He finished chewing his piece of Turkish Delight. Crème de menthe Turkish Delight was Arthur’s one vice in life; he was completely addicted to it. He never smoked, and never drank, but throughout his waking hours he would steadily munch his way through ten to twelve pounds of the stuff a week. Apart from a very sticky handshake, it didn’t appear to do him any great harm.

Arthur Jephcott was a librarian, an archivist, a sorter and storer and retriever of facts; he would take facts, pull them apart, then put them back together, five different ways, ten different ways, one hundred different ways, without his face being lined with worries, because he never had to decide which was the right way. He merely presented the options for others to decide; presented the pros and the cons, loading first one end of the scale with weights, and then the other, but leaving someone else, always, to decide whether the end that finally sank down was, in this murky world of espionage that was forever grey, to be marked either Black or White.

Every piece of information that was gleaned by the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service, the Special Branch, GCHQ – Britain’s round-the-world radio monitoring network – the Armed Forces and the police was passed, through Arthur, into Wotan.

‘How’s your very lovely lady?’ he asked.

‘Giving me a complex – she’s too damned tall; she’s also not terribly impressed with me at the moment. We came rather close to splitting up a couple of weeks ago.’

‘What happened?’

‘I got tripped up – the night Whalley went off to his meeting with Mr X. She was preparing me some special birthday surprise; I’d promised to be home early that night, and I had to stay with Whalley. I sent her a message saying I was stuck in Ireland with a broken-down aeroplane, and she’d seen me driving down Park Lane half an hour before. She’s still convinced I spent the night with another bird.’

‘Is there not a golden rule, Max? If you tell a lie, make sure it is not only plausible, but that you can substantiate it within the context of your movements and actions? It’s one thing to make a mistake like that with a girlfriend, but you could make a similar mistake in an operation which could jeopardize your life.’

‘You haven’t met Gelignite,’ I said, ‘it damned nearly did!’

He grinned.