'It's just the underpainting,' explained Gloria. 'He'll put coloured glazes over that to create deep luminous colours.'

'You seem to know all about it.'

'I was an au pair girl in Nice. I used to come up here on my afternoons off. Sometimes I helped him. He's a sweet man. Do you know what it is?' Gloria asked.

'Egg tempera painting, I suppose. But why on long panels?'

'Renaissance marriage chests.'

'I don't get it.'

'He paints forgeries. He sells them through a dealer in Munich.'

'And buyers are fooled?'

'They are authenticated by international art experts. Often famous museums buy them.'

'And he gets away with that?'

'Now it's new… unfinished. It will be stained and varnished and damaged so that it looks very old.'

'And fool museums?' I persisted.

'Museum directors are not saints, Bernard.'

'And there goes another illusion! So Dodo's rich?'

'No, they take him a long time to do, and the dealers won't pay much: there are other forgers ready and willing to supply them.'

'So why…?'

'Does he do it?' she finished the question for me. 'The deception… the fraud, the deceit is what amuses him. He can be cruel. When you get to know him better, perhaps you'll see what makes him do it.'

The old man groaned and seemed about to wake up but he turned over and went back to sleep breathing heavily. Gloria bent over and stroked his head affectionately. 'The dealers make the big profits. Poor Dodo.'

'You knew all along? You were teasing him about the eggs in his refrigerator?'

She nodded. 'Dodo is notorious. He claims to have painted a wonderful " School of Uccello " marriage chest that ended up in the Louvre. Dodo bought dozens of coloured postcards of it, and used them as Christmas cards last year. I thought he'd end up in prison, but no one knows whether that was just Dodo's idea of a joke. Hungarians have all got a strange sense of humour.'

'I wondered about that,' I said.

'He knows about chemistry. It amuses him to reproduce the pigments, and age the wood and the other materials. He's awfully clever.'

The old man stirred again and put a hand to his head where he'd banged it in falling. 'Oh my God!' he groaned.

'You're all right,' I told him.

'He can't hear you; he's talking in his sleep,' said Gloria. 'You do that sometimes.'

'Oh yes,' I scoffed at the suggestion.

'Last week you woke up. You were calling out crazy things.' She put an arm round me in a protective gesture.

'What things?'

'They're killing him; they're killing him.'

'I never talk in my sleep,' I said.

'Have it your own way,' said Gloria. But she was right. Three nights in a row I'd woken up after a nightmare about Jim Prettyman. 'They're killing Jim!' is what I'd shouted. I remember it only too well. In the dream, no matter how urgently I shouted at the passers-by, none of them would take any notice of me.

'Look at these photos,' said Gloria, unrolling some old prints that had been curled up on a cluttered side-table. 'Wasn't he a handsome young brute?'

A slim youthful athletic Dodo was in a group with half a dozen such youngsters and an older man whose face I knew well. Three of them were seated on wicker chairs in front of a garden hut. A man in the front row had a foot upon a board that said The Prussians'.

'Probably a tennis tournament,' explained Gloria. 'He was a wonderful tennis player.'

'Something like that,' I said, although I knew in fact that it was nothing of the kind. The older man was an old Berlin hand named John 'Lange' Koby – a contemporary of my father – and his 'Prussians' were the intelligence teams that he ran into the Russian zone of Germany. So Dodo had been an agent.

'Did Dodo ever work with your father?' I asked her.

'In Hungary?' I nodded. 'Intelligence gathering?' She had such a delicate way of putting things. 'Not as far as I know.' She took the photo from me. 'Is that a team?'

'That's the American: Lange Koby,' I said.

She looked at the photo with renewed interest now that she knew that they were field agents. 'Yes, he's much older than the others. He's still alive isn't he?'

'Lives in Berlin. Sometimes I run into him. My father detested Lange. But Lange was all right.'

'Why?'

'He detested all those Americans who Lange ran. He used to say, "German Americans are American Germans." He had an obsession about them.'

'I've never heard you criticize your father before,' said Gloria.

'Maybe he had his reasons,' I said defensively. 'Let's go.'

'Are you sure Dodo will be all right?'

'He'll be all right,' I said.

'You do like him, don't you?'

'Yes,' I said.

At that first meeting I did like him: I must have been raving mad.

'It went well, I thought,' Dicky Cruyer said with a hint of modest pride. He was carrying illustration boards and now he put them on the floor and leaned them against the leg of his fine rosewood table.

I came into the room still trying to read the notes I'd scribbled during the babble, indignation and dismay that were always the hallmark of Tuesday mornings. I wasn't giving my whole attention to Dicky and that was the sort of thing he noticed. I looked up and grunted.

'I said,' Dicky repeated slowly, having given me a good-natured smile, 'that I thought it all went very well.' I must have looked puzzled. 'In the departmental get-together.' He tapped the brass barometer that he'd lately added to the furnishings of his working space. Or maybe he was tapping the temperature, or the time in New York City.

'Oh yes,' I said. 'Very well indeed.'

Well, why wouldn't it go to his satisfaction? What Dicky Cruyer, my immediate boss, called a 'departmental get-together' took place in one of the conference rooms every Tuesday morning. At one time it took place in Dicky's office, but the German Station Controller's empire had grown since then: we needed a larger room nowadays because Tuesday morning had become a chance for Dicky to rehearse the lectures he gave to the indefatigable mandarins of the Foreign Office. It was usually a mad scramble of last-minute paper-work but today he'd used satellite photos and had pretty coloured diagrams – pie-charts, stacked bars and line-graphs – prepared in the new 'art department' and an 'operator' came and put them on the projector. Dicky prodded the screen with a telescopic rod and looked round the darkened room in case anyone had lit a cigarette.

The get-together was also the opportunity for Dicky to allocate work to his subordinates, arbitrate between them and start thinking about the monthly report that would have to be on the Director-General's desk first thing on Friday morning. That is to say he got me to start thinking about it because I always had to write it.

'It's simply a matter of motivating them all,' said Dicky, sitting at his rosewood table and straightening out a wire paper-clip. 'I want them to feel…'

'Part of a team,' I supplied.

'That's right,' he said. Then, detecting what he thought might be a note of sarcasm in my voice, he frowned. 'You have a lot to learn about being part of a team, Bernard,' he said.

'I know,' I said. 'I think the school I went to didn't emphasize the team spirit nearly enough.'

'That lousy school in Berlin,' he said. 'I never understood why your father let you go to a little local school like that. There were schools for the sons of British officers weren't there?'

'He said it would be good for my German.'

'And it was,' conceded Dicky. 'But you must have been the only English child there. It made you into a loner, Bernard.'

'I suppose it did.'

'And you're proud of that, I know. But a loner is a misfit, Bernard. I wish I could make you see that.'