A Very British Ending

Book 5: William Catesby

by Edward Wilson

Genres: Conspiracy Thrillers; Historical Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

Bremen, 1951. An MI6 officer, haunted by an SS atrocity, kills a Nazi war criminal in the ruins of a U-boat bunker. The German turns out to be a CIA asset being rat-lined to South America. Britain, 1947. A young cabinet minister negotiates a deal with Moscow trading Rolls-Royce jet engines for cattle fodder and wood. The fates of the two men become entwined as one rises through MI6 and the other to Downing Street where, in the mid-1970s, a secret plot unfolds on both sides of the Atlantic to overthrow the Prime Minister. Can MI6 officers Catesby and Bone prevent it?

Release date: July 15, 2015

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 300

Sample

William Catesby had to brake hard. Otherwise, he and his bicycle would have gone over the cliff. But the press would have loved it: Body of Top Spy Found on Remote Suffolk Beach. The MI6 officer, reported to be under investigation for serious misconduct, had been summoned to answer questions before a secret Whitehall Committee…

Catesby was surprised how much of Covehithe had fallen into the sea during the winter gales. It was the worst erosion he had seen for years. The road now ended abruptly with broken black tarmac hanging over the cliff edge – the warning sign and barrier had been claimed by the last storm. Just as Catesby had seen no warning of the lethal cliff edge, there had been no warning of his summons to appear before the Cabinet Secretary. On the other hand, it wasn’t unexpected either. Catesby wasn’t good at burying bodies so they stayed buried. He knew that his own fall was just as inevitable as Covehithe tumbling into the sea.

What, he thought, did they want? A full and frank confession in exchange for immunity from prosecution? Not likely. They wanted his pension and his freedom. Catesby knew he was going to lose everything. Maybe he shouldn’t have braked before the cliff edge.

The north-east wind was biting and cold, but Catesby was oddly happy squinting against the salt spray out to sea. He had been born a few miles up the coast. Catesby’s job had sent him around the world, but the Suffolk coast was the only place he felt complete. He looked north towards Benacre where the cliffs ended and the dark woods began. When the tide was high, acorns and chestnuts fell directly into the sea. During the long summers of childhood, it had been a place for secret dens and midnight swims. Suffolk was a private hinterland that no one could ever take from him. They could put him in prison, but they couldn’t erase the place from his brain.

What had Catesby got to hide? A lot. It wasn’t just murder – and there were more than one – and it wasn’t trampling over the Official Secrets Act. What mattered was that he had betrayed himself and those he loved. Catesby looked out over the cold sea. How many of his family’s bones lay rolling there? Tossed and ground by the sea into smooth pale lumps. Crawled over by crabs and nosed by what was left of the cod. Catesby, the spawn of a Lowestoft sailor and an Antwerp barmaid, belonged to the North Sea – and felt as empty as that salty waste. He had grown up fluent in three languages, but couldn’t say what he had become in any of them.

Catesby had served the state for thirty-three long turbulent years. First in the Army and then as an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service. He was tired and battered. His stepchildren used to have a running joke that he was ten years older than his real age. When he was forty, they gave him a birthday card wishing him a ‘Happy 50th’ – and so on every year until he actually did turn fifty. The step-kids, now grown-ups, suddenly realised his premature ageing was no longer funny.

His jobs had left him with few physical injuries – bullets seemed to curve around him – but very deep emotional scars. The worst was what had happened to him in the war. In fact, it wasn’t a scar, but a deep open wound that would never heal. The puss of mental pain and self-recrimination was still coming out nearly thirty-two years later. Could he have prevented what happened?

Thirty years in SIS had left a different set of emotional wounds: the inability to trust anyone; the hard-faced rationality of inflicting pain; the guilt of complicity with the merciless machinery of the state. Three decades as a spy had earned Catesby a pension, but ruined his marriage and his closest friendships. And now that pension was in doubt too. But they were not just out to get him, they were out to get the Prime Minister too.

It had been the coldest winter on record. Ice flows off the Suffolk coast had disrupted shipping and pack ice had suspended the ferry service between Dover and Ostend. Drifting snow had blocked railways and roads. Many power stations had been forced to shut owing to lack of coal deliveries. German PoWs and British troops worked side by side shovelling snow by hand to clear essential rail lines.

