The paper mounds represented the briefings he had received during the previous week. They concerned a success that was not spectacular but might be significant. A mite of triumph in the unending struggle for information and the placing of pieces in the jigsaw that had no horizon.

Two years back Mawby and select colleagues had taken a private room at the Garrick Club and over champagne and lobster, and afterwards port and Stilton had celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the Service.

They had toasted their Elizabethan founder, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had created the principle that knowledge is never too dear, that no price could be set on intelligence material. For Mawby that evening had set the seal on his determination that within the confines of his influence the Service would remain a virile and lively agency. He munched at the sandwich he had retrieved from the doorway, scattered crumbs on the papers left by the Ministry of Defence (Intelligence) and the Service's Russian Desk/Military.

If the Service were to remain the vital agency that he con- jured in his mind, stay free from the constraints of the 'parsi monious politicians' that the Deputy-Under-Secretary was for ever complaining of, then it must be alert to chance, responsive to good fortune. In the case of Willi Guttmann they had much with which to be satisfied.

An English girl of good county stock, employed by the World Health Organisation, leaning towards middle age and fear of the shelf, had plucked up the courage to jump from her virginal pedestal and launch herself into an affair with a junior Soviet diplomat. And managed to get herself pregnant for her pains.

A nice girl from a nice home and father doing well in the Inner Temple, and so, of course, the thought of termination was unthinkable.

And Willi Guttmann, naive and infatuated and far from home, had been persuaded that a baby needs a father, and wet little blighter that he was had agreed that Lizzie Forsyth should trip round to the British Consul in Geneva who would know what to do, what arrangements could be made.