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Buckinghamshire, perhaps, maybe even farther, guessed Charlie. Aubrey Smith lived in Buckinghamshire. Whatever the irritation, it surely wouldn’t have got to Director-General level!
    Cooper was looking fixedly out his side window, his body partially, oddly, turned to show his back, which Charlie thought childish. Taking operational difficulties personally would explain why the man was limited to adult baby-minding. From a briefly glimpsed signpost Charlie saw that they were definitely in Buckinghamshire, although well off any major roads. He could see sufficiently through the separating glass to gauge the driver’s divided concentration between the road and the dashboard-mounted GPS, from which Charlie guessed they were nearing their destination. Beside him, the back-turned case officer was showing no recognition, from which Charlie assumed that the man genuinely didn’t know where they were going, which was confirmed when Cooper had to snatch for an armrest support when the driver unexpectedly turned into an unmarked driveway. The gate was set at least twenty meters back from its original supporting pillars, the centerpiece of a secondary, razor-wire-topped wall. The wire hedge was broken close to the gate head to accommodate the camera that swiveled at their approach to record the car’s registration, to which the driver added by manually directing an electronic fob to a sensor that Charlie couldn’t detect. The admission precautions were completed by the man lowering the driver’s window to announce their presence into a door-level entry phone.
    Almost directly beyond the gate, the Ford turned off the main driveway and onto a smaller but still paved road that ran between totally concealing, close-together trees and low shrubbery that unexpectedly ballooned out into a clearing in the center of which was a half-timbered building Charlie guessed originally to have been a hunting lodge. There were four cars, all anonymous Fords, regimented to the left of its heavy oak door. Charlie’s driver went to its right. A dark-suited woman emerged before the car stopped. She came to Cooper’s door, gesturing.
    “Stay where you are,” ordered the case officer, as he got out.
    Charlie was uneasy. His disappearing required a reprimand but this was at a far higher level. Why? The only logical answer was that he hadn’t been as professional as he’d imagined: that they’d followed him every shuffling step of the way to Jersey, knew about the bank arrangements to fund Natalia, and were about to strap him onto the rack and start twirling the bone-cracking wheel until he confessed all.
    When he was told to get out, Charlie followed the woman to the lodge, but unhurriedly, hesitating at the sudden darkness beyond the heavy oak door. Predictably there was a display of antlered heads along both wood-paneled walls. The woman stood at the end of the hall, shifting impatiently. When he reached her, Charlie said: “You were too fast for me.”
    “I imagine most people are,” she came back, thrusting open a side door for him to enter.
    A quick shot or confirmation that they had been with him in Jersey? wondered Charlie, as he saw the assembled group behind a long table at the end of another paneled room lined with a wildlife massacre of glass-eyed trophies, here interspersed with the heads of a tiger and two bears. Aubrey Smith was at the center of four men, with Deputy Director Jane Ambersom to his left. The Director-General was dwarfed by the man next to him, appearing almost a foot taller, even though he was sitting, and with his jacket spread to release a bulging belly couching a bull-like chest. The other two were on Smith’s right. There would, Charlie knew, be audio- and visual-recording equipment, which made him curious about the small, unmanned replay machine on a separate table.
    “Where were you?” demanded Smith, without any preamble.
    A clever question, Charlie acknowledged, allowing him little verbal room to maneuver,