for treating needy and deserving cases on a cost-free basis. And I am happy to inform you that your case has been deemed to fall within that category.’
She needs another meeting in one week’s time, but I am obliged to postpone it. A Latvian agent must be infiltrated into a Red Army signals base in Belarus. On my return to British shores I call Prue and invite her to dinner, only to be curtly advised that it is her firm’s policy that client relations should remain on an impersonal footing. However, she is pleased to inform me that as a result of her firm’s representations all claims against me have been abandoned. I thank her profusely and ask her whether in that case the way is clear for her to have dinner with me. It is.
We go to Bianchi’s. She wears a low-cut summer dress, her hair has come out from behind her ears and every man and woman in the room is staring at her. I quickly realize that my usual patter doesn’t play. We have barely reached the main course before I am being treated to a dissertation on the gap between law and justice. When the bill comes she takes possession of it, calculates her half to the last penny, adds ten per cent for service and pays me in cash from her handbag. I tell her in simulated outrage that I have never before encountered such barefaced integrity, and she nearly falls off her chair for laughter.
Six months later, with the prior consent of my employers, I ask her whether she will consider marrying a spy. She will. Now it is the Service’s turn to take her to dinner. Two weeks later, she informs me that she has decided to put her legal career on hold and undergo the Office’s training course for spouses shortly to be posted to hostile environments. She needs me to know that she has taken the decision of her own free will and not for love of me. She was torn, but was persuaded by her sense of national duty.
She completes the course with flying colours. A week later I am posted to the British Embassy in Moscow as Second Secretary (Commercial), accompanied by my wife Prudence. In the event, Moscow was the only posting that we shared. The reasons for this do Prue no dishonour. I shall come to them shortly.
For more than two decades, first with Prue, and then without her, I have served my Queen under diplomatic or consular cover in Moscow, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, Tbilisi, Trieste, Helsinki and most recently Tallinn, recruiting and running secret agents of every stripe. I have never been invited to the high tables of policy-making, and am glad of it. The natural-born agent-runner is his own man. He may take his orders from London, but in the field he is the master of his fate and the fate of his agents. And when his active years are done, there aren’t going to be many berths waiting for a journeyman spy in his late forties who detests deskwork and has the curriculum vitae of a middle-ranking diplomat who never made the grade.
*
Christmas is approaching. My day of reckoning has come. Deep in the catacombs of my Service’s headquarters beside the Thames, I am led to a small, airless interviewing room and received by a smiling, intelligent woman of indeterminate age. She is Moira of Human Resources. There has always been something a little alien about the Moiras of the Service. They know more about you than you know yourself but they’re not telling you what it is, or whether they like it.
‘Now, your Prue,’ Moira asks keenly. ‘Has she survived her law firm’s recent merger? It was upsetting for her, I’m sure.’
Thank you, Moira, it wasn’t upsetting at all, and congratulations on doing your homework. I would expect no less.
‘And she’s well, is she? You’re both well?’ – with a note of anxiety I choose to ignore. ‘Now that you’re safely home.’
‘Absolutely fine, Moira. Very happily reunited, thanks.’
And now kindly read me my death warrant and let’s get this over with. But Moira has her methods. Next on her list comes my daughter Stephanie.
‘And no more of those growing pains, I trust, now that she’s safely at university?’
‘None whatever, Moira, thanks. Her tutors are over the moon,’ I reply.
But all I’m really thinking is: now tell me that a Thursday evening has been set for my farewell knees-up because nobody likes Fridays, and