Then there was the strange business of the petition she had got up, the history of which was also documented in Sporting Records. There was the text of the petition itself, addressed to the Director, expressing alarm and anxiety about the preparations which were being made for the visit, and reminding Chiddingfold of the Institute’s universal desire that the occasion should be an informal one. There was the confidential memorandum from Mrs. Plushkov to Nunn asking what he thought they should do about the petition, and Nunn’s confidential reply to Mrs. Plushkov suggesting that the best thing to do at this stage was to go along with the protest movement and try to bring it out in the open. (Extraordinary advice. Who was this fellow Nunn, anyway? Perhaps he was . . . Ah, hm yes, of course. Jolly good.) Then there was the list of signatories. Riddle, Macintosh, Goldwasser, and Rowe at the top of the list, naturally. Then Mrs. Plushkov and Nunn, presumably added after their confidential consultation. Then Chiddingfold. (Chiddingfold! Something a little odd here, surely, in Chiddingfold signing a petition addressed to himself? Some touchingly human moment of misunderstanding, presumably. Perhaps he never descended far enough into the common world to read documents that were put before him for signature? Perhaps he never condescended to read anything? Perhaps he couldn’t read?) After Chiddingfold everybody had signed it, and it had been presented to Chiddingfold, who had passed it to Nunn as Deputy Chairman of the Programme Committee, who was too busy with security work to deal with it himself, and who had passed it to the Secretary of the Programme Committee, Mrs. Plushkov, who minuted that the Committee had taken note of it and filed it for the record, where it came back to Nunn. Nunn examined it at great length, but found it exceedingly difficult to know how to evaluate it. He was greatly struck by the fact that after he and Mrs. Plushkov had signed it to bring the bad security risks out into the open everyone else in the Institute had signed it. Did it mean that everyone was in fact a bad security risk? Or had everyone signed it because they thought they would seem bad security risks if they did not sign a petition which Nunn and Mrs. Plushkov had signed?

One thing was plain, anyway – the petition had been launched by Riddle, and anyone who launched a petition was certainly a grade one security risk. Nunn considered her carefully.

First of all she was scruffy, which was often a bad sign from the security point of view. Nunn made a note in his Horse of the Year Calendar, ‘(1) Scruffy,’ he wrote. The more Nunn thought about her scruffiness, the more dangerous it seemed. Her hair always looked odd. Her shoes always needed heeling. A cigarette dangled permanently from her lips – a cigarette which she had always referred to as a fag. As she always said, she was not a woman to mince her words. Perhaps, reflected Nunn thoughtfully, it was to avoid mincing her words that she always kept her fag in the extreme right-hand corner of her mouth. What should he write down to summarise his thinking here? ‘(2) Haircut,’ he put.