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code. There had been a time when I was impressed by such devices.
    "Yes, Arthur, who do you want?" she asked in a minor-royal drawl.
    It occurred to me that my key code had revealed me as an ex-member rather than a current one. Hence her unyielding tone, since ex-members are by definition trouble. I imagined her tall, horsy, and thirty-something, with a name like Sheena. There had been a time when I regarded Sheenas as the backbone of England.
    "I'd like to speak to Sidney, please," I replied. "Sort of by yesterday, if it's possible."
    Sidney for Jake Merriman. Arthur for Tim Cranmer, alias Timbo. Nobody who is anybody uses his own name. What good had it ever done us, this cloak-and-dagger rigmarole? What harm had it done us, this endless wrapping up and hiding of our identities? Squeak. Ping. A mysterious resonance as computer speaks to computer, then to God. The sound of water running out of a bath.
    "Sidney will call you back in two minutes, Arthur. Wait where you are."
    And with a click she vanished.
    But where am I? How will Sidney know where to reach me? Then I remembered that all the stuff about tracing calls went out with bustles and the old building. My phone number was probably on her screen before she picked up the phone to me. She even knew which extension I was speaking from: Cranmer is in his study. . . . Cranmer is scratching his arse. . . . Cranmer is lovesick. . . . Cranmer is an anachronism. . . . Cranmer is thinking that as eternity is reckoned, there's a lifetime in a second, and wondering where he read it. . . . Cranmer is picking up the phone again. . . .
    A vacuum, followed by more electronic matter. I had prepared my speech. I had prepared my tone. Detached. No unseemly emotion, which Merriman deplores. No suggestion that yet another ex-member might be trying to talk himself back into the fold, a thing for which ex-members are notorious. I heard Merriman and started to apologise for ringing late on Sunday night, but he wasn't interested.
    "Have you been playing silly buggers with your telephone?"
    "No. Why?"
    "I've been trying to get hold of you since Friday evening. You've changed your number. Why the devil didn't you tell us?"
    "I rather imagined you'd have your ways of finding out.”
    “At the weekend? You're joking."
    I closed my eyes. British Intelligence has to wait till Monday morning to get hold of an unlisted number. Try telling that to the latest useless watchdog committee charged with making us cost-effective, or accountable, or—joke of jokes—open.
    Merriman was asking me whether I had had a visit from the police.
    "An Inspector Percy Bryant and a Sergeant Oliver Luck," I replied. "They said they came from Bath. I thought they came from Central Casting."
    Silence while he consulted his diary, or a colleague, or for all I knew his mother. Was he in the Office? Or his desirable Chiswick gent's res, just a poodle's pee-walk from the Thames? "The earliest I can manage is tomorrow at three," he said, in the voice my dentist uses when he is being asked to fit a worthless pain case into a lucrative schedule: Well, does it really hurt? "You know where we are these days, I suppose? You can get here all right?"
    "I can always ask a policeman," I said.
    He didn't find that funny. "Come to the main door and bring your passport."
    "My what?"
    He had gone. I took a grip on myself: Calm down. That wasn't Zeus talking, that was Jake Merriman, lightest of the Top Floor lightweights. Any lighter he'd blow off the roof, we used to say. Jake's idea of a crisis was a bad olive in his dry martini. Besides, what was so sensational about Larry going missing? It was only because the police had got into the act. What about some of the other times when Larry had gone missing? At Oxford, when he decides to bicycle to Delphi rather than sit his Prelims? In Brighton, on the day he is supposed to make his first clandestine rendezvous with a Russian courier but prefers instead to get drunk with a circle of congenial