‘Good,’ said the underwriter, unimpressed and showing it. He turned, making the woman aware of Charlie.

‘This is the person whom you particularly asked to meet,’ he said, in introduction.

Clarissa focussed upon him for the first time. She squinted, not frowned, when she was curious, Charlie saw.

‘Who…?’ she said doubtfully.

‘He helped us over the Hong Kong problem,’ enlarged the underwriter. ‘Helped’ seemed such an inadequate word, thought Willoughby. It was easy for him to understand why his father, when he had been head of the Intelligence Service, had regarded Charlie as the best operative he had ever had. Willoughby doubted if anyone else could have uncovered the liner insurance fraud which would have bankrupted his firm for?6,000,000. Clarissa had openly announced her intention to divorce him if it happened. Sometimes Willoughby wondered if he should have been as grateful to Charlie about that outcome as he was about everything else.

‘You’re that fascinating man!’ exclaimed the woman.

‘I represented the company in Hong Kong,’ said Charlie, modestly. Clarissa Willoughby was someone who constantly talked in italics. She probably shouted at foreign airport porters who didn’t speak English too.

‘And were brilliant!’

‘Lucky,’ qualified Charlie.

‘I always think people make their own luck,’ said Clarissa.

Italics and cliches, thought Charlie.

‘There were some people who weren’t quite so lucky,’ he said. A whore named Jenny, Charlie recalled. And an Englishman ostracised because he had loved her. Their graves would be overgrown, he guessed. The neglect would offend the Chinese, who attached great importance to their ancestors and to whom cemeteries were places to visit on holidays, like picnic parks. It could easily have been him in that cemetery overlooking the New Territories and the Chinese mainland. He had allowed Willoughby to invoke the loyalty and respect he had felt for the man’s father and had come nearer than at any time in five years to discovery by the C.I.A.