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And Friends in Palmer’s zoology were people without the intellectual horsepower to be what Palmer was. Indeed it was his outspoken resentment that the orthodox Foreign Office to which he belonged resembled more and more a cover organisation for the Friends’ disgraceful activities. For Palmer too was a man of impressive erudition, if of a random kind. He had read Arabic and taken a First in Modern History. He had added Russian and Sanskrit in his spare time. He had everything but mathematics and common sense, which explains why he passed over the dreary pages of algebraic formulae, equations and diagrams that made up the other two notebooks, and in contrast to the writer’s philosophical ramblings had a boringly disciplined appearance. And which also explains – though the committee had difficulty accepting such an explanation – why Palmer chose to ignore the Standing Order to Resident Clerks relating to Defectors and Offers of Intelligence whether solicited or otherwise, and to do his own thing.
    ‘He makes the most frantic connections right across the board, Tig,’ he told a rather senior colleague in Research Department on the Tuesday, having decided that it was finally time to share his acquisition. ‘You simply must read him.’
    ‘But how do we know it’s a he, Palms?’
    Palmer just felt it, Tig. The vibes.
    Palmer’s senior colleague glanced at the first notebook, then at the second, then sat down and stared at the third. Then he looked at the drawings in the second book. Then his professional self took over in the emergency.
    ‘I think I’d get this lot across to them fairly sharpish if I were you, Palms,’ he said. But on second thoughts he got it across to them himself, very sharpish indeed, having first telephoned Ned on the green line and told him to stand by.
    Upon which, two days late, hell broke loose. At four o’clock on the Wednesday morning the lights on the top floor of Ned’s stubby brick out-station in Victoria known as the Russia House were still burning brightly as the first bemused meeting of what later became the Bluebird team drew to a close. Five hours after that, having sat out two more meetings in the Service’s headquarters in a grand new high-rise block on the Embankment, Ned was back at his desk, the files gathering around him as giddily as if the girls in Registry had decided to erect a street barricade.
    ‘God may move in a mysterious way,’ Ned was heard to remark to his red-headed assistant Brock in a lull between deliveries, ‘but it’s nothing to the way He picks his joes.’
    A joe in the parlance is a live source, and a live source in sane English is a spy. Was Ned referring to Landau when he spoke of joes? To Katya? To the unchristened writer of the notebooks? Or was his mind already fixed upon the vaporous outlines of that great British gentleman spy, Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair? Brock did not know or care. He came from Glasgow but of Lithuanian parents and abstract concepts made him angry.
    As to myself, I had to wait another week before Ned decided with a proper reluctance that it was time to haul in old Palfrey. I’ve been old Palfrey since I can remember. To this day I have never understood what happened to my Christian names. ‘Where’s old Palfrey?’ they say. ‘Where’s our tame legal eagle? Get the old lawbender in! Better chuck this one at Palfrey!’
    I am quickly dealt with. You need not stumble on me long. Horatio Benedict dePalfrey are my names but you may forget the first two immediately, and somehow nobody has ever remembered the ‘de’ at all. In the Service I am Harry so, quite often, being an obedient soul, I am Harry to myself. Alone in my poky little bachelor flat of an evening, I am quite inclined to call myself Harry while I cook my chop. Legal adviser to the illegals, that’s me, and sometime junior partner to the extinct house of Mackie, Mackie & dePalfrey, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, of Chancery Lane. But that was