“In that case,” Alleyn said, “I can at least touch wood.”

She gave him a quick grateful look and said, “What is all this about Mr. Garbel?”

“I saw the A.C. this morning. He was particularly nice, which generally means he’s got you pricked down for a particularly nasty job. On the face of it this one doesn’t sound so bad. It seems M.I.5. and the Sûreté are having a bit of a party with the Narcotics Bureau, and our people want somebody with fairly fluent French to go over for talks and a bit of field-work. As it is M.I.5. we’d better observe the usual rule of airy tact on your part and phony inscrutability on mine. But it turns out that the field-work lies, to coin a coy phrase, not a hundred miles from Roqueville.”

“Never!” Troy ejaculated. “In the Garbel country?”

“Precisely. Now it occurs to me that what with war, Ricky and the atrocious nature of my job, we’ve never had a holiday abroad together. Nanny is due for a fortnight at Reading. Why shouldn’t you and Ricky come with me to Roqueville and call on Mr.Garbel?”

Troy looked delighted, but she said: “You can’t go round doing top-secret jobs for M.I.5. trailing your wife and child. It would look so amateurish. Besides, we agreed never to mix business with pleasure, Rory.”

“In this case the more amateurish I look, the better. And I should only be based in Roqueville. The job lies outside it, so we wouldn’t really be mixing business with pleasure.”

He looked at her for a moment. “Do come,” he said, “you know you’re dying to meet Mr. Garbel.”

Troy scraped her palette. “I’m dying to come,” she amended, “but not to meet Mr. Garbel. And yet: I don’t know. There’s a sort of itch, I confess it, to find out just how deadly dull he is. Like a suicidal tendency.”