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time-serving old flower-pots from Central Funding who were desperately looking for some unfortunate upon whom to dump the blame for their own inadequacies.
    I was putting it all into the classified waste when I noticed the signature. Billingsly. Billingsly! It was damned odd that Billingsly hadn't mentioned it to me this morning in Number Two Conference Room. He hadn't even asked me what happened. His passion, if not to say obsession, for getting Prettyman here had undergone some abrupt traumatic change. That was the way it went with people like Billingsly – and many others in the Department – who alternated displays of panic and amnesia with disconcerting suddenness.
    I threw the notes into the basket and forgot about it. There was no point in stirring trouble for Jim Prettyman. In my opinion he was a fool to suddenly get on his high horse about something so mundane. He could have testified and been the golden boy: he could have declined without upsetting them. But I think he liked confrontation. I decided to smooth things over as much as I could. When it came to writing the report I wouldn't say he'd refused point-blank: I'd say he was thinking about it. Until they asked for the report, I'd say nothing at all.
    I didn't see Gloria until we had lunch together in the restaurant. Her fluent Hungarian had recently brought her a job downstairs: promotion, more pay and much more responsibility. I suppose they thought that it would be enough to make her forget the promises they'd made about paying her wages while she was at Cambridge. Her new job meant that I saw much less of her and so lunch had become the time when our domestic questions were settled: would it look too pushy to invite the Cruyers for dinner? Who had the receipt for the dry-cleaning? Why had I opened a new tin of cat-food for Muffin when the last one was still half-full?
    I asked her if anything more had been said about her resignation, secretly hoping, I suppose, that she might have changed her mind. She hadn't. When I broached the subject over the 'mushroom quiche with winter salad' she told me that she'd had an answer from a friend of hers about some comfortable rooms in Cambridge that she could probably rent.
    'What am I going to do with the house?'
    'Not so loud, darling,' she said. We kept up this absurd pretence that our co-workers – or such of them as might be interested – didn't know we were living together. 'I'll keep paying half the rent. I told you that.'
    'It's nothing to do with the rent,' I said. 'It's simply that I wouldn't have taken on a place out in the sticks so I could sit there every night on my own, watching TV and saving up my laundry until I've got enough to make a full load for the washing machine.'
    That produced the flicker of a grin. She leaned closer to me and said, 'After you find out how much dirty laundry the children have every day, you won't be worrying about filling up the machine: you'll be looking for a place where you can get washing powder wholesale.' She sipped some apple juice with added vitamin C. 'You've got a nanny for the children. You'll have that nice Mrs Palmer coming in every day to tidy round. I'll be back every weekend: I don't know what you are worrying about.'
    'I wish you'd be a little more realistic. Cambridge is a damned long way away from Balaklava Road. The weekend traffic will be horrendous, the railway service is even worse and in any case you'll have your studying to do.'
    'I wish I could make you stop worrying,' she said. 'Are you ill? You haven't been yourself since coming back from Washington. Did something go wrong there?'
    'If I'd known what you were going to do I would have made different plans.'
    'I told you. I told you over and over.' She looked down and continued to eat her winter salad as if there was no more to be said. In a way she was right. She had told me time and time again. She'd been telling me for years that she was going to go to Cambridge and get this honours degree in PPE