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of an unmade bed, the smell of whisky glasses and saucers piled high with fag ends. Bad habits that had made many a man seek the safety and orderliness of marriage.
    It wasn’t often that Tom came home to bedsitter chaos because more often than not he never came home at all. It was one of the Department’s fetishes that if off on a job - he could never call them ‘contracts’ and keep a straight face - an agent must never prepare to leave too obviously. There should never be a suitcase packed, no notes for the milkman. You must leave your accommodation - a Kellick word that, couldn’t find it in himself to call it a home - as if you were going out to buy a packet of tea.
    Sure enough, it had always worked. Everything he needed was always waiting for him at the Department: he got most of his underwear free that way, the only payola that was ever available.
    When he came back, his flat was always spick and span. The kitchen sink and the ashtrays were always empty, the beer stains had been washed out of the carpets and the bed linen was white, crisp and ironed in squares with the middle press mark dead centre of the mattress. He always felt, coming back after the grottiness of a job away, that it was New Year’s morning and someone had turned over a new leaf for him. It was a service he’d come to expect: the least the Department could do for him, pay the one pound eighty pence an hour for a decent char.
    What he didn’t know was that it was a service the Department considered essential, and not for any reason of hygiene. For security reasons only. By the time Tom was sipping his first gin and tonic thirty-nine thousand feet up on his way to some foreign assignment, his flat had already been turned inside out. It was the Department’s way of satisfying itself that he had left nothing around that could embarrass them, should the flat be visited by people outside the British Government’s employ while he was away. It was also a necessary routine, sorting out his letters and papers, to be certain of Tom’s continued loyalty to his government and country: to be certain that he continued to carry his high security rating.
    And recently he’d been blessed with yet another Departmental service. They paid all his bills for him. He’d now quite forgotten that spasm of panic every time he’d opened the front door to find an ominous pile of manilla envelopes scattered across the cold, empty hallway. It depended on his mood - that is before or after a Scotch - whether or not he would stuff them immediately into the waste bin, or some desk drawer he knew he was unlikely ever to open again. Sooner or later of course, after the solicitors’ warning notes and eventual court order had joined the rest in anonymity, the bailiffs would arrive threatening to take away silver, antiques and Persian rugs - of which Tom had none.
    On one occasion an unfortunate man, recently retired from the Metropolitan Police and acting on behalf of the South-Western Electricity Board in a civilian capacity, told the magistrate at Wandsworth how the said Mr McCullin had split open the lobes of both his ears. He was still partially deaf. It happened in an argument over whether the electricity supply should be disconnected. Mr McCullin, the injured party told the magistrate, had clapped his hands together very fast and very hard. The bailiff’s head was painfully in between. The incident had upset the Department and payments had to be made to various court reporters to ignore these particular proceedings. The payment of Tom’s bills was now the responsibility of some minor clerk in the Department, sums later to be deducted from payments made to Tom and deducted in the same way that the cost of cleaning his flat was made - something Tom would also have known about had he ever bothered to look at the slip of paper that always accompanied his cheque.
    It was mid-afternoon, Monday, and the red telephone on the floor in Tom’s bedroom had been ringing for