Behind him, she asked: "Are you going back to England?"

"Yes."

She paused. "The glass didn't get broken. It was borrowed, somebody wanted to make a copy of it, just like the people from the magazine had done. He didn't give it back. "

"Hecame back. Gu-Rainer Schickert. He came back. "

"Yes." She put the empty cup on the bar. "I was a fool to lend it him, he said it was the only picture of her at that time. He didn't even have one from the wedding. He said he was in shipping, I think, in Hamburg, but I couldn't find him in the directory."

"It was really him?"

"He looked different, but it was him. He knew everything; you can't be wrong about that. It takes only a few words. He came early one morning, before anybody else who might know him – I don't know why. But if you see him, you might mention the picture. He did promise."

"Oh yes, it can be done," Captain Apgood said. "Happens all the time. If you know the right people, or you've got the right money, any East German can get a doctor's chit saying he needs a couple of weeks at some West German spa. It's one of the accepted perks of office, over there. Of course, they want to be sure you'll come back. You've got to own property or leave your wife and family behind. Does your chap fit into that category?"

"I think he would." Nine years back Gustav- soundly remarried, sister's defection forgotten, back in political favour but not yet important enough to make a trip West into an Event – would fit perfectly. And he could be using his SSD connection to tip him off to any mention of wartime Dorn-hausen. Any magazine written for the Allied forces would be on the SSD's reading list.

So Gustavhad come back.

"I can get somebody to check around the hotels in Bad Schwarzendorn," Apgood offered. "They've probably still got their old records. What name would your man be using?"

"I wouldn't know… You wouldn't have any idea when the Gutersloh flight goes?"

"Ah, you've missed that already."

At the start of the holiday season, commercial flights and even train/ferry tickets were difficult to come by, or so Maxim told George on the phone. He would spend another night with the Army and be on the next trooping flight for certain sure, honour bright, cross his heart.

"Stay there a couple of days," George said, surprisingly. "Enjoy yourself. Talk about Pay And Emoluments, discuss SA8o and PJRAD and why the Headmaster always chooses such clunks as defence advisers. As long as that so-and-so Simshas got what he wants, there's no rush. I don't think you've heard about Rotherhithe?" He told about Sims's unit being involved in the shooting, and Maxim saw why he was being offered a short exile in Germany. George feared he might want to have words with Mr Sims. And George, Maxim reflected, could be right.

"How's the Prime Minister?"

"Birds of a feather, mostly carrion coloured, are flocking to his bedside." George sounded suddenly tired. "His chest doesn't appear to be good. I think he'll resign next week and then God help us all. But I don't want him going out in a cloud of cow-shit."

"All right, I promise I'll stay in Germany. "

"Ididn't mean that… I don't think I did, anyway. Just make sure we know where you are. "

"If he goes, will you stay on at Number 10?"

But George had already rung off.

The summer days were too long. While the light lasted she couldn't really feel sleepy, so she sat by the window and watched the slow shadows pooling in the valley. Lights glowed on in other houses down there, but she just waited, soaking in the darkness as if it were drowsiness itself. Soon it would be time for the last of the yellow pills, then the sleeping pills and then perhaps two hours of total oblivion, sleep without pain, before the terrible long process of waking, remembering and hurting all over again.

For the moment, there was the brandy which she was trying to make last until the weekend, and little nibbles of cheese or chocolate and of course the flask of soup. Like most touring musicians she had learned to take a flask of soup to a recital, since wheedling even a plate of sandwiches out of a provincial hotel at ten or eleven at night was a virtuoso performance in itself. Now she clung to the habit as one last reminder of having been Mina Linnarz.

A little crowd of people spilled out of the chapel down the street, swirled gently for a moment in final conversation and then drifted away in twos and threes. It couldn't have been a film show, they would have asked her to that, but they didn'tseem to have them any more. Probably everybody in the village had television by now. Most likely it had just been some committee meeting to organise or object to something. They'd tried to get her involved in that sortofthing, but she was past trying to reform the world. No, she'd never really cared enough; that sortofthingshe always left to Gustav.

But she liked the villagers, with their slow speech and equal slowness to interfere. They were farmers, like her mother's people in the Harzmountains. They knew about frost and hailstorms, and crippled hands too; these things happened. There was no peace, but there at least there was silence, silence that she would never find in a city. She had been a fool to go to London, even to see Leni…

She took the pills with the last of the soup, saving the final half-inch of brandy in her glass for when she was in bed. Now the drowsiness was real, the pain dulled to another brief defeat. This was the best time of the day and she stood up slowly, luxuriating in the silence within her own body. At first, she barely heard the tap on the front door.

Oh dear Lord, not somebody come to say little Rosemary won't be at her piano lesson because… it could wait until tomorrow. What did they think she'd do if little Rosemary simply didn't arrive? Perhaps make the greatest-ever recording of the Romance in FSharp? Or merely dash down and give a sell-out Wigmore Hall recital? Or maybe drink a little more brandy, a little earlier than usual.

When she opened the door she didn't know them, but she knew what they were. For thirty years they had been visiting her in nightmares; at last they had come when she was awake.

"Get Major Maxim back from Osnabrück,"George told the Number10switchboard.

Chapter 24

Although it was the middle of a normal working day, the corridors of the Foreign Office seemed almost deserted, and Miss Milward's high-heeled footsteps echoed between the cracked mosaic floors and the high arched ceilings. The walls were lined with central heating pipes, pneumatic message tubes, drooping power cables and clumps of odd-lot filing cabinets and cupboards secured, if that was the word, by an extraordinary variety of padlocks. Everything had a dusty look, although that was probably the faded colours and the lighting.

"You haven't been in here before, have you?" she asked. "First they plan to tart it all up and then they say No, we're having a whole new office built, so they scrap the paint job, and then they find there isn't any money for the new office anyway… and so it goes. They keep the one corner up to snuff to impress visiting Arabs… Scottie's using the Foreign See's room. He's up in Scotland consulting the PM… It's just up here…"

After two flights of stairs and a near-miss with an old lady pushing a trolley of file boxes, the fresh paint suddenly appeared and they were in Arab territory.

Nobody actually explained why Scott-Scobie was colonising Lord Purslane's room, since his own could hardly have been insecure, although it might have been too secret for a mere major. Looking back, Maxim decided it was probably a move to impress him, which the room did. High ceilinged, it was built on a corner overlooking both the Horse Guards and St James's Park, and furnished like the Committee Room of a well-off but moderately progressive London club. The walls were papered in dark green and gold, with a tall cabinet ofbound Hansards; the furniture was made of rich wood and red leather and – except for the leather-topped desk – not too antique; the quiet pinky-blue shade of the thick carpet could have been taken directly from the faces of the hunting aristocracy. In the evening, lit only in patches over the pictures on the walls and from the desk lamps in their green glass shades, it would have been a place for considered opinions and memorable phrases; at midday it was still impressive but dominated by the familiar babble of a television set by the empty fireplace.