'Both impeccable. They could take me through.hell and back.' Had done so, in a way, and more than once.

'You know Pepperidge lost his sister, do you?'

'Yes.' I'd met her at his little house in Hampstead, a pretty woman with gaunt eyes and sallow skin, dying of cancer as gracefully as she could.

'What about Pringle?'

'He's never directed me.'

'Less experienced, perhaps,' Flockhart said in a moment, 'than the directors you're used to.'

'I don't know. Bit young, isn't he?' I'd only run into Pringle a couple of times in the signals room. 'Wasn't he on Switchblade?'

'He was,' Flockhart said, 'and he brought it home rather well. Pringle is young, yes, but he has style.' He was watching me intently now. 'Which is something you'd understand, I rather think.'

'Who was his control on that one?'

'I was.'

He looked past me as some people came down the steps, and I watched his face as he carefully checked them out. Quite a few of Luigi's clientele are spooks of some sort from DI5 and DI6, and some of our own people come down here.

I wasn't ready to think that this man Flockhart had a mission for me but it looked as if it could be on the cards: what he'd actually been asking me since we'd come down those steps was: How difficult are you to control in the field? And if you think I ought to have been blowing my fuses at the thought of a new mission after six weeks of wearing my bloody shoes out along those dreary corridors the reason is quite simple. I had a question of my own: Did I want to work for a tarantula?

Flockhart had finished checking out the people who had just come in, and was watching me again as I put my fork down and pushed my plate away an inch and sat watching him back.

'The thing is,' he said in a moment, 'I need someone to go and take a look at certain things in Cambodia for me.'