1

IN 1948 WHEN I was working on The Third Man I seem to have completely forgotten a story called The Tenth Man which was ticking away like a time-bomb somewhere in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in America.

In 1983 a stranger wrote to me from the United States telling me that a story of mine called The Tenth Man was being offered for sale by MGM to an American publisher. I didn’t take the matter seriously. I thought that I remembered—incorrectly, as it proved—an outline which I had written towards the end of the war under a contract with my friend Ben Goetz, the representative of MGM in London. Perhaps the outline had covered two pages of typescript—there seemed, therefore, no danger of publication, especially as the story had never been filmed.

The reason I had signed the contract was that I feared when the war came to an end and I left government service that my family would be in danger from the precarious nature of my finances. I had not before the war been able to support them from writing novels alone. I had indeed been in debt to my publishers until 1938, when Brighton Rock sold eight thousand copies and squared our accounts temporarily. The Power and the Glory, appearing more or less at the same time as the invasion of the West in an edition of about three thousand five hundred copies, hardly improved the situation. I had no confidence in my future as a novelist and I welcomed in 1944 what proved to be an almost slave contract with MGM which at least assured us all enough to live on for a couple of years in return for the idea of The Tenth Man.

Then recently came the astonishing and disquieting news that Mr Anthony Blond had bought all the book and serial rights on the mysterious story for a quite large sum, the author’s royalties of course to be paid to MGM. He courteously sent me the typescript for any revision I might wish to make and it proved to be not two pages of outline but a complete short novel of about thirty thousand words. What surprised and aggravated me most of all was that I found this forgotten story very readable—indeed I prefer it in many ways to The Third Man, so that I had no longer any personal excuse for opposing publication even if I had the legal power, which was highly doubtful. All the same Mr Blond very generously agreed to publish the story jointly with my regular publishers, The Bodley Head.

After this had been amicably arranged mystery was added to mystery. I found by accident in a cupboard in Paris an old cardboard box containing two manuscripts, one being a diary and commonplace-book which I had apparently kept during 1937 and 1938. Under the date 26 December 1937 I came on this passage: ‘Discussed film with Menzies [an American film director]. Two notions for future films. One: a political situation like that in Spain. A decimation order. Ten men in prison draw lots with matches. A rich man draws the longest match. Offers all his money to anyone who will take his place. One, for the sake of his family, agrees. Later, when he is released, the former rich man visits anonymously the family who possess his money, he himself now with nothing but his life. …’

The bare bones of a story indeed. The four dots with which the entry closes seem now to represent the years of war that followed during which all memory of the slender idea was lost in the unconscious. When in 1944 I picked up the tale of Chavel and Janvier I must have thought it an idea which had just come to my mind, and yet I can only now suppose that those two characters had been working away far down in the dark cave of the unconscious while the world burnt.

The unexpected return of The Tenth Man from the archives of MGM led also to a search in my own archives where I discovered copies of two more ideas for films, and these may amuse readers of this book. The first idea (not a bad one it seems to me now, though nothing came of it) was called ‘Jim Braddon and the War Criminal’.

Here is how the outline went—a not untimely story even today, with Barbie awaiting trial.

2

THERE IS AN old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double. This is the strange story of Jim Braddon.

Jim Braddon was a high-grade salesman employed by a breakfast cereal company in Philadelphia: a placid honest man who would never have injured anything larger than a fly. He had a wife and two children whom he spoilt. The 1941 war had affected him little for he was over forty and his employers claimed that he was indispensable. But he took up German—he had a German grandmother—because he thought that one day this might prove useful, and that was the only new thing that happened to him between 1941 and 1945. Sometimes he saw in the paper the picture of Schreiber, the Nazi Inspector-General of the concentration camps, but except that one of his children pretended to see a likeness to this Nazi, nobody else even commented on the fact.

In the autumn of 1945 a captured U-boat commander confessed that he had landed Schreiber on the coast of Mexico, and the film opens on a Mexican beach with a rubber dinghy upturned by the breakers and Schreiber’s body visible through the thin rim of water. The tide recedes and the land crabs come out of their holes. But the hunt for Schreiber is on, for the crabs will soon eliminate all evidence of his death.

