He reached the foyer and slipped modestly to his place just as Rothermere Vulgurian, the last guest to arrive, alighted from his Rolls, shook Chiddingfold’s hand, and came up the steps. Everything was running to schedule. Nunn looked round. The parade was complete and perfect. Rank upon rank of best suits and shapeless print dresses filled the foyer, each suit and dress complete with a hand suitable for shaking dangling at its right side, and each hand enclosing a palm moistened by a respectful quantity of sweat. Sir Prestwick Wining was there in a wheel-chair. Jolly, jolly good.

It was nearly two minutes to three. A complete silence had fallen over the foyer. Somewhere a door banged softly. Who could be banging a door at a time like this? Not . . . not Goldwasser, come to the feast like Banquo’s ghost? Nunn turned round to look. Someone, indeed, was edging hastily through the ranks. Nunn craned his neck. It was not Goldwasser – it was Zinnia, the switchboard girl, hurrying and blushing and pushing her way to the front of the foyer. Nunn followed her with his eyes, frowning. What on earth was she up to? Her instructions were to remain at the switch in case of emergencies. And here she was . . . here she was running down the front steps! Running to where Chiddingfold was standing at the bottom, waiting for the royal car. What in the name of heaven . . . ?

And suddenly Nunn understood.

He had left the telephones in his room connected.

All at once he felt a very old man. He had made a slip. He had made slips before, of course. There was M’Lowowo, who had managed to get himself hanged for an offence committed by someone else. There was Mendelssohn, believed to be a member of the Irgun Zwei Leumi, pushed down a well in Jerusalem and visibly dead in 1947, now alive and well and house father of an orphanage in Tel Aviv. There were others. Was all his life to be spent, in spite of the intense mental alertness maintained by constant exercise, in assassinating the wrong man, in sequestering the right man in a room connected by two telephones with the outside world?

Through rheumy, ancient eyes he watched Zinnia pull at Chiddingfold’s sleeve. He watched Chiddingfold jump slightly, and incline his head to listen, and glance in the direction Zinnia was pointing, back at the foyer, and hesitate, and glance down the road, and hesitate again, and then turn and mount the steps, with Zinnia running on ahead.

He half expected Chiddingfold to come up to him and call him out before all the assembled guests for his error. But Chiddingfold walked straight past, with head bowed, passed through the waiting ranks, and disappeared with Zinnia into the switchboard room.