LITMIR.BIZ

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men had ever heard a shot fired in anger, so I didn’t take easily to their dismissal of an action of the sort that, on the rare cases when it’s happened to other more senior men, has been marked by flowery commendations and promotions. I smiled.

      ‘The monitor service heard nothing: no orders to block off the Autobahn exits, no instructions to Berlin checkpoints, nothing.’

      ‘Their car slid back into a ditch,’ I said. ‘Maybe they ended up unconscious and were put into hospital.’

      ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ said Frank, in a tone that indicated that it was not high on his list of possible explanations. ‘But VERDI… why did they wait outside and shoot him through the window? Why not inside? Why not somewhere more private?’

      ‘I didn’t say they did shoot him through the window,’ I said.

      ‘I noticed that,’ said Frank. He let the pages of my report flutter in the warm draught that was coming from a fan heater that one of his servants had placed so that the air warmed his feet. ‘Why?’

      ‘The hole in the window wasn’t made by a bullet.’

      ‘Can you be sure?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s something you learn to recognize. I won’t go into the details.’

      ‘Go into the details,’ said Dicky, joining the conversation suddenly. ‘I’m interested in how you can be so categorical about it, and still leave it out of your report.’

      I looked at Frank. Frank raised an eyebrow.

      I said: ‘A high-velocity missile going through glass, a round from a hand-gun for instance, produces radial fractures and several concentric fractures. In this case there were none. Furthermore the hole made by a bullet produces a powdering of glass around the actual hole. A low-velocity missile, such as a stone, knocks a piece out of the glass leaving a neater smoother edge.’

      ‘Are you snowing me, Bernard?’ said Dicky, shaking his head to stress his disbelief. Frank looked from one to the other of us, adopting his favourite role of unbiased adjudicator. ‘Is this just your own theory or something out of a home-repairs manual?’

      ‘Surely, Dicky, every schoolboy knows that glass is a supercooled liquid which, under impact from a fast-moving missile, bends until it fractures in long cracks radiating from the point of impact. It continues bending for a long distance until eventually it makes a second series of cracks concentrically from the point of impact. Also a high-velocity missile makes a quite different type of hole. It fragments or powders the glass as it exits, and this reveals the direction of the missile. The degree of fragmentation usually gives a rough idea of the likely range from which the shot came; the closer the range the heavier the fragmentation.’

      Frank smiled.

      ‘Okay, you clever shit,’ said Dicky. ‘So why didn’t you say the killer definitely was not waiting outside? You didn’t say they weren’t waiting outside did you?’

      ‘Because the killer might have fired through a hole in the glass that was already there,’ I said.

      ‘You didn’t say that either,’ he complained.

      ‘I can’t be sure what I said.’ If proof was needed to tell me I was slipping, my ill-timed lecture about fracturing glass was it. In the old days I would have taken more care when kicking the sand of science into the face of a prima donna like Dicky, especially doing it in the presence of Frank, an old-timer everyone respected, or claimed to. ‘The fact is that I didn’t stick around to find out.’

      Dicky had been to Oxford University and come away with an undisputed reputation for cleverness. That reputation had stuck. Cleverness was not measured and quantified in the way that passing exams or rowing strenuously enough to become a blue was on record. Cleverness was a vague characteristic not universally respected by Englishmen of Dicky’s class; it suggested cunning and the sort of hard work and determination that marked the social climber. And so Dicky’s cleverness remained a threat ever present, but a promise still unfulfilled. He looked at me and gave a sour grin. ‘But why cut and run, Bernard? You had a good man with you.’

      ‘An inexperienced kid.’

      ‘Fearless,’ said Dicky. This suggested to me that the kid might be one of Dicky’s protégés, some amiable graduate he’d met on one of his frequent bibulous visits to his alma mater. ‘We’ve used him on a couple of previous jobs: utterly fearless.’

      ‘An utterly fearless man is more to be dreaded as a comrade than as an enemy,’ I said.

      Frank laughed before Dicky had absorbed it. In Frank’s hand, along with my brief account of our unsuccessful mission, I could see the report the kid had submitted. In yellow marker I spotted a sentence about me firing the gun. There was some lengthy comment pencilled in the margin. They hadn’t mentioned the gun I collected from Andi. I still had that to come.

      Dicky said: ‘This dead colonel – this VERDI – asked for you. What’s this about someone owing someone a favour? What favour did the poor bastard owe you?’

      ‘They always say that,’ I explained. ‘That’s the standard form when they are seeking a deal with the other side.’

      ‘When did you last see him?’ said Dicky.

      ‘I know nothing of him. His asking for me was just a gimmick.’

      ‘Try and remember,’ said Dicky in a voice that clearly said that he didn’t believe me. ‘He knows you all right.’

      ‘More to be dreaded as a comrade than as an enemy,’ said Frank, as if committing it to memory, and chuckled. ‘That’s a good one, Bernard. Well, if you can’t remember VERDI maybe we’ll leave it at that. You’ll want to get back to London and see your children. Your wife is joining you there I heard.’

      ‘That’s right,’ I said.

      Dicky shot a glance at me. He didn’t like the way that Frank was letting me off the hook, and I thought for a moment he was going to mention Gloria, the woman I’d been living with during the time I believed my wife was a defector working for the East. ‘Then why is there a seat reserved for Samson on the flight to Zurich?’ Dicky asked.

      I got to my feet. ‘Samson’s a common name, Dicky,’ I said, without getting excited.

      ‘Field agents are all devious.’ Frank smiled and waved a languid hand in the air. ‘It’s the job that does it. How could Bernard be so good at his job without being constantly wary?’

      ‘Who do you know in Zurich?’ Dicky asked, as if knowing someone in Zurich was in itself a sinister development.

      ‘My brother-in-law.’ Frank looked at Dicky as if expecting some reaction to this, but Dicky just nodded. ‘He moved there after his wife was killed. I will have to see him eventually … there are domestic affairs that will have to be settled. Tessa assigned property and her share of a trust to Fiona.’

      Frank smiled. He knew why I was going to Zurich of course. He knew I would be cross-checking with Werner Volkmann everything the Department had told me. Dicky knew too. Neither of them liked the idea of me talking to Werner, but Frank was rather more subtle and able to hide his feelings.

      Dicky had been pacing about and now he turned on his heel and left the room, saying he would be back in a moment.

      ‘He gave a little party last night at a new restaurant he found in Dahlem. Indian food apparently, and he suspects the bhindi bhaji has upset him,’ Frank confided when Dicky had gone. ‘Do you know what a bhindi bhaji is?’

      ‘No, I’m not quite sure I do, Frank.’

      Frank nodded his approval, as if such knowledge would have alienated us. ‘Did Bret Rensselaer tell you to see Werner in Zurich?’

      I hesitated, but the fact that Frank had waited for Dicky to exit encouraged me to confide in him. ‘No, Bret told me to stay away from Werner. But Werner gets to hear things on the

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