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the front door behind him.
    After a while Blackwood, too, went out, and climbed an internal ladder to the flat roof. He saw two figures huddled in a corner, wearing steel helmets: fire-watchers, staring at the sky over London. There was a bad blaze somewhere; he could see it reflected in the Thames, as if the river itself was on fire, and the tang of smoke and charred wood was apparent even here; occasionally heheard the distant clamour of bells, fire engines, ambulances, maybe even the cabby, with his little pump dragging behind his taxi. A city at war, the battle about which servicemen knew the least. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Fighting and surviving. Dying.
    He thought of the girl, the way she had looked, the feel of her cold fingers on his wrist. Where was she now, while all this was going on? If the raid came this way a single stick of bombs, like the one which had killed his father, and he, Gaillard and the girl might be no more. What, then, of the secret plans? Diamond had said clearly,
others could do it.
 . . .
    He thought of all the faces he had known since the war had taken him from routine duties and made him what he was now. Young, eager, with little thought beyond the next day. After three years of it, there were not many left.
    There was a loud explosion, and he saw a column of sparks rise into the sky like something solid. It must be miles away, and yet he imagined he felt the searing heat. He glanced at the fire-watchers, one wearing pyjama trousers beneath his duffle coat. They were both drinking tea; neither was young, but Blackwood knew they would be ready to use their stirrup pumps and buckets of sand if incendiaries straddled this block of flats.
    One of Diamond’s little high fliers.
He recalled the way she had looked back at him when he had caught himself staring at her. A defiance. But when she had spoken of his father she had seemed very different, or maybe she had been reminded of somebody.
    He sighed, and the two muffled figures turned to peer at him.
    It was stupid even to think of it. He would probably never see her again. In war, it was like that, and it wasprobably better so. In the same breath, he knew it was not.
    He groped his way back to the ladder and one of the fire-watchers called after him, ‘Good luck! Take care of yourself!’
    He paused and raised a hand to them.
And what about you
, he thought.
    He let himself into the flat, and was thankful that Gaillard had not returned. It was ridiculous.
We shall be working together. Discipline, trust, determination.
    He looked around the room which was to be his refuge for the night. Clean sheets, and his greatcoat was on a hanger behind the door. She must have done that. The thought made him glance around with new eyes, although it was as plain and unimaginative as the others in the flat.
    Then he sat on the bed, and imagined her here, beside him. Smiling, perhaps, at his clumsy uncertainty. But smiling . . .
    He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling; he was still awake when the all-clear eventually sounded across London.
    He got up, with effort, and looked at himself in a mirror. Maybe, like Gaillard, he was glad to be going back.
    The face in the mirror regarded him impassively, and he was reminded of old Harry Payne at Hawks Hill.
    Aloud, to the empty room, he said, ‘You never left!’
    He was ready.
    They stood side by side in the bare, unheated waiting room, staring at the aircraft standing quite alone on the makeshift runway. A wartime airfield somewhere inHampshire, at a guess, Blackwood thought, not all that far from Hawks Hill.
    They had been driven down from London soon after dawn, with the same petty officer who had met him at Waterloo at the wheel. If the man remembered him, he gave no sign of recognition. Maybe all this cloak and dagger stuff was catching.
    The aircraft was testing its engines, like a big, awkward bird, an intruder here, as incongruous as the small control