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matter of fact, I wasn’t.”
    “Oh. Why?”
    “I remembered what your daughter told me. That you used to crawl up alongside a hedge running from the railway line to the private cricket ground at the big house. I went along and had a look. You couldn’t crawl up along the hedge now. It’s too overgrown. But there is a place at the top – it’s hidden by the hedge, and I scratched myself damnably getting into it – where two bars are bent apart. A boy could have got through them easily.”
    “You’re very thorough,” said the colonel. “Is there anything you haven’t found out about me?”
    “I would be interested to know exactly when you started betraying your country. And why. Did you mean to do it all along and falling in with Hessel and killing him gave you an opportunity – the wireless and the codes and the call signs—?”
    “I can clearly see,” said the colonel, “that you have never been blown up. Really blown to pieces, I mean. If you had been, you’d know that it’s quite impossible to predict what sort of man will come down again. You can be turned inside out, or upside down. You can be born again. Things you didn’t know were inside you can be shaken to the top.”
    “Saul becoming Paul, on the road to Damascus.”
    “You are an intelligent man,” said the colonel. “It’s a pleasure to talk to you. The analogy had not occurred to me, but it is perfectly apt. My father was a great man for disciplining youth, for regimentation, and the New Order. Because he was my father, I rebelled against it. That’s natural enough. Because I rebelled against it, I fought for the Russians against the Germans in Spain. I saw how those young Nazis behaved. It was simply a rehearsal for them, you know. A rehearsal for the struggle they had dedicated their lives to. A knightly vigil, if you like. I saw them fight, and I saw them die. Any that were captured were usually tortured. I tortured them myself. If you torture a man and fail to break him, it becomes like a love affair. Did you know that?”
    “I, too, have read the work of the Marquis de Sade,” said Mr. Behrens. “Go on.”
    “When I lay in hospital in the darkness with my eyes bandaged, my hands strapped to my sides, corning slowly back to life, I had the strangest feeling. I was Hessel; I was the man I had left lying in the darkness at the bottom of the pit. I had closed his eyes and folded his hands, and now I was him. His work was my work. Where he had left it off, I would take it up. My father had been right and Hitler had been right and I had been wrong. And now I had been shown a way to repair the mistakes and follies of my former life. Does that sound mad to you?”
    “Quite mad,” said Mr. Behrens, “but I find it easier to believe than the rival theory – that the accident of having a new face enabled you to fool everyone for twenty-five years. You may have had no family, but there were school friends and Army friends and neighbors. But I interrupt you. When you got out of hospital and decided to carry on Hessel’s work, I suppose you used his wireless set and his codes?”
    “Until the end of the war, yes. Then I destroyed them. When I was forced to work for the Russians I began to use other methods. I’m afraid I can’t discuss them, even with you. They involve too many other people.”
    In spite of the peril of his position, Mr. Behrens could not suppress a feeling of deep satisfaction. Not many of his plans had worked out so exactly. Colonel Bessendine was not a man given to confidences. A mixture of carefully devised forces was now driving him to talk. The time and the place; the fact that Mr. Behrens had established a certain intellectual supremacy over him; the fact that he must have been unable, for so many years, to speak freely to anyone; the fact that silence was no longer important, since he had made up his mind to liquidate his audience. On this last point Mr. Behrens was under no illusions. Colonel Bessendine was