There was no hint of a link to another file, no reference to papers removed. When at last he found what he sought he moved the green-shaded desk lamp closer and sat back in his chair, the file on his lap. Movement reactivated the overhead lights, which he disliked for their harshness, but if he stayed still for long enough they would go out. The desk lamp he had brought in himself, against the rules.

The paper he sought was in two sections, the first typed in Russian in Cyrillic script, the second a translation into English by someone from the Russian desk in Century House, the old Head Office during much of the Cold War. They should not have been in this file at all, an ordinary numbered P file belonging to a dead access agent run by the Paris station. Josef, as Charles had known him, was a Russian émigré who, unusually, had been allowed out of the Soviet Union on marrying a secretary from the French Embassy. Before that he was a journalist who had committed some minor indiscretion which had earned him ten years in a labour camp, in the days when ten years was what you got for being available to fill a quota, especially if you were Jewish. Settled in France, he had come to the notice of the Paris station, which had recruited him to get alongside visiting Russians. The relationship with the Secret Intelligence Service lasted many years, sustained by snippets from Josef which usually promised more than they delivered, and by payments from SIS, before Charles was sent to terminate him. That was when the case became interesting.

The paper did not, in fact, pertain to Josef at all, though that would not have been apparent to anyone reading the file. It was recorded that Josef had been in a labour camp, so a first-person account of a visit to the camp years after it had closed would be assumed to be his. The account had been left on Josef’s file after other papers had been silently removed, doubtless because whoever weeded the file had made the same mistaken assumption. By the time Charles had discovered it, both Josef and Badger, code-name of the author of the paper, were dead. It might have drawn attention to the Badger case to have transferred papers to it years later. Not that anyone read old paper files any more. Charles was probably the only person still serving who knew both cases.