He opened a window and peered in the dark at black water channelling towards an obsolete mill-wheel. Further out the main stream slid over a waterfall to crash into a deep pool. This would be a pleasant place to cast a fly on a June evening, but now the air was icy; he shut the window and got into bed.

Listening to the water he reviewed the evening, the last of assignment Clug. And, since Clug spent so much time with her, he had included Laura in the watching.

At the start of Clug’s concert tour, at a reception, he had seen them meet. Noted an instant rapport. Since then Clug and Laura had spent all the time Clug could manage together. It had puzzled him that she should take up with Clug when there could be no future in the liaison. She behaved as he frequently did himself, taking up with a girl for a short term, happy never to see her again. Martin grinned, amused to find this affinity between himself and the woman he had been observing for a month. They had spoken for the first time that evening as he got on the train and she, smiling, had let him know that she had known all along and not cared that he watched her while he watched the Rumanian.

He had done more than watch, he acknowledged to himself. By using the ploy of a mislaid umbrella, he would double back to discover, if he could, more about Laura; he was intrigued by her, fascinated. He could perhaps discover why she lived alone, worked alone, had apparently satisfactory but only short-term relationships. A fellow watcher changing shifts had told him that he had come across Laura before, having an affair on that occasion with a visiting American academician suspected by the CIA of sympathising with Chilean lefties. Another colleague remembered that she had had a brief brush with a Hungarian painter in England, like Clug, on a cultural visit. With both these men she had stayed quite openly in hotels, but paid her own way.