Others around him drank gin, but Joe Foulkes stayed with the tonic. He had been invited to spend a full day with the battalion’s Recce Troop, then stay the night in the officers’ mess. He always enjoyed time spent with any of the Parachute Regiment’s specialist units, found them receptive to the experience he had accumulated in a career of covert surveillance in UK conditions, through the four seasons, in rural and urban locations. They’d enjoyed his anecdotes over the meal… it had been a good day.

The man who called him gave no name but instead offered the Box’s poste restante number, a code good enough to tell him the Secret Intelligence Service had sought him out. After a surprisingly brief exchange of pleasantries – barely civil – he was told he should be at Northolt main gate, the guardroom, no later than 07.30 hours. He had started to explain that the call had reached him at the mess of the Parachute Regiment, 2nd Battalion, which was – didn’t the man know? – in Colchester, a hell of hike from the other side of London that would mean a bloody awful early rising, but his destination was repeated and the time at which he was expected. Then the call was terminated. He had not taken offence, and was more than interested that Six wanted his knowledge first hand.

He thought of himself, at fifty-one, as a bit of a legend in the field. Joe Foulkes had been a policeman since the age of eighteen, and a surveillance expert for more than twenty-five years; he had a good command of one of the more impenetrable languages on the planet and had, therefore, many seams of information ready for mining and extraction. That day he had been back to his first love. He seldom used it for real, these days, but he kept his veteran gillie suit in the boot of his car and always brought it out when he gave lectures and supervised field exercises. He had worn it when he had lectured Recce Troop, and his audience of young soldiers had been rapt.