

THE CONSUL FROM TUNIS

and other ghost stories

Nicholas Foster

Published by Nicholas Foster at Smashwords

Copyright 2020 Nicholas Foster

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Chapter 1 - The Rustling of Silk

We were sitting in a private dining-room upstairs at Rules in Maiden Lane, not a restaurant that I could afford. But Harrington had done very well in the City and when it came to his turn to host our annual reunion dinner, it was to Rules we were invited. And a fine dinner it was, leaving all eight of us comfortable and mellow as we sat with our coffees and port. Eight of us, all now in our sixties, thrown together studying History at that small College more than forty years before. Harrington who had always been pushy and direct, Abigail, by far the most intelligent of us, who'd changed to Law in her Third Year and was now a Supreme Court Judge, Giles the newspaper editor, and the rest of us with our less illustrious careers. All of us taken out of our daily lives and allowed, for this one evening, to put our cares to one side and feel young again.

Unsurprisingly, it was Harrington who destroyed this feeling of trouble-free nostalgia by suggesting that it would be a splendid idea if we were all to tell a story, recount a tale, share some strange or curious event. There were a couple of groans and I saw Abigail half-smile as she looked down at the table. Harrington, however, would not be put off. He'd had an idea and he was going to stick with it. He was proposing to start the ball rolling himself. as he put it, when I surprised myself by interrupting him. Perhaps it was the alcohol or the pleasantness of being amongst old friends. Whatever it was, I'd decided that I might as well be the first with a story.

I have always wondered, I said, why M.R.James never wrote a ghost-story about Cyprus. He worked there, of course, for a short while in 1887 when he joined the excavations at the Temple of Aphrodite at Old Paphos. I think he was responsible for collating the inscriptions they found. I can't imagine him directing a dig, or even wielding a trowel. It's odd enough just to think of him at work on a Classical site. We know him now as a Medievalist and it would make more sense to us if he'd been been working with Camille Enlart, studying and cataloguing the medieval Lusignan buildings of Cyprus. I could imagine M.R.James with one of those old-fashioned surveyor's wooden measures, pacing out the dimensions of the Aghia Sophia Cathedral in Nicosia. I assume he must have visited Nicosia and Famagusta to see the Lusignan Cathedrals and the other medieval churches there. But if he did, for some reason they never made it into his ghost stories.

I was reminded of M.R.James and his brief stay in Cyprus by something I was once told by one of my postgraduate tutors, Professor Somerville, when I moved on from History to Archaeology. For, as a young postgraduate student himself, Somerville had spent a year in Cyprus in the early 1950s, working at the Nicosia Museum It was before Independence, before the intercommunal fighting and before Partition. It was a time when you could travel anywhere there and Somerville did, and like M.R.James, by bicycle.

Cyprus and the Cypriots had made a huge impression on Somerville. It was his first year in the real world, I guess, and the defining year of his life. Whenever he was happy in all the years I knew him, he'd start to reminisce about Cyprus. And his memories were as sharp, clear and bright as the sea and sunlight of the island. Which, I suppose, is why the story I am going to tell you now is so unusual. For it was a uniquely disturbing anecdote from his wonderful year in the early 1950s. And one that he would probably never have told me had it not been for his first heart-attack at College which came out-of-the-blue and jolted him. I remember going to visit him in a cubby-hole room in hospital where he lay on his back recovering for a week and reflecting on his first and unexpected brush with death.

It was a different Somerville I found that afternoon on a grey, November Cambridge day. There were no jokes or wit, just a sombre thoughtfulness. I remember him smiling as though he was looking at me from a long way off, with an understanding I did not have. He gestured for me to sit down on the chair beside his bed and then unburdened himself, I think that's the best way of describing it, of a Cyprus story I'd never heard.

