Like most pub conversations between two middle-aged fellows, that in the snug of the Salisbury began with old times and old campaigns, their connection going back to the days when as younger men they had sought to thwart the intentions of the Irish Republican Army in the Six Counties of Ulster, just work for Foxton but a cause close to his heart, blood and religion for Noel McKevitt.

That lasted through the consumption of one of their two pints of bitter; the second took them on to the situation and the prospects of war in Europe, which was where McKevitt wanted to be. ‘It’ll come, Barney – and, by Jesus, I hope we are ready for it – but not over anything I deal with in my area of responsibility and not for several years yet, if I have anything to do with things.’

‘Can’t be sure, though, can we?’

‘Let me tell you, it’s damn near official policy, man. Chamberlain knows what’s right, and I have that from the lips of a cabinet minister friend of mine.’

That was accepted; Barney Foxton did not ask who or how McKevitt came by such a high-level source, one he could refer to as a friend.

‘But that’s not to say there are not people trying to queer that pitch, I can tell you, and that’s where I need your help.’

Too long in the tooth to react, Foxton nodded, said nothing, sank his pint and accepted the offer of another, content to wait till McKevitt sat down again and got to the real reason for this meeting.

‘One of the telegrams that came in from Prague last night went to one of our own MI6 boys. I have to tell you I think the sod is up to something out there and he’s not telling me about it.’

‘Naughty.’

Foxton replied as required but was not surprised; he worked in an organisation that was similar in its fractures. The only thing troubling him was the flush on McKevitt’s cheeks, given he had always been an opaque fellow, famous for his cool head. Now he was positively animated.

‘It’s worse than that, Barney, it’s bloody dangerous! You’ve read the papers. It’s all very well for those lefty bastards to say we should stand up to the likes of Hitler. With what, I ask you, and if he wants to duff up his Yids and take bits of the middle of the Continent back, who are we to interfere, eh?’

‘I don’t like the bugger, Noel.’

‘D’ye think I do! He’s a loon, and I say that having seen the shite close up. Honest, he has eyes that would melt metal and is daft enough to start a fight in an empty room. So the last thing we would want to be doing is givin’ the bastard an excuse, which is what might just happen if some folk are not stopped from poking about where they are not wanted.’

Tempted to calm him down, Foxton instead posed the obvious question. ‘What is it you’re after, Noel?’

‘If the certain party I mention to you gets another telegram from Prague, I want to know what it says.’ Seeing Foxton swell up for a refusal, McKevitt was quick to keep talking. ‘It’s domestic, so I can’t ask for it, but you can.’

‘If your boss asks my boss—’

The interruption was swift. ‘That won’t happen.’

‘It needs a warrant.’

‘What if I were to tell you, Barney, that my boss might be part of the problem, might be working against our own government, what would you say to that, I ask you?’

‘Are you having me on?’

‘God, I wish I was, but the sod has set something up that makes me wonder and I can smell it has something to do with the Czechs who would be quite happy to see us bleed so they can hang on to their miserable little country.’

Just like the Orange Order, Foxton thought, but he kept that to himself. Not that he got much chance to air any thought – McKevitt, a man normally the picture of calm, was close to bursting with rage, no doubt brought on by the drink.

‘We wandered into the last lot, did we not, Barney, and do you think if we had known the cost we would have done so? Well we damn well know the cost now and it’s likely to be worse, what with bombers in the hundreds an’ all. There’s a crisis brewing and it could go either way if we’re not careful …’

‘You’re asking for a hell of a lot, Noel.’

‘And don’t I know it. I can kiss goodbye to my job and pension if this gets out, but I tell you what, to avoid seeing those Flanders fields soaked in blood again, I would do it.’

‘I’ll have to give it a bit of thought.’

‘Do that, Barney, do that, and rest assured, if you want anything from me in return, in the rules or out of them, sure you only have to ask.’

The first thing Barney Foxton did when he got back to his office, following on from a quick and very necessary visit to the Gents, was to tell the switchboard that if Noel McKevitt rang they were to say he was out. Not normally a man to talk to himself he did so when he put the phone back down.

‘You can blow your pension if you want, you Irish nutcase, but I’m not blowing mine.’

Sir Hugh Sinclair looked at the copy of Callum Jardine’s telegram from Prague as well as the reply and he compared them with that which had been given to him by Peter Lanchester. He had no need to decipher the original as long as the cryptic characters compared properly and they did.

Getting the information from MI5 had been relatively easy and had nothing to do with an exchange of favours. Sinclair had spent many years seeking to combine the two services but had been rebuffed time and again. For all that, his opposite number, Vernon Kell, the head of the domestic intelligence service, knew that he had not given up hope, just as he knew that such affairs and infighting tied everyone up in such a Gordian knot of bureaucratic nonsense as to be a nightmare.

So any request that seemed reasonable from Sinclair was met, and if Kell wondered at the secrecy surrounding the application for telegram transcripts, and the demand that it stay strictly between the two of them, that too was easy to accede to.

His secretary entered to advise him his car was waiting, with a frown that was intended to impart that keeping waiting a high-powered delegation from Paris, including the French PM and Foreign Minister, was very bad manners indeed, but he was less concerned than she.

They were with their political equivalents and that always went on too long; such people were too fond of the sound of their own voice to adhere to a timetable, quite apart from the fact that they seemed to derive some pleasure from keeping in suspense those people they referred to in private, or certainly thought of, as their minions.

Part of the visiting party included his counterpart in French Intelligence and he would share with that man the fact that he had an independent and covert operation going on in Czechoslovakia, one in which he was happy to communicate the results, albeit the French were well placed there themselves.

Naturally he would be expected to ask for something in return and he would, out of a curiosity prompted by what Peter Lanchester had told him on his return, request a record of the calls from abroad made to certain proto-fascist organisations in France; that such records existed he had no doubts.

The telegrams were locked in his desk drawer; his briefcase was waiting for him to take out, within it the latest digest of intelligence from the Central European Desk. Emerging to cross a sunlit pavement, Sir Hugh reflected that it was probably sunny all the way across the continent of Europe. Odd that what he was carrying hinted at dark and threatening clouds.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘I think the thing that set me up most was the sea journey back to the States.’

Corrie Littleton was talking about her convalescence in what had, so far, been a very pleasant dinner, during which she had, surprisingly, asked for wine; Cal remembered her as a strident teetotaller, but as a result of her serious wounds, she had turned to alcohol to ease down from a possible morphine addiction.