I switched on the tape recorder and played the tape of Whalley and his contact several times. After an hour and a half, I was satisfied I had picked up all that was of interest: the name Wojara, which at the moment meant nothing; and the name Ben Tsenong, which also meant nothing; the contact’s voice, which I had heard before, meant something, although right now, I didn’t know what. He had driven one hundred miles; that was interesting, but there are one hell of a lot of places within a one-hundred-mile radius of Worcester. The contact had said ‘niggers’; that was very interesting. Up until now, we had only encountered Arabs; Arabs weren’t blacks. Whalley talked about gearing for a specific day, what did he mean by that? 4 January or the first day after that on which there is a westerly wind. Wind; Fifeshire had talked about wind – wind spread radiation. Westerlies were the prevailing winds over the British Isles. 4 January; I tried to figure out the significance of that date; it was a Monday. New Year’s Day was on the Friday. I went down to the library, one floor below, and looked up religious holidays; there were none on 4 January. There was no event scheduled for 4 January in any publication at all. I turned my attention to the wind, and pulled out the massive Times atlas of the world, and furrowed through until I came to the world wind-flow charts. The January chart showed the westerly winds sweeping across the Atlantic, across Spain, France and the British Isles, and then on, up towards the Arctic. In the months following January, the charts showed the same wind direction across the Atlantic, but after crossing Northern Europe, instead of curving up towards the Arctic, the winds curved down and across Russia. I thought about it for some moments; if nuclear power stations in England were going to be blown up and Fifeshire was right with his figures that fall-out could be damaging two thousand miles downwind, if the Russians wanted to be sure of not being swept by winds that had crossed England, then the safest month for them would be January.

It could well be that there was a completely different and much better explanation for the significance of 4 January, but I had to start trying to put the pieces somewhere. I went back up to my tiny office – cubicle would be a more accurate definition. The Security Services’ answer to defence-budget cuts was to reduce the amount of space its staff occupied. If they cut the size of my office much further, it was going to require a shoe-horn to get me in and out. Part of the idea was, of course, to discourage us from spending too much time indoors on our backsides; it was very effective.