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his firm. I get an electronic howl. I look in the phone book. There’s one in Hammersmith. Not his initials but Scott Blair. I get an angry lady, tells me to go to hell. There’s a rep I know, Archie Parr, does the West Country for him. I ask Archie: “Archie, for Christ’s sake, how do I get hold of Barley in a hurry?” “He’s skedaddled, Niki. Done one of his bunks. Hasn’t been seen in the shop for weeks.” Enquiries, I try. London, the Home Counties. Not listed, not a Bartholomew. Well he wouldn’t be, would he, not if he’s a –’
    ‘Not if he’s a what?’ said Palmer, intrigued.
    ‘Look, he’s vanished, right? He’s vanished before. There could be reasons why he vanishes. Reasons that you don’t know of because you’re not meant to. Lives are at stake, could be. Not only his either. It’s top urgent, she told me. And top secret. Now get on with it. Please.’
    The same evening, there being not much doing on the world front apart from a dreary crisis in the Gulf and a squalid television scandal about soldiers and money in Washington, Palmer took himself off to a rather good party in Montpelier Square that was being thrown by a group of his year from Cambridge – bachelors like himself, but fun. An account of this occasion, too, reached our committee’s ears.
    ‘Have any of you heard of a Somebody Scott Blair, by the by?’ Wellow asked them at a late hour when his memory of Landau happened to have been revived by some bars of Chopin he was playing on the piano. ‘Wasn’t there a Scott Blair who was up with us or something?’ he asked again when he failed to get through the noise.
    ‘Couple of years ahead of us. Trinity,’ came a fogged reply from across the room. ‘Read History. Jazz fiend. Wanted to blow his saxophone for a living. Old man wouldn’t wear it. Barley Blair. Pissed as a rat from daybreak.’
    Palmer Wellow played a thunderous chord that stunned the garrulous company to silence. ‘I said, is he a poisonous spy?’ he enunciated.
    ‘The father? He’s dead.’
    ‘The son, ass. Barley.’
    Like someone stepping from behind a curtain, his informant emerged from the crowd of young and less young men and stood before him, glass in hand. And Palmer to his pleasure recognised him as a dear chum from Trinity a hundred years ago.
    ‘I really don’t know whether Barley’s a poisonous spy or not, I’m afraid,’ said Palmer’s chum, with an asperity habitual to him, as the background babel rose to its former roar. ‘He’s certainly a failure, if that’s a qualification.’
    His curiosity whetted still further, Palmer returned to his spacious rooms at the Foreign Office and to Landau’s envelope and notebooks, which he had entrusted to the janitor for safekeeping. And it is at this point that his actions, in the words of our interim working paper, took an unhelpful course. Or in the harsher words of Ned and his colleagues in the Russia House, this was where, in any civilised country, P. Wellow would have been strung by his thumbs from a high point in the city and left there in peace to reflect upon his attainments.
    For what Palmer did was have a nice time with the notebooks. For two nights and one and a half days. Because he found them so amusing. He did not open the buff envelope – which was by now marked in Landau’s handwriting ‘Extremely Private for the attention of Mr. B. Scott Blair or a top member of the Intelligence’ – because like Landau he was of a school that felt it unbecoming to read other people’s mail. In any case it was glued at both ends, and Palmer was not a man to grapple with physical obstacles. But the notebook – with its crazed aphorisms and quotations, its exhaustive loathing of politicians and soldiery, its scatter-shot references to Pushkin the pure Renaissance man and to Kleist the pure suicide – held him fascinated.
    He felt little sense of urgency, none of responsibility. He was a diplomat, not a Friend, as the spies were called.