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away, Charlie Muffin stared down at the summons that had finally arrived from the deputy Director-General and hoped exactly the same thing.

Four
    Patricia Elder’s suite came off the second arm of the new triangular ninth-floor layout at the centre of which reigned the starchily formal Julia Robb.
    But the deputy Director’s room had none of the sterility of Miller’s. There were two flower arrangements, one on a small, elaborately carved cabinet of a sort that Charlie had never seen before in a government office. There was a display of art deco figures on the same cabinet and on a mantelpiece in the centre of which was a gold filigree and ormolu clock. There were screening curtains of festooned lace at the window, which had a partial view of the Big Ben clock and the crenellated roofing of the Parliament buildings. The deputy Director sat in front of the window, at a proper wooden and leather desk, not something fashioned from metal and plastic which looked as if it had popped out of a middle-price Christmas cracker. The only similarity Charlie could find with Miller’s quarters was the complete absence of any personal photographs. There would have hardly been room on the desk anyway: there were two red box containers and a string-secured manila folder Charlie recognized from the three – or was it four? – disciplinary hearings he’d endured over the years.
    The woman’s suit was as formal as that of their initial meeting: today’s was grey, high-collared and as figure-concealing as before. Charlie automatically checked her left hand: there was still no wedding ring.
    She studied him just as intently with her black-brown eyes, and at once Charlie felt like a schoolboy called to explain his hand up a knicker leg behind the bicycle sheds.
    Patricia breathed heavily, before she spoke: the sigh, dismissive, remained in her voice. ‘So now we come to talk about Charles Edward Muffin …’
    Charlie easily remembered the last two occasions he’d been addressed with such formality: both times at the Central Criminal Court at London’s Old Bailey. The first a set-up prosecution and an escape-intended imprisonment, all to create a phoney defection to the then Soviet Union: the unsuspected beginning of so many things. The initial encounter – his debriefing – with Natalia that had led to a love neither of them had foreseen and which he, ultimately, had ruined by not going to her in London. The operation – the purpose of which he’d never known until he’d innovated his own special self-protection – to discredit Alexei Berenkov. Which had nevertheless partially succeeded and led to Berenkov’s close-run retribution, involving a manipulated Natalia again. The second court appearance had been phoney too, like the announced ten year sentence, to convince the Russians his entrapment had succeeded in part. It should have protected Natalia, as well. There was no way of knowing if it had. Double disaster. Double abandonment. Belated double despair. So many things … Charlie stopped the nostalgia, forcing himself to concentrate, although the recollection of the trial stayed with him. ‘That sounds very official: should I stand to receive my sentence?’
    There was no facial relaxation. She patted the box files and said: ‘There’s enough to merit a sentence.’
    ‘A man is always presumed innocent until proven guilty by the weight of evidence. I was always innocent!’ said Charlie, brightly, trying to build bridges between himself and his new Controller.
    ‘There are parts that are impressive,’ she said. ‘But the bad outweighs the good: Charlie Muffin, forever making up his own rules but to whom no rules ever need apply.’ She paused. ‘Right?’
    ‘I’ve never failed, when it mattered,’ Charlie fought back. ‘When operations went wrong, it’s because they would have gone wrong anyway: they were impractical or incorrectly planned. Or I needed to innovate to survive, not having been properly briefed.’