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look of fear in her eyes. “I’ll give you the facts straight, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall.” He told her briefly of his encounter in The Goat in Stafford Street, and of the killing of the man who had tried to pass him a message, and of the possibility of trouble developing with the spacecraft as its centre.
    Her hands were shaking now. She saw he had noticed, and she clasped her fingers behind her back, standing before the fireplace like a man warming his backside. She asked, “Have you no idea what this . . . this threat might be?”
    “No,” he told her. “I’m sorry to say it, but we have no ideas at all at the moment, no leads. I was wondering—”
    “Who was the man?” she asked sharply.
    He said, “I don’t know that either—not for certain. But I believe he was a Pole, and—”
    “A Pole?”
    “Yes. . . He looked at her searchingly, alerted by something in the rigidity of her stance. “Yes, he was a Pole. In fact, I believe him to have been a Colonel Stefan Aleksander Spalinski.” He stopped; her body had swayed a little and her face was a bad colour. He was about to get up and go to her when she stopped him with a gesture of her hand.
    She asked, “Just what do you know about this Colonel Spalinski, Commander?”
    Gravely he returned the question to her. “What do you know about him, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall?”
FIVE
    The only sound in the room came from a clock which ticked the seconds away behind Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s back. Shaw waited for her to answer his question, watching her face meanwhile. There was fear and anxiety in her eyes but after a while she said in a clipped tone, “It was bound to come out, wasn’t it. Sooner or
    later? I knew that. I always said so to my husband, but he wouldn’t listen. You see, he was so wrapped up in his work. He refused to risk any interruption in that” Suddenly her shoulders drooped; she had a defeated look. “If he’d been . . . entirely honest they’d have taken him off all work involving a security risk, wouldn’t they? Anyway, that was what he believed. Myself, well, I never did think they’d have gone as far as that, but he always said they would.”
    She stopped. Shaw sat very still. When she didn’t go on he said promptingly, “I think you have quite a lot to explain, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall.” He repeated his question, his face hard now: “What do you know of Stefan Aleksander Spalinski?”
    * * *
    It was a slightly sordid but wholly understandable story of promiscuity and evasion. Katherine Danvers-Marshall had known Spalinski years before; her husband, she said, had never met him—but, for a very personal reason, she, at least, owed much to Spalinski and his wife. Spalinski’s wife, the woman who had been the girl Vanessa Burnside, had been married previously to Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s cousin Arnold Burnside, who had been killed at Dunkirk. Katherine, who had been deeply attached to her cousin, had grown fond of Vanessa also. At about the time of her cousin’s marriage Katherine, then aged nineteen, had fallen very much in love with a young man a few years older than herself; at twenty she had borne his child, a girl. After this she had never seen him again (and later had heard, more or less by chance, that he also had been killed at Dunkirk.) As soon as they were able to, the Burnsides had adopted Katherine’s illegitimate baby legally. Katherine had been heartbroken but her parents had made difficulties and in fact the child couldn’t have had a better home. Thus, owing to the cousin’s death in action and Vanessa’s subsequent re-marriage, to Spalinski, it was Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s daughter who was now living, presumably in Poland still, as Spalinski’s stepdaughter. The Spalinskis had taken her there when they had left England in 1948 and Katherine, who two years after they left had married Neil Danvers-Marshall, had had no contact with them since. She had told Danvers-Marshall everything, and, apparently,