He described, or tried to, the afternoon heat of July to September in Nicosia, the way all life stopped, having no choice, the silence of the tired and deserted streets. For it was precisely these dead, afternoon hours when all was in limbo, that he would get on his bicycle and head off to the coolness of the great Lusignan Cathedral, Aghia Sophia, now the Selimiye Mosque with its two minarets added as a victorious after-thought to the great medieval cathedral. Riding past the closed shops with their metal shutters pulled down and padlocked, he could feel as though the town belonged to him alone. It made him feel privileged as well as happy.

Arriving at the mosque, he'd prop his bike against the stone wall of the washing area. At the huge wooden cathedral doors (for this could be nothing but a cathedral), he'd kick off his sandals and put them down in the empty space where the faithful would leave their shoes and then he'd walk into the silent, empty cathedral.

The Lusignan walls, once covered in paintings, were now a uniform expanse of whitewash. The high windows which once held stained-glass were now filled with tracery, allowing the breeze, if there had been one, to blow through. The only sound came from the pigeons on the roof, ruffling their feathers like the quiet rustling of silk on a stone floor. But the cathedral's stone floor with its few remaining flat, broken tombstones of knights and clerics, was now completely covered with faded but valuable Turkish rugs, laid down any-old-how and overlapping, adding a strangely homely touch to the otherwise austere and looming interior. It was as if the cathedral had been domesticated and was just waiting for the van to arrive with the sofas.

But this was where Somerville would come for coolness in the dry, burning heat of the Nicosia Summer afternoons. And the more often he went there, the more he began to feel the true solemnity of this space, as though the carpets and the whitewash had gone and he was back in the 15th Century in the final years of Lusignan rule, before the Venetians secured Cyprus through marriage and then lost it to the Ottomans in violence.

And it was on one of those afternoons when he'd just propped his bicycle against the wash-shed, that he was stopped in his tracks by a shadow against the wall near the cathedral door, for all the world like a short, stocky man sitting in the shade. But the shadow disappeared as soon as he got close to it and there was nothing unusual about his quiet walk inside the cathedral. Just the blankness of the whitewashed walls and that gentle sound of the rustling of silk as the pigeons fluffed up their feathers on the window-sills so high above him.

Which was why he was unprepared on his next visit, to see the same shadow by the door rise up from the bench as he approached, putting out its hand to stop him. The man's strong arms were bare from the elbow, covered in the scars of old knife wounds, a fighting man on his feet now and blocking the path. But, as Somerville stood there uncertain and scared, the man or the shadow were gone. There was nothing there but the blank stone wall and no bench for a man to sit on.

Hurrying inside the cathedral, Somerville realised his nerves were still on edge. For when silently walking on the thick Turkish rugs, he could distinctly hear the same rustling of silk from the pigeons. But this time the noise came from in front of him, not above, and there were no pigeons inside the cathedral. He stood for a few minutes listening to the rustling sound, taking deep breaths to calm himself down as he sought some rational explanation for this trick of the acoustics. He couldn't find an answer, and he was relieved when he was brought back to reality by the sound of one of the shopkeepers from the hardware stores outside.

The man had obviously decided to re-open early for Somerville could hear the thump as a heavy sack was tossed down onto the pavement from the back of a lorry. Cycling home in the heat, he shook his head at his own stupidity. He had arrogantly thought he was immune to sunstroke and had laughed when his Greek-Cypriot landlady had insisted he should take a siesta "like all good people".

For the next week or so he was busy with his work at the Museum. They had a visit from London from the British Museum and Somerville was on-duty every day taking the visitors to Classical sites from Polis to Paphos to Salamis. It was only after a break of ten days that he had a free afternoon and could cycle back once more to the cathedral. He'd compromised with his landlady by wearing a sun hat, although this still didn't seem to satisfy her. A siesta was a siesta and, in her view, an almost medical requirement. For him, a floppy green bush-hat was a concession in itself and it made him feel more confident as he cycled through the backstreets towards the cathedral.