Britain wasn’t just cold; it was hungry too. Straw-covered potato clamps were no match for the severe frosts and 75,000 tons of potatoes were destroyed. Meanwhile, many winter root vegetables remained un-harvested because they were frozen hard in the ground. Cattle fodder was in short supply and there were fears for the survival of British herds. There was a real danger that food supplies would run out and rationing measures, more severe than during the war, were introduced.

The Board of Trade canteen had just been refurbished and was considered the best in Whitehall. The mood in the canteen was egalitarian as suited the time. Mandarins from on high sat at the same long tables with secretaries and the most junior clerks. The civil servants who dined there came from all government departments – including the Secret Intelligence Service, whose basement club only served senior officers and didn’t do lunch. Eating in works canteens was also popular because the food was ‘out of ration’, which meant your ration card coupons weren’t cancelled. A lot of people were scraping the butter off their buns to take it home for the family. But when Catesby tried to do the same, his new boss and mentor, Henry Bone, advised him: ‘Don’t do that, Catesby. They’re plebs and you’re supposed to be an officer.’

The BOT works canteen was not Henry Bone’s natural habitat. He described lunch there as ‘feeding time at the zoo’, but also a good place to observe ‘the mood of the Whitehall fauna’. Henry Bone looked like his name: tall, gaunt and sepulchre. His manner was patrician and his eyebrows arched as he spoke. But beneath Bone’s droll hauteur, there was a very complex person that Catesby never completely unravelled. Bone’s personal life was only a secret to the naive and unsophisticated, but his deeper loyalties were far more complicated. Spies spy on each other and Catesby had done the requisite snooping on his boss. Bone’s most famous ancestor was an eighteenth-century artist of the same name who enjoyed royal patronage. Bone himself was a devotee of the arts and a talented musician. He had also helmed a yacht in the 1936 Olympics.

‘Do you know him?’ said Bone staring at his food, but giving a barely perceptible nod.

‘Who?’ said Catesby.

‘The young minister with the moustache sitting next to Stafford Cripps.’

‘It’s Harold Wilson. I briefly met him at the Labour Party conference in 1945.’ Catesby had campaigned for a parliamentary seat while still in uniform, but had been soundly beaten by a Tory landowner.

‘By the way,’ said Bone, ‘are you still a member of the People’s Party?’

‘No, I followed the rules and terminated my membership – as instructed.’ Catesby frowned. ‘Terribly unfair.’

‘Not at all. SIS officers cannot be seen as politically partisan. Why are you smiling?’

‘Because many of our colleagues are the most political beasts in the Whitehall jungle.’

‘My exact words, Catesby, were cannot be seen as politically partisan. In any case, what do you think of Wilson?’

‘Very intelligent and sharp.’ Catesby glanced at the minister under discussion. ‘That’s odd.’

‘Don’t turn your head when you look at someone. Swivel your eyes. What’s odd?’

‘Stafford Cripps just pushed his chicken leg on to Wilson’s plate. Is he trying to fatten him up for higher office?’

‘Cripps is a vegetarian – he’s also a completely teetotal Christian. But higher office for Wilson is on the cards.’

Catesby smiled. ‘You seem, Mr Bone, well informed about the People’s Party.’

‘While remaining non-partisan, it is our job to be politically astute. It is almost certain that Stafford Cripps is going to become Chancellor in the next reshuffle and that Wilson will replace him as President of the Board of Trade.’

‘He’s a rising star.’

‘Wilson will become the youngest cabinet minister since Pitt the Younger. Look at him again, Catesby, but swivel your eyes this time.’

Catesby gave a furtive glance.

‘You’re looking at a future prime minister. But first,’ Bone smiled, ‘he will have to shave off that ridiculous moustache.’

‘But otherwise, you seem impressed by him.’

Bone nodded. ‘I had to give Wilson a security briefing about his planned trip to Moscow next month. We were together for over an hour and discussed the wider context.’

‘Why’s he going to Moscow?’

‘I’m disappointed in you, Catesby. You don’t seem very well informed at all. Do you even know what Wilson’s job is at present?’

‘He’s secretary for something.’

‘He’s Secretary for Overseas Trade – a very important position for a junior minister. You need, Catesby, to keep your ear to the ground in Whitehall too. There’s more to this job than spying on the Sovs.’

