‘They’re good,’ he said, taking one out of the box and lifting it up towards the cave-like orifice that had suddenly appeared between his thick moustache and even thicker beard. The beard was very uneven, as though every now and then, when the mood took him, he would have a go at trimming it with a pair of scissors, but got bored half-way through. With the jagged, uneven tufts, and the patches of white from the sugar that had fallen off the lump of Turkish Delight, his beard had taken on the appearance of a gorse bush struck by lightning.

Arthur Jephcott was in complete contrast to his office. He wore a thick, dark-green Harris Tweed suit, that, whilst looking as though it had been handed down to him by his father, had actually been made, at very great expense, by an elderly tailor who continued to labour under the 1930s view that suits that looked new were vulgar. Also, as he’d told the cheerful Arthur at the final fitting, he’d made plenty of allowance for Arthur to ‘expand’. The man had not lied; in square footage, the outfit was more like a marquee than a suit. Arthur could have doubled in size and still had room for a few friends in there. Under the jacket, he wore a yellow-and-brown checked Viyella shirt, the collar of which had almost entirely frayed away, and appeared to be held together by his bright orange tie.

I thought it odd that his wife could have let him go out like this, but then, I hadn’t met her, and maybe she was even stranger. He looked every inch an academic, with alert brown eyes, a tangle of curly hair on his head, and small, soft-looking hands of the type that appear to have spent their days caressing expensive leather-bound pages of print in quiet oak-panelled rooms. In fact his hands spent their days caressing the keys of a computer terminal, and the room was not oak-panelled, but lined with lead and concrete.

Arthur Jephcott was Director of Combined Central Information, an outfit shared by all the organizations that comprised the British Intelligence network. CCI was housed in a massive atom-bomb-proof office complex several hundred feet underneath the Hyde Park underground car park. Jephcott was responsible for an army of 5,000 people in this windowless subterranean town, and for one of the largest computers ever built; it was in fact four massive computers connected together, and the machine was known by the name of Wotan.

Arthur’s office was a sterile white, with nothing at all in it except a grey metal desk. Behind his desk, was the keyboard of a terminal into Wotan, and on one side of the desk was a large visual display unit looking much like a television screen. Arthur had no pens, pencils or paper in his office; he never used them. Everything that he wanted to write down, he tapped straight into Wotan.