He’d already had Benny Manors’s history down pat. Say what you like about John Bachelor, but he did his job, or at least, turned up prepared to do his job. It was only after that preliminary stage that things might go wrong, as with, for example, Benny Manors. So yes, he had Benny’s number, and it wasn’t what you’d call prime. Because Benny was a louse and Benny was a chancer. One of those who definitely fell within the category “not entirely honourable.” What Benny had been, when you got down to it, was a crook. Breaking and entering, though he’d discovered a sideline when a venture into a likely looking property had yielded an interesting collection of Polaroids among the loose cash and petty jewellery, Polaroids Benny had amused himself with a time or two before it occurred to him that while the starring role of Old Man in a Nappy had evidently been taken by the gentleman occupier of the recently burgled house, the two young women supporting his act were definitely not his wife. And thus Benny had learned that some stolen property enjoys a cash value above and beyond what it might reach down the local, because the elderly gentleman proved expensively keen to reacquire possession of his souvenirs rather than have them, say, appear on the internet. It was Benny’s pleasure to make the old man’s dream come true. Well, his latest dream. Going by the evidence, earlier versions had already been taken care of.

So that was Benny Manors, and that became his career: housebreaking a speciality, but with an eye for the unusual item. Careers have been built on lesser talents—soap stars, presidents, novelists—and he might have happily continued his course without interruption had he not come to the attention of a Service talent spotter. Every so often Regent’s Park found itself in need of an amateur, largely to avoid any fallout should the situation at issue turn unexpectedly professional. So, Benny Manors having dropped onto its radar as a snapper-up of unconsidered truffles, the Service pressganged him into carrying out an after-hours excursion into the premises of a certain Eastern European gentleman resident in Knightsbridge, whose diplomatic status technically put him off-limits, but whose private life remained of surpassing interest regardless. Anyway, long story short, the situation did in fact turn unexpectedly professional, with the result that Benny Manors, in what turned out to be the briefest Secret Service career since George Lazenby’s, rather than acquiring any useful information acquired a permanent limp instead, courtesy of the Eastern European gentleman’s domestic help, which was rather more energetic than the average Knightsbridge household required. Benny, and what remained of his left leg, were deposited in a dumpster just outside the postcode. This was felt by Regent’s Park to be coincidence rather than deliberate slight, but who knew?