'What was it last time?'

'Shoreditch, the battered wives' -'

'Yes, right, let it stand.'

Took it from there and got through by 01:00 hours, no weapons drawn, no courier requested, no support, so forth. Signed all the bumph.

Went off, Truscott, bobbing his head, briefcase under his arm, almost too big for him.

'In terms,' Ferris said before I left him, 'of final briefing, your primordial task is to latch on to Proctor and get everything you can from him, get right inside his head and work from there.' His hands held out in front of him with the long fingers spread – 'Proctor is the access we've got to have before we can even start running Barracuda', and I said yes I understood.

But in the morning he phoned me and said that Proctor was missing, cleared out during the night.

She was below me, looking upwards through her mask.

Two of them had worked all through the night.

Down, with her hands beckoning. I pretended not to see. Looking at all the sea fans, very pretty, so forth.

They'd gone through the flat with counter-snoop equipment and hadn't found a thing, nothing of his, anyway, only the bug that Monck had ordered put in there without telling me, but I'd stopped worrying about that by now because this wasn't going to be like other missions; this was a Classification One they'd got on the board and they were going to run me like a rat through a maze and I couldn't expect any manners.

Down, she was saying with her hands, encouraging me, nodding slowly, her light hair streaming in the current, so I tilted and went down to where she was waiting just above the sand, four atmospheres on the gauge. Okay! with her thumbs up. I made a bit of token fuss with the faceplate and then nodded yes, okay.

I've never seen Ferris move so fast, though he didn't seem to hurry: he just got a lot more done, calling people out of the woodwork and signalling London and Monck, telling me to get to the Cedar Grove on South River Drive and make certain I was clean when I got there; my hotel was blown and Ferris had got my things collected and sent to the new place.

This morning he'd used every trick in the book and got hold of Proctor's phone bills for the last three months and we'd gone through them and the most frequent local number we'd turned up had been called in the period of August 3rd to 19th and it was hers, Kim Harvester's, the woman drifting beside me with her long greenish eyes watching me through her mask.

Okay, so let's go on up now, her hands palming upwards and her flippers beginning to stroke, the stripes on her suit rippling in the underwater light and her hair drawn straight and then billowing as she slowed, waiting for me, then drawn straight again like pale seaweed in the current.

They'd known he'd gone for good because the peep Ferris had stationed in the building opposite had seen him pile a lot of his stuff into the seven-year-old soft-top Chevrolet in the street below; he'd even taken the stereo and the rowing-machine.

Up we go. Feel okay? Bubbles rising against the flat white surface.

They should have known the man they were handling. He'd seen the tag in the Toyota three cars behind him along Biscayne Boulevard and stopped at an Arco station to make a phone-call and then got back into the Chewy and driven on, and the police car had moved in before they'd gone three blocks and put the tag through the breathalyser while the Chewy had kept on going.

Sunlight bursting against the eyes, the body heavy again.

'You did very well,' she said when she'd pulled off her mask.

'Thank you.'

I'd told Ferris I wanted him to play the tape they'd made when I'd been in the flat talking to Proctor and do it now: I didn't want London to think I'd frightened him off with anything I'd said. Ferris had cleared me, called it a model exercise.

'How did you find me?' she wanted to know; we were stripping off our wet suits on the quay, where she'd got a shed full of equipment and lobster pots and some deep-sea fishing gear. 'I'm a bit out of the way.'

'Someone I was talking to yesterday said you were good. When did you leave the old country?'

'Years ago.' Shaking out her wet hair, 'My father was a small-boat skipper in Dover, but he finally couldn't stand the winters.' She hung up our suits and hosed them and then the air tanks, sluicing out the masks. 'What about you?'

'I'm just visiting.'

Looking down, then up again. 'You don't need scuba lessons.'

'It's been a long time. I'd lost confidence.'

There was a squawking of seagulls suddenly from the water beyond the boats and she swung her head and looked across at them, a square face but small, with a firm mouth, marks on the cheeks still from the mask, thirty, I would suppose, her skin ageing too fast in the sun. 'No,' she said, 'you haven't lost confidence. You were just making it look like that.' She smiled for the first time since I'd come down here.

'How long have you been teaching?'

'Oh, years.' She put a brush through her hair. 'So who told you where to find me?'

'George Proctor.'

She straightened – 'Oh.'

'He said you were a good teacher.'

'He's trash,' she said off-handedly as she looked away and then began stowing the air tanks.

'Can I give you a hand?'

'I do it in my sleep.' Lean-bodied and strong, turned-up khaki shorts and a tee-shirt, its back dark from her wet hair.

I was waiting for her to ask me how he was, Proctor, because he'd phoned her every day, sometimes twice a day, the last time nearly a month ago, but she just said, 'I didn't catch your first name.'

'Richard.' But then I suppose you wouldn't ask about someone's health if you'd dismissed them as trash.

'Since,' she said, 'you don't need scuba lessons and you haven't lost your confidence in the water, why did you come down here?' With a full frank stare.

'I hoped you might know where he's gone.'

'Oh.'

Someone was bringing a Chris Craft in, throttling the diesels down, two or three people on deck, very tanned, one of them with a line ready, and she waved back to them when they saw her. There was still a lot of flotsam swirling on the surface from the storm. There was flotsam all over the bloody place as a matter of fact: Ferris had put three men on me as an exercise in caution. A lot had happened last night – my room at the hotel had been gone through and someone had tagged me back there and then Proctor had got out very fast indeed and left no tracks, so anything could happen now and if anyone picked me up again and moved in, Ferris would want to know who they were and where they came from.

'Proctor is the key,' he'd said. 'He's also the access.'

Croder, at the board for Barracuda, would not have been pleased with that signal. Subject missing, no trace.

'Would you like some lobster?' the woman asked me.

'To eat?'

'What else would you do with a lobster? Don't tell me you're that kinky.' With a freezing smile, loathing me for even having known Proctor, but still too interested to let me go.

I said I liked lobster.

'Actually she's a tug,' Kim said, 'still is, really, though I've made a few changes.'

We'd put out a couple of miles, as far as the warning buoys on the reef, and dropped anchor.

'She was my father's, his one great love, apart from me. Two-inch oak on double-sawn oak frames, my God, the way they used to do things! She's still registered for coastwise and harbour work. Are you starving?'

'There's no hurry.'

'I've got to catch it first. There's some Scotch in that cupboard, unless you'd like wine. Help yourself.' She went into a berth and came back in a black bikini, hooking the bra and shutting the door with her bare foot. 'Aren't they handsome?' I was looking at the blown-up photographs of sharks all over the cabin. Brushing against me in the close quarters she said, 'I was rude to you back there on the quay.