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papers, clothing, and so on. When he’s done with you you’ll be passed on to armament supply.”

    A few minutes later Latymer accompanied Shaw down to the entrance hall. Pinkly beaming, he took Shaw’s arm and spoke loudly and within easy hearing of the messengers:
    “You mustn’t worry unduly, my dear fellow . . . people are always leaving things in taxis, and all that was in it—or did I tell you—was a report of some tiresome committee on the supply of toothpaste through the Naffy canteens . . . so wearisome,” he fussed, “and such a waste of time really, but there you are, that’s just one of the things sent to try us, don’t you know . . . good -bye, my dear fellow. Better remember not to be careless again—it could be important another time.”
    Shaw had an amused glint in his eye, but he said smoothly, “I assure you it won’t happen again, Mr Latymer, and I’m sorry you’ve been troubled.”
    Mr Latymer trotted away, pompously demanding the attentions of a messenger for some triviality, and Shaw walked out of the building, passed under Admiralty Arch into Whitehall, felt the seeping drip of rain, and decided to go back to the flat by Underground. Taxis were an easily acquired habit, and too many of them rolling up at the unpretentious flat in West Kensington might be remarked upon; and it was a principle of the outfit that its operatives, who were in fact paid lavishly enough, shouldn’t make a splash —not that Shaw would want to do that—but should live as befitted ordinary officers of their rank doomed to an Admiralty appointment; so Shaw, who believed that easily acquired habits were lost only with difficulty, made a habit of economy in things like that.
    As he was herded down the steps below Trafalgar Square he found himself hoping that Debonnair wouldn’t get delayed in Paris. He had to see her before he left, and her movements were always a little uncertain when she went away on these business trips. His job was always liable to be dangerous . . . his nerves were playing him up again now, and he felt desperately that he couldn’t go away again without getting things sorted out with Debonnair—just in case he didn’t come back.
    In the Tube, swaying westward after he had changed on to the Piccadilly Line, it came to him how you couldn’t trust anybody in this game. Look at them, he thought, sitting there under the adverts for wool, toothpaste, building societies, and London Transport, or standing up against the half-bulkheads . . . bored, indifferent, glazed eyes staring into nothing, blank and wooden and pale. Damp macs and umbrellas. England on a wet day. A couple of teddy boys, a housewife up for the shopping, a man with a bowler hat and a briefcase, a soldier, two Indian students, a couple of nuns . . . the man opposite him, a plum-coloured man who looked like a banker but almost certainly wasn’t if he had to travel by Tube, despite the parking problem, was gazing straight at him without seeing him. Any one of those people in that Tube might be there for a purpose. You couldn’t trust anyone . . . all this and much else passed through Shaw’s mind, and he watched every one in the compartment while he was thinking, but because he was a good operative his eyes remained as blank and his expression as wooden as anyone else’s as the train rocked and racketed him towards Baron’s Court.

CHAPTER THREE
    The hand-case down by the girl’s long, nyloned legs in the Paris air terminal had a number of old, half-torn off hotel labels on it—the Galle Face, the Barbizon Plaza, the Hotel Australia—but the most recent was a plain one which read:

    Miss Debonnair Delacroix, c/o Eastern 
    Petroleum Company, Rue des Feuilles, Paris.

    Nevertheless, the lady was London-bound, had merely forgotten to change the label. The little fat, dapper man with the bow-tie, edging closer through the crowd and trying to catch the girl’s eye, had taken a brief squint at that label because it was always