I reckoned that McEliney had been telling the truth. He spoke with an Irish accent; Kilburn was an Irish colony in London. It was becoming pretty clear it wasn’t only Arabs and Russians and blacks that were involved in this little bit of no good; it was also the IRA. After the failure of the Arab to kill me, they had probably been instructed to watch me and see if they could figure out anything from my movements. The first time I had spotted them had been last night, in the blue Marina, and then again this morning. I wondered if they had been following me last week, and decided they hadn’t. I would have noticed them. No, the reason they hadn’t followed me last week was almost certainly because they hadn’t been able to find me. They had probably presumed I would be in my office at Portico, and had been keeping watch on that. They wouldn’t have had any reason to know I was at the Atomic Energy Authority; if they had known, they would have been tailing me from there. That was a big relief. If they had tumbled me at the AEA, I would have been blown; the whole damn thing would have been blown. Last night was the first time I had been in to Carlton House Terrace since my somewhat bumpy taxi-ride. It was also the first time a tail had picked me up. It made sense, and I felt a bit better; they had no idea what we were up to.

Tsenong came through the doorway sooner than I had expected. He wore a yellow plastic anorak, and carried a barrel-shaped red and white nylon hold-all, which he was probably using as a satchel. He ran across the exposed Quad, and went out through the Back Gate into Magdalen Street, and disappeared from view. I would have liked to follow him to see where he was going and get some idea how long that would give me, but I was worried that I would waste valuable time if I did so, so I went straight up to his room.

It had an old-fashioned lock which was dead easy to pick. I locked it again from the inside and jammed the lock with a piece of metal so that if he did come back suddenly, he wouldn’t be able to get in.

The room was a standard Oxford undergraduate room. It was very small, which indicated that Tsenong did not have much private means. There was an old green filing cabinet, a shelf full of books, a large battered armchair, a wooden chair at a small modern desk, a coffee table, an elderly wardrobe, a lumpy bed and a single-bar electric heater. The window overlooked Magdalen Street, and didn’t do much of a job of keeping out the traffic noise.