Catesby nodded. Bone was head of USSR P Section, which was responsible for meeting R Section demands for intelligence about the Soviet Union. Although Catesby was assigned to the intelligence branch of the Control Commission for Germany, his own post came under Bone’s expanding jurisdiction.

‘Have you heard,’ said Bone, ‘anything about the Rolls-Royce jet engines deal with Moscow?’

‘I’ve heard it was still under discussion and that Tedder was busy twisting arms at MoD.’

‘Much better, Catesby. We were involved too – under pressure from Downing Street. We had to convince the Air Ministry that selling those jet engines to Russia would not give the Sovs a long-term strategic advantage.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Not very. We lied through our teeth – which is part of our job. Spies are professional liars.’ Bone sipped his tea and made a face. ‘Ghastly. Not only over-brewed, but cold. In any case, the deal with Moscow is almost certain. The MoD has now agreed to the Board of Trade granting an export license for fifty-five Rolls-Royce jet engines.’

‘What did you lie about?’

‘We lied about the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity to turn those jet engines into a power source for jet fighters and bombers. They are, by the way, an utterly marvellous example of British technology: centrifugal flow turbojet engines that are five years ahead of the rest of the world.’

‘But we’re only flogging fifty-five of them.’

‘Don’t be naive, Catesby. As soon as the Russians get their hands on them, they will strip down those beautiful Rolls-Royce engines and reverse engineer their construction to make their own copies – the fifty-five jet engines will soon become 500.’

Catesby already knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway. ‘Why are we doing it?’

‘Look around you. Look at that lean clerk scraping the butter off his bun and wrapping a chicken leg in a piece of paper. His poor, freezing family have probably used up their ration coupons. Not good management, but hungry people don’t always make wise choices.’

‘What are we getting back from the Russians?’

‘That’s for Wilson to negotiate. We need 800 tons of grain, cattle fodder and timber.’

Almost on cue, the Minister for Overseas Trade and his boss got up to leave. Wilson nodded a greeting at Bone as he passed by – and gave Catesby an odd look.

‘I think,’ said Bone, ‘your former comrade was surprised to see you supping with the devil.’

‘He has an excellent memory for faces and names.’

‘The rest of his memory is just as formidable. During our most interesting discussion he rattled off figures and facts with uncanny accuracy.’

‘A bit like the classroom swot showing off?’

‘No, Catesby, not at all. He’s passionate and sincere about his job. There is, however, something of the insecure little boy about him. Wilson wants to win approval by doing a good job.’ Bone paused. ‘He needs hardening up. I don’t think he fully realises how malicious and dangerous this world, the world of power, actually is.’

‘Will he be all right in Moscow?’

‘I should think so. I explained to him about Moscow Rules and how to avoid honey-trap compromises. But I was a bit concerned when I warned him about the dangers of marathon vodka sessions; he said that as a Yorkshire man he could drink any Russian under the table.’

‘Bravado.’

‘I hope so. He won’t have any problems because the Sovs are desperate to get those jet engines.’ Bone paused. ‘But there is a problem, a big problem. The Americans are not going to like this. They’re going to be furious.’

‘Why don’t the Americans buy the engines instead?’

‘Because they think we should give them the technology for free. The Yanks say it’s part of a wartime agreement to share expertise and intelligence. They’re impossible. I think Wilson is going to find the Americans far more difficult than the Russians. We talked at some length about this.’

‘Did you convince him?’

‘To some extent. He confided that Stafford Cripps had warned him that negotiating the jet engines deal could turn out to be “a poison chalice”. Ironically, Wilson had nothing to do at all with the original decision to sell those engines to Moscow. It was made before he was appointed. But the deal will always have his name on it. That is how ministerial responsibility devolves.’

‘Not very fair.’

‘Nothing is fair in our game. Mark my words, the Americans will never forgive Harold Wilson for selling those jet engines to Moscow. It will come back to haunt him over and over again.’



Catesby had chosen the ruins of the U-boot bunker as the best place to carry out the execution – remote and off-limits. It was the first time that Catesby had killed a man face to face. Killing in the war had been different, impersonal. Afterwards, Catesby was surprised – and shocked – by how little he had felt.

