He leaned over and placed a hand on my arm. ‘Please, Paul,’ he said. ‘Is that any way to greet an old friend?’ We were in the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, which he had once confided in me was his favourite meeting-place. I assumed it wasn’t for the beer or because you could visit the stairs where the Pilgrim Fathers boarded the ship, but because it was dark and cosy. The place was about half-full, with a good deal of background noise, and we were seated at a remote corner table, next to a mantelshelf filled with the usual assortment of books gathering dust: Lloyd’s Shipping Register for 1930, Bernard Spilsbury - His Life and Cases, Foote’s Handbook for Spies . . .

On the way over, between checking for tails and hopping on and off buses, I’d bought a paper - a real one - and seen that de Gaulle had resigned over a referendum on the Senate: it looked like the events in Paris the previous year had finally caught up with him. The editorial on page nine opined that his ‘ideas and presence would nevertheless continue to play a part in French affairs’, while the item beneath it discussed the fall of Biafra’s stronghold, Umuahia. Would his idea of supporting the Biafrans continue, too? I’d thought of the deserters and their families huddled in the hut in Aba; and of Gunner, ranting in the field at the futility of it all.

‘I’m no use to you any more,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe any of it.’ And too many people were dead, I could have added - most of them because of me.

He pursed his lips, then placed his forefinger and thumb either side of his mouth and stroked his beard. It meant he was thinking.

‘They have questioned you?’ he said, drawing his head a little closer to me. I gave him a look. ‘What did you tell them?’

‘I thought of something.’

He stopped stroking his beard. ‘What?’

I took a sip of my pint. ‘I blew Henry’s cover,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care what you say, it won’t scare me. Trust me, nothing you can say will scare me.’

He didn’t move for some time, and then he suddenly leaned back in his seat and started laughing. I asked him if he would mind explaining the joke.

He slowly wound down the merriment. ‘You were worried about how I might react?’

I shrugged.

‘This was foreseen, Paul,’ he said pompously. ‘This was always the endgame.’

‘What was?’ I asked. ‘For me to blow Henry’s cover?’

‘Of course. If he was not going to survive, you had to remain protected at all costs. It does not matter that you have exposed him now. They can’t question him, and you are clean.’ He frowned. ‘You told them about Anna also, I presume? I mean, that she was . . . working with Henry?’