The push for post-war trade is also on, and Braddon is despatched by his firm for a tour of Central and South America. In the plane he looks at Life, which carries the story of the hunt for Schreiber. His neighbour, a small, earnest, bespectacled man full of pseudo-scientific theories, points out the likeness to him. ‘You don’t see it,’ he says. ‘I doubt whether one person in ten thousand would see it because what we mean by likeness as a rule is not the shape of the face and skull but the veil a man’s experience and character throw over the features. You are like Schreiber, but no one would notice it because you have led a very different life. That can’t alter the shape of the ears, but it’s the expression of the eyes people look at.’ Apart from the joking child he is the only person who has noticed the likeness. Luckily for Braddon—and for himself—the stranger leaves the plane at the next halt. Half-way to Mexico City the plane crashes and all lives but Braddon’s are lost.

Braddon has been flung clear. His left arm is broken, he is cut about the face, and he has lost his memory from the concussion. The accident has happened at night and he has cautiously—for he is a very careful man—emptied his pockets and locked his papers in his brief-case which of course is lost. When he comes to, he has no identity but his features, and those he shares with a dead man. He searches his pockets for a clue, but finds them empty of anything that will help him: only some small change, and in each pocket of the jacket a book. One is a paper-covered Heine: the other an American paperback. He finds that he can read both languages. Searching his jacket more carefully, he discovers a wad of ten-dollar notes, clean ones, sewn into the lining.

It is unnecessary in this short summary to work out his next adventures in detail: somehow he makes his way to a railroad and gets on a train to Mexico City. His idea is to find a hospital as quickly as he can, but in the wash room at the station he sees hanging by the mirror a photograph of Schreiber and a police description in Spanish and English. Perhaps the experiences of the last few days have hardened his expression, for now he can recognize the likeness. He believes he has found his name. His face takes on another expression now—that of the hunted man.

He does not know where to go or what to do: he is afraid of every policeman; he attracts attention by his furtiveness, and soon the papers bear the news that Schreiber has been seen in Mexico City. He lets his beard grow, and with the growth of the beard he loses his last likeness to the old Jim Braddon.

He is temporarily saved by Schreiber’s friends, a group of Fascists to whom Schreiber had borne introductions and who are expecting him. Among these are a brother and sister—a little, sadistic, pop-eyed Mexican whom we will call Peter for his likeness to Peter Lorre and his shifty, beautiful sister whom we will call Lauren for obvious reasons of casting. Lauren sets herself the task of restoring Jim’s memory—the memory which she considers Schreiber should possess. They fall in love: in her case without reserve, believing that she knows the worst about this man: in his with a reserve which he doesn’t himself understand.

Peter, however, is incurably careless. His love of pain and violence get in the way of caution, and as a result of some incident yet to be worked out, Jim is caught by the Mexican police, while the others escape.

Schreiber could hardly have complained of rough treatment. Nor does Jim complain. He has no memory of his crimes, but he accepts the fact that he has committed them. The police force him to sit through a film of Buchenwald, and he watches with horror and shame the lean naked victims of Schreiber. He has no longer any wish to escape. He is content to die.

He is sent north to the American authorities, and the preliminary proceedings against him start. The new bearded Schreiber face becomes a feature of the Press. His family among others see the picture, but never for a moment does it occur to any of them that this is Jim.

Among the spectators at the trial, however, is the little spectacled pseudo-psychologist who was on the plane with Jim. He doesn’t recognize Jim, but he is puzzled by Schreiber (Schreiber is not acting true to character), and he remembers what he said to the man in the plane, that likeness is not a matter of skull measurements but of expression. The expression of horror and remorse is not one he would have expected to see in Schreiber’s eyes. This man claims to have lost his memory, and yet he denies nothing. Suppose after all they have got a man who is simply similar in bone structure …

Meanwhile Peter and Lauren, who escaped from the police trap which had closed on Jim, travel north. They plan a rescue. What their plan is I don’t know myself yet. Violent and desperate, it offers one chance in a hundred. But it comes off. Jim is whipped away from the court itself, and the hunt is on again. But this is not Mexico, and the hunt is a very short one. They are trapped in a suburban villa.

But Peter has taken hostages: a woman and her child who were in the house when they broke in. Jim has been obeying his companions like an automaton: there hasn’t even been time to take off his handcuffs, but at this last example of Fascist mentality his mind seems to wake. He turns on his friends and the woman he has loved. He knocks out Peter with the handcuffs and gets his gun. The woman too has a gun. They face each other across the length of the room like duellists. She says, ‘My dear, you won’t shoot me.’ But he shoots and her shot comes a second after his, but it isn’t aimed at him: it hits her brother who has regained his feet and is on the point of attacking. Her last words are, ‘You aren’t Schreiber. You can’t be. You’re decent. Who the hell are you?’

