. He was hinting that he would take the opportunity to protect himself in the event of something going wrong with Kendall: Michael was the precooked scapegoat, ready for eating if the need should arise. But there was another implication: Dansey was tacitly accepting what Michael had done; it was the first time that Michael had been allowed to make an independent decision; and that, he supposed, might be construed as progress.

‘You’re meeting Kendall tomorrow?’

‘Yes, sir – for lunch.’

‘If you do decide to take him on, you are to act as his sole control. I want him to have no contact with anyone else in London. He’s not to be given the emergency addresses in Vienna or Budapest or Zurich – is that clear? You can offer him his expenses plus fifty pounds; he can have fifteen pounds now and the rest when he returns. And get receipts.’

‘How much should I tell him?’

‘As little as possible, of course.’ Dansey’s eyebrows rose once more. ‘My dear Stanhope-Smith, surely your artistic temperament hasn’t prevented you from grasping that simple principle? All the man has to do is take something to Prague and bring something back. Unless you’re even more foolish than you look, you won’t mention Hase to him. Just teach Kendall one of the standard recognition drills and tell him to go to his usual hotel. You can then inform Hase of the arrangements independently by telegram. I’m sure you will be able to resist the temptation to wire direct; it really would be much wiser to route it through Zurich and Budapest.’

Michael almost flinched at the quiet savagery which had suddenly invaded Dansey’s voice. At first he was inclined to attribute it to the bitterness which Dansey felt because Michael had been forced on him by Sinclair; then he noticed the lines of pain in Dansey’s forehead and the tiny beads of sweat on his temples. He felt an unexpected stab of pity for the man opposite him: combining a job like his with an ulcer must be an impossible task.

Dansey stubbed out his cigarette, precisely in the centre of the ashtray. Only when the last shred of tobacco was extinguished did he speak again. ‘This is important, you know. There’s very little time. The Czech Deuxième Bureau is really very good. They estimate that Hitler will move within a month – six weeks at the outside. Then there will be no Czechoslovakia – just another province of the Reich. We have to be in place by then.’

‘May I ask a question, sir? If Czech military intelligence is so good, they must be making their own contingency plans. Why aren’t we co-ordinating with them?’

Dansey shrugged wearily. ‘We are. Colonel Moravec and Gibson – he’s the SIS Head-of-Station in Prague, you know – are practically blood-brothers. But Moravec’s an intelligence-gatherer, not a guerrilla chieftain. His idea of a resistance movement is based on the boy scouts – and his political masters think the same. The other problem is geographical: a resistance movement needs a foreign base. Moravec naturally thinks of us and France, though God knows why after what we did to them at Munich. But it’s over two hundred miles between the French and Czechoslovak borders at their nearest points. And that’s as the crow flies across the Reich.’

Michael suddenly understood what Dansey was driving at. ‘But there’s another potential anti-Nazi ally whose border is far closer? And that’s why Hase is so important?’

‘Not just Hase. God help us, even Kendall could be important.’ Dansey’s thin lips twisted. ‘In the circumstances it’s probably just as well you used your initiative.’ He gave Michael no time to savour the unexpected compliment. ‘Where are you intending to have lunch with him?’

‘I thought perhaps the Berkeley Grill. Get him in a good humour.’

‘I think not, Stanhope-Smith. Catering to the sybaritic whims of its junior employees is not one of the purposes of this organization. I’m told that one can find a very decent lunch at a Lyons corner house.’

Dansey pushed back his chair and stood up. The movement triggered a flurry of activity among the waiters near the door. Michael stepped to one side to allow Uncle Claude to precede him.

He glanced at Michael as he passed. ‘I wish you wouldn’t carry a sketchbook in your jacket pocket,’ he observed waspishly. ‘It ruins the cut.’

After dinner on Sunday evening, Mr and Mrs Kendall listened to the news. When it had finished, Kendall prowled through the air waves of Europe.

‘It’s all damned rubbish,’ he said. He turned off the wireless and began to ream a pipe with unnecessary violence.

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mrs Kendall automatically. She decided that now was not the moment to mention the possibility of a rise in her housekeeping allowance.

Kendall rapped the pipe against the side of the ashtray; a small shower of carbon fluttered on to the arm of his chair.

‘I suppose I’ll have to come to some decision about Hugh soon. I’ve always said you spoiled him, Muriel: I hope you’re satisfied. What that boy needs—’

The front door slammed. Mrs Kendall looked up; there was a smile on her face.

‘It’ll be Stephen,’ she said. ‘He’s earlier than usual.’

‘It’s about time he got to bed at a respectable hour.’ Kendall chewed his pipestem. ‘And it’s a bit much, him going out on a Sunday, don’t you think?’

Stephen pushed open the door with a little more force than was necessary. He swayed slightly as he stood in the doorway; Mrs Kendall hoped his father wouldn’t realize he had been drinking.

‘Hello. Any tea left?’ Stephen pulled up a chair to the fire. Mrs Kendall refilled her husband’s cup and poured another for her son.

‘Have you had a nice evening, dear?’

‘I met Paul Bennet up in town.’ Stephen draped an arm along the back of his chair; there was a scowl on his thin, dark face. ‘He’s finally decided to go up to Cambridge this autumn. His father’s promised to give him a car – one of those little MGs.’

Muriel Kendall prayed silently that Stephen would say no more; it would only infuriate his father. Downing College had offered Stephen an exhibition to read modern languages, but he had been unable to take it up because his father refused to find the rest of the fees. The decision had provoked one of the rare open quarrels between Stephen and his father. Her elder son had always been adept at concealing his feelings. Only ambition and, more recently, alcohol allowed one a glimpse of what was going on in his mind.

‘Ridiculous to give a car to a boy that age. When I was nineteen, we thought ourselves lucky to have a bicycle.’

To his mother’s surprise, Stephen said nothing to this. He finished his tea and stared into the fire. His next words were spoken in such a casual tone that Mrs Kendall was immediately suspicious.

‘A lot of chaps at the bank are saying there’s sure to be a war by the end of the year.’

Kendall grunted. ‘They’re probably right.’

‘One or two of them have already joined the Territorials. I was wondering if I should, too. With my background they’d probably give me a commission, wouldn’t they? And if there’s a war, we’ll all be called up in any case.’

Alfred Kendall nodded slowly. There was a flicker of interest in his eyes at the thought of his son becoming an officer and a gentleman.

‘I asked Mr Horner and he thought it was quite a good idea. He said it’s always best to get to the head of the queue.’

Muriel Kendall suppressed a smile. Stephen knew exactly what he was doing. First he had played on Alfred’s gentlemanly aspirations; then he invoked the powerful name of Horner, the sub-manager at his branch – and also, incidentally, the man who had approved the overdraft for Kendall and Son. She would be surprised if Stephen’s briefcase didn’t contain an application form, all filled in except for the space where his father’s signature was needed.

‘I’ll think about it.’ Kendall often deferred family judgments, chiefly on the principle that his decisions seemed weightier when they were finally delivered.

Stephen nodded gravely; his expression implied that he would be happy to accept whatever his father decided; he knew as well as his mother that he had already won his point.

Shortly afterwards, Kendall announced that it was time for bed. Stephen went up first, while his father made up the fire and his mother washed up and laid the table for breakfast. Kendall unlocked the sideboard and poured himself a nightcap. He sat beside the dying fire, sipping his whisky and smoking a last cigarette.

There was a pile of ironing on the kitchen table. Mrs Kendall took it upstairs with her, balancing her hot-water bottle on top. She wrapped her husband’s pyjamas around the bottle and began to put away the ironing. Her movements were slow, as they generally were when she was alone; in the last twelve months, it was as if her limbs were turning gradually from flesh to lead. She put the children’s clothes to one side. There was no point in disturbing them.

Halfway down the pile she came to one of Hugh’s shirts. It prodded her memory: she had forgotten to lay out Hugh’s weekday suit and give him clean clothes for the morning. It would be just like him to come down to breakfast in a dirty collar and his Sunday suit; and it would be just like his father to seize the opportunity to go berserk.

She made a pile of Hugh’s clothes and padded down the landing. She opened his door as quietly as possible. The room was in darkness, as she had expected, but there was enough light from the landing for her to see the chair on the far side of the fireplace. She tiptoed across the floor and laid the clothes on it.

The sensation that something was amiss crept over her. She glanced around the room, her eyes straining to make out the darker shadow which was the bed. Then the realization hit her.

There was no sound of breathing.

She knew at once that he was gone, though she flipped on the light by the door to confirm it. His bed was empty but the covers were rumpled. His Sunday suit was hanging behind the door; the rest of his clothes were on the chair. His dressing gown was gone.

Panic invaded her mind. She had a vivid mental picture of Hugh running away from the house in a blind attempt to escape from his father’s persecution.

The cistern flushed in the bathroom, breaking into her nightmare. Hugh must have gone to the lavatory. Just as she reached the landing, the bolt shot back and Stephen emerged.

‘Is Hugh in there?’ she demanded.

‘Not that I noticed.’ Stephen was wearing a purple dressing gown which he had acquired at a Christmas sale in Richmond; when he wore it, he tended to model himself on the characters of Noël Coward.

Muriel pushed past him to make sure. Stephen shrugged elaborately and walked slowly along the landing towards his bedroom. He was curious about what was happening but the dressing gown prevented him from showing it too obviously.

His mother rushed downstairs and into the dining room. Alfred was slumped in his chair, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. The nightcap had turned into two, as it so often did these days.

‘Alfred! Help me – Hugh’s gone.’

Hugh was asleep.

This evening, Meg had suggested that he come to her room rather than the other way round, as on the two previous nights. It was difficult to refuse. With the possible exception of Aunt Vida, Meg seemed to be the only person who cared that the bottom had fallen out of his world. She was certainly the only person who dared to talk to him; his father had decreed that, as part of Hugh’s punishment, he should be sent to Coventry until further notice. Another reason was that being with Meg made him warm. A third reason was that it was hard to refuse Meg if she asked you to do something when she was in a certain mood: her dark eyes had a sparkle to them which communicated her excitement to you; her charm was something you could almost touch.

When she had finished in the bathroom, she tapped lightly on his door before going on to her bedroom in the attic. Hugh counted to sixty before he scrambled out of bed and put on his dressing gown.