But the stocky man was there again by the door, his face in shadow, and Somerville could see what he hadn't seen before. That the man was wearing a tough leather breastplate over his rough cotton shirt and that there was an evil-looking dagger thrust in his belt. Not the distinctive dagger the Cretans still wore, but something long and thin and more lethal. A poniard they might have called it in the Middle-Ages. And once again the man stood up to bar his way, shaking his head as if to confirm that entry was forbidden. Only to fade away as Somerville approached, leaving nothing behind but what looked like a farthing coin under the bench where he had been sitting, had there been a bench there for him to sit on.

Somerville, ever the archaeologist, quickly picked up the coin and ducked into the cathedral. Where he was not alone. For when he turned around when he was half-way across the cathedral floor, he saw an old woman in black, whom he hadn't noticed when he entered, sitting just inside the cathedral door. At first, he thought she was knitting, but then he could see that she was telling a rosary made of pink glass beads, the kind a young girl would give as a present. But, on second sight, she too was gone and he was left with nothing but the persistent sound of the rustling of silk, like a silk dress trailing across a stone floor. Until that too disappeared, reality returning with the same shopkeeper tossing his heavy sack from his lorry. The only puzzling thing was that, when Somerville left the cathedral, he couldn't see which shop had re-opened.

He was happy, though, with his 'farthing'. For the next day at the Museum, Professor Loizides identified it as a sixain of James II, James the Bastard, as he was known, the last Lusignan King. Somerville donated it to the Museum and the small coin was duly catalogued with a note on the card describing it as a gift from C.H.Somerville Esq, found in the dust in front of the Selimiye Mosque. For the Classicists at the Museum, the 15th Century Lusignan coin was more of a curiosity than anything else, but Somerville felt he'd done something of value.

The next time he went to the cathedral, he had to admit that he was nervous. The acoustics and the tricks of the light in the cathedral were unsettling. It was no longer somewhere he could feel at peace. He went back, he guessed, for the coolness and for the chance of finding something else in the dust outside. He was used to kicking up fragments of yellow and green sgraffito ware Lusignan pottery in the empty city of Famagusta, but to find a coin in Nicosia where people had walked for centuries was unusual. It was worth another try

And he knew he'd made the right decision when he walked up to the cathedral doors and there was no shadow of a man to stop him. It was just a normal, hot afternoon in a sleepy, quiet city with "the good people" like his landlady all safely taking their siesta.

Inside the cathedral, he took off his bush-hat and tucked it in his belt making that rustling sound as he did so. It seemed that any movement in the cathedral might be misconstrued by the acoustics. But turning around, he could see the old woman was again sitting by the door. This time she stopped telling her pink glass beads and looked at him, or past him at something further ahead. He couldn't see her face which was lost in the shadow of the black cotton shawl around her head, but the way her hands were frozen in her lap suggested fear.

And her fear communicated itself to him, for he could now hear clearly the rustling of silk and see that it came not from the pigeons but from a young girl, seventeen at most, slowly pacing the cathedral in a fine silk dress which trailed along the stone cathedral floor over the faces of the long-dead knights and clerics. And all around him there was sudden bright colour, as though a real world had rushed in to fill a vacuum. The walls were brightly painted in blues and reds, the colour poured down from the stained-glass windows and the vault of the choir was now Heaven, a brilliant bright blue, studded with golden stars.

Turning around in confusion, he lost sight of the girl until he suddenly heard the rustling behind him and felt the light touch of a thin hand on his shoulder. He heard the words "Pardonnez-moi" in a young girl's voice and wheeled round to look into her face, or into the void where her face should have been. He was about to gasp for breath when he heard the same deep thud of the heavy sack being tossed down on the ground outside. This time, however, there were screams, from the girl and from the old woman by the door, but both of them had disappeared by the time their screaming was done.

Somerville raised himself up in the hospital bed and reached out to take a sip from the glass of water on the small table beside him. We sat there in silence for a while staring out of the window at the grey, November sky, a world away from Nicosia in high-Summer and several worlds away from those events in its cathedral.

