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was still uncertain. It had to have barracks, probably with separate areas to accommodate scientific, maintenance and security staffs. And it had to have a road: to accommodate the transport worker.
    Shortly afterwards, in a flurry of activity, St Louis was being urgently asked for further information: analytical material, to determine the mineral content of two lakes in the area, and gazeteer material to support the words ‘dark waters’ as a local name for them.

4
    Miss Sonntag, while this work proceeded, was getting on with her own.
    Something had come to mind after her cold. She had an idea that an envelope without a letter had appeared once before – she did not exactly remember when. But she didn’t associate it with Sweden. There was not much correspondence with Sweden. Her impression was that it was from Holland. In the same post, if she was not mistaken, there had been a number of circulars from there – academic book promotions from Amsterdam or The Hague or Rotterdam, most addressed with bits of stuck-on paper. Quite often these mailings were duplicated. She had thought that one was duplicated. Nothing in the envelope and she had shot it into the bin and thought no more about it. But after her cold she thought about it.
    She had mentioned it to Lazenby, and seemed to catch him by surprise.
    ‘ Holland , you say?’
    ‘I think Holland.’
    ‘Ah … Rotterdam, would you think?’
    ‘I can’t be certain Rotterdam. Perhaps Rotterdam.’
    ‘Well, I was supposed to … Hmm. I wonder,’ he said, and was thoughtful for a moment. ‘When are you off, Miss Sonntag?’
    ‘Off? On holiday? Next week,’ she said in surprise.
    Next week was the middle of July, and every year she went off on holiday then; this year with Sonya to Florence. The flight was booked and the pensione was booked. ‘If it is quite convenient,’ she said, anxiously.
    ‘Oh, yes, rather. Still,’ he said, and produced a list. ‘I wonder if there’d be time for you to look out some letters. It shouldn’t take for ever .’
    It didn’t take for ever, but it took four solid days, and it took place in the basement. And by the time she got down to it she had the building to herself, even Lazenby having gone off. He had left her his telephone number on the Spey.
    He had not mentioned why the letters were needed, but evidently it was his work on cell structures at low temperature. The low-temperature aspect, which was the only subject of correspondence with the Russians, he had given up eight years ago. Everything before eight years ago was in the basement.
    The basement was exceedingly dusty, and ill-lit and hideous. Hundreds of thousands of papers were there, in spring-lock boxes: lectures, reports, lab books, all mixed in with the correspondence. These days she kept an index of everything, but the only index for this heap of archive was what was on the box labels – dates and subject categories. That was what he had wanted when she had joined him fifteen years ago.
    At that time his wife (his former secretary) had just died, and he had had the institute for only a year. And in the very earliest box Miss Sonntag had come, with a pang, on condolences from foreign colleagues. They had been written to the institute – he had not encouraged correspondence to his home, always a private man. With the years he had become, if anything, even more private – detached, sardonic. But never with her. With her he had always been warm, playful. In the early years indeed she had wondered … she had still been in her forties, he was not a young man, quite bald even then … But that was all nonsense. It was nonsense but yet she thought with a pang of this also.
    And meanwhile read on, very diligently, abstracting a paper here, a paper there. These she read out to Lazenby every nightat his hotel on the River Spey. She had read out twenty-four by the end.
    ‘I have gone through two years more, Professor, after the last,’ she told him, ‘and found