There was a longish silence, during which I shifted to a slightly more comfortable position on the chimney. Anyone looking at me in the moonlight would have mistaken me for a burglar or perhaps an off-duty Santa Claus. Ludicrous, really. All I really wanted to do now was leave the Villa Mauresque and go see Anne French in Villefranche and climb into bed with her. Down in the garden I could hear the two English agents talking about football and I smelled their cheap cigarettes. I wouldn’t have minded one myself but for the fear that the men in the drawing room might smell my tobacco smoke coming down the chimney. I glanced around and saw Maugham now seating himself in the large square full of bluish light that was his study. He looked like an extinct species of tropical fish, most probably poisonous. But certainly he could have been no more poisonous than the relationship between MI5 and MI6, which reminded me strongly of the rivalry that had existed between the German Abwehr and the SD. I had direct experience of just how lethal a rivalry like that could become. I had no idea of who Kim Philby or John Cairncross were, but it was quite clear to me that Somerset Maugham had been entirely right when he’d suggested earlier that Burgess and Maclean might not be the only Soviet spies in Britain’s so-called intelligence agencies.

“But suppose that’s exactly what did happen,” continued Sinclair eventually. “Look here, Occam’s razor and all that. The simplest explanation is the most likely. Guy was always a fearful snob and typically dismissive of this tobacco salesman he’s just met—so dismissive that the Russians didn’t even notice that he could only have been referring to Roger Hollis. But here’s a rather more persuasive explanation, I think. We’ve always strongly suspected that the Soviet GRU and the KGB both run separate networks of spies in England but don’t keep each other in the loop about what they’re up to. We even believe they’re forbidden to consult each other without specific permission from the GKO—the State Defense Committee, in Moscow. This was a corollary of Stalin’s paranoia. It was he who decreed that ideally UK Soviet counterespionage should be covered by both a KGB agent and a GRU agent, so that they could always double-check a source. Well then. Suppose Guy Burgess was being run by the KGB and they spirit him out of England and while they’re doing it, for whatever reason, they record this tape. Suppose Hollis on the other hand is being run by the GRU—by Russian military intelligence. That would explain the oversight. The KGB don’t know anything about Hollis because he’s GRU. It was a cock-up, pure and simple. Too much security can be just as bad as not enough.”

“Yes, that might explain it.”