.

there if this private eye that I had with me hadn’t mentioned a Chinese. It was a long shot, but I took it, and it paid off. Murray, passing Dalby’s study, heard the detectors buzzing and switched them off before coming to find me. After Murray found me in the garden he was worried that I would spoil the whole thing by precipitate action.’

      ‘How could he think that?’ asked Jean.

      ‘That’s what I thought, but anyway, he knew I had little to lose, so he phoned Ross.’

      ‘After he came conscious?’ said Jean.

      ‘After he came conscious.’

      ‘Murray is exclusively Ross’s man?’

      ‘Not normally, but for the IPCRESS business he was. After talking to Ross he turned around, went back into the house and arrested Dalby. The Chinese man …’

      ‘Who really is Lithuanian, dear,’ said Jean.

      ‘So I hear,’ I said. ‘That was what Murray just phoned in about. He picked him up near Liphook. I don’t know the story.’

      ‘Ross must have acted quickly after Murray phoned.’

      ‘Well, he certainly did, but don’t forget that he’d had the Home Secretary prepared for days. They knew it would come suddenly when it came.’

      ‘Why did Jay give up so easily when Ross arrived?’ Jean asked. ‘It’s not like him, somehow.’

      ‘I’m not sure about that. Either because he thought Dalby would pull him out of the fire, in spite of the struggle for power that was obviously going on between them.’

      ‘Or?’ said Jean.

      ‘Or it’s something to do with the phone call from someone named Henry. Time will tell.’

      ‘More questions,’ said Jean.

      ‘Very well,’ I said.

      ‘Why did Jay let you find Raven in that club the day you were nearly arrested?’

      ‘Simple. Jay and Dalby had the “thought reform” going well by then, but they needed a neat punctuation mark to account for the series of kidnappings. If they could find a scapegoat, there the matter would end, and they could happily go forward with their new plan.’

      ‘Until they quarrelled.’

      ‘Perhaps, but they might not have quarrelled. Anyway, Dalby and Jay set me up to be found alongside Raven, with a hypodermic in my pocket, police raid and all.’

      ‘But,’ said Jean.

      ‘But instead of waiting a few more minutes, when I would have been organized into the gaming room, I got impatient …’

      ‘Extraordinary,’ said Jean. ‘So out of character. The man from US Naval Intelligence was only trying to help, then?’

      ‘I’m afraid so,’ I said.

      ‘We must get back,’ said Jean, ‘or Alice will grumble.’

      ‘The devil with Alice,’ I said. ‘I’m the boss, aren’t I?’

      ‘Not when Alice gives the orders,’ Jean said.

      ‘You know, there’s something different about that office lately,’ I said, and we both returned to it, although I was still thinking about the ear-ring.

       32

      [Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) By the week-end you will be free to follow new interests. Unexpected action brings happiness to all.]

      Back at the office the cables were beginning to flood in from Washington and Calcutta and Hong Kong. Alice was coping very well, and only a few required a decision from me. Murray flew up to a little country town near Grantham and brought Chico back in an army helicopter. He looked very ill when I saw him at the Millbank Military Hospital. Ross put a couple of men on a twenty-four-hour watch at Chico’s bedside, but they got nothing from him, except that he’d seen a friend of his cousin in the piece of film he’d seen at the WO. Instead of telling Ross, he went to visit the man. Needless to say he was in the IPCRESS network, and Chico was at Millbank, and his friend in Ross’s bag.

      Painter, the thin-faced tall fellow who’d been with us on the Lebanon job, turned out to be a psychiatrist of some standing who had brought our captive Raven, who was half-way ‘brainwashed’, back to something approaching normalcy. I gave him a room with Carswell on the top floor at Charlotte Street. If we couldn’t break Jay down everything would depend on those two.

      By Thursday I was able to take a full night’s sleep. Until then I’d kept going mainly on coffee and cigarettes and an aspirin sandwich, but Thursday I took some sleeping pills Painter gave me and didn’t wake until midday. I swore off coffee for a couple of days and stepped into a cold shower. I put on Irish tweed with Veldtshoen, cotton shirt, and wool tie. At three o’clock I was summoned to the presence of an exalted military personage at the WO.

      I was a minute or so late and Ross and Alice were both there before me. Ross was in a very stiff new uniform with crown and pip on the shoulder. His Sam Browne was as shiny as the doorman’s head and he had his bright red OBE with the Military Stripe and the India General Service and the George VI Coronation, to say nothing of a ’39–’43 Star and a Western Desert ribbon. I began to wish I’d worn the pullover with the Defence Medal sewn on it.

      The EMP shook hands rather grandly and referred to me as ‘the hero of the hour’. I celebrated by helping myself to a cigar and pretended to have no matches in order to have the EMP light it for me. He thanked me and Ross and Alice, but I knew there was more to it than that. When he began the sales talk with, ‘Mr Ross is most anxious that you should hear this from me …’ I knew what it was. Ross had finally taken over Charlotte Street. What timing! No one could challenge Ross’s competence after this IPCRESS fiasco. I heard him going on about Ross going up to ‘half-colonel’ and ‘seniority’. On the walls were photos of the EMP standing with Churchill, seated with Eisenhower, receiving a medal, sitting on a horse, and reviewing an armoured brigade while standing in a jeep. There were no photos of him as an inexperienced subaltern with his foot jammed in a drainage pipe. Perhaps people like him are born as brigadiers.

      But now the conversation was taking a different turn. Ross, it seemed, wasn’t taking over Charlotte Street. The purpose of my visit was an explanation to me!

      As I sorted it out afterwards, it all began because Ross wanted to be quite sure that I wasn’t working for the Jay and Dalby set-up. So he asked if he could offer me the Al Gumhuria work. They calculated that if I was channelling stuff out through Jay I’d jump at it. I hadn’t. I had told Ross to keep it. From that moment ‘my future was assured’ as the old army saying has it. Now Ross wanted me to be quite clear about his hands being clean, so he had the top brass tell me in person.

      The Exalted Military Personage was very keen to hear how I got out of the Wood Green house, and at one stage said, ‘Good show!’ again, and after that, something that I still consider rather foolish for a man of his experience. He said, ‘And now is there anything I can tell you?’

      I told him that I had overseas and detachment pay outstanding for nearly eighteen months. He was a little shattered, and Ross didn’t know where to put his face for embarrassment. But the EMP adopted an ‘all boys together’ attitude, and promised to action it for me if I let his ADC have details in writing. Ross had the door open, and Alice was about to go through it when I leaned across the vast highly polished desk and said, ‘When do you arrest Henry?’ Ross closed the door and came back to the desk. The EMP came around it. They both looked at me as though I wasn’t using Amplex.

      At last the EMP spoke; his brown wrinkled face was close to mine. He said, ‘I should be furious with you. You’re implying a reluctance on my part to pursue the Queen’s enemies.’

      I