'Don't worry,' I said again.

'I was scared.'

'I know.'

'You didn't recognize me, I mean.'

'I do now.'

She slid off the chair and knelt in front of me and I made to touch her face to reassure her but my hand was scabbed with dried blood and she was clean and young and fragile in the aureole of the street's light and I took my hand away.

'Do you need a doctor?'

'No. Why were you crying?'

'I was thinking about Paul and I suppose I went to sleep. It was late when you phoned. Paul Dissen. You know it was his plane today? He — '

'Yes.'

'He got mixed up in my dream, half himself and half Franz, it was grotesque. Dead, of course,' She got up and looked helpless for a moment, floating in the light from the window, aimless. 'He's always dead when I dream about him. I'll fetch some water.'

I decided to recognize the fact that retrograde amnesia was blocking off part of the past. I didn't want to telephone Ferris until I could give him the whole thing. I remembered most of the post-crash sequence, leaving the N.S.U. and finding an emergency phone and later going down through the trees again and reaching the secondary road and stopping a truck, waving a handful of deutschmarks in the glare of his lights. But I didn't know why I had crashed the N.S.U. because the retrograde kick covers a period of anything up to fifteen minutes prior to concussion and the last thing I could remember was a man at an Esso station saying if it rained later tonight the roads would freeze. I said I didn't think it would rain because the moon was too clear.

It happens with a lot of people — drivers, airline pilots — and there's nothing they can do about it when there's an enquiry: they just 'don't remember what happened'. It is why Stirling Moss couldn't explain what made him crash. The memory traces need time to consolidate and store experience and if the head gets a blow it's like tapping a bowl of sand just after someone has drawn figures on it with a stick: it smooths over.

She was bathing my hands. I could have done it for myself in the bathroom but she'd got it all set up with towels on the carpet and hot water in the bowl and I didn't stop her because playing dolls would help her to deal with the fright and bewilderment: she'd been dreaming about Paul-Franz being dead and then I'd come through the doorway and fallen flat on my face with delayed shock and it must have been hard for her to take.

'I never see him in a plane or in a wreck or anything. You'd think I would.'

'Yes.'

She had a whole plastic bag of cotton wool and tore bits off it the wrong way, tugging at it and not getting anywhere. 'I see the funeral, men in black with pale faces I can't recognize. It's always a civilian funeral, I suppose because that's the only kind I've ever seen, my mother's, with big black cars and flowers. And all the time I'm thinking about the plane — it's made another widow and this time it's me.'

There had been a boy washing the windscreen of the N.S.U. He'd asked about the engine, if it ran well. The edge of the blank area was somewhere there: at the Esso station.

'You'll mess yourself up, Nitri.'

The water was red-brown in the bowl. She nodded and went to change it. I got up and followed her because this needed an entire bathroom and anyway I wanted to see if anything had happened to my face. But there must have been some kind of memory trace in the subconscious: the moment the N.S.U. had come to rest with the front lodged at an angle between two trees I'd snatched at the buckle and thrown the straps clear, kicking at the driver's door and finding it was jammed solid, dragging myself through the white fragmented windscreen and slitting a shoe on the frame. There was a branch in the way and my coat was catching but I forced myself through the gap with my scalp shrinking and goose-flesh everywhere: there was some kind of fear driving me on, pushing me through a gap that would have been impossibly small if the fear hadn't given me the strength. Not quite fear: a kind of dread.

'I'll make you a tourniquet from something.' The water span red in the basin.

Full consciousness hadn't come back until I'd felt the telephone cold in my hand. The concussion would have left me trapped inside the wreck: i t was the dread that had taken over. I had known that unless I could get away from the wreck, something would come for me there. Even when I'd finished talking to her on the emergency phone there was no let-up: a car was slowing along the autobahn and I dropped down the earth bank and clawed my way through bramble and gone on across a knoll of trees. At one time headlights had swung through the higher branches as if a car were being turned, and the frost glittered on the dead leaves underfoot. Then there was the truck, much later, on the minor road, and my hand full of deutschmarks, waving.

The data was limited enough but it would have to do.

She was watching me in the mirror. My face wasn't too bad now that I'd rinsed off the earth. I'd obviously fallen somewhere or gone down the bank from the autobahn face first.

There's a doctor in this block.' She was impatient, annoyed at r her own sense of helplessness. 'There's nothing I can do for you.' I said: 'I need a phone.'

Code-intro for the mission was sapphire needle and we cleared on it and didn't bother with anything else because it was fool-proof: if one of us were under duress we'd slip in the alarm-phrase and take it from there. The only danger was from bugging but he was very good on security and no one could have known I'd show up here.

'I've blown my cover.'

'All right.' There was sleep still in his voice but he'd said it straight away and I knew there'd been no need for any kind of code-intro because only Ferris would say 'all right' without hesitation when you phoned him three hours before dawn to tell him a thing like that. It wasn't the work involved that would upset him — all I wanted were some new papers and something to drive in — but the background inference: you don't blow your own cover unless you've got into a very dodgy position. 'How soon can you fix me up?'

'It depends where you're going.'

'Nowhere special.'

She had gone into the bedroom and shut the door but she could listen through it if she wanted to and I thought she probably would because the normal thing to do when you've had an accident is to call round at the nearest hospital for bandages and I'd shown up here and fallen all over the floor.

'What happened,' he asked. The sleep had gone from his voice. I didn't answer right away and he said: 'We're all clear.'

The throbbing across the shoulders and chest had set in again because I was standing up. The international-standard belt is designed to take 30g's and the one in the N.S.U. must have absorbed nearly that amount of load and it was a wonder the slack hadn't whiplashed the buckle free. The only thing it hadn't done was to keep my head off the body-shell above the windscreen and the only reason there wasn't any blood was because the visor was padded.

'They got at the contact'

'I see.'

I felt vaguely sorry for him. He'd told me that London wanted to know fully urgent who made contact with Lovett. For a moment I expected him to order a rendezvous. He'd have to do an awful lot of chasing about in the next few hours trying to help London deal with the blown cover thing and he'd probably go down to Linsdorf himself to stop any flap inside the A.I.B., but when half a mission hangs on a stable cover and the other half on getting a contact across and the cover's blown and the contact's dead it's reasonable for the director to ask for a meeting person-to-person if only so that he can tread on his agent's face.

I waited till he said something else. Five minutes ago he'd been asleep and now he was having to do a lot of thinking. And there was the third thing I had to tell him and I didn't want to do it until he'd had a chance to stop reeling.