In the cabin next to Harry Slan was a man who had never been very successful with women. He had taken out a few before he had met the one who was to become his wife, but he had never got anywhere near seducing them, much as, timid though he was, he would have liked to. Marriage provided a sex life that he supposed was adequate, not that his wife was ever the whore in the bedroom he had read that good wives were supposed to be. There was something in particular which had begun as mild curiosity, but had been slowly turning into an obsession as the years went by: his wife was fair-haired; he wanted to know what it would be like to make love to a dark-haired woman. For the past twenty-one years, every remotely attractive woman who smiled at him, unwittingly sent him reeling into an erotic fantasy. One day, he had been promising himself, he would take off to Shepherd Market, and buy himself an hour or two with one, but he knew, that when it came to it, he would not have the courage.

But now, finally, his fantasy had come true; he was lying naked on a bed, on top of an equally naked raven-haired woman. She was more beautiful than anyone he had ever dared to hope he might conquer. And here she was, naked in bed with him, on a paradise boat in a paradise port on a balmy late-summer’s evening, a million miles away from his home, from his wife, from, he thought happily, any possible chance of being found out. Like Harry Slan, he too had wondered why he had been invited; but right now, he didn’t give a damn. He opened his eyes to look at her, to reassure himself that she was real, that his dream had come true; that he was finally – after all the years of dreaming – making love to a dark-haired woman. His name was Horace Whalley. Whalley wasn’t under any suspicion the night I made a routine search of his office, and the search was no more and no less thorough than the search I made that week of half the other offices of the staff of the Atomic Energy Authority. But the letter of invitation from Deke Sleder to spend a long weekend on his boat, earned Whalley his position between the glass slides under the Maximilian Flynn microscope. Deke Sleder might have been on Cosmopolitan’s ‘ten sexiest men in the world’ list; he was on quite a different list in the files of British Intelligence.

Chapter 7

7

The small brass plate to the right of the front door of the building had engraved on it the words Portico Investments Ltd. Nothing else gave the casual passer-by any clue as to the activities that went on behind the white-painted, five-storey Regency façade of 46 Carlton House Terrace.