He picked up the outside phone, but even before he had got it to his ear his first simple enthusiasm had faded. How was he going to start explaining? ‘Excuse me, the Director of the William Morris Institute has locked me in the Deputy-Director’s office . . .’? ‘In order to further the immediate execution of his sinister plans against the Queen, the Director . . .’? ‘The Queen is in danger, and I am locked in a room at the . . .’? He was almost relieved to find that the phone was dead, not switched through from the master telephone on Miss Fram’s desk in the outer office.

He put down the outside phone and picked up the internal one. It buzzed eagerly in his ear, and he stretched out his hand to dial a number. But which number? No one was at his desk in the whole building; they were all at the great handshaking in the foyer. There was no one to phone.

He put the receiver back and thought. There was only one way he could see of doing it. That was to wait until he heard the official party leave the foyer and start its tour of the building. The first section to be visited was the Political Department, and he could catch them there.

He settled himself to wait, sitting very still and straining his ear to interpret the incessant background of the day’s small noises. Distant traffic. An aircraft whining at the corner of the sky and fading again. A window rattling slightly in the wind. A faint, throbbing hum from some sort of machinery – generating? refrigerating? ventilating? – in the building’s bowels. And something else. The noise of handshaking? The mumble of Your Majestys and the muffled click of middle-aged joints curtsying?

Ten minutes passed. Suddenly the dim, problematical noise became a shade more definite; a door had been opened. There were footsteps – two or three sets, now half a dozen, now a dozen – swelling into a dense pattering like heavy rain falling on a tarpaulin. It was unmistakably the noise of two hundred people walking upstairs.