"Of course." I sat there staring at the message in my hand, and the slow anger rose in me. "We've been a couple of bloody fools over this," I said at last. "We should have managed better."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean just this," I said. "Simon was the best officer for working on the other side this country ever had, or is ever likely to get. And now he's dead. We should have thought more deeply before risking him again in Douarnenez."

"It's not so easy to rope in these chaps," McNeil said heavily. "The better they are, the more difficult they are to manage. You know that." I did, and I was silent. "He was a damn good man," he said. "But there are others just as good."

"You can't have so many Simons as all that," I replied. "We've gone and wasted one of them."

"Wasted..." he said thoughtfully. "I'm not sure that you're right." He glanced at me. "Did you read the other one?"

I turned to the other flimsy. This one said: BREST. The civil population have devised a means of harassing the Germans which is proving very effective. The name Charles Simon is written upon walls or chalked on pavements. This device is spreading rapidly, and has been observed as far away as St. Brieuc. In every case the Germans have reacted angrily, and show concern at the spread of the movement. A man of this name was executed recently at Rennes. Ends.

I stood there reading this again, and as I did so I could feel the hate swelling and seething on the other side. I put down the flimsies, sick of the whole miserable business.

"In any case," I said, "this winds up Genevieve. Simon was the last of them to be accounted for, and now that's over."

The brigadier nodded. "It's all finished now. I'll let you know if anything else turns up."

"I shan't be here," I said. "I'm going back to sea." It was a relief to talk of cleaner things. "They're giving me one of the Tribal class destroyers."

"Glad to go?"

I said: "Yes. Somebody has to do this Admiralty work, of course, but I'd rather be at sea with a definite job to do. Here you work all day in the office, and nothing ever seems to be achieved."

He stared at me. "I don't know what you want," he said. "The operations that we did with Genevieve have been a most successful show."

"We lost the ship and all her crew," I said bitterly.

"We lost a fishing vessel and two officers," he retorted. "Against that, we destroyed three Raumboote and damaged a destroyer. We killed not less than ninety Germans. We landed seventy machine-guns, and put fresh heart into a town that needed it. And not the least part, we drew off a division from the Russian front."

"A pretty scruffy sort of a division," I remarked.

"I grant you that," he said. "It was a very tired division. But it was a division, none the less, taken from the Russian front at Rostov."

He turned to me. "Who knows what that may mean?"

The End.