"When did he get in?"

"About an hour ago. We'd cleared Customs for him."

Some people from the Yard were taking measurements of the TR-4's position, and bringing flash equipment. We moved away a bit to give them room.

"What was he doing here, for God's sake?" I asked Tilson. I was getting worried. They don't often go for us on our home ground, any more than we go for them at the embassies. Sinclair would have driven straight from the airport to our place in Whitehall if he'd had something so important to say that he couldn't put it in a signal.

"We think he was got at," said Tilson.

"Pretty obvious. He knew how to drive, for Christ's sake." A flashlight popped, freezing the scene, and I noticed some blood on the seat of the crashed car. "Who met him at the airport?" I asked Tilson.

"He landed thirty minutes early. They missed him."

I went cold suddenly. Tilson was keeping an awful lot back, I knew that now, but this was quite bad enough. Someone had let this man fly into London with some vital information in his head and they'd left him without an escort and now he was down there somewhere among the dead cats and the weeds with his mouth shut forever.

Tilson shuffled his feet, and I noticed he'd come here in such a hurry that he was still wearing the plaid slippers he used at the office. "I suppose what happened," he said miserably, "is that he picked them up in his mirror on his way to our place and led them clear just in time. Led them as far as here." Glass crackled under the men's feet as they moved around the car with their cameras.

"Did anyone see him crash?"

"Oh yes, several people. They said another car ran smack into him and drove off without stopping. But someone said he thought he saw the car stop, and two men go over to the wreck and pull the driver out. You know what witnesses are. We're doing what we can to spread the story of a drunk hit-and-run driver."