I'd have time to make a brush contact with Flower and give him the rendezvous and let him get to the Hillman.

But it didn't work out that way because when she reached the Jensen I looked at Flower to make sure he'd seen. He obviously had: he was turning and making his way down on the other side, hurrying a little and trying not to show it. The pavement was a bit crowded and as far as I could see he stepped off the kerb at the wrong time and someone shouted and there was the fling of an arm and then a long red smear where the wheel of the bus went dragging.

'Wai?'

'What is the goose?'

'It is gold.'

'This is for London, immediate.'

'Wait.'

I listened carefully, thinking he was warning me, 'Yes?'

He'd just been getting a pencil.

'Mandarin. They picked the flower. Wing.'

I could hear his breathing as he wrote it down: he'd been in the shop below when the telephone had rung.

'Yes.'

'Please repeat.'

'Wait. Mandarin. They pick the flower. Wing. Yes?'

'Picked.' I spelt it.

'Yes. Picked.'

'Thank you.'

Then I got Fleetway and said I'd left the Capri outside the Excelsior and they could pick it up there and I'd see them as soon as I could to sign the papers and they said they'd prefer me to bring the car in personally and complete the formalities and I said they wouldn't be in business long if they didn't learn to co-operate, feeling savage, wanting to curse everybody just as one does when it's been one's own fault.

I can't stand a messy death. I don't mean the smear bit, I mean a death that doesn't do anything, doesn't mean anything. Thornton did it the right way, Thornton above all people, hit the Caucasus Mountains head-on with a twin-engined Petrov X-7 trying to dodge the missiles they were sending up from the base at Krasnodar, one big bang and no heel taps, the whole of the Bureau laughing all the way to Codes and Cyphers with the stuff he'd given the Queen's Messenger in Odessa, complete blueprints of the submarine complex and defence installations with blown-up photographs. If you've got to go, do it like that.

Bobbie? Oh he's fine, I think. He's off abroad again, you know, some sort of government work, to do with the consular staff welfare scheme, I believe that's what he told us. Yes, we do miss him, of course — we were hoping he'd go into Arthur's bank, but there you are, so long as he's happy, that's the main thing, isn't it?

A long red smear down the street and my fault because I should have kicked him out of Hong Kong last night when I'd seen he was low calibre and dangerous and too young to be out alone; they'd let him run because they'd thought he must be Special Branch and then they'd picked me up and seen it was Intelligence and finished him off. The thing they were running was so big and they were so determined to push it through that they weren't even interested in asking questions when the opposition turned up: they just moved straight in for the kill.

I left the phone-box and went out to the street again. There was a case for asking London for a director because the pressure was coming on hard, but there wasn't anything to report yet, there was no breakthrough. The key to the breakthrough was Nora Tewson, and she'd gone.

I'd had to cross the road and go up there to make sure they'd been thorough, and she was already coming past in the Jensen before the traffic began jamming up around the 'accident'. There wasn't a taxi in sight and I'd been tempted to wave to her, well well well, fancy seeing you here, take her to lunch, get everything I could out of her. But that would have been expedience, not design, The Jensen was a death trap and I left it alone, edging back from the knot of people and finding an alley and getting clear, checking with every step because they were still here somewhere in the area.

The alley led on to Kwong Yuen Street and I turned right and hurried but couldn't see her car. There was a taxi near the intersection and I got in and we did the whole travel pattern, starting with the House of Shen, Constellation '144', Kaiser's and the places she'd stopped at earlier in the day, in case she was looking for something specific and trying to make up her mind, doubling back.

No go.

At four o'clock I picked up a Taunus from Fleetway and went to the Standard office, back numbers department, giving them the date I needed. The report took some finding because the tourist trade is a major industry in Hong Kong and they like to feel that everything looks just as it does in the brochure.

Tragic Death of British Visitor, page ten, one small photograph of George Henry Tewson, the same as the one I had in my briefing file and obviously from the same source, undistinguished, glasses, indefinite age. There wasn't anything I hadn't been told already. I asked if I could use their phone before I left but she wasn't in. The self-disgust about letting that poor little devil get caught in the machinery like that had so far kept my mind off the present situation. The present situation was that the key figure in the field was changing her routine tonight for the second time and it could be critically significant and I wasn't going to be there unless I tried everything in the book and had some luck as well.

On my way back to the Cathay I stopped to buy a pair of Bushnell 7 X 50's with a 7 30' field and ultraviolet niters because Jade Imperial Mansion was a quarter of a mile from the hotel and I might risk holing up there for another few hours if the binoculars could give me a reasonable view of the entrance gates the Jensen normally used. There was a chemist's next door to the optical place and I went in and bought some more toothpaste, Neodens Safeguards your Health, more than you could say for the last lot.

I parked the Taunus in St Paul's Hospital and walked down Cotton Path into Tung Lo Wan Road, crossing it and keeping on, going round past the theatre into Causeway Road, checking the windows of Room 39, shutters still closed.

A gentleman had telephoned three times, they told me at the desk, a Mr Chou. He hadn't left his number. It hadn't been Flower and it hadn't been Chiang and no one else knew me in the whole of Hong Kong. I said I was going out again this evening but I'd let them know when I left, so they wouldn't have to page me if Mr Chou called again. Then I went upstairs.

They must have been very quiet or the management would have heard about it by now. Every drawer was upside down and the carpet was off the floor and draped across the bed. They'd prised several boards up and stripped some of the wallpaper and turned off the pipe-tap in the bathroom and dragged the cistern away from the wall, taking down the air conditioner grilles, unscrewing the wall plugs and turning the wardrobe on its side to get at the bottom. The lamp brackets were on the floor with the wires pulled out of the swan-necks and the bathroom door handles were off and lying on the window-sill. The base was off the phone but it worked and I dialled and waited for ten rings but she didn't answer.

It took an hour to check for booby traps, even though I didn't need to move more than a few things: clothes, shaver, toilet bag, so forth; the shoes weren't any good because they'd taken the heels off. I was sweating a lot by the time I'd finished (someone had slammed a door when I was picking up the shaver), but I'd decided to do it instead of just walking out and rekitting at Lane Crawford's because I wanted to know if they thought I was green enough to blow myself up in here, and to know if they'd rigged something for me anyway: if they hadn't, it could conceivably mean they were going to let me run till they could bring me down and interrogate. As a general rule you don't ferret your way into their operation by picking their locks, you do it by picking their minds.