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Office without delay. A boat was being sent to save time.
    He glanced at his watch. Colours had long since sounded; he had heard the twitter of calls and the lordly blare of a bugle from the cruiser long ago, or so it felt. And he was still waiting. It was the navy’s way.
    Once he had arrived here, there had been no obvious urgency. A tired-looking yeoman of signals had called for a messenger, but seemed more concerned with a ship which was already under way, heading for the last brightly painted buoy and the sea beyond. Without looking, he had known she was Kinsale .
    He had gone out to the balcony and uncovered the telescope and focused it. Like being part of it. With them.
    Again the shrill of calls, the acknowledgment from the cruiser as she passed abeam, little figures at attention, an officer saluting from the forecastle by the empty jackstaff. Her motor-boat was hoisted, secured by the gripes, until the next time. He had wondered if the young sailor who had joined Kinsale , his first ship, had found his feet yet in the contained world of the lower deck.
    He stifled a yawn. In a minute, someone would come and tell him that there had been a mistake, there was no urgency. It was only one of those things …
    He looked around the room. A trestle table, scrubbed, of course; a couple of chairs. He could hear a solitary typewriter, very slow, two fingers at a time, probably someone translating a bunting-tosser’s scrawl into something legible.
    He remembered the faces as he had climbed down into the motor-boat. Weighing the unexpected change in routine. Some men still chewing on their breakfast, a few moving pieces of gear in readiness for washing down under the watchful eyes of a tough-looking leading seaman, the coxswain’s right-hand man. The name had slipped Kearton’s mind, but his flattened, broken nose made him easy to recognize. Some were still strangers.
    He thought of Spiers, the Number One, always ready to answer any questions, never at a loss. Duties, watches, morale. But nothing personal yet to bridge the gap.
    His attention returned to the window: a vibration, rather than a sound, had broken the stillness, an aircraft on the Rock’s narrow runway preparing for take-off. He had heard people say the experience was not for the faint-hearted, but from a distance it reminded him of his old motor-bike, a second-hand Triumph, when you twisted the grip and made the revs mount up. When Julie had been on the pillion, arms wrapped around his waist. Laughing whenever they hit a hump in the road, or some unexpected pothole, and when they had taken a short cut along the towpath, anglers squatting by their rods and yelling threats as they had clattered past.
    The old bike would be on a scrap heap now, written off. And with petrol rationed so severely, joy-riding was just another memory.
    He turned. No voices, but the typewriter had stopped, and chairs were being scraped aside.
    The door swung open and closed just as casually behind the newcomer.
    He wasted no time. “I know who you are.” He thrust out his hand. “I’m Garrick. Sorry I’m a bit adrift. It takes a month of Sundays to get things moving around here!”
    The ready smile and keen eyes, like the handshake, seemed familiar, although they had never met. Captain Richard Garrick, D.S.O., Royal Navy, ‘Dick’ Garrick as he was called in the popular press, was known to most people following the war’s progress at sea and on land; he seemed ubiquitous. Kearton had seen him in interviews on newsreels at the cinema, or photographed surrounded by armed squaddies after some successful raid into enemy territory. Often wearing battledress or camouflaged combat gear, cigarette in one hand, and usually the smile. ‘Our man of action’, one journalist had dubbed him.
    The smile was the same now, but the rest was different. Maybe it was the formality of the smart uniform and its medal ribbons , the four gold rings on either sleeve, and the oak-leaved cap he had tossed