The job had required liaison with MI6 because Aden, which was British-occupied, was a key distribution point on the arms route. Local apparatchiks kept kicking the buck upstairs until Kendig had been obliged to fly out to London, meet with the top man and smooth out the arrangements.

The top man had been Chartermain and the meeting had taken place on a Sunday—not in White-hall but in Chartermain’s home in Knightsbridge, a detached Victorian manse in a mews: too large for practical living but then Chartermain and his memsahib were given to lavish entertaining. Chartermain used his study there as a second office; it was a good deal more than the usual gentleman’s library.

An excellent way to enrage a lion was to disturb its den.

Luck could run bad; there was always the danger of the unhappy coincidence; there’d be scores or hundreds of them searching for him and if he spent a lot of time in public places there was the risk of someone’s fortuitously spotting him. Pure accident like that accounted for a large number of man-hunting coups; pure accident like that was not accident at all but a mere mathematical long shot—if they kept enough people searching long enough then the chances of their finding him increased geometrically with the passage of time and the accretion of clues.

When he went out of the hotel he avoided using the lift which could be a trap; he used the stairs. When he set out for the first time he did it during the morning rush and melted into crowds. Impulse made him cache the manuscript: he removed the pages from the false-bottomed suitcase, crept to the basement with them and found the domestic supply cupboard, a fair-sized room filled with mops and dustcloths and bedding fresh from the laundry, hampers on wheels for the daily room changings, cartons of loo paper and hotel-size bars of soap, brooms, vacuum cleaners, spray polishes and the like. He opened a bar-soap carton and counted the contents and multiplied that figure by the three dozen cartons stacked against the wall and concluded it would be at least seven weeks before they got down to the last carton in the stack, if they didn’t cover it again with fresh supplies; he emptied the carton he’d opened, put the manuscript in it, filled the rest with soap bars and rearranged the stack with the manuscript carton at the back and bottom of everything. He marked it with a little pencil cross that nobody would notice unless he was looking for it and knew what it meant. He carried the excess bars of soap out of the hotel in an ordinary paper bag and disposed of them miles away in a sidewalk dustbin.

When he made his first evening reconnaissance he went out at dusk when the light was poorest. He used the underground a bit but mostly buses; never taxis.

Chartermain’s garden was a horseshoe around the house, well tended but drab this late in the year. On the fourth side—the left—a paved lane ran past the kitchen door, made a little dogleg at the rear corner of the house and ran on through the back garden to a coach house that had been converted into a garage with servants’ quarters upstairs—a remodeling job that had been done in the 1920s when occupants of such a house could afford a large staff. Goosenecked streetlamps bathed the front garden and the porte-cochere but the lane went back through a patch of shadow beyond the kitchen; the illumination at the rear was poor, thrown by a single lamp high on the side of the coach house at the head of an outside stair that clung to the ivied wall.

Past the garage the lane continued in a gentle bend, going on between two five-story Georgian monoliths into a street beyond. But there was a gate across the front of the lane and at its other end a chain hung across it to prevent traffic; it was no thoroughfare out of the mews.

It took him several days to work out the population and routines of the household. There were two servants; they looked like husband and wife; they lived in the quarters above the coach house. Presumably the maids’ and butler’s quarters in the main house were unoccupied—perhaps closed off to conserve heat. The wife evidently performed as housekeeper and cook, the husband as butler, chauffeur, gardener and handyman. On the second night of his surveillance there was a gathering of eight couples among whom Kendig recognized a member of Parliament and a man who had been, and perhaps still was, the Deputy F. O. Secretary to whom Chartermain’s department reported through the Chief of MI6. On that occasion two additional servants worked in the house but they went home afterward and presumably had been supplied by some agency on a temporary basis.

Each morning a Humber saloon piloted by a liveried driver—a government employee—collected Chartermain and drove him away to his duties. The garage housed two automobiles—an Austin Mini which the servant husband used for errands and the wife for shopping, and a Jaguar 3.8 saloon which the memsahib used twice in the four days, both times for afternoon excursions lasting several hours (shopping? hairdresser? liaison with lover?); she drove herself. When she returned she let herself into the house with a single key, indicating there was no burglar alarm system. That conformed with what he knew of Chartermain; the man was as old-fashioned as Yaskov, he probably had contempt for gadgets and gimmicks and the electronics of modern espionage.

He performed his surveillance from stolen cars, He would boost a car, park it somewhere in the mews and watch the house; he would drive the car to another part of London and abandon it within a few hours before the description could have got onto the hot-sheets.

His break came on the Thursday evening. The servant husband emerged from the kitchen door carrying two valises; the memsahib, who was quite trim and attractive in her lean fifties, came along a moment later tugging on her gloves with brisk little jerks. She wore a topcoat and a little pincushion hat—a traveling outfit. The servant fed the luggage into the boot of the Jaguar and the memsahib smiled and spoke, got into the car and backed it out into the mews and drove away. Chartermain had private means and a country estate; quite likely she was going down to Kent for the weekend.

He’d had the Cortina since morning and it would be heating up by now. He drove out of the mews ten minutes behind the memsahib.

After dinner and a movie he purloined a Rover from the car park of a block of high-priced flats near Victoria Station. He chose it for three reasons: it was expensive enough to be in keeping with Chartermain’s quarter; it had a Spanish plate and diplomatic tags which meant it wouldn’t be disturbed by traffic patrols for illegal parking; and the keys had been left in it.

By the time its operator discovered the theft in the morning Kendig would have abandoned it like the others; in time it would be returned to its owner with the apologies of the Foreign Office and a shrug of the shoulders and a word of advice about leaving keys in the ignition.

He drove into the mews at half-past ten and made a three-point U-turn at the end of it and drove out again. It happened five times a day, drivers losing their bearings and not knowing they were going down a dead end. He drove slowly out of the mews again, scrutinizing the house. Two windows were alight upstairs; and a light burned in the bedroom of the apartment above the garage.

Both servants would be in the coach house by this hour. The two lights in the house were at the head of the main stair and in the memsahib’s room—some sort of reading or sewing chamber where she seemed to spend part of each evening when they weren’t entertaining. It didn’t seem a room to which Chartermain repaired. The conclusion to be drawn was that there was no one in the house; the lights had been left on purposefully by the servants. Chartermain might have gone from his office straight down to Kent but it was more likely he was working late trying to collate the clues to Kendig’s whereabouts.