You old fool, the landlord thought. Aloud he said, “I don’t suppose it occurred to you that you might have been burgled?”

The old man looked astonished. “I never thought of that.”

“Nobody’s missing any valuables?”

“Nobody’s said so to me.”

The landlord went to the door. “All right, I’ll have a look when I go down.”

The old man followed him out. “I don’t think the new bloke is in upstairs,” he said. “I haven’t heard a sound for a couple of days.”

The landlord was sniffing. “Has he been cooking in his room?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Riley.”

The two of them went up the stairs. The old man said, “He’s very quiet, if he is in there.”

“Whatever he’s cooking, he’ll have to stop. It smells bloody awful.”

The landlord knocked on the door. There was no answer. He opened it and went in, and the old man followed him.

“WELL, WELL, WELL,” the old sergeant said heartily. “I think you’ve got a dead one.” He stood in the doorway, surveying the room. “You touched anything, Paddy?”

“No,” the landlord replied. “And the name’s Mr. Riley.”

The policeman ignored this. “Not long dead, though. I’ve smelled worse.” His survey took in the old chest of drawers, the suitcase on the low table, the faded square of carpet, the dirty curtains on the dormer window and the rumpled bed in the corner. There were no signs of a struggle.

He went over to the bed. The young man’s face was peaceful, his hands clasped over his chest. “I’d say heart attack, if he wasn’t so young.” There was no empty sleeping-pill bottle to indicate suicide. He picked up the leather wallet on top of the chest and looked through its contents. There was an identity card and a ration book, and a fairly thick wad of notes. “Papers in order and he ain’t been robbed.”

“He’s only been here a week or so,” the landlord said. “I don’t know much about him at all. He came from North Wales to work in a factory.”

“Well,” the sergeant observed, “if he was as healthy as he looked he’d be in the Army.” He opened the suitcase on the table. “Bloody hell, what’s this lot?”

The landlord and the old man had edged their way into the room now. The landlord said, “It’s a radio” at the same time as the old man said, “He’s bleeding.”

“Don’t touch that body!” the sergeant said.

“He’s had a knife in the guts,” the old man persisted.

The sergeant gingerly lifted one of the dead hands from the chest to reveal a small trickle of dried blood. “He was bleeding,” he said. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

“Five doors down,” the landlord told him.

“Lock this room and stay out until I get back.”

The sergeant left the house and knocked at the door of the neighbor with the phone. A woman opened it. “Good morning, madam. May I use your telephone?”

“Come in.” She showed him the phone, on a stand in the hall. “What’s happened—anything exciting?”

“A tenant died in a lodging house just up the road,” he told her as he dialed.

“Murdered?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“I leave that to the experts. Hello? Superintendent Jones, please. This is Canter.” He looked at the woman. “Might I ask you just to pop in the kitchen while I talk to my governor?”

She went, disappointed.

“Hello, Super. This body’s got a knife wound and a suitcase radio.”

“What’s the address again, Sarge?”

Sergeant Canter told him.

“Yes, that’s the one they’ve been watching. This is an MI5 job, Sarge. Go to number 42 and tell the surveillance team there what you’ve found. I’ll get on to their chief. Off you go.”

Canter thanked the woman and crossed the road. He was quite thrilled; this was only his second murder in thirty-one years as a Metropolitan Policeman, and it turned out to involve espionage! He might make Inspector yet.

He knocked on the door of number 42. It opened and two men stood there.

Sergeant Canter said: “Are you the secret agents from MI5?”

BLOGGS ARRIVED at the same time as a Special Branch man, Detective-Inspector Harris, whom he had known in his Scotland Yard days. Canter showed them the body.

They stood still for a moment, looking at the peaceful young face with its blond moustache.

Harris said, “Who is he?”

“Codename Blondie,” Bloggs told him. “We think he came in by parachute a couple of weeks ago. We picked up a radio message to another agent arranging a rendezvous. We knew the code, so we were able to watch the rendezvous. We hoped Blondie would lead us to the resident agent, who would be a much more dangerous specimen.”

“So what happened here?”

“Damned if I know.”

Harris looked at the wound in the agent’s chest. “Stiletto?”

“Something like that. A very neat job. Under the ribs and straight up into the heart. Quick. Would you like to see the method of entry?”

He led them downstairs to the kitchen. They looked at the window-frame and the unbroken pane of glass lying on the lawn.

Canter said, “Also, the lock on the bedroom door had been picked.”

They sat down at the kitchen table, and Canter made tea. Bloggs said, “It happened the night after I lost him in Leicester Square. I fouled it all up.”

Harris said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

They drank their tea in silence for a while. Harris said, “How are things with you, anyway? You don’t drop in at the Yard.”

“Busy.”

“How’s Christine?”

“Killed in the bombing.”

Harris’s eyes widened. “You poor bastard.”

“You all right?”

“Lost my brother in North Africa. Did you ever meet Johnny?”

“No.”

“He was a lad. Drink? You’ve never seen anything like it. Spent so much on booze, he could never afford to get married—which is just as well, the way things turned out.”

“Most have lost somebody, I guess.”

“If you’re on your own, come round our place for dinner on Sunday.”

“Thanks, I work Sundays now.”

Harris nodded. “Well, whenever you feel like it.”

A detective-constable poked his head around the door and addressed Harris. “Can we start bagging-up the evidence, guv?”

Harris looked at Bloggs.

“I’ve finished,” Bloggs said.

“All right, son, carry on,” Harris told him.

Bloggs said, “Suppose he made contact after I lost him, and arranged for the resident agent to come here. The resident may have suspected a trap—that would explain why he came in through the window and picked the lock.”

“It makes him a devilish suspicious bastard,” Harris observed.

“That might be why we’ve never caught him. Anyway, he gets into Blondie’s room and wakes him up. Now he knows it isn’t a trap, right?”

“Right.”

“So why does he kill Blondie?”

“Maybe they quarreled.”

“There were no signs of a struggle.”

Harris frowned into his empty cup. “Perhaps he realized that Blondie was being watched and he was afraid we’d pick the boy up and make him spill the beans.”

Bloggs said, “That makes him a ruthless bastard.”

“That, too, might be why we’ve never caught him.”

“COME IN. SIT DOWN. I’ve just had a call from MI6. Canaris has been fired.”

Bloggs went in, sat down, and said, “Is that good news or bad?”

“Very bad,” said Godliman. “It’s happened at the worst possible moment.”

“Do I get told why?”

Godliman looked at him intently, then said, “I think you need to know. At this moment we have forty double agents broadcasting to Hamburg false information about Allied plans for the invasion of France.”

Bloggs whistled. “I didn’t know it was quite that big. I suppose the doubles say we’re going in at Cherbourg, but really it will be Calais, or vice versa.”

“Something like that. Apparently I don’t need to know the details. Anyway they haven’t told me. However, the whole thing is in danger. We knew Canaris; we knew we had him fooled; we felt we could have gone on fooling him. A new broom may mistrust his predecessor’s agents. There’s more—we’ve had some defections from the other side, people who could have betrayed the Abwehr’s people over here if they hadn’t been betrayed already. It’s another reason for the Germans to begin to suspect our doubles.