Braddon gives himself up, and the truth of the psychologist’s theory is glaringly exhibited. The likeness to Schreiber has proved to be physical only. I imagine the little man remembers at this point the man he talked to on the plane, he gives evidence, produces Braddon’s family. The happy ending needs to be worked out, but the strange case of Jim Braddon really comes to an end with the shots in the suburban villa. After that there’s just the reaching for the coats under the seats. Anyone in the stalls could tell you what happens now.

3

THE SECOND SKETCH for a film, entitled Nobody to Blame, was written about the same time for my friend Cavalcanti. He liked the idea, but our work on it never began, for when he submitted it to the Board of Film Censors, he was told that they could not grant a certificate to a film making fun of the Secret Service. So this story too joined the others for a while in the unconscious, to emerge some ten years later as a novel—simplified but not, I think, necessarily improved—called Our Man in Havana.

There is no censorship for novels, but I learnt later that M15 suggested to M16 that they should bring an action against the book for a breach of official secrets. What secret had I betrayed? Was it the possibility of using bird shit as a secret ink? But luckily C, the head of M16, had a better sense of humour than his colleague in M15, and he discouraged him from taking action.

Nobody to Blame

1

RICHARD TRIPP IS the agent of Singer Sewing Machines in some Baltic capital similar to Tallinn. He is a small inoffensive man of a rather timid disposition with a passionate love for postage stamps, Gilbert and Sullivan’s music and his wife, and a passionate loyalty to Singer Sewing Machines. Unofficially he is Agent B.720 of the British Secret Service. The year is I938/39.

Mrs Tripp—Gloria—is much younger than Tripp and it is to give her a good life that he has allowed himself to be enlisted in the Secret Service. He feels he must spend more money on her than Singer provide in order to keep her, although she has a genuine fondness for her dim husband. She knows nothing, of course, of his activities.

At HQ in London Tripp is regarded as one of their soundest agents—unimaginative, accurate, not easily ruffled. He is believed to have a network of sub-agents throughout Germany and he keeps in touch with HQ through the medium of his business reports written to his firm. What HQ does not know is that in fact Tripp has no agents at all. He invents all his reports and when London expresses dissatisfaction with an agent he simply dismisses one notional source and engages another equally notional. Naturally he draws salaries and expenses for all the imaginary agents.

His active imagination, from which he has drawn the details of a large underground factory near Leipzig for the construction of a secret explosive, does on one occasion lead to a little trouble with the local police. From an independent source London learns that B.720 is being shadowed, and they send him an urgent warning, but the warning arrives too late.

At the end of a programme of Gilbert and Sullivan opera by the Anglo-Latesthian Society in which Tripp takes a leading part the Chief of Police, who is sitting in the front row, hands up a bouquet with a card attached and the request that he may have a drink with Tripp immediately in his dressing-room. There he tells Tripp that the German Embassy have complained of his activities. Tripp confesses to his deception.

The Chief of Police is amused and pleased that Tripp’s presence will keep out any serious agents, and he accepts the gift of a sewing machine for his wife. He will ensure that Tripp’s messages go safely out of the country—and to keep the German Embassy quiet, he decides, they can have a look at them on the way. London’s warning comes on the heels of the interview, and Tripp sends back a message announcing that he has appointed the Chief of Police himself as one of his agents, enclosing that officer’s first report on the chief political characters of Latesthia and requesting that as first payment and bonus the Chief, who he says is an ardent stamp collector, should receive a rare Triangular Cape, and when the stamp arrives of course he sticks it in his own album. This gives him an idea, and soon the Chief of the Secret Service is commenting to the HQ officer in charge of Tripp’s station, ‘What a lot of stamp collectors he has among his agents.’

‘It might be worse. Do you remember old Stott’s agents? They all wanted art photos from Paris.’

‘Stott’s at a loose end, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Send him over to take a look at Tripp’s station. He maybe able to give Tripp some advice. I always believe in letting two sound men get together.’

2

STOTT IS A much older man than Tripp. He is bottle-nosed and mottled with a little round stomach and a roving eye. Tripp is naturally apprehensive of his visit and expects to be unmasked at any moment, but to his relief he finds that Stott is much more interested in the foods and wines of Latesthia, and in the night life, than in the details of Tripp’s organization. There are even fleeting moments when Tripp wonders whether it could possibly be that Stott also had run his station on notional lines, but such a thought of course can hardly be held for long.

