Young Gray was fiddling about next door with a couple of Dinky Toys and the model of a street intersection. One of the buildings had a little flag and the whole thing looked terribly like a long-range elimination set-up for telescopic sights and I didn’t interrupt him, except to remind him to lock the door as soon as I’d gone: we get a few visitors to the Bureau and although they’re usually deep-screened people from the Foreign Office or DI6 we ought not to be seen playing games like that on the fourth floor, which is now the executive action complex.

I was sitting around in Monitoring with one ear on some stuff going out on the Chinese-speaking propaganda programme from Moscow when one of the phones rang and someone picked it up and looked around and said:

“Yes, he’s here.” He passed it to me and I gave my name and listened very intently because this was the call I’d been waiting for: it couldn’t be anything else.

It was one of the girls from Admin, asking if I could be in Mr. Parkis’s room as soon as possible and I said yes I could and put the thing down and went out, keeping my breath steady and my pace steady but finding it difficult, having to work at it. Because I knew what had happened, and I’d spent half the night and all this morning trying to tell myself that I didn’t.

A copy of the Telegraph was lying on the desk with the front page turned towards me as I came in. Parkis was looking down at it, his pale fleshy hands in the side pockets of his jacket with the thumbs hooked over the top. He didn’t speak.

When he saw I was looking at the newspaper he turned away and began walking in a short straight line between the window and the Lowrie on the wall, his soft elegant shoes leaving traces of dark and light as they disturbed the nap of the carpet. I didn’t spend long looking at the paper: I’d seen it already.

Parkis stood still and looked at me with his ice-blue eyes. He is made entirely of ice, this man, and one day when I blow my cover at the wrong time or spring a trap in the wrong place or walk into a red sector without checking it first I’m going to go out cursing Parkis. This I promise.