'I visit lovely ladies.'

She laughed her cheery bell-toned laugh. 'I thought that was only in the Une of duty.'

'Strictly above and beyond. And one day I'll finish a commentary on Vegetius.'

'On what?'

So I had to explain about him.

'What makes him so interesting?' she asked.

'He wrote the most complete description of the Roman armies, and that was everybody's ideal army for better than a thousand years after. They all read him: Charlemagne, Richard Coeur de Lion, all the Renaissance princes.'

'Was he a great general himself? '

'No, probably not even a soldier. He was pretty much of a historian in his own day; the Roman army had gone to pieces by this time. Rome itself got sacked a few years later. Prophet without honour and all that.'

'Will you publish this when you've finished it?'

'Oh, yes. I've got a publisher who wants it for a specialist military series. But it'll be a time yet.'

'Will you ever finish it?'

'Course I will.' Maybe I sounded a bit annoyed, because she smiled kindly and put a hand on mine.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I wonder if they've got anything to eat here?'

'A bag of crisps, a pickled egg, and an aspirin, if you're lucky, I should think.'

She laughed again. I said, 'We could find somewhere else to eat.'

'No, let's try here. Are you going back to London tonight?'

The baby-faced innocence with which she could say things like that. I said slowly, 'I suppose not.'

The loving was slower, gentler, calmer. A careful exploration, a memorising of each other's bodies. But at first she was nervous, dodging from shy stiffness to clutching hunger… almost inexperienced, though that couldn't have been it.

And afterwards we lay side by side in her bed, not quite touching each other. The house and the countryside beyond it were very quiet. Funny how I missed the constant noises of the city that you never notice until they're gone, like a forest without birds.

Lois lit a cigarette and the light glowed from her pale soft body. 'Jamie…?'

'Yes?'

'Do you always have a gun with you?' She'd seen me take the derringer off my wrist; she hadn't seen the Mauser in my jacket pocket.

'No – but recently, yes. Things have been getting a bit rough since… Arras.'

'Why was Martin going to Arras? – have you found out?'

'He was being blackmailed, I think. To give up the logbook.'

'What about? Was it little Maggie Mackwood?'

'I think so.'

'Ah.' She sounded quite calm. 'Martin was rather highly sexed. He was a very good lover.'

There's a time and place for comments like that, like some other time and place. But I didn't say anything.

Suddenly, but quite gently, she began to cry. I put an arm around her but she didn't come any closer. She was weeping for memories I would never know, never share.

After a while she got up, leaned over me, and kissed me gently. A few tears touched my cheek. 'I'll sleep in Martin's room,' she whispered. 'Sleep well, Jamie.'

When she'd gone, I pulled the bed apart and remade it and then lay down again. Sleep well. Why not? – I was alone, as usual.

After a time I remembered the half-finished drink I'd brought upstairs and found and finished it. And some time after that, I slept.

It was still dark, still silent. I didn't know what had woken me but it must have been something positive because I'd come awake with a rush. I lay and listened.

Far away, a lorry made a painful gear-change on a hill and wheezed out of hearing. Nothing else. I lifted my wrist to look at my watch. And a door clicked.

It could be Lois. It could be the wind. In a strange house it could be a dozen things I wouldn't know about. But I wanted to know. I reached for my trousers, my shoes, then the Mauser.

Outside the room I stopped, trying to remember the layout. Stairs to my right. I paused again at the head of them, and a cold draught breathed on my chest. The front door was open.

Down there, the dining-room was ahead on the right, the drawing-room back on the right, the study ahead on the left.

And that was where a faint line of light glowed and Vanished. Somebody was working by torchlight in there. It was the obvious place to begin, just as I had.

I kept right over against the wall where the stairs were least likely to creak and mousied my way down.

Halfway down, the door opened and a pool of torchlight wavered across the hall floor. Two figures, barely more than shadows, followed it. I leaned against the wall and held my breath.

The light shifted around indecisively, the figures blended, and an indecipherable whisper floated up towards me.

Then the torch flashed up the stairs, across me, away, and back, pinning me down like a butterfly in a case.

An incredulous voice said, 'Christ, it's Card!'

A younger voice yelped, 'He's got a gun!'

Something long glinted at the base of the light, the older voice shouted, 'Don't shoot!' and I threw myself against the bannister.

A gigantic double explosion slammed through the house and the air swirled around me. A red-hot fingernail scored across my back.

I got my hand out from under me and fired blindly down into the dazzle of the torch. The little Mauser snapped feebly in the ringing deafness after those bangs.

I'd fired three before I realised what I was doing and stopped. The double bang meant a shotgun, of course, and now an empty one. The torch tilted towards the floor, fell, and went out.

I shouted, 'Hold it! You're a lovely target in that doorway!' Then I stood up carefully and winced at the pain in my back. I could feel a trickle of hot blood slide down it. Behind me, a light went on, and Lois said, 'Jamie, what are you-' Then she screamed.

I didn't look round. I kept the gun pointed and moved slowly, carefully, down towards the two figures in the hall. I was beginning to tremble, and not just from the cold blast coming through the front door.

It was Mockby's chauffeur, Charles. It had to be, of course. And his young friend, still clutching the twelve-bore. Charles was holding his right arm out in almost a hand-shaking position, but as I watched, it began to drip blood.

'I got you,' I said. My voice sounded high and strained. 'You got me, too. That makes it all square, doesn't it? Perfectly fair, what? I was aiming at the torch, so it wasn't a bad shot, was it? Only a few inches off. I suppose none of the others got you, did they? Not like through the stomach? I'd like you to have got one through the stomach. It takes about five minutes to come on really strong, they say, but then it apparently feels like rather bad peritonitis. Rather jolly, that. I could stand watching you have peritonitis. You aren't saying much, are you?'

Both of them were standing rigid as ice statues, staring at the Mauser. It was shaking in my hand like the last leaf of summer, but it couldn't miss at that range. And a part of me, a part beyond legality and morality and common sense and probably humanity itself, wanted to squeeze the trigger and go on squeezing until the slide locked open. And they knew it.

I said, 'I think I'd better sit down,' and sat on the stairs. My voice must have sounded more natural because they both took deep breaths and relaxed. The younger one let the shotgun droop.

'You want to be careful with that thing,' I said cheerfully. 'You never know how being mistaken for a partridge is going to affect people. Some people take it one way, some another. You just can't tell, can you? I'm sorry about your arm, Charles, but I think we'd better both stay here bleeding until the US Cavalry arrives.'

At the top of the stairs, a phone bell gave a single ting.

Charles said evenly, 'We're having the coppers in, are we?'