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things and wore false eyelashes.’
    I nodded.
    â€˜I thought Steve had sent you … to get William.’
    â€˜No,’ I said.
    â€˜He’ll stop at nothing to get him. He told me that. But I’ll fight him, Charles. You tell Steve that. He’ll never get William from me.’
    She picked up Billy’s favourite toy rabbit and went to the door. She looked back at me as if I was a Solomon who would decide Billy’s future. ‘If I thought he would be happy with Steve, I wouldn’t mind so much. But William is not like his father – he’s a gentle child and easily hurt.’
    â€˜I know he is, Caty.’
    She stood there for a moment, thinking of things to say, and not saying them. Then she went out of the room.
    I saw her as she passed the window. She was wearing a riding mac and a scarf over her head. She had Billy’s rabbit under her arm.

4
    That Champion’s Master File had been brought from Central Registry was, in itself, a sign of the flap that was in progress. It was seldom that we handled anything other than the Action Abstracts and they were a three-hour task. This Master would have stacked up to a five-feet-tall pile of paperwork, had the Biog, Associative, Report, Vettings and year by year Summaries been put one upon the other.
    The papers had yellowed with age, the photos were brittle and dog-eared. The yellow vetting sheets were now buff-coloured, and the bright-red Report dossier had faded to a brownish-pink.
    There was little hope of discovering anything startling here. The continuing triple-A clearance, right up to the time that Champion stopped reporting to the department, was in itself a sign that men more jaundiced than I could ever be had given Champion a clean bill of health. Since then the department had shown little interest in him.
    I looked at his Biographical entries. Champion’s father, a Welsh Catholic, had been a senior lecturer at the Abbasiyah Military Academy, Cairo. Young Champion came back to England to attend public school. From there he won a place at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. For a boy who grew up to table-talk of tactics, battles and ballistics, Sandhurst was a doddle. Champion became an under-officer, and a well-remembered one. And his scholarship matched his military expertise: modern history, four languages and a mathematics prize.
    It was Champion’s French-language skills that earned for him a secondment to the French Army. He went the usual round of military colleges, the Paris Embassy, Maginot Line fortresses and Grand General HQ, with occasional glimpses of the legendary General Gamelin.
    Champion had only been back with his regiment for a matter of weeks when a War Office directive automatically shortlisted him for a Secret Intelligence Service interview. He was selected, trained and back in France by 1939. He was just in time to watch General Gamelin’s defence system surrender to the Nazis. Champion fled south and became ‘net-officer’ for what was no more than a collection of odds and sods in the unoccupied zone. His orders were to stay clear of the enthusiastic amateurs that London called their Special Operations Executive, but inevitably the two networks became entangled.
    It was Champion who greeted me in person that night when I landed from the submarine at Villefranche. I was assigned to SOE but Champion kidnapped me and got it made official afterwards. If I’d gone up to Nîmes as ordered, my war service would have ended two or three months later in Buchenwald.
    But Champion used me to sort out his own network and I stayed with him right up to the time the network crumbled and Champion was taken prisoner. Eventually he escaped and was flown back to London. He got a DSO and a new job. Even before D-Day, Champion was assigned to peacetime network planning. He demanded choice of personnel, and got it. His first request was to have me as his senior assistant. It wasn’t easy for