I was in luck; around the next corner, I saw him put his brake lights on, and then I saw him shine a torch out of his right-hand window. He held it steady for a moment, then switched it off, turned right, and drove straight in between the bushes. I ran up to where he had gone in. There was a gap which led through to a huge field. Sitting at the edge of the field, glinting slightly in the moonlight, was a dark-coloured Ford Capri. I pressed down the tip of my pencil. ‘Daphne’s stopped for a picnic. She’ll need some ice.’ My code words told the team to keep both ends of this lane covered.

Whalley drove up towards the Capri. I snapped open my case, and drew out my image-intensifier binoculars, and looked firstly at the Capri’s registration. It was different from the last time, but I had little doubt it was the same car. I looked up through the windscreen. The driver wore a large pair of sun-glasses and a cap pulled down over his forehead. His mouth was covered by a thick moustache. Whether by accident or design, he had made it quite impossible to identify any of his facial features.

I took a set of headphones from my case and put them on. There was a wire running from them to a device with a telescopic sight, that was long and pointed, like a gun with no stock or breech. I stared through the image-intensifier sight and picked up Whalley. I pushed the switch on the side of the device, and was nearly deafened by the grating of a handbrake being pulled on. I turned the volume control down.

Whalley, methodical as always, removed his ignition key, then left his car, walked over to the Capri, and got into the front passenger seat of the Capri.

I aimed the cross-hairs of the sight onto the front windscreen of the Capri, midway between their heads. The device was the very latest in eavesdropping from Messrs Trout and Trumbull of the Playroom, British Intelligence’s answer to Alexander Graham Bell, Oppenheimer, the Atari Corporation, and Heath Robinson, all rolled into one. Their inventiveness knew no bounds. Among this month’s collection of essential items for the Spy-Who-Has-Everything were a rubber plant containing a concealed gun that could be aimed with deadly accuracy and fired, by remote control, from a distance of up to five miles; an apple that was a hand grenade – the removal of the stalk primed it; and an aerosol that, if sprayed onto the trunk of a tree, coated it in a substance that turned it into a highly effective radio aerial. Trout and Trumbull were heavily into Mother Earth this month; all the past few years’ publicity on ecology had obviously suddenly got through to them.