'I've seen you somewhere before.'

Will Flemyng turned his head a little to the left to look at him. 'Who knows?' he said. 'Paris may not be as big as it seems.'

He had watched the man come into the carriage at Solférino metro station and move directly to a place beside him, taking a moment or two to settle. It was Flemyng's usual hour, and he recognized that his companion, who hadn't turned towards him to follow his own question, was not a regular. He could be certain, because the man was memorable. His left shoe seemed to have been built up, he wore old man's trousers and an unlit pipe was pushed into his breast pocket, stem outwards so that it spewed unlit tobacco over his clothes. His navy blazer glistened with age, completing the picture of someone who might be expected to have a decade or two on Flemyng, and he seemed stiff with weariness. Yet his face was that of a youngish man, despite his greying hair, and a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand was incongruous, a fleck of gold in the dust. The effect was unsettling, a portrait split in two.

It produced pleasure in Flemyng. He waited for the follow-up, which came as the train slowed down for the next station, the man having turned to face him.

'It may have been at the Salle Pleyel last month. Did you attend the concert with the Gewandhaus? And perhaps the reception afterwards?' His English was accented but accurate and flowing, the words delivered at a practised pace, and his gaze was direct. Flemyng shook his head.

At the next stop the carriage thinned out quickly. The National Assembly was somewhere above. 'So many civil servants,' Flemyng said, and smiled. No reply.

They reached Concorde, and Flemyng rose. 'Someone else, I'm afraid,' he said. 'But, who knows, we may see each other again on the metro. It's like that, don't you find?' The man nodded as Flemyng stepped on to the platform, and he gently tipped a hand from his knee to say goodbye.

On most mornings, Flemyng stopped for a coffee at a corner café on rue du Faubourg St-Honoré but today he walked directly to his office. The last days of April held the promise of summer and a stirring breeze with the dampness of coming rain seemed to brighten the streets. The sweepers had left pavements clean, and the trickle of water in the roadside gutters was a clear stream. Flemyng savoured the natural smells and sounds of the city. Bread from the café, the faint scent of blossom drifting from the trees over the wall, long trails of cigarette smoke from the workmen outside the apartments across the way and always the horns blaring down the street. Paris appeared content. But as the high wooden gate opened for him and he turned from the pavement into the embassy courtyard, he could see the security barricades being hauled into place at the Élysée Palace, a hundred yards away. The guard had been doubled at every entrance.

May Day promised thunderstorms.

Within five minutes he had reached his eyrie on the third floor, and before going to his desk he pushed open Craven's door, giving a light knock as he stuck his head inside. 'Freddy – can I see you, in ten minutes or so?'

The room was filled with smoke, with yellowing curls on the ceiling, and through the fog a warm and gravelly voice welcomed him. It was quiet, and musical. 'Be my guest, but give me a hint. A little clue, my boy?'

Flemyng leaned forward through the doorway. 'Well, I've just been picked up.'

* * *

Wilfred Craven ran a merry ship. Although his office reeked and the walls were drab, the one painting hanging askew, he contrived to give it spirit. A place for confessions and stories, a centre of operations that was also a hidey-hole from the world. A boys' room. Freddy was a joker who rationed the high seriousness in his life, and made a stand against office tedium in the hope of keeping the flame of good humour burning. As an emblem of his regime he'd placed in one corner of his small room a mechanical wooden doll, half life-size – a grinning black figure with lurid painted lips, striped trousers and a patchwork jacket of many colours, who raised his bowler hat with one jerky hand when a glass was removed from the other, in Freddy's case usually filled with Scotch and soda.

His last ambassador, in Vienna, had ordered it out of the embassy, and for a while Craven secreted it in the garage with the rest of his fabled collection of ephemera. There were Victorian theatre bills, shiny boxing gloves from long-gone title fights, a model of HMS Victory made from matchsticks because he was a navy man, and the silk stockings of a music-hall star. Even a black ballot box he'd bought in a backstreet in Chicago to remind him of shenanigans, and the doll fitted in. He had brought it out of retirement for the entertainment of his boys in Paris, because they understood his need for the absurd.

Taste didn't come into it. Freddy Craven never wanted to forget the ludicrous things he'd known, sometimes the ones he'd done. He had spotted the doll in a small-town auction in North Carolina and knew that some day it would be a grotesque antique. So he took it home, and it still made him smile.

Flemyng had been picked up. The young man, whom Craven had steered through his first secret forays in the streets of Vienna, had a quick eye and, precociously, the tender touch of a veteran. He would handle the contact delicately. Craven made a rough pile of the books scattered across his desk, crumpled yesterday's newspaper into the bin and split the foil on a new packet of cigarettes. He lay back in his chair, grey waterspout hair flopping behind him and a country-check shirt tight over his belly, which was starting to shrink like the rest of him. With an effort, he put his feet on his desk and stretched out. Flemyng.

The good-looking boy had arrived in Vienna green and eager, and with an advantage. Craven came of West Country farming stock and preferred the few youngsters who knew something of rural ways, taking them under his wing. Flemyng's family was a little different, having an estate in Perthshire that covered forest and hill, but there was still a bond. Even as he felt the shadow of illness coming on, Craven found in Flemyng a listener and an outlet for old enthusiasms lived out on the front line, and often in the darkness beyond. They would talk for long nights, Flemyng drinking from the well of stories that Freddy wanted to pass on before they disappeared with him and became folklore. And it was on the orders of Freddy in Vienna that Flemyng had taken to the lanes behind St Stephen's Cathedral on a November night five years before and crawled back to the embassy slashed from neck to right breast with a knife wound that nearly killed him.

Craven was coughing when Flemyng knocked on his door a few minutes later, and took a moment to recover.

'Apologies, my boy. One of my bad days, I can tell.' He smiled.

'I'm sorry, Freddy. Water?'

He shook his head. 'I want to hear it all.'

Flemyng sat between him and the window. He was dark-haired and slim, dressed without ostentation and with natural style. His shoes were polished but his hair cut longer than anyone in the embassy except Craven, who was past all that. On this morning his shirt was white, and his tie was a soft green. The jacket of his grey suit hung over the chair, and he put his hands behind his head.

'I was spoken to, on the metro.'

'Did you get on at your usual station?'

'Yes. Rue du...