The historian in Somerville had made him write the story down, however improbable it might seem, however ridiculous it might make him look. He gave me a copy, but he admitted he didn't have an answer for what had happened.

Years later, when that second manuscript of George Boustronios's Chronicle resurfaced in a monastery at Mt Athos, an explanation of a sort did appear. Somerville by then was dead, but I'd kept an interest in the period of James the Bastard as a hobby because of Somerville's strange story. This second manuscript contained additions to Boustronios's Chronicle and life of James the Bastard, additions written by one Petros Kouklianos, a priest from near Paphos. In the few extra paragraphs he'd added, Kouklianos touched on some more of the scandals of that turbulent period at the very end of Lusignan rule. In one paragraph, he briefly referred to a nobleman's daughter, married off at fourteen (as was the custom) to a much older man for reasons of family advantage. There were few places a nobleman's daughter might go with her maid and her bodyguard, but the cathedral was one of them. And it was there that she met a young priest/confessor with whom, in Kouklianos's polite language, the girl had "formed an attachment". The story ended when their secret was betrayed for money by her bodyguard. One day, he left his post at the cathedral door and her husband's retainers stormed in to drag the priest up one of the octagonal staircases to the roof, taking him out onto the flying buttress from where they tossed him like a heavy sack onto the pavement below. They sent the girl to a nunnery where she gave birth to a boy six months later. They killed the child and threw it down a dried-up well. Kouklianos doesn't record what happened to the mother.

"Dieu pardonne" is all one can say. I hope she is at rest.

Chapter 2 - The Comrades

I think we'll have trouble following that, said Abigail, smiling at us as we sat in that upstairs dining-room in Maiden Lane, eight former History students, now in our sixties and still meeting once a year for a reunion and to tell a ghost story or two. The after-effects of the story we'd just heard hung in the room like cigarette smoke and even the normally loquacious Harrington seemed unusually quiet, speaking only to order us another bottle of port.

A good story but a bit erudite for me, said Giles, but then I don't suppose any of you read my paper. It would be a bit down-market for you, a tabloid. Not that I blame you. But the one thing that working on the tabloids does teach you is how to tell a story, and quickly. You don't get the column inches of the broadsheets. You've got to hook the readers in the first sentence and keep re-hooking them in every paragraph till the brief roller-coaster is over.

The problem, though, like all journalism, is that there are some stories you can't tell. Not because they're not well-sourced or because you can't check them out, but simply because your readers would take one look at them and decide you had a screw loose.

You don't mind if I smoke, do you? We did but we were all too polite to say otherwise. So Giles brought out a pack of Rothmans, tapped one out and lit up.

My first boss in Fleet Street got me onto Rothmans, he said. In those days the office was just a fug of cigarette smoke, with a deeper cloud in the corner where our chief crime reporter sat with his pipe. My boss, though, was Rothmans and a chain-smoker. It was he that taught me pretty much all I know about journalism and it was he who showed me that, once in a while, there comes along a story you just can't publish. For your own sanity, I suppose.

My boss had been in on some of the big stories of the Fifties when he first started out in Fleet Street. Sex scandals, spy scandals, the lot. He had a track-record and we all looked up to him. He had a sure grip, sound judgement and a confidence in his abilities that radiated out to the rest of us. He was a real leader and it was a good paper, if not one that any of you, my friends, would have read.

I only once remember him ever looking flummoxed by anything. It was when one of our best reporters took off to Barcelona unannounced with a staff photographer in tow. The latter started phoning back to say something was wrong. My boss got hold of our Madrid stringer and sent him up there to check it out. The stringer got to Barcelona and had a few quiet drinks with the photographer on expenses, as stringers do. The photographer said that he thought the reporter had gone mad. The stringer then spent a day going around with the reporter gently teasing out what was going on. It turned out that the reporter had got a tip-off, from an Archangel apparently, that Christ's Second Coming was due within the week. It wasn't clear why Christ had chosen Barcelona, but an Archangel is a pretty good source. Not surprisingly, that reporter never worked in Fleet Street again.

