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job.
    The silence of the hillside was broken by the sound of a car climbing the gradient. As it reached the level stretch below them it began to accelerate, then slowed down and pulled into the verge beyond Audley's. Roskill got out and looked expectantly up at Audley.
    Again he had the feeling that the action was outrunning the script. For Roskill to disturb him like this only trouble was sufficient reason.
    He stumped down to the road with undignified haste.
    'I'm sorry to break in on you, Dr Audley,' Roskill apologised, 'but when I phoned in to the office to say I was coming home there was an urgent message for you. I'm to tell you that the professor–no names, just the professor -has been positively identified in East Berlin. And rumour puts him on a flight to London on Tuesday.'
    Audley blinked unhappily, and Roskill completely misconstrued his reaction.
    'I'm sorry it sounds so bloody mysterious, but that's exactly what the Harlin said, and I'm afraid it comes from that JIG character, not Fred.'
    Audley tried to think. A moment before the task ahead seemed reasonably clear, no matter how unfamiliar his own role in it was: a simple and leisurely reconstruction of the events of the last week in Steerforth's career, with the willing or unwilling help of the survivors of his crew. Panin had only been a potential complication.
    But now Panin was a reality, and Panin appeared to be on the move. And unlike Audley, Panin knew exactly what he was doing.
    He grasped the nettle. 'Hugh, I'm going back to London at once. You run Jones home and then get tracing the crew as fast as you can. Tell Butler to drop everything and get after the Belgian.'
    He turned towards Jones, who had stepped on to the road a discreet distance away.
    'Trouble?' There was a suggestion of amused sympathy in Jones's eyes.
    'What makes you think that, Mr Jones?'
    'The same reason I wasn't too surprised to see you. If you've got Steerforth, you've got trouble: you can't just bury men like Steerforth.'
    'You may have him too, Mr Jones.'
    'I've got a shotgun too. Just leave me your telephone number, and I'll let you know if I shoot something interesting.'

III
    Audley stared from his study window out across the South Downs and tried to make sense of Nikolai Andrievich Panin.
    Usually he found it relaxing to watch the evening spread over that landscape, dissolving the familiar landmarks one by one. But Panin refused to let him relax on this evening.
    The Russian had to be the key to Steerforth. It was his involvement alone which had kept the dead pilot alive in the files over the last decade; it was his interest which- had aroused the department and had even provided Fred with an honourable way of sacking Audley: Panin was big enough to make the sack look like promotion.
    Big enough, but wholly enigmatic. For no one seemed to know what made Panin tick and what kept him wound up. He hadn't been tagged as a coming man until after he had arrived, and then it was too late. They had simply never caught up with him.
    Audley looked down at the thin file in front of him and the pathetic handful of notes he had made during the afternoon. Kremlinology was at best a foggy enterprise, more divination than detection, full of Delphic hypotheses about men whose passion for secrecy appeared at times to be pathological.
    But Panin had raised this passion to an art form.
    There wasn't an ounce of meat on the bones of the man's career. He had allegedly been at Moscow university before the war, and certainly returned to it afterwards, emerging as an acknowledged expert in the arts and customs of the ancient Scythians, for what that was worth. In between he had been a staff officer in Khalturin's crack division of Chuikov's army, and that in theory brought him to Berlin in 1945. But between the time he had been identified across the public bar of the Bull Inn, Newton Chester, and his appearance at the famous Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, when Kruschev had denounced