‘If I’m not back within two hours,’ he whispered to Hiawatha on the bedside table, ‘you’ll find a file marked Top Secret in my dugout. Take it to the General at once. Make sure you hand it to him directly – not to one of the ADCs.’

‘Right, sir.’ Hiawatha would add gruffly, ‘You will take a revolver, sir, won’t you?’

‘Not tonight. Shooting would give the whole show away.’ Major Hugh Kendall glanced down at his muscular hands. ‘There are other ways of keeping the enemy quiet.’

Hugh walked quietly along the landing. He paused by the stairs. The wireless was booming away in the dining room. He climbed up to the attic. The third stair creaked loudly, so he avoided it; the other treads were all right, as long as you kept to the sides of them.

Meg’s room was in darkness. As he opened the door, its characteristic smell swept out to meet him: it reminded him of Aunt Vida’s garden in autumn.

‘Come into bed,’ she whispered.

She moved over to make room for him. He could feel her warmth through her nightdress.

‘Does it still hurt down there?’ Her hand burrowed under his dressing gown and stroked his buttocks.

‘A bit.’

‘Come on top of me, then. If you’re face downward it won’t be as bad.’

They wriggled into the new position. Hugh found it surprisingly comfortable and Meg didn’t complain about the weight. She ran both hands down his back, from the shoulder blades to the top of the thighs and stirred gently beneath him. Hugh’s face was buried in the crook of her shoulder. It seemed to be hard to breathe. He raised his head and Meg gave a little giggle.

‘You know Gerald? The one who looks like Robert Donat? Mary said he didn’t just kiss her – he put his hand on her breasts.’

Hugh yawned. Why Gerald should have wanted to do a thing like that was beyond him. He knew, of course, that ladies’ breasts were somehow taboo: you weren’t supposed to look at them or touch them.

‘You try,’ Meg whispered. A trace of irritation came into her voice when he hesitated. ‘Go on, silly – you’re too young for it to matter.’

Stung by the reference to his age, Hugh laid his hand on Meg’s left breast. To his surprise, it felt quite firm – he had expected it to be fragile. Meg squirmed beneath him, forcing the pressure to increase.

‘Put your hand inside my nightie,’ she said. ‘That’s the proper way to do it.’ She fumbled with the buttons, seized Hugh’s hand and thrust it inside.

‘I’ll make you cold,’ Hugh objected.

‘It doesn’t matter. Rub it.’

He obeyed. Beneath his hand, the nipple grew hard. When he pointed this out to Meg – he was worried that he was damaging it in some way – she said it didn’t matter: nipples often went like that when it was cold. His hand warmed up, but the nipple remained hard.

Two late nights had left them both with a backlog of tiredness. Their breathing became slower and heavier; Hugh’s mind slid sideways into a waking dream. Suddenly he jerked awake.

‘I’d better go.’

Meg’s arms tightened around him. ‘Stay for a bit longer, Hugh. You’re lovely and warm.’

‘Just another minute.’

This time sleep enveloped them both completely. Hugh dreamed that he and Hiawatha were at Buckingham Palace, receiving medals from the King. Neither of them heard the slam of the front door when Stephen came in, or the movements downstairs as he and their parents prepared for bed.

Neither of them heard anything at all until Meg’s door was flung open and her room was flooded with light.

A quite extraordinary thing happened just before breakfast: the telephone rang.

Alfred Kendall was upstairs in Hugh’s room at the time. He broke off in mid-sentence and hurried downstairs. But Muriel got to the dining room first and he was forced to listen to one incomprehensible side of the conversation which ensued. Meanwhile, the smell of burning bacon grew stronger.

‘I’ll come at once,’ Muriel said; her voice was unusually decisive. ‘Meg can pack for me and come over later with the suitcase.’

‘Who was that?’ Kendall demanded before his wife had time to replace the receiver. ‘Where are you going?’

She pushed past him into the smoke-filled kitchen and turned off the gas ring.

‘It was Bunnings, dear. Aunt Vida had one of her turns in the night. A minor stroke, probably.’

The same thing had happened last year. Aunt Vida refused to go into hospital and Muriel had spent two weeks in Richmond looking after her.

Kendall grunted. ‘You’ll have to go, of course.’

It was damned inconvenient but he had no alternative. He knew what women were like: Vida was quite capable of leaving her money to a home for sick parrots, just to spite him; and she would as well, if she felt the Kendalls weren’t giving her the attention she deserved. He also suspected – though he barely admitted the suspicion to himself – that Muriel would go to Richmond whatever he said.

‘I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay. But Meg will look after you – she’s quite a good little cook now. Besides, you’ll get your main meal at lunchtime.’

‘What about Hugh?’

‘He’ll have to look after himself during the day.’ She avoided his eyes and wiped her hands on the apron. ‘After all, you’ll be there in the evenings.’

‘Mr Stanhope-Smith?’ The voice sounded doubtful.

Michael looked up. Kendall hovered over him with an anxious smile on his face. Obviously he had been expecting a man of his own age.

‘Captain Kendall?’ Michael stood up, his hand outstretched. ‘How d’you do?’ He hadn’t described himself over the phone; he had merely said that he would be sitting alone at a table near the band in the Coventry Street Lyons, with a copy of The Times open at the crossword but upside down, in front of him.

They sat down and Michael passed him the menu.

‘I haven’t ordered yet. I don’t know what you’d like to drink. I don’t think much of their wine list but they certainly know how to keep their Bass.’

He steered the conversation into neutral channels until their food arrived. Kendall said little at first, but Michael persevered; he listened in deferential silence as his guest gave his opinions about the state of the weather and the deficiencies of modern youth. By the time the soup arrived, Kendall’s nervousness had evaporated and he was giving Michael the benefit of his views on the servant problem.

He sucked noisily at his soup. ‘I blame the war, you know,’ he confided. ‘It gave the working classes a grossly inflated view of their own value.’

Michael seized the opportunity to introduce another topic. ‘Sir Basil tells me you were in the Pay Corps, sir.’

Kendall nodded. ‘They also serve, eh? Of course I applied to be sent to France, time and time again. They always turned me down on the grounds I was more useful where I was.’

‘Of course.’ Michael tried to look sympathetic. Then he abandoned finesse. ‘You’re probably wondering why I asked Sir Basil to arrange for me to meet you.’

Kendall laid down his soup spoon. ‘He said it was something of national importance.’

‘Perhaps I should explain, sir. But I must stress that what I’m going to say is completely confidential and must remain so. I’m connected with the Foreign Office and I have a proposition for you. If you decline it, which of course you may, I must ask for your word that you will immediately forget this meeting has taken place.’

‘You can rely on my discretion entirely, Mr Stanhope-Smith.’

‘Then may I begin by asking you a few questions?’

Kendall nodded gravely. He sat up straight in his chair and wiped his moustache with his napkin.

Michael cleared his throat to conceal his desire to smile. ‘Do you make regular visits to Czechoslovakia on business?’

‘Until very recently, I’ve been going two or three times a year. Bohemian glass is my bread and butter, you understand – and my father’s before me.’ Kendall chewed his lower lip. ‘But I don’t mind telling you that fellow Hitler’s made my life damned awkward in the last few months. I’m thinking very seriously of taking my business elsewhere.’

‘But even now, if you were to visit Czechoslovakia for a week or two, it would hardly seem strange to the authorities there?’

‘Not at all.’ Kendall looked away. ‘In fact, I wish I could afford to do so. One or two of my contracts have been cancelled recently. I’ve a feeling that, if I could see the people concerned on the spot, I might be able to get them to reconsider their decisions. At least I’d have a sporting chance.’

‘Do you speak Czech?’

‘I can get by – both in Czech and German.’

Michael nodded. ‘Excellent. Now – you don’t mind me asking what your views are on Hitler, do you?’

Kendall shrugged. ‘Why should I? At first I thought these Fascists had a lot of good ideas. Look at Mussolini, for example – at least he’s made Italian trains run on time. Their methods seem to get results. But after the Anschluss, I began to change my mind. Only a fool would think that Hitler means to stop with Austria and the Sudetenland. Churchill’s right: the only argument the Boche respect is cold steel.’

‘Quite so.’ Michael paused while the waiter brought his lamb cutlets and Kendall’s steak. The interruption gave him time to consider his tactics. It would be better not to mention the money, he thought, not at this stage. He was able to fit Kendall into a category now: the warlike attitude was often found in men of his generation who had done no actual fighting in the Great War; the bitterness of combat was an abstraction to them, as it was to Michael himself.

Kendall waggled his fork in Michael’s direction. ‘Mark my words, we shall be at war before the end of the year, whatever that fool Chamberlain thinks. My eldest boy is joining the Territorials already. I’ve always said—’

‘The more preparations we can make beforehand, the better our chances will be,’ Michael cut in. ‘You agree?’

‘Of course. If only—’

‘And preparations have to take place right across the board. We at the FO, for example, are not concerned with the purely military aspect, naturally. Our fundamental purpose is to gather information from abroad. In wartime, the purpose remains the same but the – ah – methods of collection have to be adapted to meet the circumstances. Particularly in those countries where we can have no formal diplomatic representation.’

Michael chewed a mouthful of lamb, covertly watching Kendall’s face. The man looked as if he nourished his inner self on a diet of John Buchan and Sapper: surely he wouldn’t be able to miss such an obvious appeal to pick up a cloak and dagger for his country?

Kendall stiffened in his seat; his nostrils flared. ‘Does this mean you work for the—’

‘It’s better not to mention names,’ Michael said quickly. ‘Even in private.’ This was one of Dansey’s recruiting principles: that one should leave as much as possible to the recruit’s imagination.

‘What do you want me to do?’

Michael leaned forward. ‘Our concern is to establish channels of communication which will remain open when the usual ones are closed. At present we need someone to act as a courier – to take a small package to someone at the other end and to bring back something else. It may be just the one time – or there may be others. You’ll appreciate that it’s difficult to be definite in these matters. There’s no risk involved, but it’s vital that the courier should be a man whom we can trust absolutely – and who has a cast-iron reason for going there in the first place.’

Kendall gave a little grunt of satisfaction. Michael decided that, if one was going to lay on flattery, there was no point in being niggardly about it.

‘When I consulted Sir Basil, yours was the first name he mentioned.’ As he spoke, Michael wished he could afford the luxury of a job where lying was not part of the stock in trade. Try Kendall, Cohen had said. He’s a wretched little man, but he’ll fit your bill.

