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Chapters (45)
  1. The Man With No Face
  2. Also by
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. INTRODUCTION
  9. CHAPTER ONE
  10. CHAPTER TWO
  11. CHAPTER THREE
  12. CHAPTER FOUR
  13. CHAPTER FIVE
  14. CHAPTER SIX
  15. CHAPTER SEVEN
  16. CHAPTER EIGHT
  17. CHAPTER NINE
  18. CHAPTER TEN
  19. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  20. CHAPTER TWELVE
  21. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  22. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  23. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  24. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  25. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  26. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  27. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  37. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

When he left the Council of Ministers it was dark, and he had walked up the Boulevard Charlemagne, past a bar where German journalists spent their days. At the IPC building he had found Slater in his office. It was well after seven now and he turned away from the window to take in the figure of Slater crouched by the open drawer of a filing cabinet. The Herald man had left and the secretary, Mademoiselle Ricain, was on her break. ‘I won’t be long,’ Slater said.

Bannerman looked around the cluttered office. Four desks were pushed together to form a square. They were strewn with discarded press releases, overflowing trays of copy, technical journals, wordy reports and empty coffee cups. The walls were plastered with charts and maps, and a door led off to an anteroom where a chattering teleprinter shared by the Herald and the Post sent copy back to the mother ships to be printed for publication in clattering machine rooms in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The panoramic windows looked out east across the rooftops, a forest of leaning chimneys and television aerials. Bannerman pulled up a chair and sat down, and reached for an open file. It was filled with loose newspaper cuttings from various papers. He saw a grey, smeared photograph of Gryffe and picked up the cutting. He was bored already by Brussels and the EEC, depressed at the thought of spending as long as a month in this dreary place. He let his eyes wander over the cutting. Mr Robert Gryffe, a rising star at the Foreign Office, yesterday warned at a meeting of the EEC Council of Ministers in Brussels of an impending slump . . .

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Slater snatched away the cutting and grabbed the folder from his desk. Bannerman looked up, surprised, mildly irritated. Slater eyed him suspiciously, a fragile, unhealthy-looking man, all his wasted years stretching behind him like links in a rusted chain. He was a man who had started out on his journalistic career full of ambition and enthusiasm, only to have both slowly battered out of him by long, weary years of fires and murders, of knocking on doors and carving initials on court benches. There had been the anonymous pubs and reporters, drinks and stories, night shifts and fictitious expenses. And there had been, too, the moves from paper to paper until the faces had all begun to look the same, the conversations predictable, the copy more turgid.