Douglas had disagreed most vigorously. He had, he said with a short laugh, the poorest opinion of the official counterespionage system and would greatly prefer to tackle the matter himself. ‘That’s what we’re like, out here, sir,’ he told Alleyn. ‘We like to go to it on our own and get things done.’ He added that he felt, personally, so angry with Markins that he had to do something about it. Fabian’s suggestion he dismissed as unrealistic. Why wait? Report the matter certainly, but satisfy themselves first and then go direct to the authority they had seen at army headquarters and get rid of the fellow. They argued for some time and separated without having come to any conclusion. Douglas, on parting from Fabian, encountered his aunt who, as luck would have it, launched out on an encomium upon her manservant. ‘What should I do without my Markins? Thank Heaven he comes back this evening. I touch wood,’ Flossie had said, tapping a gnarled finger playfully on her forehead, ‘every time he says he’s happy here. It’d be so unspeakably dreadful if he were lost to us.’

This, Douglas said, was too much for him. He followed his aunt into the study and, as he said, gave her the works. ‘I stood no nonsense from Flossie,’ said Douglas, brushing up his moustache. ‘We understood each other pretty well. I used to pull her leg a bit and she liked it. She was a good scout, taking her all round, only you didn’t want to let her ride roughshod over you. I talked pretty straight to her. I told her she’d have to get rid of Markins, and I told her why.’

Terence Lynne said under her breath, ‘I never realized you did that.’

Flossie had been very much upset. She was caught. On the one hand there was her extreme reluctance to part with her jewel, as she had so often called Markins; on the other, her noted zeal, backed up by public utterance, in the matter of counter-espionage. Douglas said he reminded her of a speech she had made in open debate in which she had wound up with a particularly stately peroration: ‘I say now, and I say it solemnly and advisedly,’ Flossie had urged, ‘that with our very life blood at stake, it is the duty of us all not only to set a guard upon our own tongue but to make a public example of any one, be he stranger or dearest friend, who, by the slightest deviation from that discretion, which is his duty, endangers in the least degree the safety of our realm. Make no doubt about it,’ she had finally shouted, ‘there is an enemy in our midst and let each of us beware lest, unknowingly, we give him shelter.’ This piece of rhetoric had a wry flavour in regurgitation, and for a moment Flossie stared miserably at her nephew. Then she rallied.