‘Could I have a day or two to think things over?’

Michael shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Captain Kendall. Time is the one thing we haven’t got. I need a decision now. If you turn it down, I’ll try someone else. I must get a man in Prague by the weekend.’

Michael’s bluff partly succeeded: Kendall looked faintly aggrieved at the thought that there might be other candidates for the job.

‘Would you be able to leave at such short notice?’

‘My passport and visas are all in order, if that’s what you mean. And it wouldn’t take long to tie up any loose ends at the office. But there is one problem …’

‘If you accept our offer, we would naturally take care of your expenses.’ Michael smiled apologetically. ‘And we usually make some sort of token payment for such services.’

Kendall sawed violently at his steak. ‘I don’t deny the money would be useful. But it’s not that. You see my wife had to go away this morning to nurse an aunt of hers. Going to Prague this weekend would mean leaving my younger son alone. I can’t do that: he’s – ah – he’s not at school at present.’

There was a curious inflection in Kendall’s voice and it puzzled Michael. It was almost as if the man was afraid of what his son might do if left alone, rather than of what might happen to him.

‘I deeply regret,’ Kendall said through a mouthful of pink meat, ‘that I may have to decline your offer.’

The solution to the difficulty suddenly occurred to Michael. It would remove Kendall’s little difficulty at a stroke – and it might even increase his professional cover in Czechoslovakia. Dansey could hardly object.

He took a long swallow of his beer and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He waited until Kendall’s jaws had stopped moving.

‘I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take the boy with you.’

Three

‘For God’s sake!’ Kendall snapped. The Czech matron at the next table looked curiously at them. He lowered his voice to a hiss. ‘Has no one ever told you that it’s rude to stare?’

Hugh looked away from the crowd in the hotel foyer. The sight of his son’s bowed head brought Kendall’s exasperation to the boil: at that moment he could have willingly strangled the boy. He lit another cigarette from the stub of the old and glanced once again towards the revolving door which led to Vaclavske Namesti. Everyone in Prague seemed to be here except the man he wanted.

The presence of Hugh was only part of the reason for his irritation, but he was a convenient focus for Kendall’s discontent. Hugh was simply not to be trusted: he was a thief and a liar; and after Sunday night Kendall had begun to suspect that he was something worse as well.

His mind shied away from the memory of finding his son in his daughter’s bed. It seemed to Kendall that whenever he closed his eyes he was doomed to relive that instant when he turned on Meg’s light.

Two heads, one fair, one dark, on the same pillow.

According to Hugh, he had crawled into bed with her to get warm; and she had been so soundly asleep that she hadn’t woken up. According to Meg, on the other hand, she was the one who had been cold; and she’d persuaded him to come to bed with her.

Kendall had beaten them both: they were lying; they were conspiring against him; they were breaking his rule forbidding one child to go into another’s bedroom. He felt instinctively that Hugh must have taken the initiative – after all, he was the boy. The top of Meg’s nightdress was unbuttoned. It looked almost as if Hugh’s hand was inside, resting on her breasts.

The thought was monstrous and Kendall tried to push it away. But one thing was clear: Hugh needed strict and constant discipline. Kendall could not risk leaving him in Twickenham while he was away. Meg would have been completely at his mercy.

After they returned from Prague, he would have to find a long-term solution to the problem of Hugh. It was as if the boy had a highly contagious disease: it was imperative to isolate him from the rest of the family. Kendall wondered whether the merchant navy might be a possibility.

He pulled out his watch: it was nearly three o’clock. He suspected that Stanhope-Smith’s man was going to let him down again. It would be the third time. Stanhope-Smith had told him to wait in the foyer of the Hotel Palacky for an hour after lunch and an hour after dinner, until the contact made his approach.

The big glass door revolved. Cold air swept into the lobby. Kendall swore under his breath as three women filed in.

‘Can’t you sit up straight?’ he said to Hugh. ‘Don’t slouch.’

‘Smim si pripalit?’ said a husky voice behind him.

Kendall swung around. His eyes widened when he saw that it was a woman. She was short and her plumpness was accentuated by a heavy fur coat with an upturned collar; she had a snout-like snub nose and a faint but distinct moustache. At first Kendall thought her words must be a coincidence. But then he saw that she was tapping the butt of her cigarette against a silver case. The case was angled towards him so he could see the design of four interlocking lozenges engraved on the side.

‘Prosim,’ he muttered politely, fumbling in his waistcoat pocket. His fingers shook slightly as he opened the silver matchcase. He nearly forgot to let her see the lozenges on its lid.

‘What is your room number?’ she murmured in English just before the match touched the tip of the cigarette.

‘Twenty-three.’

She blew out words and smoke simultaneously: ‘Meet me there in twenty minutes.’ Her voice returned to its normal speaking level: ‘Dekuji.’

Kendall bowed. She turned and walked to the bar. From the back she looked like a hedgehog in patent-leather high-heeled shoes.

The fat woman with the overpowering scent stood in the centre of the hot and ill-proportioned room which Hugh shared with his father. She jabbed her thumb towards Hugh and broke into a rapid stream of Czech.

His father replied haltingly in the same language, but she interrupted him before he could say more than a few words. As she spoke she gestured towards Hugh; he wished he could understand what she was saying.

At last his father shrugged. ‘Hugh, I want you to go for a walk for an hour. You can take the guidebook. And make sure you behave yourself.’

Hugh grabbed his coat, scarf and cap and almost ran out of the room. He was so relieved to get out of his father’s presence that he hardly bothered to wonder why he had been sent away. He ran down the stairs, through the lobby and into the street.

For a moment he stood at the head of the steps which led down from the revolving door, savouring the sights and sounds of freedom. It was the first time he had got away from his father since they had left London. At the far end of the broad road he could see a statue of a man on horseback. The strangeness of everything gave him a jolt of pleasure. He darted down the steps and began to run towards the statue.

The pavements were crowded and slippery. As he dodged between a linden tree and a stall selling spicy sausages, he skidded on a pile of dirty snow. At the last moment he clutched at the tree and saved himself from sprawling on the surface of the road. A car swerved to avoid him. A bicycle bell jangled angrily.

Hugh laughed aloud and ran on.

‘We could have talked in Czech,’ Kendall said peevishly. ‘The boy wouldn’t have understood.’

Madame Hase settled herself in the only armchair that the room possessed. ‘My English is much better than your Czech. Besides, if we talk in English, there is less chance that an ear at the keyhole would be able to understand.’ Her voice hardened. ‘Why did you bring the boy? It is very foolish. I was not warned.’

‘It was decided in London,’ Kendall said curtly. He was annoyed that his contact had proved to be a woman, largely because the fact surprised him. Her haughty attitude made things worse; he was damned if he was going to let a female talk to him like that.

‘You have brought the package? There was no trouble with customs?’

Kendall nodded. He crossed the room to the basin in the corner and picked up the shaving brush which stood on the glass shelf above it. The handle was made of metal. He unscrewed the base and extracted the small chamois leather bundle.

‘It’s stitched together. Do you want me to open it?’

‘Of course.’

He slit the neck of the bag with the blade of his penknife. Madame Hase snatched the bag from him and upended it over the palm of her hand. Seven cut diamonds, small but flawless, trickled out. She sucked in her breath sharply. For the first time she smiled.

‘Satisfied?’ Kendall asked with heavy sarcasm.

‘Perfectly.’ Her pudgy fingers clenched around the stones, as if she was trying to squeeze the virtue out of them. ‘But we may have a problem at the other end of the transaction.’

‘What do you mean?’ Kendall had assumed that she would hand over the papers now she had the diamonds; he knew nothing about possible problems. Now he came to think about it, he knew very little about this whole business. Stanhope-Smith hadn’t been very informative.

‘I have not yet obtained the information.’ Madame Hase’s English might be fluent, but she pronounced it as if it was a dead language, with equal stress on each syllable and without inflections. ‘The principals with whom I am dealing lack confidence, both in me and in London. They do not trust me because I am a woman and because my origins are bourgeois. And of course they have only my word that London is the source of these.’ She unclasped her hand and prodded the little pile of diamonds.

Kendall shrugged. ‘I’d have thought diamonds were diamonds wherever they come from.’

‘Not if they come from Berlin. That is their worst fear, I think. But these men see enemies everywhere. Can you blame them? England and France were our allies; they guaranteed to maintain our borders; and then they betrayed us at Munich because of a ranting bully with a big stick. Or perhaps they think these diamonds come from closer home. The Deuxième Bureau has never loved us and Moravec is a man who likes to hold all the strings in his hand. No one trusts our government any more: those Fascist toadies dissolved the Communist Party just before Christmas.’

Kendall took his time over filling and lighting a pipe. A familiar sense of helplessness swept over him; and that as usual made him angry. As far as he could see, the only course open to him was to return to London, empty-handed. He had a shrewd suspicion that Madame Hase meant to keep the diamonds whatever happened. He could hardly force her to return them; she would probably shriek the place down and accuse him of trying to rape her.

If he returned to London without those papers (whatever they were), he would be back to square one: he would have failed Stanhope-Smith; there would be no more lucrative little jobs. Worst of all, England would suffer because of his failure.

‘Is there nothing we can do to convince them that we’re all above board?’ He spoke more loudly than he had intended; Madame Hase looked at him sharply.

‘Perhaps,’ she said after a pause. ‘We have one strong card in our hand: they need help from somewhere. Any resistance network needs money and it needs access to the outside world. We thought Moscow would provide both, but they are being dilatory and time is running out. You are here and you can offer what they want.’

‘Would it help if I met them?’

‘It might. But that would take time to arrange – and there might have to be several meetings.’ A fit of coughing interrupted her. ‘It would help if you were more important. They may consider that a mere messenger boy can have nothing useful to say to them.’

Kendall’s face became mottled. Madame Hase appeared not to notice.

‘But of course they do not know what your rank is,’ she continued. ‘Nor do I. I simply draw inferences.’

‘I fail to see—’

There was a tap on the door.

Madame Hase snapped open her handbag, dropped in the diamonds and pulled out something else. A sense of unreality caught Kendall by the throat, making him literally gasp for breath. She was holding an automatic pistol.

This time it wasn’t a tap: it was an impatient double knock. Madame Hase concealed the pistol in the folds of her fur coat and signalled to him to open the door.

It was almost with a sense of anticlimax that he found one of the pageboys waiting in the corridor.

