'Where's your baggage?' said the driver. Getting out of the car he tossed the remainder of his coffee into the snow where it left a brown ridged crater that steamed like Vesuvius. He wasn't looking forward to a drive to the airport on a Friday afternoon, and you didn't have to be a psychologist to see that in his face.

'That's all,' I told him.

'You travel light, mister.' He opened the door for me and I settled down inside. The car was warm, I suppose he'd just come in from a job, expecting to be signed out and sent home. Now he was in a bad mood.

The traffic was slow even by Washington weekend standards. I thought about Jim while we crawled out to the airport. I suppose he wanted to get rid of me. There was no other reason why Jim would invent that ridiculous story about Bret Rensselaer. The idea of Bret being a party to any kind of financial swindle involving the government was so ludicrous that I didn't even give it careful thought. Perhaps I should have done.

The plane was half-empty. After a day like that, a lot of people had had enough, without enduring the tender loving care of any airline company plus the prospect of a diversion to Manchester. But at least the half-empty First Class cabin gave me enough leg-room. I accepted the offer of a glass of champagne with such enthusiasm that the stewardess finally left the bottle with me.

I read the dinner menu and tried not to think about Jim Pretty man. I hadn't pressed him hard enough. I'd resented the unexpected phone call from Morgan, the D-G's personal assistant. I'd planned to spend this afternoon shopping. Christmas was past and there were sale signs everywhere. I'd glimpsed a big model helicopter that my son Billy would have gone crazy about. London was always ready to provide me with yet another task that was nothing to do with me or my immediate work. I had the suspicion that this time I'd been chosen not because I happened to be in Washington but because London knew that Jim was an old friend who'd respond more readily to me than to anyone else in the Department. When this afternoon Jim had proved recalcitrant I had rather enjoyed the idea of passing his rude message back to that stupid man Morgan. Now it was too late I was beginning to have second thoughts. Perhaps I should have taken up his offer to do it as a personal favour to me.

I thought about Jim's warnings. He wasn't the only one who thought the Department might still be blaming me for my wife's defection. But the idea that they'd frame me for embezzlement was a new one. It would wipe me out, of course. No one would employ me if they made something like that stick. It was a nasty thought, and even worse was that throwaway line about getting to me through my father. How could they get to me through my father? My father didn't work for the Department any more. My father was dead.

I drank more champagne – fizzy wine is not worth drinking if you allow the chill to go off it – and finished the bottle before closing my eyes for a moment in an effort to remember exactly what Jim had said. I must have dozed off. I was tired: really tired.

The next thing I knew the stewardess was shaking me roughly and saying, 'Would you like breakfast, sir?'

'I haven't had dinner.'

'They tell us not to wake passengers who are asleep.'

'Breakfast?'

'We'll be landing at London Heathrow in about forty-five minutes.'

It was an airline breakfast: shrivelled bacon, a plastic egg with a small stale roll and UHT milk for the coffee. Even when starving hungry I found it very easy to resist. Oh well, the dinner I'd missed was probably no better, and at least the threatened diversion to sunny Manchester had been averted. I vividly remembered the last time I was forcibly flown to Manchester. The airline's senior staff all went and hid in the toilets until the angry, unwashed, unfed passengers had been herded aboard the unheated train.

But soon I had my feet on the ground again in London. Waiting at the barrier there was my Gloria. She usually came to the airport to meet me, and there can be no greater love than that which brings someone on a voluntary visit to London Heathrow.

She looked radiant: tall, on tiptoe, waving madly. Her long naturally blonde hair and a tailored tan suede coat with its big fur collar made her shine like a beacon amongst the line of weary welcomers slumping – like drunks – across the rails in Terminal Three. And if she did flourish her Gucci handbag a bit too much and wear those big sun-glasses even at breakfast time in winter, well, one had to make allowances for the fact that she was only half my age.

'The car's outside,' she whispered as she released me from the tight embrace.

'It will be towed away by now.'

'Don't be a misery. It will be there.'

And it was of course. And the weathermen's threatened snow and ice had not materialized either. This part of England was bathed in bright early-morning sunshine and the sky was blue and almost completely clear. But it was damned cold. The weathermen said it was the coldest January since 1940, but who believes the weathermen?

'You won't know the house,' she boasted as she roared down the motorway in the yellow dented Mini, ignoring the speed limit, cutting in front of angry cabbies and hooting at sleepy bus drivers.

'You can't have done much in a week.'

'Ha, ha! Wait and see.'

'Better you tell me now,' I said with ill-concealed anxiety. 'You haven't knocked down the garden wall? Next door's rose beds…'

'Wait and see: wait and see!'

She let go of the wheel to pound a fist against my leg as if making sure I was really and truly flesh and blood. Did she realize what mixed feelings I had about moving out of the house in Marylebone? Not just because Marylebone was convenient and central but also because it was the first house I'd ever bought, albeit with the aid of a still outstanding mortgage that the bank only agreed to because of the intervention of my prosperous father-in-law. Well, Duke Street wasn't lost for ever. It was leased to four American bachelors with jobs in the City. Bankers. They were paying a handsome rent that not only covered the mortgage but gave me a house in the suburbs and some small change to face the expenses of looking after two motherless children.

Gloria was in her element since moving in to the new place. She didn't see it as a rather shabby semi-detached surburban house with its peeling stucco and truncated front garden and a side entrance that had been overlaid with concrete to make a place to park a car. For Gloria this was her chance to make me see how indispensable she was. It was her chance to get us away from the shadow of my wife Fiona. Number thirteen Balaklava Road was going to be our little nest, the place into which we settled down to live happily ever after, the way they do in the fairy stories that she was reading not so very long ago.

Don't get me wrong. I loved her. Desperately. When I was away I counted the days – even the hours sometimes – before we'd be together again. But that didn't mean that I couldn't see how ill-suited we were. She was just a child. Before me her boy-friends had been schoolkids: boys who helped with logarithms and irregular verbs. Sometime she was going to suddenly realize that there was a big wide world out there waiting for her. By that time perhaps I'd be depending on her. No perhaps about it. I was depending on her now.

'Did it all go all right?'

'All all right,' I said.

'Someone from Central Funding left a note on your desk… Haifa dozen notes in fact. Something about Prettyman. It's a funny name, isn't it?'

'Nothing else?'

'No. It's all been very quiet in the office. Unusually quiet. Who is Prettyman?' she asked.

'A friend of mine. They want him to give evidence… some money they've lost.'

'And he stole it?' She was interested now.