If he’d been slower I’d have gone with him. As it was I’d got my foot in the partition, but it was still between us. It seemed to belly out and hit me amidships in a flare of white light. The last sensation I had was of an appalling noise and of my body hurtling through space and striking itself crazily against a wall. I was, in effect, blown into the middle of next week. He went considerably farther and is now among the eternal Herrenvolk.

There wasn’t much left. However, we did find enough to show how he’d provided for the last emergency. His work on shells may have given him the idea, but I fancy he was under orders, in event of a final exit, to take me with him. We found the wreck of a cigarette case showing traces of an explosive and a detonator that had been wired to a torch cell. The cigarette case, we think, was in his breast pocket and the cell in his side pocket.

We shall never hear the story of his engineering days in Germany, of his association with other correct and terrible youths. We shall never know what oaths he took or to what intensive training he submitted himself before he was sent back to await the end of 1939 and the moment when he would enlist with our forces and begin to be useful.

Fabian Losse talks of building a new wool-shed.

Part of a letter from Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn to his wife.

…almost midnight and I am in the study with only poor Flossie Rubrick’s portrait for company. I’m afraid, my love, that you would be very much put out by this painting and, indeed, it is a dreadfully slick and glossy piece of work. Yet, with its baleful assistance and the post-mortem on her character I feel as if I had known her very well. In a sense, Fabian Losse was right when he said the secret of her end lay in her own character. Who but Florence Rubrick would have practised a speech in the dark to a handful of sheep during a search for her own diamonds? Who but she, having made up her mind that her nephew was an enemy agent, would have informed her husband, bound him over to secrecy, and decided to tackle the job herself? That it was Douglas Grace she suspected, and not Markins, is clear enough when one remembers that Rubrick clung to Markins after her death, and that, after her interview with Grace, her manner towards him altered and she subsequently climbed down over Fabian Losse’s engagement to Ursula Harme. She said nothing of her precise suspicions to any one else. She played a lone hand and she hadn’t a chance. Down she went, that ugly little woman, with all her obstinacy, arrogance, generosity, shrewdness and energy, down she went before an idea that was too strong for her.