‘Pan Kendall?’ The youth held out a dented silverplated salver. On it was a flimsy grey envelope addressed to Kendall at the Hotel Palacky.

Kendall took the letter, dropped a tip on the tray and closed the door. He ripped open the envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper it contained. Madame Hase returned the automatic to her handbag.

‘Oh, my God.’ Kendall suddenly sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

When Hugh had looked at the statue, he went on to the end of Vaclavske Namesti. The broad avenue ended in a T-junction. He turned right, hoping eventually to reach the river.

Before he came to the Vltava, he emerged into a rectangular open space. He consulted the guidebook and decided he might be in Charles Square. The centre was laid out as a public park. The snow was still thick on the grass, contrasting bleakly with the bare branches of the trees.

A covered fiacre clopped past him; the nearside wheels of the carriage sprayed his legs with slush. Hugh wiped it off as best he could with his handkerchief. He was beginning to feel cold. He sidled nearer to a brazier on the corner of the park, hoping to steal a little heat. Chestnuts cracked and sizzled above the glowing charcoal. Hugh’s mouth watered. It was a long time since lunch. He wished his father had given him a little pocket money. Aunt Vida’s half-crown wouldn’t be much use here.

A small van pulled over to the kerb and parked. Two men got out, both wearing faded blue overalls. One of them opened the back of the van and appeared to be rummaging around inside. The other came over to the brazier and held his hands over the fire. He was tall and thin, with very large blue eyes. Hugh backed away: this looked like a real customer.

‘Dobry den,’ the newcomer said to the owner of the brazier.

That meant ‘Good day’ in Czech, according to the list of useful phrases in the back of the guidebook. Hugh felt pleased: already he was learning to swim in strange waters.

The man said something else and was given a cone of newspaper filled with chestnuts that steamed in the cold air.

He paid for them and sauntered over to Hugh.

‘English?’ He held out the cone. ‘For you. Take.’

Hugh made a half-hearted attempt to explain in sign language that his parents had told him never to accept presents from strangers. But the man was insistent and it seemed easier to take the cone, just to keep him happy. Besides, Hugh told himself, this was Prague, not London: the old rules were no longer so important.

The first chestnut burned his fingers and scorched his mouth; but it tasted wonderful. Hugh politely offered the bag to his benefactor.

The man shook his head. He laid a hand on Hugh’s arm. ‘Come. My friend speak English good.’ With his other arm he gestured to his friend at the back of the van.

Hugh hesitated: his parents had also told him never to go anywhere with strangers, either. But a few paces across a crowded pavement was surely a different matter. It seemed churlish to refuse.

The other man turned as they came up. He was built like a bull, with thick shoulders and a massive head. The van doors were open, but the interior was still sheltered by a pair of canvas curtains.

‘Hello, my friend.’ He smiled and pantomimed with finger and thumb that he would like a chestnut.

Hugh moved a step closer, holding out the cone. The first man was close behind him; on either side were the doors; in front was the van itself.

The smile vanished. Two hands grabbed him around the waist and threw him bodily through the curtains. Before he had time to think, he was sprawling on the ridged metal floor of the van. Chestnuts rattled around him like hailstones.

The doors slammed behind him. A few seconds later, the engine coughed into life and the van began to move. The floor vibrated uncomfortably beneath Hugh: they were going over cobbles and the rudimentary suspension of the van couldn’t cope.

Hugh bit his lip in an effort to keep back the tears. For once his parents had been proved right. He pulled himself up, using the side of the van as a support. The van, now travelling at some speed, took a sharp turn to the left. Hugh lost his balance and careered over to the right. His fall was partially broken by a large, unyielding object that hung along the far side of the van. It was cold, firm and sticky.

Both his hands and one cheek felt clammy from its touch. Hugh lifted one hand to his nose and sniffed cautiously.

It smelled of blood.

Madame Hase hailed one of the taxi-cabs which lurked in wait outside the Palacky’s door. She pushed Kendall before her into the back and scrambled in after him. Her skirt – far too short for Kendall’s taste – rode up, exposing sturdy legs; wiry black hairs poked through the flesh-coloured silk stockings.

She told the driver to take them to Nadrasi Dejvice, a suburban station on the other side of the river just north of the great hill of Hradcany.

‘We can walk from there,’ she whispered to Kendall. ‘It would be foolish to drive straight to the shop.’

‘Whose shop?’ Kendall was too angry to keep his voice down.

Madame Hase patted his knee reprovingly. ‘Jan’s, of course,’ she said in an undertone. ‘Your letter was in Bela’s handwriting so it’s the obvious place. Jan and Bela are on the Provisional Committee for Prague.’ She giggled incongruously. ‘They do everything together, you see.’

‘It’s damnable,’ Kendall burst out. ‘Do you Bolsheviks make a habit of kidnapping the sons of British subjects?’

‘No, no, my friend.’ She patted his knee again and Kendall edged away. ‘You don’t understand: the fact they took your son is good. It means they think you are worth taking seriously. We have a proverb: in English it would be something like “You don’t mark the pack if you don’t want to play cards”.’

Kendall looked blankly at her. ‘I don’t see why you’re so cheerful. If they’re just going to give Hugh back, why bother to take him in the first place? It’s perfectly obvious they’re going to use him as a lever to blackmail me.’

She shook her head and leaned closer to him. ‘First they did it to show you they are strong men, men you must respect. Next they did it to make sure your son is really English. But, most of all, they did it so that you would hand over the diamonds to them at a place which they choose, not you. Once you have exchanged the diamonds and the boy, we can all get down to business.’

‘How did they know where I was staying? How did they know the one time that Hugh was going out by himself? It was your suggestion that he should go for a walk.’

Madame Hase ignored the suspicion in his voice. ‘I had to tell them your name and where you were staying. They wouldn’t just take my word, you know. They’ve been watching you since you arrived. There will be plenty of Party members at the Palacky to act as their eyes and ears. Communism makes a simple emotional appeal to waiters and bellboys and that class of person.’ She squeezed his knee. ‘Leave the talking to me, as much as possible. We will offer them two of the diamonds in exchange for the boy; they do not know how many you have brought.’

‘What if they search you?’ Kendall objected.

This time she nudged him in the ribs. ‘Two diamonds are in my bag. The others are in a hiding place only ladies have.’ She tittered and snuggled closer to Kendall. ‘Jan and Bela are not the sort of men who enjoy searching the intimate parts of ladies.’

Kendall blushed and cleared his throat. It was difficult to imagine anyone less like a lady than his present companion. To his great relief she pulled away from him.

‘You must say very little – be cold and angry and very British gentlemanly. I want to make them feel that they have gone too far, that they have been rash in offending you so casually.’ She broke off and studied Kendall thoughtfully for a few seconds. ‘Yes, I think I shall say you are the head of the Middle European network of SIS. That should impress them.’

Kendall had never heard the acronym before. He guessed it might refer to the British secret service. He felt a sudden spasm of hatred for this domineering woman beside him. He drew out a cigarette and tapped it deliberately against his case.

‘That, madame, is precisely who I am.’

When the van stopped, Hugh wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and stood up. He had been crouching for so long that his knees screamed with agony.

The doors opened and the curtains were pulled back. The bull-like man beckoned him to come out.

Hugh jumped down and glanced around. He was in a cobbled yard. On three sides were sheds; on the fourth was a brick wall, ten feet high and topped with a row of spikes. The other man had his back to them: he was barring the heavy double gates in the middle of the wall. During the journey the afternoon had turned into evening.

His captor seized Hugh’s ear between a huge thumb and forefinger and led him over to one of the sheds. He shot back the two bolts, undid the padlock and pushed Hugh inside.

A match rasped and flared. The tall, thin man followed them in and closed the door behind them; his colleague lit a paraffin lamp. The wick was untrimmed and the lamp sputtered fitfully, throwing out a flickering yellow light.

The shed was about five yards square. It had a concrete floor and was lined with crudely built shelves of unvarnished pine. There were piles of tins on the shelves. All the tins which Hugh could see bore the same picture – a garishly pink joint of ham.

The picture connected in his mind with the blood on his face and hands. He might have fallen against a pig’s carcass. The thought made him feel slightly better.

The taller man pointed at Hugh’s face and said something in Czech. Both men chuckled.

Their laughter made Hugh feel a little bolder. ‘Why have you brought me here?’ he demanded. ‘Who are you?’

Neither of them replied. The bull-like man, who seemed to be the leader, said something else in Czech. He walked behind Hugh and grabbed him by the shoulders; the grip was firm but not painful. The younger man knelt in front of Hugh and methodically emptied his pockets.

One by one, Hugh’s possessions formed a little pile on the concrete. Some items aroused little interest; but others, including the guidebook and Hiawatha, were obviously considered important.

Hugh tried to work out the motive for their search. When the thin man passed his purse, containing Aunt Vida’s half-crown, to his colleague, the answer suddenly occurred to him: they were interested in anything that suggested he was English. The guidebook had the stamp of a London bookshop on the flyleaf; underneath Hiawatha’s base were the words Made in England. The hypothesis seemed to be confirmed when the two men exclaimed excitedly over the school outfitter’s label inside his jacket.

The conclusion intensified his fear: perhaps they were going to strip away all evidence of his name and nationality as a preliminary to murdering him.

When the search was over, the big man released his shoulders. Hugh backed away until he came to the shelves. He knew he had to do something before it was too late. One of those tins might make a weapon. He could knock over the lamp and make a break for the door. Plans chased feverishly through his mind, all nullified by the sheer impossibility of carrying them out.

But nothing happened to him. After a rapid, incomprehensible conversation, the men left without a word to him. They took the lamp with them. The bolts shot home and, a few seconds later, he heard the van’s engine. The roar of the motor grew louder and then gradually diminished into silence.

Once he was alone, Hugh began to tremble uncontrollably. It was cold in the shed, but he knew that was not the only reason why his teeth were chattering. It was also completely dark. The only sound he could hear was the distant grumbling of traffic.

He edged across the floor, using his feet to probe for his belongings. When he found them, he stuffed them back in his pockets. Hiawatha remained in the palm of his hand.

‘Well, sir, they say it’s always darkest just before dawn,’ his batman would say in the gruff voice he reserved for tight spots. Somehow Hiawatha seemed less reassuring than usual.

