It was a name from the past and I hadn't seen him for more than a year. He used to be with the Liaison Group and I'd worked three times under his direction, then they sent him to Rome on the Carosio thing and one of the adverse party found him alone and left him for dead. It finished him for operations and the Bureau put him into their political section to sit in on summits and report any rot. He could still move about without crutches or things like that but he was full of platinum tubing and bone-rivets and his face was attractively lopsided so he never went short of a bed.

There was a NATO conference going on in Hanover this month and I suppose the Bureau had sent him to sit in on it.

It was a bit of metal, which explained why it had got lodged in so efficiently. The room looked watery now.

That sort of job must be irksome for a man like Lovett because he'd been very active before and spent most of his leaves in the Box of Squibs showing people how to break a door down without any noise and things like that: the Box is the house in Norfolk where we're sent at intervals for refresher training. But Lovett was good in subtler ways and perhaps he now passed the time trying to get two frames of micro under one full-stop without any tweezers.

I had to blank my mind consciously before I could get to sleep because I was still narked with Ferris for not telling me anything. Lovett would have to make up for that in the morning.

'He can't be!'

She laughed at first, like some people do, but her eyes were beginning to go bright and she went on staring at me with the laugh still on her face.

It seemed genuine.

I said: 'He threw himself out of a window on the fourth floor. Last night, about eleven o'clock.'

It was genuine all right. I got to her before she could hit her head on anything. She didn't go right under. When I helped her into the chair she stayed there without moving, like a dress thrown across it, but her eyes opened and she began staring again and I said: