I went down the stairs, this place gave you the creeps at night, shrugging my wet mack on, passing one of the briefing staff in a lower corridor.

'Hello, Quiller, what are you doing here?'

'None of your bloody business.'

It occurred to me, driving back to Knightsbridge through the rain, that I could be entirely wrong about this: maybe North hadn't told them anything in Lubyanka, maybe he'd stood up to it and got out clean and then just couldn't stand the reaction, gone a bit too far. There must have been something still left in him even in the last few minutes of his life, because he'd made an attempt to explain his misery to Connie in terms of his cover: 'nearly crashed', and something about fog across the airport. That hadn't been easy to do and he'd done it so maybe they'd chalk up something decent for him as an official epitaph, better than the one Dewhurst had given him.

Not that we'd ever hear of him again. Outside the hermetically sealed circle of his immediate contacts — his briefing officer, mission controller and director in the field — there wouldn't be any enquiry. After tonight, along those warren-like corridors of that anonymous building in Whitehall where no one officially exists even when they're alive, there'd be no questions asked, and the name of North would never be mentioned again. In the Bureau, death is a disease with no complications.

The call came through over the week-end and I ducked down the steps below the leaky guttering and got into the car, every bloody window misted up, had to find the cloth and even then it wasn't much better, the rain drumming on the metal roof and the street lamps just coming on as I drove through the park. Well over the limit and one eye on the mirror, no real hurry but this was the sixth day of the ten-day call and that meant they'd set it up in record time: someone had been on the blower or there'd been a bunch of signals in and Parkis or Mildmay or Kinloch had looked at the picture again and said all right tell him to come in.