'I'll take this one,' he'd told me the night before; 'they know you, but they don't know me.' But it was just that he'd been frightened, and wanted to prove that he wasn't. We've got a few things in common.

So he wasn't dead.

'What theatre?' I asked Croder.

'Europe.'

That was all I'd get. There wasn't anything more I could ask him. He could have switched to selective code but he obviously wasn't prepared to. In a couple of seconds he said: 'You know him quite well, I understand.' Shapiro.

'Not too well. But I know him.'

The bloody thing had been ticking all the time and he'd stood looking at it with his small gnome's head on one side: 'the best thing'd be to disarm it, don't you think, take it apart, before it can do any harm.' He'd worked at it for nearly three hours without a break, his pale grey eyes wide open, staring at God all the time while his nicotine-stained fingers stroked and caressed the matt-black metal components and the sweat ran off his face and dripped on to the bare boards where I sat waiting, hunched into my own ghost and unable to look away. 'I think that's it,' he said at last, and pulled the detonator clear and reached for a cigarette and put it into his mouth with fingers that shook so badly now that he knocked the flame out and I had to strike another match for him.

Shapiro.

Say this much: he was a professional.

'You know his work, at least.' Croder's voice came insistently.

'Yes.'

'What would be your opinion of him,' in slow and reasonable tones, 'as an executive in the field?'

I felt Tilson listening, beside me. I thought of lying, then realized I didn't have to. In the end I could refuse, I could refuse, repeat it like a litany, I could refuse.