Catesby didn’t regard what he had done as murder. It wasn’t revenge either. He didn’t know a single person who had been killed in the massacre. But the images were still haunting him seven years later. Catesby thought that by killing a war criminal, one who had operated in the region, he could get rid of the ghost that haunted him. It was a form of exorcism. Catesby wanted to remove the phantom of Oradour-sur-Glane so he could sleep at night and stop the recurring images. He didn’t know that you can’t kill a ghost – you had to find a way of living with it.

Catesby had been parachuted into France in 1943 along with a radio operator and a courier who doubled as an explosives expert. Their principle job was to send intelligence back to London about the enemy. The resistance group they worked with, the Maquis du Limousin, was the largest in France and numbered more than 10,000. The resistance fighters were busiest in the days following the D-Day landings as German units streamed north to join the fight in Normandy. The Maquisards sabotaged rail lines, blew up bridges and attacked troop movements. The Germans responded with reprisals against the civilian population. Owing to a stroke of luck, Catesby’s resistance group captured a high-ranking German officer, SS -Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe. What to do with the captured SS officer became a problem and a matter of contention. One of the resistance leaders wanted to execute him; others wanted to use him to negotiate a prisoner exchange.

Catesby never found out exactly what happened, but never forgave himself either. He wished that he had stood up to the Maquis leader who wanted to execute Kämpfe. Catesby couldn’t see the point of risking reprisals for the satisfaction of killing an SS officer. But what happened? No one seemed to know – or wanted to admit knowing. Was Oradour-sur-Glane a reprisal for the killing of Helmut Kämpfe? Or was the execution of Kämpfe a reprisal for Oradour-sur-Glane?

Catesby had been warned not to go to Oradour because the Germans were still in the area. But he needed to verify whether or not the rumours were true. It was a long cycle ride through the dark forests of Limousin warmed and scented by the summer sun. His fake identity papers were in order and his French was so fluent that he was sure he could talk his way out of confrontation with the Milice, the French paramilitary police who collaborated with the Gestapo. In any case, the Miliciens were pretty thin on the ground in a sparsely populated countryside dominated by increasingly well-armed resistance fighters. Just north of Limoges, Catesby rendezvoused with a Maquisard who accompanied him the rest of the way to Oradour. When Catesby asked him what had happened, the resistance fighter simply shook his head and remained silent. The news was unspeakable.

It was the day after the massacre and the ruins of the village were still smouldering. The first thing that Catesby noticed was the overpowering stench of burned flesh. It was inescapable – and most of it seemed to be coming from the church. The second thing that he noticed was the large number of lost-looking dogs. The animals were prowling around sniffing with their tails down – probably, thought Catesby, looking for their owners. Other dogs were howling and whining in a chorus of despair. The sound made his flesh crawl.

The people, on the other hand, were silent. There were fifty or so wraith-like figures poking through the ruins looking for loved ones. When people did speak it was in hushed whispers. Everyone seemed numb. Catesby heard one person whisper that the Germans had left only a few hours before and weren’t far away. Another said they were on their way back. But no one seemed afraid – and neither was Catesby. The enormity in front of them blanked out all other emotions. If a tank appeared in the village square and started firing, no one would have dived for cover.

Catesby was drawn to the church whose ancient stone walls had survived the flames within. He couldn’t resist its dark pull. He didn’t want to look inside, but he had to. The whispers he had heard were still echoing in his head: all the women, all the children; burned alive. He was later told that the church contained the bodies of 247 women and 205 children, but on the day he was unable to count – or even to recognise the charred corpses as women or girls or boys. In many cases, the only remains were blackened carcasses with thigh and upper-arm bones sticking out. The only thing that differentiated the bodies was their size. The smallest blackened bundles were obviously infants. There were other charred body parts that could have belonged to children or adults. It was a confusion of dead burned flesh that defied description. The smell in the church must have been terrible, although Catesby couldn’t remember it. It was as if some of his senses had been abruptly shut down. But the visual image stuck in his brain forever.

Catesby had wanted to explore further into the church, only it was impossible to move forward without stepping on the bodies. The floor of the church was a singed carpet of women and children. He couldn’t member how long he stared at the horror. But it wasn’t a horror then; it was just dead bodies. The images on his brain were like a film that hadn’t yet been fully developed. Eventually, he felt someone touching his elbow. It was the Maquisard he had cycled with. He gestured for Catesby to follow him.

