It looked as if we were the last to arrive, and someone came forward to meet us.

'This is Mr Jones,' Hyde told him, and the other man shook hands with me and said:

'I'm Barstow, Private Secretary. Come and meet people.'

Another flash lit the tunnel, and there was the crackle of the welding flame.

Barstow took us over to the group and made the introductions. 'His Excellency Qiao Dejian, Ambassador from the People's Republic of China. The Right Honourable James Jarrow, Secretary of State for the United Kingdom. Mr William Glover, MI6. Mr Hou Jing, Chinese embassy counselor. This is Mr Hyde, and Mr Jones. Shall we go and sit down?'

There was a holdup because the Secretary of State wanted the Chinese ambassador to go into the coach first, and little Qiao couldn't possibly allow it, so Barstow managed to shepherd them discreetly side by side through the sliding doors and the rest of us shuffled after them, with Hyde and me in the rear. Hyde's official capacity hadn't been mentioned and 'Mr Jones' is generally understood among the diplomatic crowd to be a cover name for some kind of agent.

There was another holdup inside the coach because Ambassador Qiao wouldn't sit down until the Secretary had, but Jarrow finally took his seat halfway along the coach and everyone else followed suit and someone pulled the sliding doors together manually and took up guard duty on the platform outside. I noticed that Qiao was looking deathly tired and the Secretary of State wasn't looking particularly tired but certainly tense. The Chinese counsellor sat with a heavy black briefcase on his knees, clutching it with gloved hands.

Barstow, our Private Secretary, looked at his boss, and Jarrow nodded, but then there was another holdup while Ambassador Qiao got a handkerchief out and blew his nose and asked us to excuse him because he'd caught a cold. His English was perfect, I would have said Cambridge.