'C'est la vie,' she said, and I nodded. She was talking about Hans Strobel, and she probably meant, c'est la mort. The loudspeakers were still echoing around the buildings but I couldn't make out what they were saying because the Radio Monte-Carlo helicopter was making some low passes across the circuit where the crash had been. A whole crowd of people were moving into the car park now and the traffic police were taking up stations.

'Merci, m'sieur.'

He gave me back my papers and it occurred to me that the whole thing was a bit odd because you can't break many regulations leaving your car parked in a nice neat row with the others; but I wasn't really interested because I wanted to start battling a gangway through the traffic till we got to a quiet bar where I could give Marianne a cognac.

'Eh bien, m'sieur,' the big one said, 'il y a un Monsieur Steadman qui vous attend a I'Hotel Negresco, a Nice. C'est assez urgent, et vous n'avez que nous suivre,vous savez?'

'Okay,' I said, and got into the Lancia.

'What is happening?' asked Marianne.

'They're going to give us a hand getting through all the traffic.'

She kept her green eyes on me for a moment and then looked down and didn't ask anything else. I'd told her I was in the diplomatic corps, one of the routine covers when we're hanging around foreign parts between missions. There was the prescribed plate on the back of the car and I'd telexed the number to London and that was routine too. We're never asked to report at intervals or tell them where we're staying because we're meant to relax between missions but we have to tell them the country we're in and the car we're driving, so that they can get their hooks on us if something blows up.