'Luckily for you,' said Werner.

'Luckily for both of us,' I said. 'Because if they'd stuck to their story that Stinnes was a traitor, I'd now be on a plane to London handcuffed to an Internal Security man and you'd still be on the wrong side of Charlie. Okay, there are wounds, and there will be scars, but it's not game, set and match to Fiona. It's not game, set and match to anyone. It never is.'

Werner opened the door and, as the light inside the car came on, I saw his weary smile. He wasn't convinced.

About the author

Len Deighton was born in London in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin's School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. It was while working as a waiter in the evenings that he developed an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate and spectacular success. Since then he has published twenty books of fiction and non-fiction – including spy stories, and highly-researched war novels and histories – all of which have appeared to international acclaim.