It was Thursday 5 September and he was about to leave his office to drive to Bramshill Police College to begin a series of lectures to the Senior Command Course when the call came through from the private office. Berowne’s private secretary spoke after the manner of his kind. Sir Paul would be grateful if Commander Dalgliesh could spare a few minutes to see him. It would be convenient if he could come at once. Sir Paul would be leaving his office to join a party of his constituents at the House in about an hour.

Dalgliesh liked Berowne, but the summons was inconvenient. He was not expected at Bramshill until after luncheon and had planned to take his time over the journey to north Hampshire, visiting churches at Sher-borne St John and Winchfield and lunching at a pub near Stratfield Saye before arriving at Bramshill in time for the usual courtesies with the Commandant before his two-thirty lecture. It occurred to him that he had reached the age when a man looks forward to his pleasures less keenly than in youth but is disproportionately aggrieved when his plans are upset. There had been the usual time-consuming, wearying and slightly acrimonious preliminaries to the setting up of the new squad in C1 and already his mind was reaching out with relief to the solitary contemplation of alabaster effigies, sixteenth-century glass and the awesome decorations of Winchfield. But it looked as if Paul Berowne wasn’t proposing to take much time over their meeting. His plans might still be possible. He left his grip in the office, put on his tweed coat against a blustery autumnal morning and cut through St James’s Park station to the Department.

As he pushed his way through the swing doors he thought again how much he had preferred the Gothic splendour of the old building in Whitehall. It must, he recognized, have been infuriating and inconvenient to work in. It had, after all, been built at a time when the rooms were heated by coal fires tended by an army of minions and when a score of carefully composed handwritten minutes by the Department’s legendary eccentrics were adequate to control events which now required three divisions and a couple of under secretaries. This new building was no doubt excellent of its kind, but if the intention had been to express confident authority tempered by humanity he wasn’t sure that the architect had succeeded. It looked more suitable for a multinational corporation than for a great Department of State. He particularly missed the huge oil portraits which had dignified that impressive Whitehall staircase, intrigued always by the techniques by which artists of varying talents had coped with the challenge of dignifying the ordinary and occasionally unprepossessing features of their sitters by the visual exploitation of magnificent robes and by imposing on their pudgy faces the stern consciousness of imperial power. But at least they had removed the studio photograph of a royal princess which until recently had graced the entrance hall. It had looked more suitable for a West End hairdressing salon.

He was smilingly recognized at the reception desk, but his credentials were still carefully scrutinized and he was required to await the escorting messenger, even though he had attended enough meetings in the building to be reasonably familiar with these particular corridors of power. Few of the elderly male messengers now remained, and for some years the Department had recruited women. They shepherded their charges with a cheerful, maternal competence as if to reassure them that the place might look like a prison but was as gently beneficent as a nursing home and that they were only there for their own good.

He was finally shown into the outer office. The House was still in recess for the summer and the room was unnaturally quiet. One of the typewriters was shrouded and a single clerk was collating papers with none of the urgency which normally powered a minister’s private office. It would have been a very different scene a few weeks earlier. He thought, not for the first time, that a system which required ministers to run their departments, fulfil their parliamentary responsibilities, and spend the weekend listening to the grievances of their constituents, might have been designed to ensure that major decisions were made by men and women tired to the point of exhaustion. It certainly ensured that they were heavily dependent on their permanent officials. Strong ministers were still their own men; the weaker degenerated into marionettes. Not that this would necessarily worry them. Departmental heads were adept at concealing from their puppets even the gentlest jerk of strings and wire. But Dalgliesh hadn’t needed his private source of department gossip to know that there was nothing of this limp subservience about Paul Berowne.

He came forward from behind his desk and held out his hand as if this were a first meeting. His was a face, stern, even a little melancholy in repose, which was transfigured when he smiled. He smiled now. He said:

‘I’m sorry to bring you here at short notice. I’m glad we managed to catch you. It isn’t particularly important but I think it may become so.’

Dalgliesh could never see him without being reminded of the portrait of his ancestor, Sir Hugo Berowne, in the National Portrait Gallery. Sir Hugo had been undistinguished except for a passionate, if ineffective, allegiance to his king. His only notable recorded act had been to commission Van Dyck to paint his portrait. But it had been enough to ensure him, at least pictorially, a vicarious immortality. The manor house in Hampshire had long since passed from the family, the fortune was diminished; but Sir Hugo’s long and melancholy face framed by a collar of exquisite lace still stared with arrogant condescension at the passing crowd, the definitive seventeenth-century Royalist gentleman. The present baronet’s likeness to him was almost uncanny. Here was the same long-boned face, the high cheekbones tapering to a pointed chin, the same widely spaced eyes with the droop of the left eyelid, the same long-fingered pale hands, the same steady but slightly ironic gaze.

Dalgliesh saw that his desk top was almost clear. It was a necessary ploy for an overworked man who wanted to stay sane. You dealt with one thing at a time, gave it your whole attention, decided it, then put it aside. At this moment he managed to convey that the one thing requiring attention was comparatively unimportant, a short communication on a sheet of quarto-sized white writing paper. He handed it over. Dalgliesh read:

‘The member for Hertfordshire North East, despite his fascist tendencies, is a notable liberal when it comes to women’s rights. But perhaps women should beware; proximity to this elegant baronet can be lethal. His first wife was killed in a car accident; he was driving. Theresa Nolan, who nursed his mother and slept in his house, killed herself after an abortion. It was he who knew where to find the body. The naked body of Diana Travers, his domestic servant, was found drowned at his wife’s Thames-side birthday party, a party at which he was expected to be present. Once is a private tragedy, twice is bad luck, three times looks like carelessness.’

Dalgliesh said:

‘Typed with an electric golfball machine. They’re not the easiest to identify. And the paper is from a pad of ordinary commercial bond sold in thousands. Not much help there. Have you any idea who could have sent it?’

‘None. One gets used to the usual abusive or pornographic letters. They’re part of the job.’

Dalgliesh said:

‘But this is close to an accusation of murder. If the sender is traced I imagine your lawyer would advise that it’s actionable.’

‘Actionable, yes, I imagine so.’

Dalgliesh thought that whoever had composed the message hadn’t been uneducated. The punctuation was careful, the prose had a certain rhythm. He or she had taken trouble over the arrangement of the facts and in getting in as much relevant information as possible. It was certainly a cut above the usual filth and drivel which dropped unsigned into a minister’s postbag, and it was the more dangerous for that.

He handed it back and said:

‘This isn’t the original, of course. It’s been photocopied. Are you the only person to receive it, Minister, or don’t you know?’

‘It was sent to the press, at least to one paper, the Paternoster Review. This is in today’s edition, I’ve only just seen it.’

He opened his desk drawer, took out the journal and handed it to Dalgliesh. There was a folded marker at page eight. Dalgliesh let his eyes slide down the page. The paper had been running a series of articles on junior members of the Government and it was Berowne’s turn. The first part of the article was innocuous, factual, hardly original. It briefly reviewed Berowne’s previous career as a barrister, his first unsuccessful attempt to enter Parliament, his success at the 1979 election, his phenomenal rise to junior ministerial rank, his probable standing with the Prime Minister. It mentioned that he lived with his mother, Lady Ursula Berowne, and his second wife in one of the few extant houses built by Sir John Soane and that he had one child by his first marriage, 24-year-old Sarah Berowne, who was active in left-wing politics and who was thought to be estranged from her father. It was unpleasantly snide about the circumstances of his second marriage. His elder brother, Major Sir Hugo...