'You just come in?' Tilney was saying on the phone. 'Listen, there's some things on the desk in the store-room downstairs, the one next to Clearance. They're in some newspaper; you'll see what they are. I want you to deal with them.' He put the phone down and looked at me and asked, 'Did you get any instructions to blot out McCane's identity for us?

Blot out. I could feel the cold going through to the bone.

'No. I did it as a matter of routine.'

McCane had been a high-echelon shadow executive, and when one of us hits the ground there's immediate smoke put out. We're known to a dozen major intelligence networks and whether a given agent is alive or dead is strictly our own business.

The essence of intelligence is secrecy, of all and any kind.

'You were there all night,' Tilney said, and waited. The yellow pencil he'd picked up to play with was nibbled almost down to the lead, but I'd never seen him at it.

'The crash was soon after nine. Everything was too hot to touch until the early hours.'

The embers glowing and the smoke drifting in thin grey skeins among the trees, the smell of pinewood, and frost, and the other smell, from the thing inside the car, sitting there like a charred scarecrow, a human sacrifice to gross incompetence, rub the salt in, let me rub it in.

'And you don't know where he phoned you from,' Tilney was saying.

'No.'

'No kind of background noise, that you can remember? Was he in his car, or maybe a pub?5 'I didn't hear any background.' It was something you're trained to listen for; it can tell you a lot.