Hugh tried to act as Major Kendall, VC, would do. He made a reconnaissance, which in this case meant looking in vain for a window and banging helplessly on the door. He laid an ambush: having chosen half a dozen tins of ham, he stood behind the door and waited for the enemy to return. As he made his preparations, he knew it was hopeless: Major Kendall lived in a different world from the two Czechs.

Of course it was possible that they didn’t intend to murder him: perhaps they were going to hold him to ransom, in the mistaken belief that his father was a wealthy British businessman. But his father wasn’t wealthy; and, even if he were, Hugh rather doubted that he would spend money to ensure the safe return of his son.

After five minutes of waiting in ambush on his feet, Hugh decided that he could wait just as well if he sat on the floor. He was tired; and he might feel warmer if he clasped his hands round his knees. He would have plenty of time to stand up when he heard the van’s engine in the yard outside.

His head fell forward and he dozed.

The door cannoned into him, waking him abruptly.

Men were laughing; an unbearably bright light shone into his eyes. He turned his head away from the glare. His hand closed around one of the tins.

A woman’s voice said, ‘But there’s blood on his face.’

‘Get up, boy,’ his father said.

A hand grasped one of his lapels and hauled him to his feet. The torch swung away from his face. Hugh recognized the fat woman with the fur coat and the two Czechs behind his father. Everyone seemed to be grinning and there was a heavy smell of spirits in the air.

His father cuffed him lightly. ‘What’s that mess on your face? Have you been crying again?’

Hugh shook his head automatically. He had learned long ago that admitting weakness to his father was always rash.

Alfred Kendall turned to the woman. ‘He’s a regular mother’s boy.’ The tone was jocular; in private he often used the same words in an entirely different way.

‘He needs a bath,’ she said judiciously. ‘And perhaps food.’

His father laughed. ‘What he needs is a bit of self-discipline. Perhaps this tutor will make him pull himself together.’

It occurred to him that they were talking about him as if he wasn’t there. The four white faces above him seemed to be revolving, receding from him as they spiralled. The motion made him feel giddy; the acrid taste of nausea flooded his throat. One of the Czechs said something to his father, but the words were too faint for Hugh to catch.

His body crumpled into darkness.

‘It is all arranged,’ Madame Hase said.

Alfred Kendall pushed aside the remains of his breakfast. After last night, he had a splitting headache and Madame Hase’s voice made it worse.

‘When can he start?’

‘This morning. I told him Hugh would come every day except Sunday, between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. He can have his lunch there – that will be included in Dr Spiegel’s salary. Hugh can go to and from the apartment by tram. It is an easy journey – the number seven will take him almost from door to door.’

‘I hate to think what this is going to cost.’

Madame Hase sat down and reached for Kendall’s coffee pot. ‘Spiegel’s in no position to bargain. Besides, if money is short we can use one of the diamonds to cover these extra expenses. I know a jeweller who will give us a good price.’

‘But that money is for—’

‘The diamonds are there for a purpose. They may legitimately be used for anything which helps to achieve that purpose. We can’t afford to have Hugh under our feet for the next week or so. You made a good start with Jan and Bela last night, but we still have a long way to go.’

‘I’d better tell Hugh.’ Kendall pushed back his chair. ‘There’s no need for me to come, is there?’

Madame Hase put down her coffee cup and reached for her cigarette case.

‘The less Spiegel knows the better. This time I’ll take Hugh. Afterwards he can travel to Zizkov and back by himself. How is he this morning?’

Kendall shrugged. ‘None the worse for wear as far as I can see.’

‘He is upstairs?’

‘In our room, mooning around as usual. I’ll bring him down.’ He glanced around the dining room and lowered his voice still further. ‘Look here, are you sure we can trust this Spiegel chap? He’s not one of your lot, is he?’

Madame Hase squinted at him through a cloud of smoke. ‘Ludvik Spiegel was a friend of my father’s. He’s a man of no account – a learned fool. I can twist him round my little finger.’

When they reached the terminus, Hugh followed Madame Hase out of the tram. She led him in silence down a narrow street lined with small factories. Without warning she turned left through an archway. Hugh found himself in a large, rectangular courtyard, around which was an eight-storey block of flats.

Dr Spiegel lived in a top-floor apartment whose door gave on to the communal balcony. The balcony was an obstacle course of clothes lines, dustbins and bicycles.

‘This is not a nice neighbourhood,’ she said over her shoulder to Hugh. She rapped on Spiegel’s door. ‘You must not talk to people on your way here.’

The door opened with a screech of hinges.

‘Good morning!’ boomed Dr Spiegel.

He was a tall, thin man whose beard straggled over his bow tie. He ushered them into what was evidently his living room. It was crowded with dark-stained furniture and there were piles of books on most horizontal surfaces.

Madame Hase declined to sit down. She spoke rapidly in Czech to Spiegel; it sounded as if she was reeling off a string of orders. She left abruptly, without even glancing at Hugh.

‘Pan Kendall, we must introduce ourselves,’ Spiegel said in English. He held out a bony hand with ragged nails. ‘How do you do?’

‘How do you do, sir?’

Hugh and his tutor shook hands ceremoniously.

Dr Spiegel tilted a chair, sending a pile of newspapers to the floor. ‘Please sit down. I would advise you to keep your coat on for the time being. I do not light the stove in the mornings. You must pardon me for forcing you to share the brunt of my domestic economies.’

For the next five minutes, Spiegel strode up and down, his frock coat flapping behind him, describing with nostalgia his experiences in the British Museum reading room at the turn of the century. Hugh felt himself relaxing.

‘And now, Mr Kendall, we must consider our curriculum. We need not trouble with English, since I’m sure you know more about your delightful language than I could ever do. I think we may safely ignore mathematics and the natural sciences for much the same reason. Latin and Greek, on the other hand … But I forget my manners: I should begin by asking your opinion. Is there something that you would like to learn which is within my competence to teach?’

For a moment Hugh said nothing. His mind was full of what had happened yesterday. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could have understood what the two men were saying.

‘I’d like to learn Czech.’

‘Indeed? An interesting choice. You think you may be here for some time?’

‘I don’t know, sir. But I’d like to know more of what’s going on.’

‘That, my dear Kendall, is a desire which does you credit. Most people prefer to know less rather than more. I wonder if we should add German to our syllabus? It is a language which is often heard in Prague. And of course you will need to have an idea of the historical background. Languages are not static things; they exist in time; they grow, flourish, and decay like organic matter. In a word, languages are alive. Like plants, their development is intimately connected with the soil and climate in which they grow.’ He smiled at Hugh, revealing an ill-fitting set of discoloured false teeth. ‘Yes, I think we have our modern trivium: Czech, German and history.’

Hugh looked blankly at him. Dr Spiegel appeared not to notice.

‘You will remember, of course, that the trivium provided the foundations of learning in the Middle Ages. Every scholar began with its three subjects, the essential tools of grammar, rhetoric and logic. But – mutatis mutandis, as it were – other subjects are essential if one is to live in contemporary Prague. It is most unfortunate, but these days one must be practical. At least I am well qualified in this respect: my mother was Czech, my father a Sudeten German, and my lifelong study has been history.’

Dr Spiegel stirred in his chair. His mouth moved as if he was talking silently to himself. He pulled out his watch and consulted it. His hand shook so much that he had to steady it against his leg.

‘Before we begin, I think we should drink a toast to our joint enterprise.’ He peered anxiously at Hugh. ‘Would this meet with your approval?’

Hugh nodded. It seemed a little early for elevenses, but perhaps the routine was different in Czechoslovakia.

Dr Spiegel went into the next room; before the door closed, Hugh caught a glimpse of a sink piled high with crockery. The door’s catch failed to engage and the door swung six inches back into the kitchen. Hugh saw his tutor take a brown, unlabelled bottle from a wall cupboard; he took a long swallow from it and put it away. When he returned to the living room, he was carrying another bottle and two large teacups, neither of which had saucers.

‘Glass breaks so easily,’ Dr Spiegel said apologetically. Taking great care to avoid spillages, he poured precisely the same quantity of a translucent golden fluid into each of the cups. He raised his cup in salute and drank with solemn concentration. Hugh took a sip and blenched: the taste was bitter.

Dr Spiegel refilled his own cup. ‘Czech, of course,’ he remarked suddenly, ‘is a Slavonic language in origin, though much influenced by German. It emerged as an independent language in the Middle Ages, at much the same time as the Czechs achieved political independence. Indeed, our progenitors used a single word, jazyk, to denote both “language” and “nation”. As you know, it is written in Latin characters; this was an early development, despite the problems associated with the transliteration of specifically Slav sounds—’

‘Please, sir,’ Hugh said desperately. ‘I don’t understand.’

The excitement drained away from Spiegel’s face. ‘Forgive me, Pan Kendall. I was giving you a condensed version of the introductory lecture I used to deliver to my first-year students. Perhaps it is not altogether appropriate to our present circumstances.’ He drank again and stared into the cup as if enlightenment was hidden there.

‘Sir, I really want to be able to understand what people are saying on the streets – what the signs mean – to know how to ask for something in a shop.’

‘Ah. I see you favour the practical approach.’ Dr Spiegel looked relieved. He poured himself another cupful, which emptied the bottle. He flicked a fingernail against the glass. ‘I have an idea. We shall further your education and, if you have no objection, my convenience at one and the same time. If you return to the road and walk to the left, you will come to a shop on the corner. There you may purchase our lunch. A humble collation – bread, a few slices of sausage and some more of this excellent Pilsener. The modern Czech, my dear Kendall, makes two things superlatively well – guns and lager.’

The first day established a pattern that they followed with little variation for the next few weeks. In the mornings they studied languages – Czech or German, according to Spiegel’s whim. The afternoons were devoted, at least in theory, to general knowledge and history.

The old man proved to be a surprisingly efficient teacher, particularly in the first few hours of the day. He gave Hugh a grounding in the grammar of the two languages, but for most of the time they concentrated on speaking them.

Dr Spiegel revealed a talent for mimicry. He would invent little scenes, and he and Hugh would act them out. He gave Hugh a dictionary and a grammar, and made him puzzle out the main stories in the newspaper. Hugh often did his tutor’s shopping.

Dr Spiegel drank his way steadily through every day. His main source of nourishment seemed to be the strong export Pilsener which he had produced on that first morning. On later occasions, Hugh drank sweet black tea which he made himself in the cramped and evil-smelling kitchen. His tutor rarely drank tea; but he would sometimes bring out the little brown bottle between cups of lager.

