Cullis had met Penny only once, in Cambodia, during his first tour as a junior inspector. He had been drawn to her. (A small oil decorated an upstairs room in the Wiltshire cottage.) Penny had entertained him beside the pool and late in the afternoon escorted him shopping. A rickshaw led them to a covered market near the palace. She wanted him to meet an old man who wove beautiful silk belts. She encouraged him to buy one for Hilda. Thirty years on, Lady Cullis continued to wear the black and gold belt.

Cullis hoped Penny was spared the knowledge of her husband’s infidelity, but he doubted it. Anyway it was none of his business. His business was not to solve problems that had arisen, rather to prevent them from arising in the first place. He thought of Croby in the Gabon. He thought of Pendock in Peshawar. He thought of Dwindell. And Wavery.

Why did so many intelligent men become blithering idiots when it came to matters of the heart? Wavery had been given his chance. Cullis simply couldn’t, not and remain true to all he held sacred, have recommended Lisbon in the land of Fatima to a diplomat who had discovered late in life that there were more ways of eating cauliflower than off a plate.

He retrieved his stare from the window. Rain then showers, moderate becoming good, he reckoned. He had forgotten what he had been going to say. “How’s Penny?”

“She’s well.”

“Do give her my love.”

“Rather.”

Cullis rose to his feet, Wavery too. “Better not forget that, Thomas.” Wavery gathered up the post report. The PUS opened the door. “Keep an eye on Morocco, will you. Keep us posted, above all, on what the Berbers are thinking.”

Cullis closed the door and walked to the mantelpiece. He warmed his back against an unlit fire. What actually had he been going to say? Something to do with the Yeats poem, the title of which had escaped him?

He scratched his leg where it itched between the trouser and the sock. He thought of Penny. He thought of his own two children and the sanctity of family life. If diplomats couldn’t promote the British ideal of family they, by God, deserved to be treated as accountants. He was still scratching when his secretary rang.

“Sir Derek, you won’t have forgotten your lunch appointment?”

“Remind me.”

She reminded him of an inspector who was taking early retirement. “You wanted Personnel Department’s list of possible replacements.”

4

The post report which Cullis had given Wavery contained the Political Department’s potted history of Abyla.

A Spanish possession since 1580, Abyla has long been claimed by Morocco. The southern pillar of Hercules, the enclave is situated on the North African coast fourteen miles across the Straits from its northern pillar, Gibraltar. Officers should refrain from the temptation to find parallels. The Spanish position is that Morocco is not entitled to ask for Abyla’s return since Abyla never belonged to Morocco in the first place: it was captured by the Portuguese in 1415, becoming a possession of Spain a century before Morocco united as a kingdom.