Frank Harrington looked round the table and said, 'It would be worth a lot to them to have Bernard there asking for political asylum. I think we have to take into account the way that Bernard has stayed here and faced the music.' Until that moment I'd wondered if Frank's offer to let me run off to Checkpoint Charlie had been in response to some directive from London. But now I decided that Frank had done it on his own. I was more than ever grateful to him. And if Frank seemed lukewarm in his contribution to this meeting that might be because he could offer more support to me behind the scenes if he showed no partisanship.

To me Bret said, That's your considered opinion, is it; that all this evidence against you is part of a Moscow plan to have you running over there?' He paused, but no one said anything. Sarcastically Bret added, 'Or could it just be your paranoia?'

'I'm not paranoid, Bret,' I said. 'I'm being persecuted.'

Bret exploded with indignation. 'Persecuted? Let me tell you – '

Frank put a hand on Bret's arm to calm him. 'It's a joke, Bret,' he said. 'It's an old joke.'

'Oh, I see. Yes,' said Bret. He was embarrassed at losing self-control if only for a moment. 'Well, it's hard to imagine KGB Operations cooking that one up.'

I said, 'I could tell you some even more stupid ideas that we've followed through.'

Bret didn't invite me to tell him any of the stupid ideas. He said, 'But what you describe would be a change of style, wouldn't it? The sort of thing someone new might dream up, to show what a genius they were.' Everyone round the table knew what he meant but when he remembered there were no notes or recordings he said it anyway. 'Someone like your wife?'

'Yes. Fiona. She could have had a hand in something like that.'

'She makes you run. She gets you and gets your kids. Ummm,' said Bret. He had a gold ball-point pen in his fist, and he clicked the top two or three times to show us he was thinking. 'Would Fiona think you could be stampeded that way? She knows you well. Why would she guess wrong? Is she wrong?'

'Hold it, Bret,' I said. 'Just four beats to the bar.'

Bret said, 'Because we still have another unreported incident.' He looked at Tiptree.

Tiptree continued right on cue. Maybe it hadn't been rehearsed but this interview had obviously been discussed in detail. Tiptree looked at me and said, 'A black woman asked for a lift in your car and you took her to London Airport. There you both had a brief exchange of words with a second woman.'

I looked at Tiptree and then at Bret. I was shaken. They'd caught me off-guard with that one. And bringing it up so late was a part of the effect it had. 'That was nothing to do with the department.'

'Well, I say it was to do with the department,' said Bret.

'We're all allowed a private life, Bret,' I reminded him. 'Or are we starting a new game? We all come in on Monday mornings and discuss each other's private lives as revealed by the surveillance teams. Do you want to start right away?' Bret, who wasn't above taking some of the more shapely secretaries to his riverside mansion for a cosy weekend, was not keen to get into an exchange of confidences.

To take the pressure off Bret, Henry Tiptree said, 'By that time we were checking your journeys between home and the office. You were under suspicion from the time you returned, Bernard. Surely you must have guessed that.'

'No, I didn't. At least, I didn't think you were sending Internal Security teams to follow me home.'

'So who was she?' said Tiptree.

'It was a neighbour. She has a friend who works at the airport and I was going to employ her to look after the children. She's a qualified nurse who wanted to earn some extra money on her days off. But, the way things are now, I have to have someone full-time.'

It was a hasty improvisation and I was by no means sure that Tiptree believed me. Tiptree looked at me for a long time and I stared back at him in mutual antipathy. 'Well, we'll leave that for the time being,' he said, as if making a concession to me. I wondered if he too had been trying to trace the black girl with rather less luck than poor old MacKenzie. 'Let's move on to MacKenzie,' said Tiptree, as if reading my thoughts. 'Tell me what he was doing for you at the time of his death.'

Was it a trick? 'I don't know the time of his death,' I said. 'I just know what the doctor estimated it might have been.'

Tiptree smiled grimly. 'If you don't know the time of his death,' he said, carefully inserting that proviso as if not believing it, 'tell me about MacKenzie. You gave him quite a few errands. From what I hear of you, it's not like you to use a probationer. You're the one who's always complaining about the lack of experience around here. You're the one who won't tolerate amateurism. Why MacKenzie, then?'

I kept as near to the truth as possible. 'He wanted to be a field agent,' I told them. 'He really wanted that.' They nodded. We'd all seen lots of probationers who wanted to be field agents, even though the various selection boards tried to screen out anyone with that perverted ambition. Soon even the most headstrong such probationer came to realize that his chances of being sent off to operate as a field agent were very slim. Field agents were seldom chosen from recruited staff. Field agents didn't get sent anywhere. Field agents were there already.

'You used him a lot,' said Tiptree.

I said, 'He would always find time to help. He'd type reports when all the bloody typing pool had refused to work overtime. He'd stand in the rain all night and never ask questions about the premises he'd watched. He'd go into municipal offices and spend hours rummaging through boxes of old birth certificates or ratings slips or voters' lists. And because he was a particularly rude and badly dressed probationer, and spoke ungrammatical English with a regional accent, he had no trouble convincing anyone that he was a reporter on one of our great national newspapers. That's why I used him.'

Morgan, a man with a Welsh accent who had briefly tried his hand at being a reporter for one of our great national newspapers, allowed a ghost of a smile to haunt his face.

'That hardly explains what he was doing in a departmental safe house in Bosham,' said Tip tree.

'Oh, we all know what he was doing there,' I said. 'He was lying there dead. He was lying there dead for seven days before anyone from that highly paid housekeeping department of ours bothered to check the premises.'

'Yes, those bastards,' said Bret. 'Well, I shafted those lazy sons of bitches. We won't have that trouble any more.'

'That will be very comforting for me next time I walk into a safe house and sit down in a chair so that some KGB hood can put a.44 Magnum into my cranium.'

'How do you know what kind of pistol it was,' said Henry Tiptree as casually as he was able.

'I don't know what kind of pistol it was, Mr Tiptree,' I said. 'I just know what kind of bullet it was; a hollow-point one that mushrooms even when the muzzle velocity is high, so it blows people apart even when it's not well aimed. And, before you ask me the supplementary question that I can see forming on your lips right now, I got that out of the ballistics sheet that was part of the file on MacKenzie's death. Maybe that's something you should read, since you are so keen to find the culprit.'

'No one is blaming you for MacKenzie's death,' said Frank gently.

'Just for Biedermann's,' I said. 'Well, that's nice to know.'

'You don't have to stand up and sing 'Rule Britannia',' said Bret. 'There's been no suggestion of opening an orange file on you. We're simply trying to get at the truth. You should be more keen than anyone that we do that.'

'Then try this one on for size,' I said. 'Suppose everything is the way I say it is – and so far you've produced nothing to prove I'm wrong – and suppose my slow way of enrolling Stinnes is the best way. Then perhaps there are people in the department who'd like to see my attempt to enrol Stinnes fail.' I paused to let the words sink in. 'Suppose those people hope that, by hurrying me along and interfering with what I do, they'll keep Stinnes where he is on the other side.'