‘Surely you work in compartments?’

‘We do and I must say this, there is no leak of military secrets to Jerry or anyone else we can trace, it’s the political we’re adrift on. Let’s leave it at this – there are chaps in SIS who can see no further than the lead editorials in the Daily Mail, a fair few who would not even object to Oswald Mosley as prime minister.’

‘Come on, Peter, the man’s a bombastic farce.’

‘I seem to recall some folk saying that about the fellow we used to jokingly refer to as “Herr Schicklgruber”. Calling Hitler that in Germany now can get you a very swift bullet in the brain. Anyway, that’s by the by; with the rivalries in the department, getting untainted advice to the top so they might make the right choices is proving difficult. The way things are we have no method of properly altering their stupid policy.’

‘So you need outside sources?’

‘More than one and people not at all connected with the establishment, yet they also have to be folk who have personal relations where they are needed.’

‘How many people did you set out to tell you were coming to La Rochelle?’

Peter was slightly thrown by that question, even if he had known that eventually it must arise; Cal was never going to leave the uncertainty over betrayal dormant, but he did no more than hold up two fingers in reply. ‘Just don’t go asking me who.’

‘I wouldn’t expect an answer if I did, but I would like to know how important they are.’

‘Top floor.’

‘This is all a bit nebulous, Peter.’

‘Goes with the job, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m curious as to what’s in it for me?’

That produced a wry smile. ‘Fighting the good fight, which always tickles your fancy—’

‘Hardly enough,’ Cal interrupted.

‘How about the freedom to operate unhindered in your chosen field?’

‘Which I am doing now.’

‘You won’t be, Cal, take my word for it. Things leak out and certain folk are spitting blood at the rumour that you got those embargoed weapons to the Spanish republicans.’

‘It’s still just a rumour I take it?’

Peter understood the question, not that he enjoyed it being posed. ‘If you are asking me if I let on about helping you, or any precise knowledge of what you did, the answer is no. I did nothing to expose you and I must add that I find the question itself offensive.’

‘Sorry,’ Cal responded, unabashed, ‘I had to ask.’

‘If we could get enough good info to put some backbone into HMG, maybe they will stand up to Hitler, or at least make some noises in that direction. That is what we need and we have no means of getting to such a position through an intelligence service that is not countered by those who think we should just let the Nazis do as they wish in Central Europe, many from a genuine desire to avoid another bloodbath like the last show. You have certain contacts in the Czech Government—’

‘Do I?’ Cal interrupted, suddenly guarded.

‘Come along, old chap. You spent months setting up the purchase of those weapons and no doubt greased a few palms in the process, but to get away with what you did, that fake End User Certificate, there had to be at least one person in a high official position who went out of their way to assist you, and probably more than one.’

All he got for that statement was a bland look and a request that he sit down, given the sun was at his back, becoming low and blinding. That break was extended when the captain’s steward, who looked to be Malay, appeared to give them a refill and advise them that dinner would be in half an hour, for if they were in a rather low-class freighter, the captain was ex-navy and a man who adhered to certain standards in both dress and comportment.

‘Look,’ Peter said, once the man had gone, leaning forward from the edge of his lounger. ‘I can very well appreciate that you would want to keep to yourself the names of who you dealt with in Prague or Brno and I do not for one moment want you to disclose them. But to deny the existence of at least one high-placed contact is to insult my intelligence.’

He paused again, allowing Cal’s silence to acknowledge that had to be the case. ‘What we require is that you get back in touch with him or them and find out how far the Czech Government is prepared to go to defy Hitler—’

Cal’s interruption was brutal. ‘Which they cannot do alone.’

‘… and what they need from HMG to make that possible.’

‘Now you’re insulting my intelligence, Peter. What they need is general mobilisation in the UK and France as soon as Hitler acts up and, much as it pains me to say so, the backing of the USSR.’

‘We thought maybe Poland?’

‘The Poles won’t lift a finger to aid the Czechs. You have heard of a place called Teschen, I take it?’

‘Vaguely,’ Peter replied with a bored look that preceded a deep swallow.

‘My regiment was posted there after the armistice in 1919 to stop the Poles and Czechs killing each other for possession of the coalfields, and bloody hard going it was, a full-scale armed conflict, just when we thought all that was over.’

‘A few thousand on each side, Cal, and the odd armoured car! It wasn’t much of a war.’

‘It was enough of one for me. The Poles, who, I would remind you, have a military government, think they were hard done by in the plebiscite that followed and established the border, cheated in fact by the slimy Czechs. They have been smarting ever since.’

‘They’re a bit given to grievances, the Poles, old boy.’

‘They’re also a bit given to doing something about them. Half a sniff and they will take the Teschen region back and challenge anyone to oppose them. The only thing that’s stopping them is the Czech army, and if they are fighting the Germans—’

‘Enough, Cal, please. I don’t need a lesson on the last twenty years of European history.’

‘A point on which we fundamentally disagree!’ Cal snapped. ‘Our whole country needs a lecture on precisely that, especially the idiots in Downing Street.’

‘Let’s leave the Poles out of it, and the Russians for that matter. I can tell you, flat out, HMG wants nothing to do with Stalin.’

‘If you want to put a spoke in Hitler’s ambitions, Peter, unpalatable as it is, you will need the Russians, just as we did in 1914. Necessity makes for strange bedfellows.’

‘Shall we get back to the subject at hand, Cal, which is the need to find out how far the Czechs are prepared to go to stand up for themselves?’

If he was expecting an answer to that question he did not get one, and what Cal did say threw Peter Lanchester completely.

‘Are you sure you are working for HMG?’

‘What!’

‘Don’t take this personally, but it is the nature of what I do to be suspicious …’

‘Something that has not gone unobserved,’ Peter growled.

‘Much as you don’t want to, I think you are going to have to be open with me about certain things, or this conversation is going nowhere.’ The silence that followed was, to Cal Jardine, a clear indication that there were indeed ‘things’. ‘For instance, I would like to see the passport on which you travelled to France.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Because it has to be your own and that is worrying.’

Peter took refuge in sipping his G and T, so Cal had to press.

‘I can think of only one reason why you did not use a hotel in La Rochelle and why we had to go to so much trouble to clean up that apartment you were staying in, and the car for that matter. Your prints were all over both and you are not travelling on false papers.’

Peter shrugged and smiled, though it had a forced quality to the recipient. ‘I told you, standard procedure and, I might add, it was done to protect you as much as me.’

‘I shouldn’t need it, given I do have a false passport.’

‘You can’t be too careful.’

‘Which is only a viable reason if you suspect my real identity has been leaked to the French, a leak that could only have come from London, and if that is the source, then it is from the outfit you claim to work for. Now you are asking me to go into Czechoslovakia for those same people, a prospect that does not fill me with confidence that whatever identity I use will remain a secret.’