'Saturday evening?' she said. Her face stiffened.

'And your father got the phone call on Sunday evening?'

'From the university in Budapest, yes. Just time enough for Silas Gaunt to make the arrangements,' she said cynically.

'What do you mean? You think there wasn't any letter that went back to them?'

'I don't know,' she said.

'But what's bothering you?'

'I'm frightened for him, Bernard. If he was in some remote spot in Hungary ... It can be desolate there. And they said it would involve travelling and lecturing.'

'You've got to tell me what this is really about, Gloria. What are you keeping from me?'

'I know I'm not supposed to use the computer for anything but assigned tasks, but I was worried about Daddy. That day I saw you down there, I brought his file up on the screen and it all looked normal at first: the usual listing of operational files and continuity files and cross-referred "personals" and so on. So then I began looking at all his files, one after the other. It was all in order until I got to an operational reference dated this summer ... It had been cleared, Bernard.'

'So what?'

'So what? Bernard, files are never cleared. This file has been emptied. And the file number has been entered on the list for re-use.'

'Why should that worry you so much?'

'You don't understand what I'm saying, Bernard. If you worked with those computers in the Data Centre you'd realize that that is unprecedented. And you'd know how much work is involved in wiping the files, and every single cross-referred file too. They've even wiped each numbered message referred to in each and every file.'

'If they are wiped, how can you tell? You can't see them, can you?'

'Because all the reference numbers a file, personals and so on a have been listed for reassigning.' She sipped some coffee. 'Let me explain this to you, Bernard. When you open a file, or even send a simple message, the machine provides a number automatically. Automatically; you don't select it. At present I can see what they've been up to, because I can call up the empty files on the screen. I load the file but there is nothing to be seen but a number; the screen is blank, all the back-ups are blank, including the master back-ups in the mainframe. But the worrying thing is the way in which those file numbers are listed for reassigning. One by one the computer will provide those numbers to new documents, and there will be no way of telling that anything has ever been wiped.'

'Okay, I don't know anything about computers. But doesn't each file number have a date? These newly assigned file numbers will have dates that are not chronological.'

'That won't mean anything. Lots of files are opened prematurely. They are dated as from the time that money was allotted, that someone gets permission to start work. No operator ever goes down into the Yellow Submarine trying to trace anything by means of a date; it would be hopeless. Nothing is chronological. No, once those files are reassigned there will be no way to see the join.'

'But how does this concern your father?'

'Three of his operational numbers are wiped.'

'Why are you telling me all this, Gloria?'

She hesitated and opened one of the maps on the table. 'You're not going to report me, are you?'

'Of course not.'

'Four of your files are wiped too. One of them was an on-going operational file with a Category A prefix. The same reference as one of Daddy's files, so it was something you and Daddy did together.'

'Except that I've never worked with your father.'

'I shouldn't have told you.'

'Perhaps there is a rational and innocent explanation,' I said. 'Maybe they are just weeding the electronic data, the way they do with paperwork. Maybe it's just an error; there are plenty of those.'

'Forget it, Bernard. Forget I ever said anything to you.' She stood up and drank her coffee hurriedly.

'Look, Gloria. If what you've found out proves there is a plot to kill your father, then wouldn't it also mean there is a plot to kill me too?'

The effect of my question was dramatic. 'Oh, go to hell, Bernard!' she said, with a flash of that truly terrible self-righteous wrath she could muster. Then she picked up a map from the table and quietly said: 'Look at this route.' She spread it across the table. It was one of the large-scale Ordnance Survey maps showing all the contours, footpaths and every last cottage. 'We'll drive over the whole route next weekend. Then perhaps do it again the following weekend. Knowing the course is what makes the difference.'

'Will that Saab be put together in time?'

'In my car, silly.' She got out her handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. 'I'll get you to Notting Hill Gate,' she said, picking up the maps and forms.

