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needn’t go on.’
    But Kellick was enjoying it. He loved these departmental soliloquies.
    ‘Kate, let me repeat to you my little sermon of this morning. Tom’s already had a good run: at forty-one, a very good run indeed. But how long now before we must decide he’s too old, or cares too little? How long before his . . . retirement . . . is forced upon him by other people for quite different, even hostile reasons? Kate, this job we have for him is not dangerous. It’s hardly A.D. status at all!’
    He looked quickly across to Fry, who was looking at nothing but his own hands clasped on his lap.
    ‘Mr Kellick’ - Kate sounded strained - ‘I’ve told you I’ll do as you ask. I have already begun to do it. I had only hoped to know a little of what it is I’m having to persuade Tom to do, that’s all. I want to help him, but I do not want to hurt him!’
    Said with feeling, Kellick thought. Such a pretty woman. She’s been a little indiscreet in the past, but undoubtedly pretty. He could never understand how the sexes paired themselves up. McCullin did have a job that might seem attractive in itself to women. He travelled and when he wasn’t travelling he’d enough money to spend, more than enough. McCullin had taken Mrs Cathcart and caused her to throw away the pleasant, comfortable life she’d enjoyed in Regent’s Park Terrace with the Hon. Jeremy Cathcart, and the baby daughter, Sarah.
    Kate got up to leave his office. And yet, he thought, watching the tall, neat blonde in the blue flared tweed skirt and tight blue sweater, she doesn’t seem the kind of girl to be attracted by the usual clichéd sex symbols.
    Tom’s left hand rested high, between her legs, casually, gently fondling. Her legs, very long, were stretched out beneath the steering wheel. Her thighs were the longest Tom had ever seen, the skin always slightly brown, the soft blonde hair like a down on them. Tom remembered seeing those thighs for the first time many years ago. She was sitting, he was standing, in a coach taking them to a display of new Ministry of Defence weaponry at Warminster in Wiltshire. On the way he had tried to count the number of tiny blonde hairs on each thigh as she sat there reading Le Carré. He’d finished counting by the time they reached Salisbury, so he began an imaginary count up and beyond the seam of the scrubbed denim skirt. By the time they’d reached Warminster he’d promised himself he’d kiss - one night or day - every hair he’d counted and all those still out of sight.
    Her head rested on the support on the seatback. Her face turned Slightly away from him, her blonde hair failing back unruffled. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing deeply, regularly.
    The windows have steamed up, Kate,’ he said, softly.
    This isn’t the Serpentine!’
    ‘It’s just as good.’
    ‘It is,’ she whispered back, ‘it’s always good. . . sometimes it’s unbearable, it’s so good!’
    He felt a slight tremor and the muscles on the inside of her thighs stiffened, catching Tom’s hand tight. He began to get cramp in it. She relaxed again. He felt relief, glad to exercise his hand again in and around her. He kissed her ear and blew gently into it. He knew she liked that. He knew much of what she liked: and she of him.
    Tom had whored in many parts of the globe - Bangkok, Vientiane, Saigon, Hong Kong, Macau, Manila and all stations west. He’d once managed it for a bet in a cold bath in Reykjavik, Iceland, and again with a superb, well- bosomed Army lieutenant in a gunboat off the port of Haifa, Israel. But never, never had it been like Kate. English girls turned him on, anyway. In all the years he’d spent off and on in Asia he’d never managed to be attracted to any of their women. Saucer tits, saucer faces, shaved in all those places Tom especially liked to taste sweat, the sweet intoxicating smell of an excited woman. He remembered his first-ever Vietnamese whore, in Tu Do, Saigon. A thousand piastres