‘That’s right. I cabled in code to the Special Branch and they told me to go ahead. They were very interested in Mr Kan. So I came over and it worked out nicely. Mrs Rubrick took me on, and here I stuck. The first catch in it, though, was what would I tell Kurata Kan? The Special Branch warned me that Mr Losse’s work was important and they gave me some phoney stuff I could send on to Kan when he got discontented. That was OK. I even rigged up a bit of an affair with some spare radio parts, all pulled to pieces and done up different. I put it in a bad light and took a bad photograph of it and told him I’d done it through a closed window from the top of a ladder. I’ve often wondered how far it got before some expert took a look at it and said the Japanese for “Nuts.” Kan was pleased enough. He knew nothing. He was only a middle man. Of course it couldn’t last. They pulled him in at last on my information, and then there was Pearl Harbor. Finish!’

‘Only as far as Kan was concerned.’

‘True enough, sir. There was the second catch. But you know all about that, Mr Alleyn.’

‘I’d like to hear your end of it.’

‘Would you, sir? OK, then. My instructions from your end had been that I was on no account to let Mrs Rubrick or either of the young gentlemen get any idea that I wasn’t exactly what I seemed. After a bit your people let me know that there’d been leakage of information—not my phoney dope, but genuine stuff—about this magnetic fuse. Not through Japanese canals but German ones. Now that was a facer. So my next job was to turn round after three years working the bogus agent, and look for the genuine article. And that,’ said Markins plaintively, ‘was where I fluttered to pieces. I hadn’t got a thing. Not a bloody inkling, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

‘So we gathered,’ said Alleyn.

‘The galling thing, Mr Alleyn, the aspect of the affair that got under my professional skin, as you might say, was this: somebody in this household had been working under my nose for months. What did I feel like when I heard it? Dirt. Kuh! Thinking myself the fly operator, cooking up little fake photographs and all the time—look, Mr Alleyn, I handed myself the raspberry in six different positions. I did indeed.’