Stukeley was pleasant enough: cottages on either side of a narrow street, a pub, a general store and Emsworth's place, Rose Cottage, on the other side of the church. Lady Helen had phoned before leaving London to give him the time and he was expecting them, opening the door to greet them, tall and frail, the flesh washed away, the face skull-like.

She kissed his cheek. 'Tony, you look terrible.'

'Don't I just?' He managed a grin.

'Should I wait in the Merc?' Hedley asked.

'Nice to see you again, Hedley,' Emsworth said. 'Would it be possible for you to handle the kitchen? I let my daily go an hour ago. She's left sandwiches, cakes and so on. If you could make the tea.

'My pleasure,' Hedley told him, and followed them in.

A log fire was burning in the large open fireplace in the sitting room. Beams supported the low ceiling and there was comfortable furniture everywhere and Indian carpets scattered over the stone-flagged floor.

Emsworth sat in a wing-backed chair and put his walking stick on the floor. A cardboard file was on the coffee table beside him.

'There's a photo over there of your old man and me when I was a subaltern,' he said.

Helen Lang went to the sideboard and examined the photo in its silver frame. 'You look very handsome, both of you.'

She returned and sat opposite him. He said, 'I didn't attend Peter's funeral. Missed out on Roger's, too.'

'I had noticed.'

'Too ashamed to show my face, ye see.'

There was something here, something unmentionable that already touched her deep inside, and her skin crawled.

Hedley came in with tea things on a tray and put them down beside her on a low table. 'Leave the food,' she told him. 'Later, I think.'

'Be a good chap,' Emsworth said. 'There's a whiskey decanter on the sideboard. Pour me a large one and one for Lady Helen.'

'Will I need it?'

'I think so.'

She nodded. Hedley poured the drinks and'served them. 'I'll be in the kitchen if you need me.'

'Thank you. I think I might.'

Hedley looked grim, but retired to the kitchen. He stood there thinking about it, then noticed the two doors to the serving hatch and eased them ajar. It was underhanded, yes, but all that concerned him was her welfare. He sat down on a stool and listened.

'For years I lived a lie as far as my friends were concerned,' Emsworth said. 'Even Martha didn't know the truth. You all thought I was Foreign Office. Well, it wasn't true. I worked for the Secret Intelligence Service for years. Oh, not in the field. I was the kind of office man who sent brave men out to do the dirty work and who frequently died doing it. One of them was Major Peter Lang.'

There was that crawling feeling again. 'I see,' she said carefully.

'Let me explain. My office was responsible for black operations in Ireland. The people we were after were not only IRA, but Loyalist paramilitaries who, because of threats and intimidation of witnesses, escaped legal justice.'

'And what was your solution?'

'We had undercover groups, SAS in the main, who disposed of them.'

'Murdered, you mean?'

'No, I can't accept that word. We've been at war with these people for too many years.'

She didn't pour the tea, but reached for the whiskey and sipped some. 'Am I to understand that my son did such work?'

'Yes, he was one of our best operatives. Peter's ability to turn on a range of Irish accents was invaluable. He could sound like a building site worker from Derry if he wanted to. He was part of a group of five. Four men, plus a woman officer.'

'And?'

'They all came to an untimely end within the same week. Three men and the woman shot…'

'And Peter blown up?'

There was a pause as Emsworth swallowed the whiskey, then he got up and lurched to the sideboard and poured another with a shaking hand.

'Actually, no. That's just what you were told.' He swallowed the whiskey, spilling some down his chin.

She drank the rest of her whiskey, took out her silver case, selected a cigarette and lit it. 'Tell me.'

Emsworth reached the chair again and sank down. He nodded to the file. 'It's all in there. Everything you need to know. I'm breaking the Official Secrets Act, but why should I care? I could be dead tomorrow.'

'Tell me!' she said, her voice hard. 'I want to hear it from You.'

He took a deep breath. 'If you must. As you know, there are many splinter groups in Irish politics, both Catholic and Protestant. One of the worst is a nationalist outfit called the Sons of Erin. Years ago, it was run by a man called Frank Barry, a very bad article indeed, and almost unique – he was a Protestant Republican. He was eventually killed, but he had a nephew, named Jack Barry, who had an American mother. He'd been born in New York, then gone to Vietnam in 1970, when he was eighteen, on a short-term commission. There was some kind of scandal – apparently he shot a lot of Vietcong prisoners, so they turfed him out quietly.'

'And then he joined the IRA?'

'That's about it. He took over where his uncle left off. He's a murdering psychopath who's been doing his own thing for years now. Oh, and another bizarre thing. Jack's great-uncle was Lord Barry. He had a place on the Down coast in Ulster called Spanish Head. It's part of the National Trust now. His father died when he was a child and Frank Barry was killed just before his old uncle died.'

'Which leaves Jack with the title?'

Emsworth nodded. 'But he's never attempted to claim it. He could be proscribed as a traitor to the Crown.'

'I wonder. I think executions on Tower Hill went out some years ago. But Tony, please, get to the point.'

He closed his eyes for a moment, then sighed and continued. 'There was a man called Doolin who used to drive for Barry. He ended up in the Maze Prison and we put an informer in his cell. Our man had an ample supply of cocaine and eventually had Doolin telling his life story from birth.' 'My God.' She was horrified.

'It's the name of the game, my dear. Doolin had not been with Barry during the time in question, but his story was that Barry was on a high as he drove him north to Stramore, on pills and whiskey. He told Doolin he'd just taken out an entire undercover British group thanks to the New York branch of the Sons of Erin, and with a little help from someone he called the Connection. Doolin asked who this Connection was, and Barry said no one knew, but that he was an American, and then he started acting all coy, and talking about the detectives who'd operated out of Dublin Castle for Mick Collins in the old days.'

'So the implication was that this Connection was someone very high up and on the inside? But where? How?'

'For years, British Intelligence has had a link with the White House, especially because of the developing peace process. Information has been passed to what were supposed to be friends on a need-to-know basis.'

'Including information on my son's group?'

'Yes. I thought that was going too far, but those more important than I, people such as Simon Carter, Deputy Director of the Security Services, ruled against me. And then Doolin was found hanged in his cell.'

She went and poured another whiskey and turned. 'It gets more like the Borgias every minute. And as you've avoided explaining your remark about Peter not being blown up, I think I'm going to need this.' She swallowed half the whiskey. 'Get on with it, Tony.'

'Yes, well, the Sons of Erin. They passed on information obtained from the Connection. They all had contacts in Dublin and London.' He was in agony and showed it. 'It's in the files. Everything's in there, all the players, photos, the lot. I copied the Top Secret file and

…"

'Tell me about Peter.'

'They snatched him coming out of a pub in South Armagh, Barry and his men. They tortured him, and when he wouldn't talk, beat him to death. They were building a new bypass road nearby, down to the Irish Republic. It had one of those massive concrete mixers that works all night. They put his body through it.'