"Yes… Will you go with him to France, once we've located this de Carette?"

"I'd love to watch him in action." Agnes grinned mischievously. "Perhaps we'll get ourselves into another war with France and see Britain restored to her former glory."

"Agnes, do not say these things."

Opening the door to his flat, Maxim knew immediately there was something wrong. A smell? A draught? The way the lock had turned? He stayed very still and carefully took the revolver from his briefcase. For once he had it when he might need it.

But he didn't. There was nobody there – not any longer. They seemed to have taken nothing and done nothing like vandalise the place. There were just tiny things like a few books upside down in the bookshelf, the tea and sugar jars switched around in the kitchen cupboard, his usual chair moved out of line with the TV set. Little things that said: we could have done big things, and next time…

He threw out the tea and sugar, just in case, and took a can of beer from the fridge – left with its door slightly open. It had all been nicely done, because the local police would give you one of those ay-ay-he's-one-of-those looks if you complained that someone had broken in just to change your tea and sugar jars around, then relocked the door on the way out.

Nicely done, perhaps too nicely. It was frightening how easily they had got in, but no more than frightening. Maxim couldn't share Barbara Masson's feeling of being despoiled by strangers picking over her property, because he had no property to be picked over. The flat was just the ninth – or was it tenth? – place he had rented since his marriage.

Both the gas fire and the record player seemed to be working. He put on the first side of Ralph Kirkpatrick playing 'The Well-tempered Clavier' – Jenny had given him the album, to show there was more to the keyboard than Ellington and Basic – and sat down yet again with The Gates of the Grave. The twenty-year-old paperback was coming unbound in lumps, but he knew which lump he wanted.

The patrol started from Zella oasis, the new headquarters of LRDG, about 200 miles south of the coast road…

24

Nice airport was swarming with would-be skiers off some cancelled or diverted flight. The floors were piled with tartan-coloured luggage and skis in long red plastic cases, the desks surrounded by suntanned men in short fur jackets of the sort women wore to the 1953 Coronation.

Maxim and Agnes hired a Citroлn Deux-Chevaux and, after a few mistakes, untangled themselves from the complex of fast new coast roads and began weaving up into the hills behind the city. For the first twenty miles the land was all used up, busy and untidy with olive groves on every slope, red-tiled villas, garages, souvenir shops and pylons. But after that it thinned out, and the rock bones of the hillsides showed through.

"The French," Agnes said, as they passed a very old farmhouse, "let their buildings flourish but keep the trees very much pruned and in their place. In Britain it's the other way round: it's an offence to enlarge your house or cut down your trees. What a basis for entente."

Maxim smiled and went on winding the bouncy little can of a car around the sharpening bends. Above, the sky was a hard cold blue, and against it they could suddenly see the place they had come to visit. And miles before they got there, it could see them.

The Chateau de Carette had always been small, by castle standards. Now it was just the tall square keep, a shaft of grainy honey-coloured stone rising firmly out of a rabble of extra buildings and wings that had been built on down the years. There was almost no sign of the curtain wall and its gatehouse that had originally defined the boundaries, but Maxim could see just where it must have led around the subtle curves and advantages of the hilltop. A soldier's eye is the same, whether he's positioning a laser target designator or a frightened peasant with a crossbow.

The rough driveway – the French don't take gravel seriously – led around to a small door set in one corner of a newish wing. A worn Citroen Safari was parked untidily by the edge of a bank of rough grass that slid down towards the valley. Maxim put the Deux-Chevaux in beside it.

"He's watching us," Agnes said suddenly.

"Yes."

"Do you feel it, too?"

"Not particularly. But he would be; it's what the place was built for." The keep reared above them, its narrow top windows still holding an all-round view: down the valley, up the valley, across the hills to either side.

The arched door, criss-crossed with ironwork, opened just before they knocked on it. A dour old man-servant poked his head out and grunted at them.

"Nous sommes M'mselle Algar et Major de Chasseurs Maxim" Maxim said in a very flat accent. He had already learnt that Agnes spoke the language almost perfectly, but she was letting him lead.

"Vous avez des cartes de visite, M'sieur, M'mselle?" The old boy had wet blue eyes and the look of a Dracula with indigestion.

Solemnly, they both handed him calling-cards. What on earth does Agnes put on hers? Maxim wondered. They were led down a stone corridor into a wide reception room, and motioned to stay there.

The interior of the keep had been torn out, or possibly fallen down, and rebuilt recently in a more-or-less mediaeval style. But real money had been spent: you don't pick up floor beams over twenty feet long just by strolling around Cannes market. The furniture was thick, dark, square, and the walls partly rough-plastered, partly raw stone that felt slightly warm to the touch, the way southern stone does even in winter.

Agnes was humming: "Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen…"

The servant came back and led them upstairs, breathing in dry gasps like the swish-swish of a stiff broom. At each floor, the glimpses of decor got more and more personal: thick rugs in front of fireplaces that were obviously used, the sparkle of silver and glassware.

The last flight was a steep stone newel curling up a small turret at one corner. The old man stayed at the bottom, wheezing loudly.

At first sight, Colonel de Carette was both dapper and plump. He was shortish and Maxim knew he was just about sixty. The face was round but not fat, with a sharp nose and very expressive thick eyebrows. He had a neat little moustache, still a lot of silvery-black hair and he could never be anything but French, or think of trying to be.

"M'mselle Algar. "He brushed her hand with his lips. "Enchantй. And Major Maxim." They shook hands. "Will you take a glass of wine? It is from the region only, so you will not expect too much…" The bottle was waiting, misted with cold, on a silver tray. He poured three glasses.

"May I ask you not to smoke? The doctors…" he waved a hand. "And I believe the weather in England hasn't been too good? We even had a few flakes around the hills here. But I think perhaps we see more snow than most of England." Beyond the tall windows on the east wall they could see a grey corner of the Mediterranean and then the jagged white peaks lifting out of a hazy horizon. The Ligurian Appenines, far across the Italian frontier.

The room was the whole top floor, with windows on all sides and a fireplace with a small wood fire burning in between the two on the west wall. It was low-ceilinged, for its size, and obviously de Carette's private hideout. There was no mock-medievalism about the furniture and panelling, just comfort and a respectable untidiness: piles of books and papers but no dirty glasses or full ashtrays. On a big table at the north end, dozens – maybe hundreds – of model soldiers were laid out in the formal patterns of an eighteenth-century battle.

Maxim glanced at Agnes and wondered if she was thinking what he was: we're privileged to be met in this room instead of downstairs. That means he's going to talk to us. It doesn't mean he's going to tell us the truth.