As the day wore on, Dr Spiegel’s step would become unsteady and his eyes had difficulty in focusing. But his courtesy to Hugh remained unchanged; nor did the alcohol affect his speech.

In the afternoons he talked. Most of his monologues concerned two inextricably entwined subjects – himself and the recent history of central Europe. He spoke with nostalgia of the heady days of the Great War when he had fought with the Czech Legion on the Allied side. He described the early years of the newly created republic of Czechoslovakia and the democratic constitution he had helped to frame. He was particularly proud of the course on Czech nationalism which he and his wife had founded at the Charles University.

But there were bad days as well, when the nostalgia was supplanted by bitterness and the brown bottle came out of the kitchen and stood beside Dr Spiegel’s chair. He was obsessed by the weakness of his country – an infant democracy surrounded by increasingly hostile neighbours; its allies, Britain and France, were hundreds of miles away and lacked both the will and the means to intervene. Across the border was Germany, gleefully exploiting her neighbour’s political problems and racial divisions.

‘Hitler wants to carve us up like a big sausage,’ Spiegel said on one afternoon, early in March. ‘Our minorities rush to join the feast. They do not realize that they will be eaten too.’

The rape of the Sudetenland, Spiegel claimed, was but a symptom of what he regarded as a wider evil – Hitler’s perversion of the sacred traditions of nationalism.

‘With all the means at his disposal, that foul little man has encouraged the separatist nationalist movements in our Slovakian and Ruthenian provinces. Quite simply, he plans to undermine Bohemia and Moravia, which form the core of Czechoslovakia.’ Spiegel raised a trembling hand and hammered it down on the arm of his chair. ‘Once he invades us, Hitler will be exposed as the fraud he is: all his previous conquests could be justified, if only speciously, on the grounds that they brought Germans into the Reich. But Bohemia and Moravia are chiefly inhabited by Czechs, not Germans. You grasp my point, my dear Kendall?’

Hugh nodded; what puzzled him was his tutor’s uncharacteristic vehemence.

A few hours later he discovered the answer. Madame Hase had dined with the Kendalls at the Palacky. She was in a confidential mood after the better part of a bottle of wine and several brandies. Hugh was puzzling his way through an illustrated magazine when he heard his tutor’s name.

‘You would not believe that Spiegel was once a friend of President Masaryk, would you?’ Madame Hase was saying. ‘Today he is nothing more than a political fossil. At one time my father believed he would succeed him as professor of history, but he destroyed his career when he wrote that pamphlet about Nazi tactics in the Sudetenland. So foolish – what did he hope to achieve? He lost all sense of proportion after his wife disappeared. Jewish, you know. She went to visit relatives in Berlin in the spring of ’thirty-eight and never came back. He spent thousands of crowns trying to find her. We thought he was going insane.’

As March progressed, Dr Spiegel’s behaviour became more erratic. He developed a craving for the news. Hugh gathered that the government had proclaimed martial law in some parts of the country; but in Prague life went on much as before.

On 14 March, they heard that Slovakia had declared itself to be an independent state.

‘The fools have changed masters,’ Spiegel said. ‘They prefer Berlin to Prague.’

Later the same day, the Czechoslovak president took the train to Berlin. The following morning, the German Army flooded smoothly across the border into Bohemia and Moravia.

As usual, Hugh reached his tutor’s apartment at nine o’clock. For the first time in their acquaintance the old man was unshaven and he forgot to shake hands. He stumbled back to his chair. The brown bottle was already within reach.

‘It is the Ides of March,’ he murmured as if to himself. ‘Today a country has been murdered.’

Four

Colonel Dansey continued writing when Michael came into his office; with his free hand he pointed to the chair in front of his desk.

Michael rubbed his bloodshot eyes and sat down, grateful that there was no immediate need for him to make intelligent conversation. He had spent most of last night in the company of Betty Chandos, proving yet again that lack of sleep and an almost exclusive diet of champagne cocktails created a five-star hangover. Up here, on the eighth floor of Bush House, the rush-hour traffic in the Aldwych was mercifully muted.

Dansey capped his pen and used his blotter on the letter before him.

‘No news from your man Kendall yet?’

‘No, sir. I can’t understand—’

‘It doesn’t matter now. You can forget him.’

‘I don’t follow you, sir.’ Michael’s tongue seemed too large for his mouth. ‘If Hitler – I mean, since yesterday – we need …’

‘If I were you, I’d start again,’ Dansey said.

Michael flushed. ‘Bohemia and Moravia are now part of the Reich. More than ever we need all the Czech allies we can find. I admit that Kendall and Hase have probably failed, but there’s still an outside chance.’

Dansey picked up a newspaper and tossed it to Michael. It was yesterday’s Times. A small news item, ringed with pencil, announced the arrival of several unnamed Czechs at Croydon Airport.

‘Someone blundered,’ Dansey said sourly. ‘There was even a photograph in some of the papers. Not that it really matters.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Colonel Moravec and fourteen of his intelligence officers. We chartered a Dutch plane for them. They left Prague just before the Germans arrived, with the cream of their files and all the money they could lay their hands on.’ Dansey permitted himself a prim smile. ‘Which happened to be quite a substantial sum. SIS handled the operation through Gibson and the embassy.’

Michael felt himself beginning to sweat. What Dansey had told him seemed to have no bearing on Kendall and Hase.

Dansey took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. ‘Neither Z nor SIS has much interest in Czech communists at present. They’re a disorganized rabble with little access to useful information; they’re too far away for us to control with any degree of certainty; and in any case they’ll always give Moscow right of way over London. But Moravec naturally sees them from another angle. He’s spent half his career fighting the Bolsheviks and of course he wants to know what they’re doing in his own country.’

‘Do you mean we were just going through the motions to oblige Moravec?’

‘Precisely. That was the sole purpose of the exercise. Your godfather and I knew the Deuxième Bureau would have to transfer its headquarters abroad sooner or later. Moravec had two choices – London or Paris. The Hase business was designed to woo him over here. Now he’s here, he’ll find it very difficult to move on.’ Dansey restored his glasses and looked directly at Michael. ‘Which means, of course, that we have achieved our real goal – direct access to A-54.’

A-54?

Michael knew he was now expected to ask who or what was A-54. But Dansey’s reply was unlikely to be very informative: either he would yet again have the pleasure of reminding Michael of the need-to-know principle; or his answer would lead to a bewildering vista of further questions that would leave Michael no better informed than he had been in the first place.

Michael mulishly decided to say nothing. He pulled out his case and lit a cigarette with a great show of concentration. As he looked up, exhaling a cloud of smoke, he caught an unfamiliar expression on Dansey’s face, just before it vanished.

On another man’s face it might have been a smile of approval.

Dansey stood up; and Michael obediently followed suit.

‘So, Stanhope-Smith, from now on you may leave Czechoslovakia to SIS and the Deuxième Bureau. In the meantime—’

‘But, sir, what about Kendall? I recruited him and I do feel to some extent responsible. And it was my idea that he took his son.’

Dansey clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘You and I no longer have any responsibility for the Kendalls. You didn’t compel Captain Kendall to take the job. He knew there were risks: he must take the consequences.’

‘We could at least alert Gibson and the embassy. And what about—’

‘Stanhope-Smith,’ Dansey snarled with a ferocious hiss of sibilants, ‘will you be quiet? I want you to spend the rest of your valuable time this morning compiling a brief political and economic analysis of Poland, using the material in the B files. By brief, I mean about five hundred words. And make it not only succinct but simple enough for even a politician to understand. If it helps you, imagine you’re writing for the eyes of our revered prime minister. I want it on my desk by lunchtime.’

‘Poland?’ said Michael dully. His mind was still full of the Kendalls.

‘Yes, Poland. It may interest you to know that, according to A-54, Poland will be Hitler’s next target.’

On the evening of 15 March, twelve SS officers moved into the Hotel Palacky and the Kendalls moved out.

Most of the officers were young. They tipped well, smiled a lot and went out of their way to be pleasant to the other guests. Hugh secretly thought they looked rather heroic.

Later that evening Madame Hase came to their room unexpectedly; most people, both staff and guests, were watching Hitler’s imperial entry into Prague. She was flushed with excitement and looked happier than Hugh had ever seen her.

‘You must leave the hotel at once. The staff will have registered your arrival with the police. Checking on foreign visitors is one of the first things the Gestapo will do.’

Alfred Kendall shrugged. ‘Does it matter? Britain’s not at war with Germany. My papers are all in order. I’ve a perfectly legitimate reason for being here.’

‘Fool!’ Madame Hase drew herself up to her full height of five foot two. ‘Half the staff in this hotel are Nazis. If they weren’t before, they will be now. Servants talk, my friend, and my name is bound to come up. Have you never heard of guilt by association?’

Her urgency infected Kendall and Hugh. While Kendall paid their bill, she helped Hugh pack; they were out of the hotel within ten minutes of her arrival.

She directed the taxi across the river to Mala Strana, a part of Prague that lay just south of the castle; Hugh had never been there. On the way, she explained that she could not take them to her home – that would be too dangerous. They would go to the house of one of her cousins; the cousin was away but the servants knew her and would do whatever she asked.

The house came as a surprise to Hugh. It was built round a cobbled courtyard and covered an area of roughly the same size as the entire apartment block where Dr Spiegel lived.

There were only two servants, an old man and his wife, who grudgingly agreed to open up a few rooms for Madame Hase and her guests. The palace had been shut up since the previous autumn. The furniture was shrouded in dustsheets and cobwebs. Candles were the only form of light available, which made the huge rooms seem still larger.

They ate an impromptu supper in a dining room whose ceiling was so far away that it might just as well not have been there. Scratches and rattles came from the walls.

‘Rats,’ said Madame Hase. ‘One gets used to them in an old barn like this.’

Shortly after the meal, Hugh was sent to bed. He lay there, trying not to listen to the sounds behind the skirting boards and wondering whether there were many more communists like Madame Hase.

They spent the whole of the next day at the palace. In the afternoon, Jan and Bela arrived in the butcher’s van at the tradesmen’s entrance. They joined Kendall and Madame Hase in a large room that had been a library before part of the ceiling collapsed. It was not a comfortable place to sit but its windows covered the whole of the courtyard, including the great entrance gates, and it had the additional advantage of a small staircase which led down to a side entrance. As Madame Hase said, they could not afford to be careless.

