“You realize, of course,” Parkis said, and one of his phones rang, ‘that the police are looking for you at this moment, and with great energy?” He picked up the phone and spoke with his back to me. “No. No clearance. No briefing. The first available. I would say within ten minutes.” He put the receiver back and faced me. “Well?”

“Looking for someone,” I said, but I didn’t feel so casual as I sounded.

“You killed Novikov,” he said with soft anger, ‘and they are looking for his killer. They are looking for you, don’t you understand? And you were seen on that train, by a great many people. The Yard is now questioning every passenger they can trace, asking for a description of anyone acting strangely.”

“No one saw me do it. They — ”

“How far do you think you’d gone before they saw him lying there dead? You imagine — ”

“Descriptions are notoriously vague, you know that.”

He came up to me and stared into my face with his ice-blue eyes and his voice was soft, though not quite steady. “Even if the police never found you by routine investigation, they’ll receive every possible help from the Russian Embassy, however anonymously. Don’t you realize that?”

I didn’t say anything; it wasn’t really a question. He was just getting rid of some shock and setting me up for the pay-off, in whatever form it would take. Of course he was perfectly right about the Russian Embassy: they’d give my description to the police out of sheer indignation. On any given day there are scores of people moving around London with a tag on their tail, with the action concentrated at the embassies and consulates; the Foreign Office and the headquarters of MI5 and DI6 are also under uninterrupted surveillance.