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'She'll be all right now. She's in the car.'

'What will you do, sir? Go to an hotel?'

'No, she wants to go home.'

'A tricky drive at this time of night on those Essex country roads.'

'I was a padre with the Royal Artillery in Korea in the winter of nineteen-fifty, when a million Chinese came out of Manchuria and chased us south again. I drove a Bedford truck through heavy snow for four hundred miles and they were never very far behind. We were short on drivers, you see.'

'A hell of a way to take your advanced driver's course,' Baker commented.

'One interesting aspect of life, Superintendent, is that some experiences are so terrible, anything that comes after seems like a bonus.'

They were talking for the sake of it now and they both knew it. Baker said, 'Just one thing, sir, I've had a phone call from my superiors. It would seem that for security reasons, no direct link will be made publicly between your daughter's death and the Cohen affair. I hope you and your wife can accept that.'

'Frankly, Superintendent, I think you'll find that my wife would infinitely prefer this terrible business to be handled as quietly as possible.'

He turned towards the door, then paused. 'But we were forgetting. You asked me about Megan's father.'

'That's right, sir. Where can we contact him?' Baker nodded and Stewart got out his notebook.

'Rather difficult, I'm afraid. He's out of the country.'

'Abroad, sir?'

'It depends entirely on your point of view. Belfast, Superintendent, that's where he is at the moment. Colonel Asa Morgan, the Parachute Regiment. The right department of the Ministry of Defence would be able to help you contact him, I suppose, but you'd know far more about that than me.'

'Yes, sir, leave it to us.'

'I'll say good night then.'

The door swung behind him. Stewart said, 'Colonel Asa Morgan, Parachute Regiment. You know something, sir, I shouldn't think he'll be too pleased when he hears about this, a man like that.'

'And that's the understatement of the bloody age,' Baker said violently.

'You know him, sir?'

'Yes, Inspector. You could say that.'

Baker made straight for the porter's office, phoned Scotland Yard and asked to be put through to Assistant Commissioner Joe Harvey, Head of the Special Branch, whom, he knew, had already installed himself there for the night with a camp bed in his office.

'Harry Baker here, sir,' he said when Harvey answered. 'I'm at the mortuary. The girl whom our friend ran down in the Paddington tunnel while making his escape - her mother's just left after making a formal identification. A Mrs Helen Wood.'

'I thought the kid's name was Morgan?'

'Her mother's divorced, sir. Remarried to a vicar, of all things.' Baker hesitated. 'Look, sir, you're not going to like this one little bit. Her father...'

He hesitated again. Harvey said, 'Spit it out, Harry, for Christ's sake.'

'Is Asa Morgan.'

'There was a moment of silence then Harvey said, Dear God in heaven, that's all we needed.'

'Last I heard he was in Trucial Oman with the Special Air Service. Know what they are, George?'

Baker was standing at the window of his office. It was a little after midnight and rain drummed against the glass.

Stewart passed him a cup of tea. 'Can't say I do, sir.'

'What the military refer to as an elite unit. The army likes to keep as quiet about this one as they possibly can. Any serving soldier can volunteer. A three-year tour is the rule, I believe.'

'And what exactly do they do?'

'Anything too rough for anyone else to handle. The nearest thing to the SS we've got in the British Army. At the moment, they're in Oman on loan to the Sultan, knocking merry hell out of his Marxist rebels in the mountains. They also served in Malaya during the Emergency. That's where I first came across them.'

'I didn't know you were out there, sir.'

'On secondment. They weren't doing too well with the Chinese Communist underground so they decided to see if some real coppers could help. That's where I met Morgan.'

'What about him, sir?'