Without consulting Kendall, she sent Hugh to sit in the anteroom before the library. Kendall stood in the doorway and watched as she settled him down on a tiny chair upholstered with dusty velvet. Opposite them was a grimy, twelve-foot-high mirror. Their reflections swam in the murky world behind the glass. For an instant Hugh’s eyes met his, and then looked away. Kendall felt an inexplicable sense of loss; since it was inexplicable, he ignored it.

As if by prearrangement, the four adults veered away from the easy chairs around the smouldering fire and sat round the table in the centre of the room. Above their heads a chandelier creaked and tinkled faintly in the draught.

Kendall tried to seize control of the meeting. ‘We must review the situation,’ he began. ‘Events have moved so quickly that—’

‘Perhaps I should do it, Alfred,’ Madame Hase interrupted. ‘I am the only person here who is fluent in both English and Czech.’

Kendall winced. It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name. He was both offended and thrilled by the careless intimacy it implied. He was the natural person to chair this meeting; but, on the other hand, Madame Hase was the cousin of the Slovakian countess whose husband owned this immense place.

Madame Hase briskly reviewed the military and political situation. Bohemia and Moravia were solid with German troops, particularly in the major cities and along the frontiers. Slovakia, now nominally independent, had asked for Hitler’s ‘protection’; the Wehrmacht, ever obliging, was already crossing the border. A new government had been announced which consisted solely of Nazis from Berlin or the Sudetenland.

‘And you, my friend,’ she said to Kendall, ‘are going to find it very difficult to leave the country. It will be just like Austria after the Anschluss. Foreigners will be one of the first targets the Gestapo choose. And you have already compromised yourself by your activities in the last few weeks.’

As she translated what she had said to Jan and Bela, Kendall gnawed his lower lip. He felt a pleasant sense of superiority: the others were so afraid of the Germans – and of the Gestapo in particular. No doubt they posed a problem, but there was no need to be theatrical about it. When Madame Hase had finished, he leaned forward, tapping the table to draw their attention.

‘Look here, it’s about time you decided whether or not you’re going to trust me. You can’t dither any longer. You need funds and England can supply them. But we must have cooperation in return. And that means information, not to mention a way of getting me out of your blasted country.’

Madame Hase blinked. She talked rapidly in Czech for a moment.

Jan shrugged his heavy shoulders and said slowly in the same language, ‘We need money now, not promises, Pan Kendall. I trust you as far as I can see you. Maybe we can get you out of the country – but how do we know you will come back?’

‘Very well.’ Kendall had only one thing left to offer. ‘I can give you three more diamonds. And I give you my word as an English gentleman that I will be back within a few weeks.’

Jan’s head was lowered. He shook it slowly from side to side. Bela glanced quickly round the table and then out of the window.

‘Good faith – that’s what it comes down to.’ Madame Hase’s beringed hand wrapped itself around Kendall’s wrist. ‘Alfred! I have an idea. There’s only one way you can prove to our friends that you really mean to return. Leave the boy behind in Prague.’

High above him, from the ridge of Hradcany, the great bell of St Vitus’ Cathedral tolled midnight. In the still air, he could hear other bells broadcasting the same message. Tomorrow had already become today.

Kendall shivered and stepped from the balcony into his bedroom. He closed the window with difficulty – the wood was warped – and drew the heavy curtains. The room seemed as cold as the outside world. He knew he should try to sleep but the bed, despite its imposing appearance, was as hard as concrete; he had already discovered that the sheets were damp.

It was hardly worth going to bed in any case – Bela would be collecting him at four-thirty. Kendall preferred not to think about the journey ahead of them. For the first time in his brief secret service career, he would be adopting a disguise and actually breaking the law.

For the first time, he was afraid.

The plan was very simple. Bela, though he had lived and worked in Prague and Brno for many years, was a Slovakian. The authorities were used to him paying regular visits to his family in Presov. Kendall, suitably equipped with false papers, was to play the part of Bela’s half-witted cousin. Once they reached Presov, Bela would be in his home territory; he had access to the smuggling routes through the mountains into Hungary.

It was obvious that the faster they moved, the better their chances would be. Germany’s control over its new Protectorate and its Slovakian satellite was not yet complete. In a way, Kendall was glad that they had to hurry – it left less time for reflection.

Time and again, he told himself that he had no option but to leave the boy behind. Stanhope-Smith had strictly forbidden him to contact the Prague Embassy. If the Kendalls tried to leave the country under their own names, the Gestapo would pick them both up at the border. Kendall was left with a choice between two evils: either he stayed with Hugh, in which case his mission would be a failure and the two of them would be fugitives in Prague; or he returned to England, in which case the mission would succeed. Hugh would be in good hands and he would only be alone for a few weeks. Kendall was sure that Stanhope-Smith would send him back to Czechoslovakia in the circumstances. In the meantime Hugh would be safer than if he and his father tried to escape on their own initiative.

He imagined how he would put it to Stanhope-Smith and possibly even to Muriel: It wasn’t an easy decision, of course. But when one took a common sense view, patriotic duty and one’s paternal responsibility really left one with no alternative. Perhaps he would add as a casual afterthought: I left Hugh at the Michalov Palace – the Countess is Madame Hase’s cousin, you know.

Kendall felt a little more cheerful. He removed his jacket, tie and waistcoat and put on his dressing gown. His clothes and the rest of his luggage would have to be left behind – Bela would be bringing him the clothes and possessions appropriate to a labourer at a Brno munitions factory. Madame Hase had assured him that his own belongings would be safe in the cellars of the palace.

A wing armchair in front of the empty fireplace looked more comfortable than the bed. He settled into it with a pillow and a couple of blankets, intending to smoke a last pipe before blowing out the candle. Just as he had succeeded in insulating himself from the main draughts, there was a tap on the door.

His instinctive reaction was to panic. But, even as he was struggling to free himself from the blankets, it occurred to him that the Gestapo would be unlikely to knock.

‘Alfred!’ Madame Hase rattled the handle. ‘Let me in.’

Kendall unbolted the door. She burst into the room, despite his half-hearted attempt to keep her on the threshold. His sense of propriety was outraged: what would the servants think?

Madame Hase had discarded her fur coat, for the first time in their acquaintance; she wore a pink quilted dressing gown and a pair of pale blue mules with two-inch heels. The smell of musk was stronger than usual.

She put down her candle next to his on the wine table and settled herself into the armchair.

‘Sit down.’ She pointed to a footstool. ‘We must talk – there will be no time in the morning.’

‘It is the morning,’ Kendall pointed out. ‘Where have you been all evening?’

‘Making arrangements about Hugh. He can’t stay here – the servants would talk and it might be difficult if my cousins return. But Ludvik Spiegel is willing to take him for a month.’

‘What about his neighbours? They must know that Hugh is an English boy.’

Madame Hase shook her head. ‘Spiegel sees very little of his neighbours. Most of them are young, working-class couples and they’re out to work when Hugh is there. Besides, if we give Hugh a haircut and another set of clothes, he won’t look English any more.’

‘But he’ll need identity papers and so forth, won’t he? The Boche run a tight ship.’

‘True. Jan may be able to help with that. I think he knows a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior. But there might be an easier method. Hugh could become my nephew.’

Kendall sucked angrily on his pipe. He said, with exaggerated patience, ‘But everyone would know—’

‘It’s not so foolish as it sounds. My sister married a Hungarian, a banker. They had a son – he was born in ’twenty-seven. The whole family died in a car crash last year – near Budapest, where they lived. The shock of it killed my father.’

‘So the boy’s dead?’

Madame Hase patted his knee. ‘The point is, Rudi had dual nationality. His death was never registered in this country. It was done in Hungary, of course, but not here. With my father dying, I had too many things on my mind. Hugh could use Rudi’s identity. I have all the papers. Perhaps Jan’s friend at the Ministry could help bring them up to date.’

‘Anyone who talked to the boy would immediately see he was English.’

‘Foreign, yes; but not English necessarily. If everyone thinks he spent most of his life in Hungary, that would be quite understandable. It may not arise – Ludvik says that Hugh is making very rapid progress in Czech.’

‘Hugh? Nonsense – the boy’s as thick as two short planks.’

‘As you say. But you must not worry: we will equip him well enough to pass a street check, if need be. It will only be for a few weeks.’

There was a moment’s silence, during which Kendall fervently wished his hostess would leave. But she settled herself deeper in the armchair and fumbled in the pocket of her dressing gown.

‘Here.’ She passed a silver flask to him. ‘It is cognac. We must drink a toast to your safe return.’

Kendall’s face brightened. ‘I’ll get you a glass. I’ll use the cap.’

They drank to a safe return; they drank to England and Czechoslovakia; Kendall poured another drink and they drank damnation to the Nazis.

Then Madame Hase proposed another toast: ‘To us.’

Kendall blushed and drank.

The conversation took a personal direction. Madame Hase talked about her husband, a young German of good family whose political career had been cut short with tragic finality by tuberculosis in 1931. Had he lived, she implied, neither Germany nor Czechoslovakia would be in its present appalling condition. She dropped tantalizing hints about her own family’s connections with the old nobility of Bohemia and Saxony.

‘The trouble with people like Jan and Bela,’ she said confidentially, ‘is that they cannot appreciate what was good in the old values; and that means they don’t understand the poetry of communism.’

Kendall didn’t understand it either, but he nodded nevertheless; it seemed to be expected of him. In any case he was watching her rather than listening to what she was saying. The candles were kind to her: her skin lost its pallor; the lips were no longer flabby but sensuous; her plumpness might almost be described as voluptuous.

Desire stirred within him, engendered by the sheer romance of his surroundings. What would it be like, he wondered, with a beautiful aristocrat in a Bohemian palace?

Madame Hase leaned forward, holding out her glass. ‘Is there more in the flask?’

‘Of course, Madame.’ As he took her glass, her hand brushed his. He nearly dropped the glass.

‘I call you Alfred,’ she said with a touch of petulance. ‘Why do you not call me Josefina?’

‘I – very well.’ Kendall cleared his throat and took the plunge. ‘Your glass, Josefina.’

When she took the glass, her hand again touched his. She put it untasted on the table. Kendall refilled the cap. He was very conscious of her presence; out of the corner of his eye, he could see that a tendril of black hair was swaying only inches away from the sleeve of his dressing gown.

