In his opinion, and professional suicide to voice it, there should have been room in Five for men like that. He looked up and noted that the door to the outer office was closed. He had what his wife described, without sympathy, as a siege mentality to his work now. He pushed the file away across his empty desk, empty because little of substance in the affairs of the Security Service these days came his way. He reached for his direct-line telephone, dialled, and spoke quietly so that his voice would not carry through the prefabricated walls of his office and the closed door. He valued his neighbour's friendship, something that excited him about the power of decision that no longer came his way. "Charles, it's Arnold… Can't speak much. Mary, she most definitely has the right to know. There's a man who was once on our books… If Mary wanted someone to peck around a bit then I've a telephone number… I'll have all the details tomorrow for her, and I'll mark his card meantime… Yes, I would recommend him."

Two.

He had been sat in the Sierra since before first light. He had the engine idling and the heater going and every few minutes it was necessary for him to wipe the inside of the windscreen hard, bully it, to clear the mist that hazed his view of the target house. He had parked up in a side street a full fifty yards from the main road on which the target house was one of a line of low-set terraced homes. Four hours back, when he had first parked his Sierra in the side street, he had felt a small glow of satisfaction; it was a good place to be parked because it gave him the option of going right or left up the road without the clumsiness of a three-point turn, it was the way he would have done it before the slip, slide, out of the Service. But it was different now from his Service days, and this was solo surveillance and he was working cheapskate, this was shoestring stuff.