What was going on? A few moments ago he had been furious; now he was buttering me up. When he’d been Head of Station in Czechoslovakia in ’62, we had often shared a few glasses of this local liqueur in his office.

‘Good times,’ I said. ‘Have you kept some back since then? I can’t imagine anyone stocks it in the village shop.’

He poured a few glugs of the stuff into a tumbler and passed it over. ‘Barnes finds it for me,’ he said.

Barnes was a Mau Mau veteran he had reluctantly taken on as a minder when he had been appointed Chief. He had resisted all entreaties for Barnes to be allowed to move into the house, claiming that the place had been his weekend retreat for years and he wasn’t about to have it invaded by a stranger. So Barnes rented a cottage in the neighbouring village, and popped his head in as regularly as he could without annoying the old bugger too much. Apparently, he also made sure he never ran out of booze.

Chief settled back into his armchair and raised his glass solemnly towards me, seemingly in a toast. As I lifted mine in return, I was surprised to catch the scent of Vanessa’s sex still on my fingertips. I breathed it in, and its rawness overcame me for a moment.

‘One never quite gets used to it,’ he said softly, ‘does one?’

I looked at him blankly. ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

He pointed at his glass. ‘My Prague poison, Joan used to call it. Do you remember?’

He gave a short uncharacteristic laugh, which I did my best to imitate.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do remember.’

I was relieved, but also, I realized, a little disappointed that he apparently wasn’t about to sack me, after all. I’d become so bloody soft I had actually been looking forward to a bit of drama.

Chief was leaning down, running his hand through the papers at his feet. Then he gave a triumphant snort and edged a manila folder out from beneath a copy of The Sunday Telegraph. He fished it up and placed it on his knees. It was a file from the office - a new one, by the look of it.

‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘Traitor country.’

The folder had been sent by diplomatic bag from our station in Nigeria and concerned one Vladimir Mikhailovich Slavin, a cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Lagos. He had turned up at our High Commission there on Friday evening and announced that he wanted to defect.