We came down through black overcast across the Gulf of Thailand with a glimmer of light below us to the east of the mountains where the city of Phnom Penh lay sprawling across the land. A cloud of water vapour started filling the cabin as the Tupolev 134 settled into the approach path and the landing gear went down with a thump.

'Tout va bien, vous croyez?'

I said yes, everything was fine, you often got fog on board these things, par for the course. He was a jeweller from Paris, out here to look at some silver, and was actually wearing, he'd told me, a bullet-proof vest.

There was the normal chaos inside the main hall at Pochentong and it was gone eight in the evening when I walked into the Trans-Kampuchean Air Services office, my shoes squelchy from the puddles in the street. Office? Call it a shed, tucked against the wall of what looked like a maintenance hangar.

'I'm here to pick up an envelope,' I told the man behind the chipped plastic counter. 'Name of Jones, David.'

'Jones, David, yes. Right-o.' But he didn't move yet, just sat looking at me with his head turned slightly as if he were deaf in one ear, English, pale, sweating — touch of malaria? I waited.

A phone was ringing somewhere but he didn't seem interested. 'Jones,' he said, 'now that's a good old name. All the way from the Valley, are you?' He'd put on a Welsh accent, not a very good one. He was pissing me off a little by now.

'I'm in a hurry,' I told him.

'But of course you are.' He dropped the magazine he'd been reading and got up and went across to a dented metal filing-cabinet and hit it with the palm of his hand to get the top drawer open. 'The same with all of us, isn't it? Always in a hurry. How's Daisy?'

'She's fine.' I'd got it now: he hadn't just been chatty: he'd been fishing around for a code introduction because I hadn't given him one. And he wouldn't give me the envelope marked David Jones until I'd done that. 'Arthritis still bugging her,' I said. Not quite your traditional code intro, but it was telling him I knew my way around that rotten dump in Whitehall and must therefore be strictly kosher.