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getting greyer and lower every moment, and as we entered the Kaartingrilli Café small businesslike flakes began to fall.
    The Kaartingrilli is a long narrow place full of heated air that smells of coffee. Half of the wall space is painted black and the other half is picture windows. The décor is all natural wood and copper and the place was crowded with young people shouting, flirting and drinking Coca-Cola.
    We sat down in the farthest corner staring out across a crowded car-park where every car was white with snow. With her heavy coat off the girlwas much younger than I thought. Helsinki teems with fresh-faced girls born when the soldiers returned home. Nineteen forty-five was a boom year for gorgeous Finns. I wondered whether this girl was one of them.
    ‘I am Liam Dempsey, a citizen of Eire,’ I said. ‘I have been gathering material for Professor Kaarna in connexion with a transfer of funds between London and Helsinki. I live in London most of the year.’ She presented her hand across the table and I shook it. She said, ‘My name is Signe Laine. I am a Finn. You work for Professor Kaarna, then we shall get along swell because Professor Kaarna works for me.’
    ‘For you,’ I said without making it a question.
    ‘Not for me personally,’ she smiled at the thought. ‘For the organization that employs me.’
    She held her hands as though she’d seen too many copies of Vogue, picking up one hand with the other and holding it against her face and nursing it as if it was a sick canary.
    ‘What organization is that?’ I asked. The waitress came to our table. Signe ordered in Finnish without consulting me.
    ‘All in good time,’ she said. Outside in the carpark the wind was carrying the snow in horizontal streaks and a man in a woollen hat with a bobble on it was struggling along with a car battery, leaning into the wind and trying not to slip on the hard, shiny, grey ice.
    Lunch was open cold-beef sandwiches, soup, cream cake, coffee and a glass of cold milk, whichis practically the national drink. Signe bit into it all like a buzz saw. Now and again she asked me questions about where I was born and how much I earned and whether I was married. She put the questions in the off-hand preoccupied way that women have when they are very interested in the answers.
    ‘Where are you staying?—You’re not eating your cream cake.’
    ‘I’m not staying anywhere and I’m not allowed cream cake.’
    ‘It’s good,’ she said. She dipped her little finger into the chocolate cream and held it to my lips. She put her head on one side so that her long golden hair fell across her face. I licked the cream from her finger-tip.
    ‘Did you like that?’
    ‘Very much.’
    ‘Then eat it.’
    ‘With a spoon it’s not the same.’
    She smiled and looped a long strand of hair around her fingers, then asked me a lot of questions about where I was going to stay. She said that she would like to take the documents intended for Kaarna. I refused to part with them. Finally we agreed that I would bring the documents to a meeting the next day and that meanwhile I wouldn’t re-contact Kaarna. She gave me five one-hundred-mark notes—over fifty-five pounds sterling—for immediate expenses, then we got down to serious conversation.
    ‘Do you realize,’ she said, ‘that if the material you are carrying got into the wrong hands it could do a great deal of harm to your country?’ Signe didn’t fully understand the distinction between Eire and the United Kingdom.
    ‘Really?’ I said.
    ‘I take it…’ she pretended to be very occupied with the lock on her briefcase, ‘…that you wouldn’t want to harm your own country.’
    ‘Certainly not,’ I said anxiously.
    She looked up and gave me a sincere look. ‘We need you,’ she said. ‘We need you to work for us.’
    I nodded. ‘Who exactly is “us”?’
    ‘British Military Intelligence,’ said Signe. She wound a great skein of golden hair around her fingers and secured