'She wants to stage her own death, so that they won't be alerted to what she's been doing over there. Stage her death and then go to ground somewhere for six months or so. We could continue using her material for ages if they are not alerted to what she's been doing.'

I followed the reasoning but the implications made my head swim. If Fiona was to be hidden away somewhere, would I be there with her? And what reason could Gloria be given for my sudden disappearance; telling her the whole truth would be out of the question. And what about the children?

Silas added, 'She's given us all sorts of wonderful stuff that we haven't used for fear of endangering her. Once she was safe we could really pull all the stops out.'

He might have said more but Mrs Porter came and set out tea for us. She had excelled herself today: homemade sausage rolls and a Kugelhopf; a sweet bread she'd learned to make after discovering that it brought back to Silas happy memories of times long ago.

'I can't eat all that, woman,' said Silas fiercely.

'Don't fuss! Mr Samson will eat it. It's a long drive; he must be hungry.'

Silas reached in his pocket for the keys that were on a ring at the end of a gold chain. He held one key up. 'You see this fellow, Mrs Porter? If anything should happen to me, you take this little item and you give it to Mr Samson. You phone him and tell him to come here, and you give it to him and to no one else. You understand that, don't you, Mrs Porter?'

In a carefree gesture, worthy of a boulevardier, he swung the keys round on the end of the chain before tucking them back into his pocket. Outside the chainsaw noise began again.

'I can't bear to think of such a thing, Mr Gaunt.'

'You'll do as I say now. I can depend upon you, can't I?'

'You know you can, sir.'

'That's good. Now toddle along. I don't want you weeping all over me.'

Mrs Porter arranged the cups and lifted the lid on the vacuum jug to show me it was filled with hot water. Silas grunted to indicate his impatience. She gave me a brave smile, sniffed and withdrew.

'I saw that fellow Dodo in Vienna,' I told Silas casually as I poured tea from the magnificent silver tea pot. There was a date engraved on it. Silas had been given it by his staff when he left Berlin.

'Ah, yes. We had to do something about him,' said Silas vaguely.

'So what happened?'

'They gave him an MBE or something and supplemented his pension.'

'They did what?'

'Don't get excited, Bernard. It was probably the best way of handling it. He was getting to be rather disgruntled and he knows too much for us to let him go around talking his head off. He got the stick and carrot routine.'

'He's a drunk.'

'He's settled down, Bernard. He knows what's good for him.'

'An MBE was the carrot?' Even a cynic like me was appalled.

'No citation, nothing like that. For services rendered to the intelligence community. All very vague. An MBE will disqualify his revelations. That award will make Moscow think we're pleased – that he is acting on our orders.' His compressed lips moved in what might have been a fleeting artful smile to celebrate the cunning of it. 'It doesn't cost anything, Bernard, and it's Fiona's safety we have to think about.'

'Yes.' How very English! When the peasants became troublesome, throw a title to them.

'Give me that big brown packet.' I took it from the table and passed it to him. From it he got a legal document: the curiously ornate sort of thing that – along with wigs and gowns, and the world's most autocratic trade union – English lawyers find indispensable to practising the law. It consisted of about forty pages of typed material bound together with green tape that passed through eyelet holes punched in each sheet.

'Here's a complete description of everything I know concerning Fiona's assignments. Names, dates and so on. It's all here.'

Thinking he was about to give it to me I held out my hand, but he ignored it. 'Have you got a pen that works?' He opened it to the back page and said, 'I want you to witness my signature. The solicitor johnny comes round tomorrow for me to sign and swear in his presence. I want you as a witness too. You don't mind I hope.'

'No,' I said. 'Of course not.'

He signed his name and then showed me where he wanted me to sign, pedantically insisting that my address was written in block capitals in the appropriate space. 'I want to make sure that it is legally valid,' he said. Where it said Occupation, I wrote civil servant. He inspected what I'd done, blew on the ink to help dry it and pronounced it satisfactory.

'Can I read it now?' I asked.

'No need for you to read it, Bernard. This is just for insurance purposes. I have every reason to hope I'll be alive and well when Fiona returns.'

'Of course.'

He heaved himself from his chair and went over to an antique military chest. Using a key on his key chain he locked the document away. He held up the key before putting it back in his pocket. 'Understand, Bernard?'

I nodded. 'She was recruited at Oxford was she?' I asked. " 'Let's rather say she was noticed there. It was a cousin of mine – a history professor – who recruited for us. He'd never put forward a female student before. Fiona was to speak at a debate and he suggested that we both went over there to hear her. I'll never forget that evening. She was supporting the motion that Einstein's theory of relativity was a hoax. I wish you'd heard her: it was an impressive performance, Bernard.'

'But Fiona doesn't know anything about mathematics,' I said.

'That's perfectly true, but not many of the audience did either. She was clever enough to exploit that. The other speakers bored everyone with rational argument. When it came to Fiona she was attractive and amusing. She made fun of her opponents and put together a loose but reasoned and coherent argument. She couldn't win of course, everyone knew that – but she demonstrated some fast thinking. She assembled a few well researched facts, a few half-truths and a lot of absolute bosh and cobbled together a convincing whole picture from it all.'

'I thought that's what everyone did at university.'

'You're not far wrong, Bernard. But in Fiona I saw someone who could keep her own mind crystal-clear and far removed from the material she was handling. That is the essence of the work we do, Bernard. Failure in the art of intelligence comes to those who cannot distinguish between what they know to be facts, and what they wish were true.'

'Or will not distinguish,' I said feelingly.

'Precisely. And your wife is a realist, Bernard. No flights of fancy for her, no romanticism, no wishful thinking.'

'No,' I said. 'None at all.'

'She was never recruited. I kept her to myself. It was the way things were done at that time. We all had our own agents: your dad, me, Lange, ran our own people by means of Central Funding's unregistered transfers. The sort of money you hounded Bret Rensselaer about not too long ago: remember?'

'Yes,' I said.

'When Sir Henry became Director-General I told him that Fiona was in deep cover. When she pressed for a chance at this big one I brought Bret in too. We decided to keep it to that. Her name was never written down.'

He relapsed into silence. I poured more tea for myself but he didn't touch his. Staring into the fire, he seemed to be lost in thoughts that he was reluctant to share. 'I miss your dad,' he said finally. 'Your father always had an answer for everything that came along. He hadn't had his brain pickled by bloody university lecturers. I don't think he ever sat an examination in his life.' Silas looked at me; I didn't respond. Silas said, 'Self-educated people such as your father – auto-didacts I hear them called nowadays – don't read in order to find accord with the answers predetermined by half-baked examining boards, they find an individual point of view.' He sat back in his chair. 'My word, Bernard, I've laughed to see your father demolish some of those young lads they sent us. He could quote from such diverse sources as to leave them gasping: Jung, Nietzsche, Suetonius, Saint Paul, Hitler, George Washington, statistics from Speer's confidential records, Schiller and Einstein. It was all at your father's command. I remember him explaining to a scholarly old SS general that his great hero Arminius – who valiantly defeated the Romans in a way that the Britons, Celts and the rest of them had failed to do – deprived Germany of the benefits of civilization, kept her in a state of barbaric chaos so that for centuries they didn't even use stone for building. "You Germans have a couple of centuries of civilization to catch up with," said your father patiently. It was difficult to know how much of it was to be taken seriously.' Silas chuckled. 'We had such good times together, your dad and I.' For a few moments Silas was his old self again, but then, as if coming to terms once more with the fact of my father's death, he relapsed into a solemn silence.