The first evening together Stott remarks, ‘Now, the brothels, old man. You’ve got good contacts there, I suppose?’

Tripp has never been in a brothel in his life. He has to own that he has overlooked brothels.

‘Most important, old man. Every visiting businessman goes to the brothels. Got to have them covered.’

He has a night round the town with Stott and gets into trouble with his wife for returning at two in the morning. Stott moves on to Berlin, but he has sown seeds in Tripp’s mind. His notional agents in future follow a Stott line. London is asked to approve in rapid succession the madame of a high class ‘house’, a café singer, and, his most imaginative effort to date, a well-known Latesthian cinema actress who is described as Agent B.720’s (i.e. Tripp’s) mistress. Of course he has never spoken to her in his life, and he has no idea that she is in fact a German agent.

3

A SECOND CRISIS—needing more delicate handling than Stott’s—blows up. The threat of European war is deepening and London considers that Tripp’s position in Latesthia is a key one. He must have a proper staff: Singer Sewing Machines are persuaded in the interests of the nation to build up their agency in Latesthia and they inform Tripp that they are sending out to him a secretary-typist and a clerk. Tripp is innocently delighted that his work for Singer has borne such fruit and that sewing machines are booming. He is less pleased, however, when the clerk and typist arrive and prove to be members of the Secret Service sent to assist him in handling his now complicated network of agents.

The clerk is a young man with a penetrating cockney accent and an enormous capacity for hero-worship—and heroine-worship. His devotion is equally aroused by what he considers the experience and daring of Tripp and by the legs and breasts of Tripp’s wife. His name is Cobb, and he has an annoying habit of asking questions. He says himself, ‘You don’t have to bother to explain things, Chief. Just let me dig in and ask questions, and I’ll get the hang of things for myself.’

The typist—Miss Jixon—is a withered spinster of forty-four who regards everyone and everything with suspicion. She believes that even the most innocent labourer is in the pay of the secret police, and she is shocked by the inadequacy of the security arrangements in the office. She insists on all blotting paper being locked in the safe and all typewriting ribbons being removed at night. This is highly inconvenient as no one is very good at fixing typewriter ribbons. Once she finds a used ribbon thrown in the waste-paper basket instead of being burnt in the incinerator and she begins to demonstrate the danger of the practice by deciphering the impress on the ribbon. All she can make out is ‘Red lips were ne’er so red nor eyes so pure’, which turns out to be a line of a sonnet written by Cobb—obviously with Mrs Tripp in mind.

‘He’s really rather sweet,’ Mrs Tripp says.

The chief problem that Tripp has to solve is how to disguise the fact that he has no sources for his reports. He finds this unexpectedly easy. He goes shopping and returns with envelopes that have been handed to him, he says, from under the counter: he makes a great show of testing perfectly innocent letters about sewing machines for secret inks: he takes Cobb for a round of the town and now and then in the restaurants points out his agents.

‘A very discreet man. You’ll see he won’t show the least flicker of recognition.’

The monthly payments to agents present a difficulty: Miss Jixon objects strongly to the payments being made by himself.

‘It’s irregular, insecure: HQ would never countenance it.’

By this time, for the sake of his assistants, he has drawn up an impressive chart of his sources: with the immediate head agents who control each gang. Miss Jixon insists that from now on he shall cut off his personal contacts with all but his head agents (of whom the cinema actress is one) and that he should meet them on every occasion in a different disguise.

Disguises become the bane of Tripp’s life. What makes it worse, of course, is that his wife knows nothing. Miss Jixon shows a horrible ingenuity: Tripp’s make-up box for the operatic productions of the Anglo-Latesthian Society is requisitioned. He finds himself being forced to slip out of back doors in red wigs and return by front doors in black wigs. She makes him carry at least two soft hats of varying colours in his overcoat pockets, so that he can change hats. Spectacles, horn-rimmed and steel-rimmed, bulge his breast pockets.

The strain tells. He becomes irritable and Mrs Tripp is reduced to tears. Cobb is torn between hero-worship and heroine-worship.

4

NEXT CRISIS: THE enemy begins to take Tripp seriously. He becomes aware that he is followed everywhere—even to the Anglo-Latesthian musical soirée—‘an evening with Edward German and Vaughan Williams’. Miss Jixon’s security arrangements have been a little too good and the Germans are no longer able to keep an eye on the reports he sends.

