He turned from the window and found a note on his desk from Mademoiselle Ricain. Inspector du Maurier had phoned twice. There was a number to call back. It was the same number the Inspector had given him the other day. There was also an invitation to British press correspondents to attend a dinner at a Brussels restaurant that night where the Foreign Office would announce its arrangements for shipping Gryffe’s body back to London. There was an embargo until ten a.m. tomorrow when an official government statement would be put out on the wires. Dress was informal.

Ironically, the invitation was addressed to Timothy Slater Esq., EEC Correspondent, Edinburgh Post. Bannerman crushed it in his fist and chucked it in the bin. One more exercise in government PR. The tragedy was that their attempts to draw a veil over the affair would probably succeed. Most journalists were susceptible to good food and drink and the gentle persuasions of contacts they were almost certain to need in the future. Correspondents based here in Brussels, like the two he had met the day he arrived, would be reluctant to dump in their own backyard. It was the staff men sent over from London who would be harder to convince. But how many of them would stay here long enough to get to the truth?

Bannerman sat down and examined his swollen knuckles. His hand had stiffened up. He wondered where Palin had gone. Was he getting drunk somewhere? And Mademoiselle Ricain. She would not understand why he had hit his colleague. The world was filled with people who would not understand, who would never understand. Bannerman took out the envelope Tait had brought him and began reading his way laboriously through every article.

It took him half an hour to read them all twice. But there were no sudden revelations, no blinding lights on the road to Damascus. Just the bare bones of a man’s life. Not much more than he’d known already from the file of cuttings Slater himself had compiled.

Gryffe had been forty-four years old when he died. Born in a London suburb, the son of a wealthy lawyer, he had been educated at a lesser-known public school before going on to academic distinction and an honours degree in economics at Cambridge. His background did not suggest that his politics would fall on the side they did.