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Lieselott Hoffmann turned on Morgan and raised a clenched fist. 'Power to the people.'

'Which people, you silly little bitch?'

She lowered her hand, a strange uncertainty on her face and he opened his briefcase and took out a sheaf of photos.

'I thought you might care to be put in touch with reality for a change. See what your Cretan's been up to over the years.'

She approached the table and Katherine Riley followed.

'That's a Colonel Vassilikos in the back of his car in Paris. As you can see, his skull has fragmented. The man kneeling beside him is one of his bodyguards. Those are his brains showing through.'

The expression on her face didn't alter in the slightest as he threw down one photo after another of the Cretan's victims. The last was of Megan, taken in the Paddington tunnel, lying in the gutter where she had been found.

'Who was she?'

'My daughter,' Morgan said. 'She was fourteen. He ran her down in a car he stole to make his escape after shooting Cohen.'

She put it down and turned to Katherine Riley, an expression of total indifference on her face. 'Can I go now?'

And Katherine Riley, in a gesture totally alien to her nature, struck her across the face.

Morgan was between them, his hands on her arms, his voice soft, insistent. 'Easy, girl. Let it go.'

Behind them, Lieselott Hoffmann walked to the door and pressed the bell. After a while it opened and she passed through without a word.

Beyond his shoulder, Katherine Riley could see the photo of Megan clearly, the bloody mask of the face, and was physically sick.

'I'm sorry,' she whispered.

'Ah, Kate,' he said. 'Rule number one. Never apologize, never explain. Now, let's get out of here and find ourselves a drink.'

'Asa?' she said. 'That's a strange name.'

'From the Bible,' he told her and, for a moment, he became very Welsh indeed. 'A religious woman, my Mam. Chapel twice every Sunday when I was a boy.'

'And where was that?'

'A village in the Rhondda Valley in Wales. Coal mines, slag-heaps. A place to get out of. My father was killed in a roof fall when I was eight. The company gave my mother ten shillings a week pension. I went down. the pit myself at fourteen, came up for the last time four years later to join the army.'

'And never looked back?'

'I loved it,' he said. 'Soldiering. I'd never felt so right. And the army was good to me. I was a sergeant at Arnhem, then I got a commission in the field as second lieutenant. After the war, they kept me on. Sent me to Sandhurst.'

'And your background? Didn't that ever give you problems in a place like that?'

'Oh, any fool can learn how to handle a knife and fork and being Welsh, you see, I always knew I was better than any bloody Englishman who walked the earth, even if he'd been to Eton.' He smiled, mocking her now. 'Very intellectual people, we are. I surprised them there. I didn't only read Clausewitz on war. I knew my Wu Ch'i as well. Heavy stuff, you see.'

'I bet you were the original bastard.'

'I had to be, girl. I had to be better, see? Languages, for instance. Not that they were any problem. Learn to speak Welsh fluently, anything else seems easy.'

They were sitting at a small table, one of a number outside a pub on the banks of the River Cam. It was very pleasant in the early evening sun.

'What about your wife? How has she taken all this?'

'With her usual firmness, as far as I could judge.' He shrugged. 'That finished quite some time ago. She never took kindly to military life, or my version of it. She's a painter by profession and a very good one. We met in the National Gallery one Sunday morning. One of those monumental errors people make in life so frequently. I think it was the uniform that did it, and the red beret.'

'She liked that?'

'Not for long.'

'What went wrong?'

'She visited me in Cyprus during the EOKA campaign. We were driving through Nicosia one day behind a doctor from one of the cavalry regiments who'd been spending his spare time giving free medical aid to peasants in the villages of the Troodos mountains.