‘About what, sir?’ Roland Bentley looked wary; he was always nervous when asked to commit himself to an opinion.

‘You’ve heard everything; you know what’s going on. I need to get Richard Prince into Denmark. I was worried about using the SOE due to our fears they’d been infiltrated, hence my putting Hendrie in there. Now that it is clear Llewellyn Tindall was the informer, do you think we are safe to send Prince in using the good offices of the SOE?’

‘If I may say, Tom – and you’ll appreciate I am to a certain extent playing the devil’s advocate here – the evidence against Llewellyn Tindall is only circumstantial. Nothing has been found in his flat—’

‘Hang on, Roland, he was the only person in Rodmarton Street who knew about Hendrie sending an agent over, and sure enough there was a German reception committee of a couple of hundred troops waiting around the drop zone… and then what about this young chap with a foreign accent whom he met in St Martin’s Lane – his German contact?’

‘Indeed, Tom, but that’s circumstantial evidence nonetheless, and there’s nothing to prove Tindall is… was… a German spy. In law, one differentiates between circumstantial and direct evidence. Unlike hearsay, they are both admissible in court, but the latter certainly carries a good deal more weight than the former. And there may be another explanation for this young chap, the foreigner…’

‘Go on.’

‘This is somewhat sensitive, Tom, as you’ll appreciate, but Treslake told us Tindall was hanging around between St Martin’s Court and Cecil Court. Well…’ Bentley coughed nervously and glanced at Gilbey and then Hendrie, as if unsure whether it was wise to continue. ‘On that block is the Salisbury public house. You may not be aware, but that is a venue where homosexual men… meet each other. It is perfectly feasible that this is the reason Tindall met this young man. I believe they call it a pick-up. They went into Cecil Court, which is somewhat less prominent, where Tindall handed him a slip of paper with his address on it and arranged for him to visit him later that evening. Clearly he would not want to be seen travelling with the young man or indeed entering his apartment block with him. The evidence, such as it is, could just as easily point to this having been a sordid sexual encounter: illegal certainly, but hardly in the same bracket as treason.’

Gilbey looked at Bentley, giving the impression that what he said made some sense, but he was nonetheless reluctant to acknowledge it as such. ‘What do you think, Hendrie? You didn’t think a lot of Tindall, did you?’