I hoped to God it wasn't Sinclair. He was one of the best we had.

Higher along the embankment, at the end of the bridge, the police were still taking flash photos of the wrecked car. From the little Tilson had told me, Sinclair — or whoever it was — had been thrown from the car into the river when it had crashed, or had been dragged out of the wreck and dropped off the bridge.

The light was getting brighter now, and soon one of the divers rose like a shark, his black finned body breaking the surface not far downstream; then another came into view and a lamp swung clear of the water and flashed across our eyes before a man on the bank grabbed it and steadied it. We were all leaning forward now, and I heard someone say: "Right. They've got him."

Chandler moved at last, poking his thin face towards the river, where two more divers were surfacing, pulling at the drag lines as the land crew took up the slack; then we saw the body as it floated clear of the long net, rolling in the turbulence with its white face showing and then darkening, showing again in the glare of the floods. They hauled him out and lowered him to the walkway, turning him onto his back and gently pulling his legs together. Chandler stooped over him.

An hour ago I'd been with a girl in the Gaslight Club, halfway through a late dinner and getting to know her, one of the Foreign Office staff, the only ones we were allowed to meet when we were on standby, for security reasons. A plain-clothes man from the Yard had come in and told me I was wanted, and I didn't argue because he'd mentioned the name Tilson.

I'd driven straight to the Thames with a police escort and found Tilson standing near the wrecked TR-4.

"Sinclair was coming in from Taiwan," he said plaintively, "with something to tell us, according to his signal from Calcutta. There was some trouble with the plane, and he had to switch flights." He gazed unhappily through his horn-rimmed glasses at the diving crew along the river.