‘Link arms, please,’ said McLennan. ‘Lean your heads together. Could you bend your knees a little, Mrs Astley-Grey, to even up the heights?’

‘Do call me Avril.’

‘Actually, it might be preferable if we had something for Wendy to stand on.’

‘It’s Winnie.’

As she spoke, there was a noise like the snap of a dried stick, followed by a directionless rolling boom, which shook the floor and set the overhead light-bulb swinging on its wire.

‘Near-ish,’ said Basset.

‘Ring up Control, would you?’ asked Winnie. ‘See where it is. And someone take a gander outside.’

‘You’re all splendidly calm,’ said Avril, as Smiler and Polesworth left the hut. ‘And talk about being in the right place – it’s like getting appendicitis while you’re in the doctor’s surgery.’

‘Could someone straighten the bulb so we can get back to the business in hand?’ asked McLennan. ‘I have a reception at the Russian Embassy at seven.’

The rocket, it turned out, had dropped over a mile and a half away, well out of their sector. ‘On a bus garage,’ Basset reported back, after a second call. ‘Hell of a mess.’

‘And now could we have Mrs Astley-Grey sitting on the edge of the desk, showing a page of her book to Wanda?’

‘It’s Winnie,’ said Winnie yet again, staring at a passage which contained the words ‘the oiled-silk skin of her thighs’ and trying to adjust her features into an expression of rapt interest. It jolted her right back to drama school – to that moment during a first-year party when she’d realized that her ability to act on stage didn’t extend to real life, and that while there were girls in her year who could apparently dilate their own pupils to order, she herself had difficulty even feigning a genuine-looking smile at someone she didn’t like.

She remembered telling Emlyn about it, not long after they’d met: ‘Well, that’s a good quality, isn’t it?’ he’d said. ‘I’ll always know what you’re really thinking.’ Though now, of course, it was more than four years since he’d had any idea what she was really thinking; nearly half a decade of mutual opacity. She’d been trying to remember the contents of the last letter he would have received from her and could recall only a rather perfunctory account of what she’d been listening to on the wireless. ‘… On the other hand, the Dorothy L. Sayers adaptation was pretty good, though I guessed the murderer about a quarter of the way through …’ Hard to imagine anyone pressing that to their heart, except as insulation.

‘Only one more left on the film,’ said McLennan. ‘How about something amusing – both of you playing Tug-o-war over the warden’s helmet?’

‘No,’ said Winnie and Avril, simultaneously.

‘Could we have a photograph of all of us from Post 9?’ asked Winnie. ‘We’ve never had the chance before.’

They bunched together in front of the map, Winnie and Avril at the centre.

‘Say “Cheese” everyone!’ said Avril.