She has objected to the use of the Chief of Police as transmitter and has evolved an elaborate method of sending secret ink messages on postage stamps. (There is a moment when Miss Jixon skirts shyly round the possibility of bird shit as a secret ink.) Unfortunately the ink never develops properly—single words will appear and disappear with disconcerting rapidity.

Tripp, in order to be able to fake his expenses sheet and show the expenditure of huge sums for entertainment, is forced to dine out at least three times a week. He hates restaurant meals—and in any case it would be fatal if one of his assistants saw him dining alone. He therefore rents a room in the suburbs and retires there for a quiet read (his favourite authors are Charles Lamb and Newbolt) or the writing of a bogus report, taking a little food out of the larder with him. (In his account book this appears as ‘Dinner for three (political sources) with wines, cigars, etc., £5.1os.od’.) This constant dining out had never been necessary in the old days before his assistants came, and Mrs Tripp resents it.

The domestic crisis reaches its culmination when on pay day Tripp has to pretend to visit the home of the cinema actress with pay for her sub-sources. Cobb keeps guard in the street outside and Tripp, wearing a false moustache, proceeds up to the actress’s flat, rings the bell and enquires for an imaginary person. He turns away from the closing door just as Mrs Tripp comes down from visiting a friend in the flat above. His excuse that he was trying to sell a sewing machine seems weak to Mrs Tripp in view of his false moustache.

Domestic harmony is further shattered when Cobb, anxious to make peace between his hero and his heroine, tells Mrs Tripp everything—or what he thinks is everything. ‘It’s for his country, Mrs Tripp,’ he says.

Mrs Tripp decides that she too will go in for patriotism. She begins to dine out too, and Tripp, not unduly disturbed, takes the opportunity of appointing her as agent with a notional lover in the Foreign Ministry.

‘That fellow Tripp,’ they say in London, ‘deserves a decoration. The Service comes even before his wife. Good show.’

His notional mistress and his wife’s notional lover are among his most interesting sources. Unfortunately, of course, his wife does not believe that his mistress is notional and her dinner companion, unlike the notional member of the Foreign Ministry, is a very real young man attached to Agriculture and Fisheries.

Mrs Tripp gets news of Tripp’s hide-out and decides to track him down. She is certain she will find him in the company of the actress and that he will not be engaged in work of national importance.

The enemy are aware of his hide-out.

5

TRIPP HAS GOT his legs up on the stove, some sausage rolls in his pocket, and he is reading his favourite poet Newbolt aloud, in a kind of sub-human drone which is his method with poetry. ‘Play up, play up and play the game … the dons on the dais serene …’ He is surprised by a knock at the door. He opens it and is still more surprised by the sight of his notional sub-agent, the cinema actress. Her car has broken down outside: can she have his help? Outside in the car two thugs crouch ready to knock Tripp on the head. A third—a tall stupid sentimental-looking German of immense physique—keeps watch at the end of the street. Tripp says he knows nothing about cars: now if it had been a sewing machine …

Mrs Tripp is coming up the road. She has obviously lost her way. Tripp by this time is demonstrating the special points of the Singer sewing machine … Mrs Tripp is cold and miserable. She leans against a fence and cries. A little further down the road the sentimental German watches her. He is torn between pity and duty. He edges nearer.

Mr Tripp is talking about poetry to the cinema actress …

Mrs Tripp weeps on the German’s shoulder and tells him how her husband is betraying her at this moment, but she can’t remember the number of the house …

The Germans in the car are getting very cold. They get out and begin to walk up and down … Tripp is reading Newbolt to the actress … ‘His captain’s hand on his shoulder smote …’ Mrs Tripp and the German peer in at the window. He hasn’t realized that this treacherous husband has anything to do with him. Mrs Tripp moans, ‘Take me away,’ and he obeys at once—in his comrades’ car. Somebody—he is too sentimentally wrought up to care who—tries to stop him and he knocks him down. He deposits Mrs Tripp at her own door.

Tripp is still reading poetry when there is another knock at the door. One German pulls in the other German who is still unconscious. There is a babble of German explanations. ‘He was trying to mend the car,’ the actress explains, ‘and it ran away from him.’

‘I’ll ring up the garage,’ Tripp says. He goes in an alcove, where nobody has seen the telephone.

They prepare to knock him out. ‘Wrong number,’ he says furiously. ‘It’s the police.’

