During the last months of his National Service, Ian Charteris had a couple of visitors, a man and a woman in good civilian clothes, who carried very high-grade Defence Ministry identification. One or other of them had overdone the scent. Ian didn’t know much about scent but he thought this one smelled quite decent, not the kind of stuff you could win at a fairground. ‘In some respects we are making a routine call,’ the man said. ‘It’s standard in our work for people to function in pairs. Oh, let me present Lorna-Jane Underhill. I’m Charles Fisher. We operate as a unit in this kind of procedure. Very much so. A harmonious unit, I might say.’ ‘Which kind?’ Ian said. ‘A very reasonable question! We like to talk to people who are about to be demobbed,’ Fisher said. He had a big voice that came across as not too far off rage, or possibly hysteria. He somehow made ‘reasonable’ sound as if it meant offensive or insulting or footling. It was sort of ‘Don’t fucking quiz me, matey ’cos I’m the fucking one who does the fucking quizzing.
