Wilson straightened in his chair and the leather elbow patches squeaked against the seat. ‘Are you telling me you don’t want a trial?’

Naire-Hamilton sucked at his breath, noisily. ‘Just giving general guidance, my dear fellow. More tea perhaps?’

Wilson wished the other man wouldn’t keep calling him a dear fellow. He shook his head against the offer. ‘If there were an accident, you wouldn’t regret not being able formally to endorse the file closed?’

‘Admirably put,’ congratulated the other man. ‘And another thing…’

‘What?’

‘I think it would be best if you remained in personal charge. Confusions always arise if things as important as this get delegated.’

‘I hadn’t any intention of delegating anything,’ said Wilson.

‘Glad to hear it, dear fellow,’ said Naire-Hamilton. He raised his ever-moving hands against his forehead in a measuring gesture. ‘Up to here with traitors and super-spies,’ he said.

For some inexplicable reason, the Ministry of Works, which was responsible for government decoration, considered buildings south of the river to be modern, for which Wilson was grateful. There was the obligatory bookcase, with its stuck-together tomes, but otherwise he was spared Naire-Hamilton’s working conditions. There were even two Dora Carrington pictures on the wall. The window view of the river included St Paul’s and the furniture was sufficiently contemporary not to make the television set, on which Wilson sometimes watched afternoon horse racing, appear obtrusive. Since the Calcutta accident, racing was the nearest he got to horses: once they’d been a hobby, like roses.

Peter Harkness was waiting when Wilson returned from his Whitehall meeting. The deputy intelligence director was an undemonstrative man whose initial training had been as an accountant and who still worried about money. He lived separately but beneath the same Bayswater roof with a wife to whom he had been married for twenty years and wouldn’t consider divorcing because both were practising Catholics.