Before I went downstairs I used the bathroom. With its ancient taps, stained bath and cracked linoleum it was as cramped and timeworn as the rest of the little house. But Gloria had left her unmistakable mark here. The mirror was spattered with make-up, there was a long grey smear of mascara in the sink, and half a dozen balls of cotton marked with eye-shadow and rouge. But any last doubt I might have had that this was a habitat Gloria shared was removed by the perfume hanging faintly in the air. What reached so deeply into my memory was the almost comical absurdity of the heavy, spicy and totally unsuitable fragrance that she insisted upon wearing on special occasions a she called it her Arabian Nights perfume.

'Let's go, Bernard,' I heard her call from outside the building, and by the time I got down to the cobbled street she was standing with the brass padlock in one hand and the key in the other, waiting to lock up.

The short drive along Bayswater Road took only a few minutes. We talked banalities until she pulled up at the front door of the apartment block. 'Here we are,' she said. 'You are delivered safe and sound.' We sat in the car for a moment. I could smell the Arabian Nights perfume now. I wanted to kiss her but I knew I would not.

'Thanks for the lift, Gloria.'

She looked at the entrance to the apartment block. 'I told you a lie; I'll never forget that night. We danced. I remember every note of the music. I was only pretending when I said I'd forgotten.'

'I know,' I said.

'You'd better be getting along,' said Gloria. 'Take care of yourself, Bernard.' Like a small child, she reached out and slowly ran a finger down the sleeve of my coat. We both watched it moving as if it had a life of its own. I shivered as it was about to touch my wrist, but she lifted it away.

'Yes,' I said. 'I'd better be getting along.' But neither of us moved. 'Good luck with the rallying. Good luck to you both.'

'Thank you, Mr Samson. That's very sweet of you.' She smiled a brief nervous smile and I opened the door and got out. I slammed the door shut and waved goodbye. But she couldn't have seen me; she was five blocks away by then.

I'd collected the key to the Notting Hill apartment, so I let myself in. I suppose that someone had tried to decorate the place in a style that was warm and comforting but there was an all-pervading theme of kitsch, from the gilded mirrors in the hall to the electric candle wall-lights and the tassels on the curtains.

When I went into the drawing-room, Fiona was standing by the window wearing a mink coat. It was a legacy from her sister Tessa. 'I didn't see the car arrive,' she said.

'The car didn't show up. I got a lift.'

'That was lucky,' said Fiona. 'I had to get a cab from Hampstead; I had terrible trouble getting here. Is it still raining?'

I hung up my raincoat, sank down into an armchair and sighed. Fiona looked at me quizzically. 'No,' I said. 'It stopped raining a long time ago. Where's Dicky?'

'The meeting is cancelled. Our man couldn't make it. I hung on for you. I thought you'd have a car.'

'He's nervous,' I said. 'We're going to lose him.' The man we had been due to meet was described on the Diplomatic List as a Third Secretary of the East German embassy. But his real job was assistant to the codes and ciphers chief. He was a good catch but he wasn't landed yet. I'd been in at the previous meeting and I could tell he was having second thoughts.

'What you told Dicky was right,' said Fiona. She was angry because Dicky had not told her of the cancellation earlier and had caused her a wasted journey across London. But she didn't rail against Dicky; she blamed the house instead: 'It's this damned safe house. It's compromised. It shouldn't be used for operational meetings any longer.'

'It's the money,' I said. 'There isn't enough money for new safe houses. Not even enough to heat this one properly.'

'I didn't switch the heating on. I thought you would come here directly from the office.'

'I wondered why it was so cold in here,' I said. 'Would you like to go out for dinner?'

'I don't want fish and chips from Geale's, if that's what you mean.'

The Notting Hill safe house was conveniently close to one of London's finest fish and chip restaurants, but I suppose Fiona wasn't dressed for it.

I went to the phone in the hallway and ordered an official car to take us home. While on the phone I inquired from the car pool desk why my car hadn't arrived.

'Your car was cancelled, Mr Samson,' said the duty transport officer.

'Cancelled? I don't think so.'

'A lady phoned ...' there was a pause and I heard him as he turned the pages of his booking register. 'Here we are: six-thirty. Car to Notting Hill Gate a cancelled at five minutes past six. I took the call myself. It was a young lady's voice. I thought it was your secretary. Is that where you are now?'