And he was one of my best reporters, said the Boss to me later, shaking his head sadly. It was a week or two afterwards and I was standing with him in his office in those dead hours after midnight when the presses had started rolling. He brought out a bottle and two glasses from his desk and lit up another Rothmans. You think I'm tough, he said, but it always bloody scares me, the fragility of the human mind. And I bet that's not the sort of phrase you'd ever hear me say, he said laughing. Sit down, have a drink. I'll tell you about one of my greatest triumphs.

Have you ever heard of the Baxter suicide in the early Fifties? That's right, the up and coming Labour MP who filled his pockets with stones, like some sad wronged woman, and threw himself off Westminster Bridge early one morning "just as the sun was rising". There were long columns of speculation in the papers but no-one ever knew what was behind it. Except me, of course, I got the whole story, neat and tidy and all cross-checked. It was a scoop that could have kick-started my career a lot earlier. But I couldn't publish it for the simple reason that my Editor would have had me sectioned.

It was before your time, I guess. Baxter was one of those upper-class Englishmen with a glowing war record and a young wife who looked like a film star but who had a lot more going for her. She ran a Charity sorting out housing for ex-Servicemen. She was a real power in her own right. He'd found Socialism while serving in the Army. He'd been with Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia. Baxter and his wife were the great hopes of the Labour Party. He was already set to become a Minister and she looked ready to join him as an MP herself. I think his suicide put an end to her political ambitions. She just seemed to lose all heart in it. And that too was a tragedy. All-in-all the Labour Party might have turned out a lot stronger if he'd lived.

So you can understand why every young journalist in Fleet Street went hurrying off to dig up the truth behind the Baxter suicide. All of us could see there had to be some pretty big story there and our Editors were breathing down our necks for results. You know what it's like when there are a dozen or more of you from different papers all going hell-for-leather after the same story. However hard you try, you can't keep the others from getting a sniff of your leads, of getting some idea of what you're up to. I'd been through his war record, found some blokes who'd been with him in Yugoslavia. Baxter had worked for one of the secret mobs in their offices in Bari. By the time he went into Yugoslavia, it was by motor torpedo boat and he was passed like a package all the way to Tito's HQ to join the others already there. It wasn't like the early days. Parachuting on your own at night to land God knows where and to find God knows what. I'm not knocking him. It's just that he went there late in the day. It was all fairly organised by the time he went in.

I'd then tried all my Labour Party contacts, gone through them with a fine-tooth comb. From a couple of them, and from what I was picking up from the slip-streams of my rivals from other papers, it seemed as though we were probably looking at another spy scandal, Baxter and the Russians, which the Government was going to do its best to cover up, not wanting to admit what it had lost. That was the line I was working on when I managed to get close to an electrician doing some rewiring work on Baxter's house. He had a couple of kids and was a bit short of cash. He liked to place too many bets as well, I think. Anyway, we soon came to an arrangement. He'd bring me an envelope of letters and bills from the late Mr Baxter MP's writing desk each evening. I'd give them the once over, pay him and he'd put them back the next morning. Little by little, we got through the lot.

It didn't help much until, two nights running, my electrician friend's envelope contained two polite letters from a professional typist in Muswell Hill. It seemed she'd done some unspecified work for Baxter and not been paid. I don't know why his wife or the police hadn't followed it up. A stone they just didn't want to turn over perhaps, for fear of more scandal? Anyway, I put on my best shirt and tie and turned up at the Muswell Hill address claiming to be a solicitor's clerk from the Law Firm handling Baxter's estate. I was there to settle unpaid bills. The money wasn't much. I paid it and she was happy. It seemed he'd wanted a manuscript typed privately. She still had both the typescript and the original. He'd told her it was a work of fiction. He didn't want anyone to know about his amateur literary efforts until he'd decided if it was any good. So there I was on the bus back from Muswell Hill with a large brown envelope of Baxter's private thoughts which I'd duly paid for, above board so to speak. The strangest bloody document I've ever read.