When he puts down the receiver again they knock him out.

6

MR TRIPP HAS not returned home for some days. Cobb and Miss Jixon are worried. Mrs Tripp is furious but finds consolation.

Tripp comes to himself inside the German Embassy. Enormous pressure is put on him to betray his organization, but he has no organization to betray. The threat forcibly resolves itself into this: either he will remain a prisoner in the Embassy until war starts, when he will be handed to the Gestapo as a spy, or he will send a message for them—containing false information carefully devised to discredit him—to London and then in due course he will be released. They show him films of concentration camps, they keep him from sleeping: he is shut up in a cell with the sentimental German, now disgraced, who wakes him whenever he tries to sleep and reproves him for betraying his wife.

The German Ambassador, in collaboration with the Military Attaché, plans out the message for him to send. On one sheet the Military Attaché notes the facts to be concealed: the date of invasion; number of divisions etc. On the other they note the lies to be revealed. A breeze from the open window whips the papers around. The wrong notes (that is to say the true notes) are handed to Tripp to write in secret ink. Tripp gives way. To send one more message of false information seems a small price to pay.

To make all secure and ensure that no Tripp message will ever be believed again, the Germans instruct the Chief of Police to go to the British Ambassador and expose Tripp’s dealings with him—the invented messages which he used to show to the Germans before transmitting them. He gives the impression that Tripp knew that the Germans saw them.

Tripp is arrested by the police immediately he leaves the German Embassy. He is escorted home where he is allowed to pack a bag. Mrs Tripp is not there. Cobb shows him a decoded cable from London: ‘Dismiss Agent XY.27 [his wife]. Intercepted correspondence to school friend shows she is carrying on intrigue with … of Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry instead of … of Foreign Ministry. Unreliable.’

Tripp says goodbye to his home, to Cobb and Miss Jixon, to his make-up box, presented to him by the Anglo-Latesthian Society, to his collected works of Gilbert and Sullivan. He empties his pockets of the false moustache, soft hats, spectacles. ‘These were the trouble,’ he says sadly to Miss Jixon.

He is put on board a plane to England.

An official enquiry awaits him at HQ. His Ambassador’s report has been received, but opinion among his judges before he comes is divided. The trouble is that his reports have been welcomed by the armed forces. The whole Secret Service will look foolish if they have to recall hundreds of reports over the last two years—ones which have been acclaimed as ‘most valuable’. The head of the enquiry points out that it will discredit the whole Service. Any of their agents could have done the same. None of them will be believed in future.

A message arrives that Tripp is in the outer office, and the youngest member of the enquiry—a dapper, earnest FO type—goes out to see him. He whispers to him urgently, ‘Everything will be all right. Deny everything.’

‘If only,’ the chairman is saying, ‘he hadn’t sent that last message. All his other messages are matters of opinion. You remember the underground works at Leipzig. After all, they are underground—we can’t be sure he invented them. General Hays particularly liked that report. He said it was a model report. We’ve used it in our training courses. But this one—it gives a time and date for zero hour, and the source claimed—the German Military Attaché himself—you can’t get round that. Such and such divisions will cross the frontiers at ten o’clock today. If we hadn’t been warned by the Ambassador we’d have had the whole Army, Navy and Air Force ringing us up to know who the devil had sent such nonsense. Come in, Tripp. Sit down. This is a very serious matter. You know the charges against you.’

‘I admit everything.’

The dapper young man whispers excitedly, ‘No, no, I said deny.’

‘You can’t possibly admit everything,’ the chairman interrupts with equal excitement, ‘it’s for us to tell you what you admit and what you don’t admit. Of course this last message—’ The telephone rings: he raises the receiver: ‘Yes, yes. Good God!’

He puts the receiver down and addresses the enquiry board. ‘The Germans crossed the Polish frontier this morning. Under the circumstances, gentlemen, I think we should congratulate Mr Tripp on his last message from Latesthia. It is unfortunate that bungling in the British Embassy resulted in no use being made of it—but those after all are the chances of the Service. We can say with confidence among ourselves that the Secret Service was informed of the date and time of war breaking out.’

Tripp is given the O B E. He is also appointed chief lecturer at the course for recruits to the Secret Service. We see him last as he comes forward to the blackboard, cue in hand, after being introduced to the recruits as ‘one of our oldest and soundest officers—the man who obtained advance news of the exact date and even the hour of the German attack—Richard Tripp will lecture on “How to Run a Station Abroad”.’