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trampled and sprinkled with legitimate sawdust, where the fallen limb had been cut up into manageable sections and stacked. It was good burning wood, too, dead but not rotten.
    Dead, but not rotten: there was something maybe not quite right about that. He ran his eye up the trunk again: it was odd how the great branch hadn’t fallen in a line with the tree itself – yet if it had done so it would almost certainly have missed Maitland’s wires. As it was it had peeled off towards the left, almost as though it had been … pulled.
    Pulled! He kicked himself mentally for missing the simplest method of all: hitch a cable to the dead branch and pull obliquely. It was not only the obvious way but virtually the only way, and he’d been a monumental idiot not to see it at once.
    And yet it would take immense strength to do it – not only bringing down the branch, but also very nearly the tree itself. It would take more than manpower to do that.
    He looked up at the elm again, then down to the torn turf, trying to gauge the likely direction from which the pulling had been done. It had to be out in the field to the left of the wires.
    He moved carefully away from the hedge, searching the ground intently. It had been dry on that night, and for some days before, but this land was low lying. Further out in the field there were tussocks of coarse marsh grass. It would never be less than damp here.
    And there they were!
    Hardly more than twenty yards from the elm, and somewhat closer to the hedge than he had expected, were four symmetrical bruises in the grass where the wheels had spun for a moment before winning their tug-of-war with the branch.
    Roskill’s pulse beat with excitement: f our tyre marks made the evidence conclusive. The act of dragging a heavy object on the ground would have produced deeper rear wheel marks and shallower front ones, even if the vehicle was four-wheel drive. But the downward pull had equalised the forces at work — another few yards, indeed, and it would have been the front tyres which would have dug deeper into the ground. These marks were exactly those which a Land-Rover would make in the act of sabotaging the line, unremarkable in themselves but irrefutable evidence in context.
    He experienced a curious mixture of gratification and anger. His logic – and Audley’s confidence – was vindicated by this tattered piece of low-grade pasture. Here Maitland had been deliberately cut off, so that Jenkins should keep the appointment.
    Somebody knew too bloody much about the technical section, that was certain. And somebody knew too much about Llewelyn’s movements.
    Roskill felt for the camera in his webbing haversack. And somebody, he thought grimly, had come unstuck, nevertheless.

III
    AUDLEY WAS STANDING on the pavement in Grosvenor Gardens, ten yards from its junction with Buckingham Palace Road, which was precisely where he had said he would be, to the yard.
    In fact, thought Roskill, he looked rather like a solitary, oversized waxwork which had been stolen from Madame Tussaud’s and then abandoned to become a pedestrian obstacle: he stood unmoving, engrossed in a dull-looking, stiff-covered mag;azine, oblivious of the passers-by who eddied round him and of the traffic which accelerated past his nose.
    Even when Roskill slid the Triumph alongside the kerb beside him he did not move at once. And nor, when he did move, did he bother to verify that it was Roskill. He methodically closed the magazine, turning down the page – so much Roskill could see from the driver’s seat – and simply got straight into the car, without a word.
    Roskill engaged the gears. ‘Well, we were right,’ he said.
    Audley grunted and nodded. ‘You mean you were right. I was reasonably sure you would be, whether you found anything or not. But I’m glad to hear it; it’s always nicer to be certain.’
    He subsided into silence and it occurred to Roskill that he wasn’t going to ask for details. That might indeed be