It was three in the morning when she phoned me and I went straight round there through the pelting rain and found North slumped in a chair looking like death.

'What happened?'

He didn't answer. I don't think he heard.

Connie said: 'Thank God you're here,' and got some brandy and put it into tumblers, shivering, only a thin dressing-gown round her shoulders, hair all over the place and her big eyes frightened. The rain hit the window-sills in sharp taps, like someone typing.

'It's okay now,' I told North, but he sat staring up at me with his face appalled, as if I'd told him Big Ben had just fallen over; but his pupils looked normal, he didn't look doped and he certainly wasn't drunk. Connie brought one of the tumblers for me, chipped round the rim, and I held it for him — 'Come on, slosh this lot down, you're ten drinks short.' But he wouldn't take it, didn't seem to catch on to anything I was saying.

I didn't know him very well: he was one of the new ones, said to be brilliant, specialized in the documentation snatch, knew his Kremlin, had a lot of Slav languages. The one obvious thing about him at the moment was that he was recently back from a mission.

'When did he get here?'

'About an hour ago.'

He was still fully dressed, his wet mack thrown over a chair Bear the door. People came to this place to have a drink and go to bed with Connie and he hadn't done either. He just sat there looking totally blank, his tie pulled loose and blood on his knuckles.

'What happened?' I asked her again.

'Nothing, really.'

'Well how did he get like this? Was anyone else here?'

'No. He was hitting things,' she said irrelevantly, 'punching the wall and — '

'What's he been talking about?' I put it as just another quick question so that she wouldn't think it was significant. The thing was that when a man came back from a mission a bit broken up he was liable to talk too much and blow the whole works.