I’m grinning, my mind full of memories both good and bad. And then I’m wincing, holding up a hand to shield my eyes as Walt flicks the torch into life and steps out of the shadows as if he were Rumpelstiltskin come to life. He’s aged poorly. It’s been a few years since we last shared a gin and a chinwag but they’ve been harder on him than on me. Walt is a tubby little chap: conspicuously gnome-like in his red-cheeked, white-bearded jolliness. There’s a gumminess to his mouth now: a suggestion that his big white teeth no longer fit his shrunken gums. He’s not fat, not exactly, but there’s something about him that puts a person in mind of a painful mosquito bite, as if his skin is stretched tight over some irritating infection and that a shaving cut could cause him to burst. The lenses of his eyes are the yellow of a harvest moon. He’s dressed for the weather: his boilerman’s cap pulled down so low that it nearly touches his big pink ears and his short Alpine jacket looks to still be damp from this morning’s downpour. Beneath his coat he wears the grey suit and loudly patterned jumper that were his trademark when he was a senior figure near the uppermost reaches of the Service. His glasses, I notice with a whiff of nostalgia, are as filthy as they were when he first introduced himself to me as a new recruit in the spring of ’68. I wondered then, as now, how much of his appearance was affectation. He looked so very unlike a spy. And yet he was the best of all of them: clever, cunning, witty in his way. He was the last of the old school; the last of the Cambridge intelligentsia with the old-England surname and a reputation for causing the right kind of mischief. Whether he achieved greatness or missed it completely depends entirely upon whom you ask. But in ’82 he’s long since been given his marching orders after one row too many with his Whitehall overlords. He wasn’t, as they saw it, a company man. He either saw the bigger picture, or didn’t see the same one that everybody else at the table was looking at. He had an annoying habit of trying to do the decent thing in a merciless business. There was some sticky business involving a botched buy in Nicaragua and I know he took the loss of one of his agents hard. Not much leaked out during the ensuing autopsy but it became clear, as these things do, that Walt was no longer one of us and that it would be better for those with an eye upon advancement, to start making fun of his memory and mocking his outdated little ways. I, as something akin to a protégée, was lucky not to be tarred by association. It still sickens me how little I said or did in his defence. All the things I’ve done and not done and that’s what I feel the most shame about.