And finally this, the official memorandum that Charlie was fingering in his pocket on his way to the seventh floor. ‘The Director-General will see you at 14.00. Subject: Relocation.’ Ten words, if he included the numerals (and the worst of them all, ‘relocation’) ending the career of Charles Edward Muffin in the British intelligence community.

The only thing he couldn’t understand was being called before the Director-General himself. There were at least six deputies or division chiefs who could have performed the function, which in Charlie Muffin’s case roughly equated with shooting an old warhorse that had outlived its usefulness and needed putting out of its misery. Or someone in Personnel. It could even have been done by the newly appointed relocations officer, who might have been able to throw in the offer of a lavatory cleaner’s position or a school caretaker’s job.

Charlie’s feet began positively to ache the moment he emerged from the elevator on to the seventh floor of the new Thames-side building. Charlie Muffin’s feet invariably ached. Afflicted as they were by dropped arches and hammer toes, they were literally his Achilles heel, the weak point at which every bodily feeling or ill ultimately manifested itself. Sometimes they hurt because he walked too far or too long, a problem he’d largely overcome by rarely walking anywhere if there were alternative transport. Sometimes the discomfort came from his being generally tired. Sometimes, although again rarely, the problem was new shoes, a difficulty he handled by treating the comfortably beaten-into-submission Hush Puppies with the tweezer-tipped care Italian clerics show the Turin Shroud. And sometimes they twinged at moments of stress or tension or even suspected physical danger, the bodily focal point again for the inherent, self-defensive antenna which Charlie Muffin had tuned over the years to the sensitivity of a Star Wars early warning system. And of which Charlie always took careful heed.