The train stopped, and from the noise outside the passengers guessed they had arrived. When Faber got out he realised how hungry and thirsty he was. His last meal had been sausage-meat, dry biscuits and bottled water, twenty-four hours ago. He went through the ticket barrier and found the station buffet. It was full of people, mostly soldiers, sleeping or trying to sleep at the tables. Faber asked for a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea.

"The food is reserved for servicemen," said the woman behind the counter.

"Just the tea, then."

"Got a cup?"

Faber was surprised. "No, I haven't."

"Neither have we, chum."

Faber contemplated going into the Great Eastern Hotel for dinner, but that would take time. He found a pub and drank two pints of weak beer, then bought a bag of chips at a fish-and-chip shop and ate them from the newspaper wrapping, standing on the pavement. They made him feel surprisingly full.

Now he had to find a chemist's shop and break in.

He wanted to develop his film, to make sure the pictures came out. He was not going to risk returning to Germany with a roll of spoiled, useless film. If the pictures were no good he would have to steal more film and go back. The thought was unbearable.

It would have to be a small independent shop, not a branch of a chain that would process film centrally. It must be in an area where the local people could afford cameras (or could have afforded them before the war). The part of East London in which Liverpool Street station stood was no good. He decided to head toward Bloomsbury.

The moonlit streets were quiet. There had been no sirens so far tonight. Two Military Policemen stopped him in Chancery Lane and asked for his identity card. Faber pretended to be slightly drunk, and the MPs did not ask what he was doing out of doors.

He found the shop he was looking for at the north end of Southampton Row. There was a Kodak sign in the window. Surprisingly, the shop was open. He went in.

A stooped, irritable man with thinning hair and glasses stood behind the counter, wearing a white coat. He said, "We're only open for doctor's prescriptions."

"That's all right. I just want to ask whether you develop photographs."

"Yes, if you come back tomorrow."

"Do you do them on the premises?" Faber asked. "I need them quickly, you see."

"Yes, if you come back tomorrow."

"Could I have the prints the same day? My brother's on leave, and he wants to take some back."

"Twenty-four hours is the best we can do. Come back tomorrow."

"Thank you, I will." On his way out he noticed that the shop was due to close in ten minutes. He crossed the road and stood in the shadows, waiting.

Promptly at nine o'clock the chemist came out, locking the shop behind him, and walked off down the road. Faber went in the opposite direction and turned two corners.

There seemed to be no direct access to the back of the shop, and Faber did not want to break in the front way in case the unlocked door was noticed by a patrolling policeman while he was in there. He walked along the parallel street, looking for a way through. Apparently there was none. Still, there had to be a wall of some kind at the back, the two streets were too far apart for the buildings to be joined back-to-back.

Finally he came across a large old house with a nameplate marking it as a residence hall for a nearby college. The front door was unlocked. Faber went in and walked quickly through to a communal kitchen. A lone girl sat at a table, drinking coffee and reading a book. Faber muttered, "College blackout check." She nodded and returned to her text. Faber went out of the back door.

He crossed a yard, bumping into a cluster of dustbins on the way, and found a door to a lane. In seconds he was at the rear of the chemist's shop. This entrance was obviously never used. He clambered over some tyres and a discarded mattress, and threw his shoulder at the door. The rotten wood gave easily, and Faber was inside.

He found the darkroom and shut himself in. The light switch operated a dim red lamp in the ceiling.

The place was quite well equipped, with neatly labelled bottles of developing fluid, an enlarger, and even a dryer for prints.

Faber worked quickly but carefully, getting the temperature of the tanks exactly right, agitating the fluids to develop the film evenly, timing the processes by the hands of a large electric clock on the wall. The negatives were perfect.

He let them dry, then fed them through the enlarger and made one complete set of ten-by-eight prints. He felt a sense of elation as he saw the images gradually appear in the bath of developer. Damn, he had done a good job! There was now a major decision to be made.

The problem had been in his mind all day, and now that the pictures had come out he was forced to confront it. What if he did not make it home?

The journey ahead of him was, to say the least, hazardous. He was more than confident of his own ability to make the rendezvous in spite of travel restrictions and coastal security; but he could not guarantee that the U-boat would be there; or that it would get back across the North Sea. And, of course, he might walk out of here and get run over by a bus.

The possibility that, having discovered the most important secret of the war, he might die and his secret die with him, was too awful to think about.

He had to have a fall-back stratagem; a second method of trying to ensure that the evidence of the Allied deception reached the Abwehr.

There was, of course, no postal service between England and Germany. Mail had to go via a neutral country. And all such mail was sure to be censored. He could write in code, but there was no point; he had to send the pictures; they were the evidence that counted.

There was a route, and a good one, he'd been told. At the Portuguese Embassy in London there was an official, sympathetic to Germany-partly for political reasons and partly, Faber worried, because he was well bribed-who would pass messages via the diplomatic bag to the German Embassy in neutral Lisbon. From there, it was safe. The route had been opened early in 1939, but Faber had used it only once before, when Canaris had asked for a routine test communication.

It would do. It would have to do.

Faber felt angry. He hated to place his faith in others. They were all such bumbling… Still, he couldn't take the chance. He had to have a backup for this information. It was a lesser risk than using the radio and certainly less than the risk if Germany never learned at all.

Faber's mind was clear. The balance of argument indisputably favoured the Portuguese Embassy contact.

He sat down to write a letter.

Frederick Bloggs had spent an unpleasant afternoon in the countryside.

When five worried wives had contacted their local police station to say their husbands had not come home, a rural police-constable had exercised his limited powers of deduction and concluded that a whole patrol of the Home Guard had not gone AWOL. He was fairly sure they had simply got lost. They were all a bit daft, otherwise they would have been in the Army, but all the same he notified his constabulary headquarters just to cover himself. The operations-room sergeant who took the message realised at once that the missing men had been patrolling a particularly sensitive military area, and he notified his inspector, who notified Scotland Yard, who sent a Special Branch man down there and notified MI5, which sent Bloggs.

The Special Branch man was Harris, who had been on the Stockwell murder. He and Bloggs met on the train, which was one of the Wild West locomotives lent to Britain by the Americans because of the shortage of trains. Harris repeated his invitation to Sunday dinner, and Bloggs told him again that he worked most Sundays.