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nothing. Do you wish me to continue?’
    ‘No. That will be the lot. That fellow can have them now – the personal ones included. Tell him to send a courier. I suppose nothing of the – of the other kind has turned up in the post, has it?’
    ‘No, nothing.’
    ‘Hmm. You are going off when?’
    ‘In two days. Unless you want me,’ she said, with extreme caution, ‘to wait on until you come back?’
    ‘No, no. I’m coming now. Nothing doing here. No fish. But you’ve done a grand job, Dora. Really very good of you. Many, many thanks indeed, Dora.’
    Dora, Dora! She put the phone down, with mild rejoicing, and forgave him the four days in the basement.
    Then she took off to pack her sandals and other sensible Shoes; and for the rest of July walked about Florence with Sonya.
    Nothing happened while they were away. No messages turned up in the post. Nothing of value had come from the basement.
       
    By the end of July plenty of answers had turned up at Langley, and they were bad answers.
    No vessel at Dudinka had been boarded by anyone but port workers. No special handling was needed for nickel-alloy parts. No fingerprints supplied by the station chiefs in Holland and Germany matched the ones on the envelope. And no name resembling ‘dark waters’ was known for the two lakes near Norilsk; which furthermore were bituminous and of no use as a water supply.
    All this was discouraging and something obviously wasn’t right.

    * * *
    In England, Lazenby had come early to the conclusion that things were not right. He had come to it actually in Scotland, listening to Miss Sonntag on the phone. He had let her read everything out, but even after the first few boxes he had known that something was wrong. There wasn’t anything from Rogachev. Rogachev had been one of his earliest correspondents, and should have turned up early. But he hadn’t. And as the boxes continued he had not turned up at all.
    Lazenby had only the sketchiest recollection of the man: a red-haired fellow, jokey, rather too personal, and a drinker. Most of the Russians were drinkers, and Lazenby was not – a small Scotch occasionally, a glass of sherry. And they had got him drunk. At a conference somewhere. At night. He had a confused recollection of lurching down a street with a number of them, Rogachev making jokes. There was something else in the scene that was disreputable, but he couldn’t place it.
    This he did not manage to do until weeks later, back in Oxford, when he had to get up in the middle of the night. Advancing age made it necessary for him to get up in the night sometimes now. He was urinating away, half asleep, when the impression came back. Urinating against a wall. With Russians. All jabbering in Russian. Rogachev on one side of him and a young Asiatic on the other. The young Asiatic, when not talking Russian, had been talking a transatlantic kind of English. He had been talking about Siberia.
    Lazenby knew this was important. A number of things seemed to come together here – of relevance both to the message and to the murky episode itself. He couldn’t recollect more of the episode, and in the morning still couldn’t. But it still seemed important, so he wrote it down. He didn’t write anything about urinating against walls. That was personal and of no importance to anybody. But Rogachev obviously was. And the young Asiatic might be.
    This happened in September, when it was known that no further communication was possible, but he completed his statement and passed it on anyway.

5
    By September, the inquiry had ground down at Langley. It didn’t stop but it settled where it had started: the biographical department.
    In charge of it was a man called W. Murray Hendricks. He was an elderly lawyer who had been with the department since the mid-1960s when a series of chaotic upsets to do with faulty cross-referencing (which had cost the country some billions in an unnecessary arms race) had brought about his rapid transfer from