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one kind involved him.’
    ‘What took him to Korea, I wonder.’ Max smiled at Nadia, inviting some further disclosure.
    But there was not to be one. ‘I have said too much already. I will say nothing more.’ And nor did she.
    There was a knock at the door. Max took the tea-tray from the young man and sent him away with his thanks. A boiling kettle was what he really needed. But he was confident the steam from the jug and teapot combined would do the trick. There was no time to be lost. He held the envelope above their open lids and began prising gently at the flap.

MOST SECRET
Paris, 27th April 1919
    M EMORANDUM – Attention of C only (in cipher) HQ London
    I exercised my discretion by enrolling James Maxted (known as Max), formerly a lieutenant in the RFC, as a special off-books operative on 5th April. I considered that logging a report of the arrangement at the time would risk attracting hostile attention.
    The extraordinary opportunity Max’s engagement represented was the reason I proceeded on my own initiative. He first came to my attention following the death of his father, Sir Henry Maxted, in an unexplained roof-fall in the Montparnasse district of Paris on 21st March this year. Sir Henry was attached to our delegation to the peace conference as an adviser on South American affairs.
    It appeared at first that Sir Henry had committed suicide. The French police believed he had discovered that his lover, Corinne Dombreux, who lived in an apartment in the building from which he fell, had been unfaithful to him with an Italian artist, Raffaele Spataro. But some of the circumstances were distinctly suspicious. Mme Dombreux’s status as the widow of a traitor also gave cause for concern – Pierre Dombreux, a diplomat serving at the French Embassy in Petrograd, is believed by le Deuxième Bureau to have acted as a Soviet, and possibly also a German, spy before his death by drowning in March of last year.
    The French authorities were happy to record Sir Henry’s death as an accident, as was his eldest son, and heir, Sir Ashley. Max, on the other hand, was convinced from the first that his father had been murdered and set about proving it. I tried initially to dis courage him, in order to avoid a scandal that might embarrass our delegation. As you know, however, Max’s investigations unearthed a possible connection with Fritz Lemmer, whom Sir Henry had met while serving with our embassy in Tokyo in 1889/91.
    Max contacted Travis Ireton, an unscrupulous American who peddles titbits of information about the conference. It appeared likely Sir Henry had tried to sell information through Ireton in order to fund a golden future for himself and Mme Dombreux. One of the pieces of information, culled from a list of potential sources of money in Sir Henry’s handwriting (I explained the background to this to you and the heads of department at an HQ meeting on 26th March), related to Lemmer’s current whereabouts. Max concluded that his father had been murdered to protect Lemmer. I was inclined to agree with him.
    Max’s attempts to discover who had betrayed Sir Henry revealed the presence of a network of spies maintained by Lemmer within more than one delegation to the conference, including ours, working actively despite the collapse of the Imperial German government whose cause they originally served. Shortly after Max identified one of those spies as Walter Ennis of the American delegation, Ennis was murdered. Spataro was also murdered. In Spataro’s case, attempts were made to fasten responsibility on Mme Dombreux. The killings of Sir Henry and Spataro were well managed. They bore Lemmer’s hallmark. The killing of Ennis was hasty and public. It smacked of panic. We also lost one of our own men, Lamb, which was another reason I allowed Max to bear most of the risks of the investigation. Max was shot and quite seriously wounded at the time of the Ennis killing. That did not discourage him in the slightest, indicating to