'Are you ever in Durban?' She gave a little moue and turned away and went up the tiled steps, finding the key in her bag; and when I was back in the car she'd gone, Marianne, with her slim brown legs and her smoky eyes and the way she made you feel it was the first time and never-coding.

Steadman had left a message at the desk saying he'd be in the Rotunda, and I saw him on the far side sitting alone at a table with a tray of tea. He looked at me over the cup.

'Took your time,' he said.

We went through the code-intro for the month, inter-national and unspecified, and he ordered me some tea.

'I had a fast police escort,' I said, 'what more do you want?'

He looked faintly surprised. 'I was just joking.'

He was a small man with sideboards and a huge tie and suede shoes and I wondered where they'd got him from. He wasn't Bureau. I looked around and saw it was all right: there aren't any bugs in the Rotunda at the Negresco and the dome doesn't throw any echoes because of the carpet and all those gilt-framed copies of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

'Where are you from?' I asked him, 'Liaison 9.'

That explained it: we call them the Wet Look. The thing is they spend their time liaising with the major services and therefore know a lot more than we do and we resent that Our only consolation is that we know one or two things they can never hope to get their hands on because they're filed in a heat-proof box with an all-eventualities cutout circuit and a bang-destruct and they'd never get near the thing, even if they took off their little suede shoes.

'All right,' I told him, 'what's the form?'

We spoke just above a whisper, because people could go past on the other side of the pillars to look at the onyx ashtrays in the display windows.