There were more bodies to see: a bedridden elderly man burned alive in his bed and a baby baked alive in a bread oven in the village boulangerie. But most of the bodies, nearly 200 in number, were those of men who had been machine-gunned or shot in various barns and outbuildings – and then covered with straw, wood and petrol and set on fire while they were dead or dying. Once again, there were few bodies that were identifiable – just trunks of carcasses with bones sticking out, a grotesque reminder of Sunday roasts. Catesby felt more and more numb. It was too much to take in.

At the time, it was impossible to find out exactly what had happened. Some said there were only two survivors; others said there were twenty. It seemed certain that a few boys had escaped by running into the woods – and a woman had jumped from a church window and hidden in a patch of garden peas. But she was badly injured and had been taken to a hospital in Limoges. Confusion in the wake of chaos.

Catesby knew it was important to identify the troops who had carried out the atrocity. A boy of about eight, probably one of those who ran away, said the soldiers were dressed in greenish-brown camouflage smocks. Another survivor turned up – a male of about nineteen. He said that he and five others had fled a burning barn after hiding under dead bodies, but one of his companions had been shot and killed. There were rumours that many of the soldiers spoke good French, but with strong Alsatian accents. It turned out to be true. The revelation that former French citizens, from German annexed Alsace-Lorraine, had taken part in the massacre rocked France for years afterwards. There was always a twist.

The people were more talkative now and Catesby took notes with a shaking hand. The entire population had been ordered into the marketplace to have their identity papers checked. But once they were there, the Germans didn’t bother to check their papers at all. Following a brief conversation – oddly polite – between the commanding officer and the mayor, the men of the village were led into outlying barns to be questioned. The women and children were ordered into the church and the doors locked behind them. The executions soon followed. The village was then looted – someone showed Catesby a few dozen empty champagne bottles – and set on fire.

Catesby later found out that the atrocity had been carried out by a battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, also known as Das Reich, under the command of Otto Diekmann. The battalion had been involved in other war crimes – in Russia as well as France. Diekmann was killed in Normandy two weeks later.

The ruins of the U-boot bunker weren’t the ideal place for a clandestine rendezvous. The bunker was dark, massive and echoed every footstep. And Catesby didn’t like being dressed as a Roman Catholic priest either. It brought back too many childhood memories. His Belgian mother had brought him and his sister up as Catholics in an East Anglia where Catholics were an oddity and minority. Children don’t like feeling different. It wasn’t so bad speaking Flemish and French in the home, because that was hidden and private – and when school friends came around they always reverted to English. But being marched down Lowestoft High Street to Our Lady Star of the Sea on Sundays and holy days of obligation was public and humiliating. By the age of fourteen Catesby was a sceptic; by the age of sixteen, he was a militant atheist. As he used to explain to his smart new friends at Cambridge: ‘I lost my faith as soon as I found my brain.’ During visits home he used to humour his mother by going to Mass, but it soon became apparent that she didn’t care what he did – and he stopped going all together. He began to realise that his mother didn’t do things out of faith, but out of habit. But perhaps habits, however empty, give people a moral centre. Maybe, thought Catesby, if I hadn’t lost the habit of Mass and confession I wouldn’t be waiting in the ruins of a submarine pen with a greasy pistol in my pocket. But the priest disguise was, for a lad who had grown up among East Anglian fishermen, amusing and ironic. The wooden club that Lowestoft fishermen used to knock out cod thrashing about on the deck was called ‘a priest’.

The U-boot bunker was a dark and spooky place. A few weeks before the end of the war two eleven-ton Grand Slam bombs had finally managed to penetrate the fifteen-foot-thick roof rendering the submarine pen useless. Steel reinforcing rods now hung down from the blasted concrete roof like the venomous snakes dangling from Medusa’s head. Catesby didn’t like being alone there in the middle of the night. It was a place of monsters where hidden eyes seemed to be tracing his every movement. Catesby touched the Webley MK IV revolver, a dead dank weight that stretched his trench-coat pocket. He liked the Webley. It was big and awkward – two and a half pounds and ten inches long – but simple and reliable, like a friendly black Labrador. The Webley could vanquish a gunman who was a poor shot or an assassin coming at him with a garrotte or a knife. But it couldn’t silence the ghosts.

