‘Daphne’s coming in.’

I switched off the tiny radio receiver built into my propelling pencil. Daphne was the code name for Horace Whalley. I looked at my watch and knew I needn’t have bothered. It was exactly 7.00 a.m. I yawned, and cursed Whalley. Having to be at work at 7.00 a.m. was not my idea of fun, and after seventeen days I still had not got used to it. I decided I probably wouldn’t ever get used to it. My circadian cycle, as the twenty-four-hour clock in one’s body is called, is not geared to be in harmony with the gentle glow of dawn; it prefers to commence its daily cycle several hours after the sun has first appeared over the far horizon, and it likes to be jolted into action by a succession of cups of thick, black coffee delivered by a warm, naked girl. Much to the chagrin of myself and my much abused innards, my current coffee-mate wasn’t into 6.15 a.m. deliveries.

I took out my first Marlboro of the day and then stuck it back in the pack. I wasn’t giving up – I like smoking – but I had promised myself I was going to cut down drastically, and that definitely meant not lighting up at 7.00 a.m., for openers. If my metabolism was in ruins and my lungs in tatters, it was Whalley who was to blame. My hatred of his working hours, and the knowledge that the sooner I either gave him up as a bad job or nailed him doing something, the sooner I might have some chance of returning to a normal existence – or at any rate, to as near to a normal existence as my job would ever allow – spurred me to a degree of application to this task that appeared dangerously like enthusiasm.

The office at the Authority, which the Energy Secretary had commandeered for his hot-shot analyst, was small, and tucked away in a quiet corner of the building, with a window that looked down onto Charles II Street, and it had two features uncommon to the other offices in the building: firstly, with the door shut, it was completely sound-proof; secondly, concealed in the back of the desk was a twenty-one-inch television monitor, linked, via closed-circuit to three television cameras and as many microphones elaborately concealed in the office of Horace Whalley two floors above.