'I haven't got a secretary,' I said. 'Yes, that's where I am.'

'I'm sorry, Mr Samson. It sounded official. I'll send a car right away.' He'd recognized Gloria's voice of course. He knew who'd cancelled my car.

'Thank you,' I said and rang off.

So Gloria had pretended she couldn't get her car started, to provide a chance to tell me about the wiped files. She reasoned that anyone going to such elaborate trouble to eliminate the files would also want to eliminate everyone who knew what was in them. What she told me seemed like a persecution theory, but Gloria was a smart girl.

So had she been about to tell me more? Had my slowness to understand what she was driving at caused her to abandon an attempt to explain a more elaborate theory? Or were Fiona's suspicions, about Gloria wanting me to marry her, the real motive? Was this 'persecution' invented as a way of seeing me regularly?

'What's happening?' Fiona asked when I stepped back into the drawing-room. She was standing near the window, still wearing her mink coat, framed by the elaborate floral curtains and the ridiculous flouncing that topped them.

'The car pool will send a car right away,' I said.

She looked at me, and, using both hands, smoothed the big fur collar up around her head as if she didn't want to hear any more.

I knew the transport officer. He was a young red-haired Scotsman. I liked him a he always laughed at my jokes a but how long would it take to go around the Department that I was getting together with Gloria after work? And how long would it take for the rumours to get back to Fiona?

13.

'Your new hair-do looks nice, Tante Lisl,' I said, in that feeble confused way I always delivered such compliments.

She fluttered her mascara-laden eyelashes and touched her dyed and lacquered hair. She was sitting in her study. This had always been her special retreat; she took her breakfast here a on the tiny balcony with the french window open if the weather was warm a and did the accounts, checked the bills and took the cash from her hotel residents. A stirring portrait of the young Kaiser Wilhelm was on the wall where it had hung in her father's day, when this was his study. And on the mantelpiece, over the stove, there was the old ormolu clock that measured the night hours away with chimes more audible than most within earshot wished.

She was no longer confined to the stainless steel wheelchair that had occupied the centre of this room on my last visit. The wheelchair was relegated to the cobwebbed basement store-room, along with a trunk of my father's possessions which I'd not so far disposed of, and Werner's cherished golf clubs for which Lisl, upon finding them, had expressed picturesque contempt.

Her knee and hip operations had made her surprisingly ambulant, so that she was occupying a comfortable wing-armchair under a reading light. Some of the light struck the lower part of her face and revealed the powder and rouge without which she felt undressed. On the floor beside her chair there was a magnificent leather photo album with a hand-written label: My Caribbean Cruise. 'New hair-style, new hips and knee, new hotel, new life,' she said, and gave one of her inimitable full-throated laughs.

'Yes. It was a quite a surprise walking in here,' I said with unalloyed sincerity. I'd known Lisl Hennig and this shabby old hotel off Kantstrasse since I was a child, since I was an infant I should say. And when I walked in that morning I had almost shouted out loud. It wasn't that there was anything here that I didn't remember seeing before. But the last time I was here Werner Volkmann was taking over the management of the hotel. He had just married Lisl's niece a the onetime Ingrid Winter a and a complete refurbishing was being undertaken.

But now Werner's brief spell as manager, and his marriage, had ended. The tasteful furnishings that the dedicated Ingrid had lavished upon the hotel had been swept away. Back behind the bar, arranged around the old spotty mirror, were the shelves filled with dozens of bottles of rare and remote liqueurs and spirits that no one ever ordered. Huge prehensile potted plants, that endlessly shed leaves but never flowered, were once again helping to block the narrow entrance at the bottom of the stairs. Lisl's collection of signed photos of people who'd visited the house as guests in the old days or as hotel clients after the war a Albert Einstein, Von Karajan, Max Schmeling and Admiral Donitz a had been reinstated on the wall. The complete set of 'Scenes of German Rural Life' prints were back on the walls of the dining-room along with the priceless original George Grosz drawing. Lisl's hotel was now almost restored to the place it had been for half a century or more before she handed over to Werner. The old bentwood chairs in the breakfast room, the dusty aspidistra plants that seemed to flourish in the salon's dim light, everything was back the way I remembered it from my childhood. Even Tante Lisl had turned the clock back. The joint replacement operations had restored to her the ability to stride slowly around the whole premises, go unaided up and down stairs a albeit with deliberation and care a and to pounce upon anything that was not exactly to her liking; anything that seemed to have originated with the mild-mannered Ingrid.

