Angleton is missing. Why? And where? He doesn't live anywhere, according to Human Resources; doesn't have a life. Well, that's not much of a surprise. Angleton's grasp on mundane humanity has always struck me as tenuous—the idea that there's a four-hundred-year-old stone cottage in a village in the countryside, and a Mrs. Angleton puttering around hanging out the laundry on a line in the back garden, simply doesn't work for me. He goes beyond the usual monasticism of the man who married his job; he never takes holidays, he's always in the office, and then there's the photograph. (Maybe he inherited it from Dorian Gray?) So, let this be Clue #1 that something is wrong. Angleton never does anything by accident, so either something is rotten in the state of Denmark, or he's embarked on a caper he didn't see fit to tell anyone about.

I turn right, across a main road—quiet at this time of night—then along and left down an alleyway that leads between rows of high back-garden fences. Grass grows beneath the crumbling, silvery woodwork and around the wheelie bins; here's a concrete yard where someone has parked a decaying caravan, its windows frosted dark in the urban twilight.

The Fuller Memorandum is missing. Whatever is in it is still a hot potato after seventy-odd years. Angleton was interested in it, and in BLOODY BARON, and in this new business about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN coming into effect sooner rather than later.

Item: Why are the Russians sniffing around? And what did Panin mean about finding the Teapot? He can't be talking about Ungern Sternberg's psychotic batman, can he? I did some checking. Teapot was fragged by Ungern Sternberg's own rebellious troops in 1921, right before they handed the Baron over to Trotsky's commissars. At least, the mutineers said they shot him. If he'd run away into the Siberian forest, alone, might they have concocted some cock-and-bull cover story . . . ?

I make a right turn into a narrow path. It leads to a tranquil bicycle track, walled in beech and chestnut trees growing from the steep embankments to either side and sporadically illuminated by isolated lampposts. It used to be a railway line, decades ago, one of the many suburban services closed during the Beeching cuts—but it wasn't a commuter line. (I stumbled across it not long after we moved to this part of town, and it caught my attention enough to warrant some digging.)

The Necropolis Service ran from behind Waterloo station to the huge Brookwood cemetery in Surrey; tickets were sold in two classes, one-way and return. This is one of its tributaries, a tranquil creek feeding the great river of the dead. Today, cyclists use it to bypass the busy main roads on their way into the center. It is, however, unaccountably unpopular with the after-work exercise set, and I have the left lane to myself as I walk, still chewing over what I know and what I don't know.