How many ghosts were squeaking and gibbering against those massive concrete walls? Catesby didn’t know. No one ever would. The deaths of the Polish and Russian slave labourers who built the U-boot bunker were too numerous and insignificant for the construction company to keep a record. Not long after the war Catesby had been assigned to the intelligence branch of the Control Commission for Germany. His real job was spying, but his cover job had been compiling a report on the activities of Organisation Todt, the construction company that had used Zwangsarbeiter – forced labour – in Bremen. One of his sources of information had been a mild-mannered bespectacled man who had been an accountant for Todt during the construction of the Weser submarine pens. The accountant was very apologetic about his role – and desperate to avoid a trip to Nuremberg – but he was safe. There were far bigger fish to hang. The accountant estimated that the project had used 10,000 slave labourers, of whom 1,700 were registered as dead, however he admitted – sighing and wringing his hands – that the actual number of deaths may have been 6,000 owing largely to Unterernährungoder physischer Erschöpfung – malnutrition and physical exhaustion.

Catesby looked through the huge hole in the ceiling. The clouds had parted and starlight poured into the bunker illuminating the rubble like ancient ruins. He knew that he was alone and safe from anyone other than himself. He touched the revolver again and wondered if the American was going to turn up. Kit Fournier wasn’t always reliable. Catesby knew that Fournier had his own demons. He had bribed Fournier’s Putzfrau to do some snooping. The Putzfrauen, the cleaning women of post-war Germany, were Catesby’s most reliable agents. Fournier’s Putz didn’t even require training; she had used a Minox spy camera before. The snaps of Fournier’s private diaries, letters and sketches revealed a private passion that had tortured the American since adolescence, if not before. The blackmail card would always be ready if Fournier didn’t do what was asked.

The ruined bunker wasn’t a quiet place. There were drips of water and the scuffling of rats – and the grinding tectonic shifts of loose rubble. But a footstep was distinct and human. Catesby froze and gripped the handle of his revolver. He was good at making enemies – and his extracurricular vendetta against Nazis had singled him out as a troublemaker. The problem – and a constant source of friction with his American intelligence colleagues – was the Gehlen Organisation. Reinhard Gehlen, the Wehrmacht’s former Chief of Intelligence for the Eastern Front, had cut a deal with the CIA. In return for generous funding and immunity from prosecution for their agents, the Gehlen Org provided intelligence to the Americans about what was supposedly going on in the East Bloc.

Catesby knew that Gehlen Org intelligence was useless. Nazis were terrible spies. The real purpose of the Org, thought Catesby, was to save war criminals and mass murderers from the Nuremberg hangman. One Org operative had been in charge of the Drancy concentration camp in the bleak northern suburbs of Paris and was responsible for the deaths of 140,000 Jews. But it was too late to get him – he had escaped to the Middle East. Others had winged their way to South America – a place that cynical US intelligence officers called the Fourth Reich. Catesby and a French colleague were still on the trail of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon. When the French found out that Barbie was in American hands they demanded that he be handed over for execution, but the US High Commissioner for Germany, John McCloy, refused. Catesby had since heard that Barbie had been ‘ratlined’ to Bolivia with the help of a Croatian Catholic priest. That’s why Catesby was wearing a Roman collar – Nazis on the run always expected priests to help them. Catesby was sure there were good priests – and tried hard to think of one.

Another footstep echoed in the bunker. Catesby checked that he wasn’t silhouetted by the starlight pouring in from the broken roof and took out his revolver. Someone coughed. Catesby called out: ‘Ich sehe dich; Hände haut.’ Catesby was bluffing. He couldn’t see the other person in the darkness and would have had no idea whether or not their hands were up.

A disembodied voice answered, ‘Wer sind Sie, bitte?’ The ‘who are you, please’ was unmistakeably American and disarmingly polite. It was Kit Fournier.

‘It’s me – Catesby.’

‘Golly,’ said Fournier, ‘you had me worried. You sounded just like a genuine kraut. Where are you? The sound in this place bounces all over the place.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes. I left your present in the car.’

‘Have you got a torch?’

‘No, but I’ve got a flashlight.’

‘Same thing. Shine it in your face so I can see where you are.’

A light flashed on and Fournier’s boyish smile appeared – a cheerful out-of-place Disney-esque cartoon