The legal reversion, and the exhaustive reinstatement of furnishings that followed it, was understandable when one remembered that for Lisl this was not just a hotel. It had been her home; she'd grown up in this house. So had I; that was something that I shared with her. My father had been posted to Berlin at the end of the war and billeted in this house together with me and my mother. The salon had become a smart little teashop by that time, with Lisl's concert pianist husband playing Gershwin tunes on the Bechstein, missing a chord now and again because of the arthritis that was slowly transforming his hands into claws. My family remained here even when all manner of lovely houses were available to the 'rezident' a a man who was running the only reliable Allied intelligence organization probing the Russians. I suppose all three of us Samsons became sentimentally attached to this house, its shell-pocked facade, its interior decoration a like a museum of old Berlin a and became bewitched by wonderful crazy old Lisl too.

'Did you eat? The plat du jour is Eisbein.' She was wearing a vivid emerald green wrap-around dress, a convenient garment for someone on a drastic weight-loss programme with some way still to go.

'I've eaten already,' I said.

'You used to adore Eisbein.'

'I still do.'

'I'm sure there will be one left. A little extra cooking time doesn't hurt an Eisbein.'

'This evening perhaps.'

'You've seen your room?' she asked.

'Thank you, Lisl,' I said. 'You're a darling.' In fact I knew that it was Werner and his wife I had to thank for preserving the accumulated squalor of the cramped attic room I always used. But Lisl was not above taking credit from others when affection was at stake. I went to her, leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. She was heavily made up with the sort of paint and mascara job that was more usually seen on the other side of the footlights. Her perfume was almost overwhelming.

'Two kisses in Germany, Bernd. You are not in England now.' She lifted her head and turned the other cheek to me.

'I love you, Lisl,' I said. 'It's wonderful to see you so fit and well.'

'I look after myself,' she said complacently. 'You should stop drinking, lose some weight, take exercise and get more sleep.' She said it automatically and without much hope that her advice would be taken. She'd always enjoyed mothering me, and like a mother she repeated always the same advice. Even when I was eighteen years old, and as thin as a beanpole, she would tell me to stop eating dumplings and avoid any but German beer, because of the chemicals. 'You promised that next time you would bring family photos,' she said.

'I'll send some,' I said. 'Fiona is looking wonderful. And the children have grown so tall you'll not recognize them.'

'Stay with your wife, Bernd. You'll not regret it in the long run. She's given you those two wonderful children. What more could a man ask?'

I smiled and said nothing.

'That girl you were with on the night of the party. She was no good, Bernd. That's why she got killed. She was no good.'

'That was Fiona's sister. I wasn't with her,' I said, trying hard to remain unruffled.

'I heard differently.' She looked down to admire the silver boots she was wearing. They were high-sided shiny ones intended for party wear. She wiggled her toes and then grinned at me. I suppose she hadn't seen her toes in a long time.

Her distraction was intended to stop the conversation, but I was determined not to let it go at that. I said: 'Dicky Cruyer booked a double room at the Kempi or somewhere, using my name. Tessa was with Mr Cruyer.'

Lisl waggled a finger at me. 'That woman left with you, Bernd. Don't deny it. She got into your car and you drove off with her.'

'It was a van with diplomatic plates. And it wasn't mine. I couldn't persuade her to get out. I had to leave. It was an official job.'

'Cloak and dagger,' said Lisl slowly in her execrable English. She liked sprinkling her speech with English and French words and phrases. That was why people had trouble understanding her.

'Yes, cloak and dagger.'

'Her man came looking for her. He was angry. She was no good, that woman. You only had to look at her to see what she was.'