I murmured interest as best I could, and wondered where on earth this was heading.

Alebayo opened my passport, held it away from him as though it were contaminated, and squinted at my photograph.

‘Do you know Mister Winston Churchill?’ he asked, suddenly.

‘My colleague, or his grandfather?’

‘Are your articles as facetious as your speech, Mister Kane? Your colleague.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know him. I wouldn’t say we were friends—’

‘Well, then,’ he interrupted, ‘as your newspaper has sent you to “cover” events here, you have presumably been “boning up” on what Mister Churchill has already written about this country in your newspaper? Yes?’

‘Of course.’ It had been Churchill who had alleged that the Federal pilots were targeting Biafra’s civilian population. His articles had caused such an outcry that Parliament had held another emergency debate on the war - the same debate in which Wilson had announced his trip.

‘Your colleague appears to believe we are savages, Mister Kane,’ said Alebayo. ‘Cold-blooded killers, devoid of any moral sense.’

He suddenly held back his head and laughed, and his soldiers joined in, until he whipped the table with his crop, and the laughter abruptly stopped. It was like a very bad opera production.

‘Can you imagine it, Mister Kane? The cheek of the grandson of Winston Churchill to write such a thing! Has he forgotten Dresden?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to ask him.’ The analogy didn’t seem fair, somehow, but I wasn’t going to get into it.

He leaned in again. ‘Do you intend to file the same species of report as your colleague?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Lagos is four hundred miles from the fighting.’

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘You are a sharp one, my friend.’ He was pacing around, confusing the flies buzzing about his face. ‘So what will you be writing about? Expatriate dinner parties? Our local cuisine? What are your editor’s orders?’

‘Colour stories,’ I said.

He bristled. ‘I am so sorry, I didn’t quite hear. Could you please repeat yourself?’

I reminded myself to choose my words rather more carefully. ‘A picture of life in the capital of a country at war. What the feeling is in the corridors of power, how negotiations are going, that sort of—’

‘Are those what you call “colour stories”?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘I could tell you a few others. But perhaps your readership wouldn’t be interested in hearing the reverse side of the coin.’

‘We’re interested in the truth,’ I said, and he laughed again.

‘Let me be honest with you, Mister Kane. I do not like journalists. In fact, more often than not, I find them repellent - vultures circling around others’ misery, looking for something to misconstrue.’ He said the word beautifully, savouring its syllables. He was watching me very keenly. ‘Are you certain you are a journalist? You don’t look much like one.’