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want to throw up. What was left of Gus Keene’s car had been towed into the big garage behind the Salisbury police station, and the picture of that would remain in his mind for a long time. A pile of blackened, twisted scrap metal from which no human could have got out alive. Death at the snap of fingers. There one minute, gone the next in a tangle of flame and steel. Forensics were going over it with their plastic bags, scraping here and there, examining and measuring, combing through the wreckage like buzzards.
    Herb had also read the two statements that DI Roach placed before him, like an acolyte opening the gospel for a priest.
    The first was signed by William Dunne, a Military Police sergeant on attachment to one of the many units stationed in the town of Warminster, which, being adjacent to Salisbury Plain, has known the presence of soldiers for centuries.
    Sergeant Dunne had been driving back to his barracks following an evening spent with a young lady in Salisbury. About a mile from the small village of Wylye, on the Warminster Road, he had seen a car half pulled off on the grass verge. Being a man of instinctive powers of observation, he had identified the vehicle as a Rover with the registration number ED439B. In plain language, Gus Keene’s car. Two men stood talking near the front of the Rover, and both had turned their backs to his headlights as he passed. The time was four minutes to three in the morning.
    The second statement told how a Mrs. Doreen Hood, who lived in one of the cottages on the outskirts of Wylye, had been awakened by what she called “a terrible bang”—a phrase that had caused much ribald comment among the police who knew Mrs. Doreen Hood’s mode of life, which involved many hours in bed with numerous local worthies. On looking from her window, Mrs. Hood saw the car, later identified as Gus Keene’s Rover, engulfed in flame, lying on its side a good five meters off the road. “It was one of them explosions like you see at the pictures: in those Arnold Schwartzanagle’s films. Like Legal Weapon .” It was Mrs. Hood who telephoned for police and ambulance. They had logged the time as three-oh-four in the morning. It was summer. July. The date/time was on the tape, spoken by an electronic voice. Such is progress.
    DI Roach drove with the immense care of a police officer out to teach by example. In truth, Kruger interested him, for he was the first member of the SIS Charlie Roach had ever come across. “You weren’t born in England, were you?” he asked.
    Kruger gave not a flicker of a smile. “Thought I’d fooled you.”
    “I detected an accent. I suppose during the Cold War you spent time abroad?” Abroad for DI Roach really meant package deals to Malta or Marbella, but he was aware of the dark freezing days when secret men and women plied their trade across the Berlin Wall. Like millions of others, he had read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , so he knew it all. Now he glanced at the big man with a drawn and haunted face. In the wink of an eye, he saw Herbie in the shadows of ruined Berlin, or stepping from a doorway like Orson Welles in The Third Man . “It must be an adventurous life,” he added.
    “Sure. Dead adventurous. I still go abroad. More call than you’d think for people like me. Even now.”
    “Really? I’ve always wondered what it was like. Spying and that.”
    “Not what it’s cracked up to be.” Herb stared straight ahead. They were approaching the place where Gus Keene’s Rover had gone off the road. He knew this particular route as well as the lines on his own hand.
    The gray stone of Wylye village lay ahead. They were deep in the Wylye Valley, which is not as beautiful as it sounds. The river is more of a brook for most of the way, pollarded willows dotting its banks, which stretch out indefinitely into little pools of marshland. On some days the view could be downright depressing. Herb hardly ever passed this way without hearing words about a