‘Tell me, Alfred,’ she whispered huskily. ‘Are you really a senior officer of SIS? The head of the Central European Section?’

‘Of course.’ Kendall sipped his cognac. At this moment he almost believed he was. In any case, it was essential to maintain the pretence, both to Madame Hase and to Jan and Bela. His safety – and Hugh’s – depended on him being able to play the part convincingly. ‘Do you really think a job like this would be handled at a lower level?’

‘Ah.’

Madame Hase suddenly slumped forward on to her knees. Her dressing gown fell open, revealing a nightdress of black silk, trimmed with lace. She clasped Kendall’s legs and rubbed her body against him.

‘Love me, Alfred.’

‘Good God!’ Kendall leaped to his feet and broke away from her. She tried to seize him again, but he palmed her away. ‘Alfred, milacek—’

‘Madame, I must ask you to leave.’ Kendall backed away and took refuge on the far side of the bed. These foreigners were sex-mad. ‘I insist that you go,’ he pleaded. ‘Josefina, please.’

Madame Hase stood up; she was lopsided because one of her slippers had fallen off in the struggle. She refastened her dressing gown, found the missing slipper and picked up her candle. Kendall hastened to open the door for her.

‘You must understand, Josefina,’ he said as she passed him with her face averted. ‘I am married; I am here on duty—’

‘You English.’ She looked up at him. The candle turned the tears in her eyes to glints of fire. ‘You have no romance in you.’

Dansey lowered himself with great care into the armchair nearest the fire. ‘Just imagine I’m not here.’

‘That won’t be easy,’ said Michael drily. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘No, thank you. If you have to introduce me, call me Mr Hayward. Has the report from Moravec come in yet?’

Michael nodded. ‘The DB can confirm at least half of the information from their own sources. They seem to think the rest is at least plausible.’

‘But none of it is particularly significant?’

‘Well, no. It identifies a few names which were new to the DB on the provisional regional committees. There’s a sort of shopping list which starts with gold and ends with tanks. But there’s no firm information about what the Bolshies plan to do.’

‘That is probably because they don’t know themselves.’

Dansey fell silent and glanced round the small sitting room. Michael cringed inwardly: this was the first time Dansey had visited his rooms in Dover Street and Michael felt that his possessions – and hence his private self – were unfairly at the mercy of Uncle Claude. He wished he had removed his own paintings to the bedroom. But that would have been worse: Dansey would have noticed the lighter patches on the wallpaper and drawn his own conclusions.

He was suddenly ashamed of the shabby, comfortable room with its oversized furniture. The furniture was part of his past – he had kept back a few pieces from the sale after his mother’s death – but most of it looked ridiculous here.

‘Extraordinary,’ Dansey said. He was looking at a painting over the sideboard. First he looked through his glasses and then over the top of them. ‘Not one of yours, I hope?’

‘No, sir. Chap called Chagall.’

‘Glad to hear it. I’ve known children with a better sense of perspective. And I wonder why he found it necessary to give the man green hair.’ Dansey changed the subject without warning, or even altering his tone. ‘How’s Kendall taking it?’

‘Better than I’d expected. Of course he thinks the information he brought out was vital – perhaps that’s some consolation. I think I was more upset about the boy than he was. He’s one of these people who keep their emotions very tightly battened down.’

‘I hope he doesn’t think we’re going to send him back by the next train to collect the boy? You’ve made that clear?’

Michael got up to fetch the cigarette box from the sideboard. When he replied, he was safely out of Dansey’s sight. ‘Not in so many words, sir. I thought I’d leave it until today.’

Dansey refused a cigarette. ‘That was foolish of you.’

‘I hadn’t the heart to do it.’

Kendall had come off the boat train at Victoria yesterday afternoon. The little man had been wearing a baggy Hungarian suit; he had no luggage, apart from the contents of his pockets; he had so little money left that Michael had had to give him the cab fare home. His return journey from Prague had taken him the better part of a fortnight. Despite all he had gone through, he had been pathetically happy – full of himself like a dog who believed he had earned his master’s approval.

‘I hope your heart’s in better shape this afternoon.’ Dansey glanced at his watch. ‘He’s late.’

At that moment, they heard the doorbell. A moment later, Mrs Granger, Michael’s landlady, showed Kendall into the room. He bustled in, shook hands with Michael and looked enquiringly at Dansey.

‘Mr Hayward,’ Michael said with a wave of his arm. ‘A colleague of mine.’ A spurt of mischief made him add: ‘Just imagine he isn’t here.’

Kendall was about to hold out his hand but Dansey confounded the move by giving him the slightest of nods and becoming lost in contemplation of the fire.

When he had settled his guest in a chair and given him a cigarette, Michael produced an envelope from his inside pocket. He handed it to Kendall.

‘It’s rather more than the sum we agreed on,’ he said awkwardly. ‘You’ve done a very good job. Had I known it was going to be so difficult we wouldn’t have asked you to go.’

And I certainly wouldn’t have suggested you took the boy with you.

Kendall stuffed the envelope in his pocket without looking at its contents. ‘Only too glad to be of use,’ he mumbled. ‘Hope you don’t mind that I had to pretend I was a – ah – senior officer. It was the only way to get those chaps to cooperate.’

‘Not at all.’

It made it all the worse, Michael thought, that Kendall had done so well. He had been recruited as nothing more than a courier on the lowest of levels, but he had had to deal with problems which would have taxed an experienced agent. It was hardly his fault that his job had lost what little importance it originally had when Moravec arrived in London.

‘When do you want me to go back?’

‘Captain Kendall.’ Michael paused, wishing Dansey was at the other end of London. ‘As a matter of fact, it would be better if you didn’t go back. Your face is known, you see. You couldn’t go back under your own name because there’s no exit stamp on your passport. The Gestapo has almost certainly circularized your description. Quite frankly, your return could jeopardize the whole operation – destroy the value of the work you’ve done for us.’

Kendall sat there with his mouth open as he grappled with the meaning of Michael’s words. He sagged in the chair: the jauntiness had been sponged out of him.

‘But what about Hugh – my son?’

Michael glanced at Dansey but Uncle Claude was still staring at the fire. ‘We’ll tell the Embassy about him. You can let us have his address? I’m sure they’ll get him home almost as soon as you could. It’ll have to be carefully handled, of course.’

Kendall nodded, apparently satisfied. Michael felt a sudden revulsion for the man’s stoicism. Did his warped sense of patriotism obliterate his affection for his son? It was uncanny: Kendall was less concerned about his son than about the fact that His Majesty’s Government didn’t propose to send him back to Prague.

Kendall scribbled Spiegel’s address in his pocket book, tore out the page and passed it to Michael.

‘Then there’s my luggage,’ he said. ‘Can the Embassy send someone round to the Michalov Palace? It’s only just around the corner.’

‘Of course.’ Michael stood up, hoping that Kendall would take the hint. ‘One of our people will telephone you in the next few days and arrange a meeting. We’d like to get your firsthand impressions of the invasion in detail.’

But Kendall remained in his chair. ‘I notice a lot of changes here since I got back. Even Chamberlain seems to realize that war’s inevitable. Does this mean you’ll be expanding your permanent establishment?’

‘It’s a possibility.’ Michael moved slowly towards the door. It was more than a possibility: he knew for a fact that both SIS and Z Organization were actively trawling for recruits – and had been since Munich.

Kendall got to his feet. ‘Then I wonder if you’d consider myself and Stephen – my eldest boy. He’s a bright lad – and good at languages too. St Paul’s, you know.’

‘I’ll mention your name, of course. Naturally I can’t promise anything – it’s not my department.’

Michael showed Kendall out. When he got back to the sitting room, he found Dansey jabbing the coals with a poker.

‘I think I’ll take that drink now, Stanhope-Smith.’

Michael crossed to the sideboard. ‘What do you think of Kendall’s offer?’

‘I think we can get along quite well without the services of Captain Kendall or his wretched son. Even if he has been to St Paul’s. We may be moving on to a war footing but there are limits.’

Michael handed Dansey a small whisky and soda. ‘About the other son: shall I approach the Embassy through the FO or get on to SIS?’

‘Neither.’ Dansey finished his drink in a single swallow and wiped his moustache with his handkerchief. ‘Now I must be off. If necessary you can get hold of me through the PM’s office.’

‘But we can’t just abandon the boy.’

‘Why not? He’s of no importance. Kendall’s not going to make a fuss, especially if he thinks you might give him a job. Even if he did make a fuss, we could muzzle him with the Official Secrets Act.’

‘But we do have a moral obligation—’

‘Our moral obligations, as you choose to put it, lie elsewhere, Stanhope-Smith. Getting that boy out would be a purely sentimental gesture. I’m sorry, but the risk is unacceptable. The FO wouldn’t cooperate for a start: they’ve had to tread very carefully in Prague for the last fortnight. And I’ve no intention of compromising either SIS or Z. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Germans have already got the boy and his communist hosts under observation.’

‘We could send in a nursemaid to bring the boy out – an amateur like Kendall.’

Dansey picked up his hat and coat. ‘When I need your advice I shall ask for it. Don’t bother to come down: I’ll see myself out.’

When Dansey had gone, Michael kicked the sofa until the pain forced him to stop. He had known before that he was involved in a dirty business; but this was the first time that Dansey had rubbed his nose in it quite so hard.

For a moment he toyed with the idea of resignation. But that would rebound on his godfather’s head, especially at a time like this when the country was readying itself for war. Michael tried to ignore the thought that it would also be financial suicide: his rent was due tomorrow, on the first of the month; both his tailor and his wine merchant had presented him with extraordinarily large bills; and Betty Chandos was proving an expensive hobby.

But he had to do something – anything to prove to himself that he had not sold his soul entirely to Uncle Claude. He picked up the telephone and dialled the number of a house in Queen Anne’s Gate. He used the private line to the flat, rather than the switchboard number for the rest of the building. Dansey would be furious, but with luck he wouldn’t hear about it until it was too late.

‘May I speak to Admiral Sinclair? It’s Michael Stanhope-Smith.’

He breathed a sigh of relief when the secretary said his godfather was in. If he didn’t do it now, he suspected that he would never find the courage to try again.

‘Uncle? It’s Michael. I’ve found two possible new boys for you. I wonder if you could let them know downstairs.’

II

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