Williams, who was a fat but extremely neat man, was at the far end of the half circle. His neighbour was as contrastingly thin as Williams was fat, a stick-figured man with a beak-nosed face chiselled like the prow of an Arctic ice-breaker, bisected by heavy-framed spectacles. At the opposite end, seemingly more interested in the river traffic than in Charlie’s tentative entry, lounged a bow-tied, alopeciadomed man who compensated for his baldness by cultivating a droop-ending bush of a moustache. The man next to him was utterly nondescript, dark-haired and dark-suited and with the white, civil service regulated shirt, except for blood-pressured apple-red cheeks so bright he could have been wearing clown’s make-up.

Rupert Dean sat in the middle of the group. His appointment had, more than any other, marked the change in the role of British intelligence. For the first time in over a decade a Director-General had not entered the service either through its ranks or along diplomatic or Foreign Office routes. Until three years earlier, he had been the Professor of Modern and Political History at Oxford’s Balliol College from which, through numerous newspaper and magazine articles and three internationally acclaimed books, he had become acknowledged as the foremost sociopolitical authority in Europe.

Dean was a small man whose hair retreated in an upright wall from his forehead, as if in alarm. He, too, had glasses but he wasn’t wearing them. Instead, he was shifting the arms through his fingers, like prayer beads. At both seminars he’d appeared conservatively and unremarkably dressed – the same grey suit and unrecognized tie on both occasions – but now Charlie decided the man had been trying for an expected appearance, like Charlie would have tried if he’d had longer warning about this interview by getting the stain off his lapel and wearing an unmarked tie and fresh shirt.