“Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s a perfectly simple question.” I leaned over his desk. “Has someone just got in from a mission?”

He folded his square freckled hands and his eyes went stony.

“Well, sir, they come and go, don’t they?”

He didn’t have executive status and this was his way of telling me to get the hell out of his office.

“You must be a pain in the neck to your dentist,” I told him and went out and tried to find Thompson. Someone said he was down in the Cafe for a tea-break. He wasn’t.

I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a cup and didn’t drink it because the last thing my nerves wanted at the moment was caffeine and in this place the stuff tasted like something out of a horse.

“Is it too cold?” Maisie asked me.

“It’s fine.”

She went away.

The thing that worried me was that someone had slapped me on standby and they wouldn’t do that without checking the records and the records showed that I’d got back from Turkey a week ago and was due for special leave. Special leave is granted when you come in looking like something the dog has found in a rubbish dump, and we nearly always get it because no one ever comes in looking very fit: it’s in the nature of the job.

Being on standby isn’t the same as being on call. When you’re on call it means they’ve got a specific mission lined up for you and you have to be ready to hit the field at a moment’s notice, so you don’t go far from a telephone and you don’t leave your pad without telling them where you’re going. They let you see one of the girls but it’s on the understanding that if her phone rings you’ve got to put down the tiddlywinks and get to your car in zero seconds flat, so it’s no use complaining. Standby is less demanding and more general: it means they may have a job for you but you can leave home and travel around the Metropolitan area providing you call them at twelve-hour intervals.