Here you are, he said, unlocking the bottom drawer of his desk and tossing over a thick and aged envelope. Some weekend light reading for you. Don't show anyone else. Bring it back when you've finished and I'll tell you how I managed to check it out. Not that it did me any good.

I took the Boss's envelope home, turned on the three-bar heater in the sitting-room, made myself a large mug of coffee and read on through the deep dark hours until the first birds had started singing. The manuscript was written as a Diary, with dates, and it ran for about nine months, ending a few days before his death. It wouldn't have been a great work of fiction, it was too repetitive, but it would have been good enough to pass muster as fiction with the copy-typist. Baxter must have delivered it to her as something to be going on with, and she'd assumed that they'd be more to come. I'll leave out a lot of the description and just give you the gist of it. He'd added a title in pencil, almost as an afterthought for the typist's benefit:

THE HAUNTING

I can't say for certain when it began. But I've put down this date when I had to go up to Birmingham to give a speech. It was early afternoon when I got onto the train. It was a quiet time of day and I found a compartment to myself. And it stayed empty for the whole journey. A couple of times at different stops, someone on the platform reached out to open the door but for some reason they turned away at the last minute. I guess I was just lucky. My only complaint was the strong smell of Woodbines from whoever had been in the compartment on the way down. I tried opening the window, but the stink of Woodbines only seemed to get worse. It was only later that I realised what was happening...

I was having lunch with the Minister of Trade. We'd agreed to meet at 1pm in the House of Commons dining-room. His Secretary had booked a table for us. I got there on the dot to find the Minister was already seated and having words with the Head Waiter. The Minister had picked up his linen napkin only to find an angry-looking dirty-red wine-stain on the white tablecloth. He showed it to me as I arrived, asking whether I too thought standards were slipping. There was something very strange about it. It wasn't from the sort of stemmed wineglass we used in the Commons. It was more like the red stains from cheap glasses I'd seen on rough wooden tables abroad when I was travelling before the War...

I was travelling to Paris for an international Socialist conference. As it happened, my birthday was going to be on the second day I was away. My wife had given me a wrapped birthday present to put in my suitcase. She always gives me a book for my birthday. I confess that I cheated and opened it when I was on the train from Calais to Paris. She'd written a card saying she hoped I'd like it. She'd seen it well-reviewed. It was apparently the best study so far of the damage done by Colonialism in Africa. Only it wasn't. The book was, in fact, a very battered dirty copy of a 1930s Left Book Club title, one of those solid paperbacks with the bright-orange covers. It was scuffed and frayed as though it had been a long time in someone's pocket. It was when I saw the owner's name on the flyleaf that I realised what was happening to me...

By now, I admit that my nerves were on edge. I know it was beginning to affect my work. My wife knew that something was wrong, but I put it down to tiredness, which she accepted. She then started talking about how we should take a holiday, get away from London if just for a few days. She had a good deputy she could trust at the Charity. It wouldn't be a problem. At the end of the day, it was your health that was important. We were none of us going to live for ever. I'd agreed but without fixing a date. Instead I'd taken up smoking again to try and steady my nerves and stay sane. I was smoking Rothmans which was why it was such a shock, when I finished a packet, to see an old cigarette-card of an actress tucked down inside, issued not by Rothmans but by the United Kingdom Tobacco Company Ltd. No.26 from a series of 32 'Cinema Stars', Dolores Del Rio...

I didn't know where the next one would come from. I didn't know what places to avoid. All I wanted to do was hide but I didn't know where or from what. They were singling me out, that was certain. I could see the quiet smiles on their faces. But it wasn't a game to them, it was serious and justified retribution. What did they want me to do? I knew I could never make amends but there must be something I could do. We were all practical people. Surely, they could see that what I was doing now for Socialism was for the good? But perhaps I was wrong about the game. For we were spending the day with my wife's sister and her two small children. A boy of six and a girl of four. It was after lunch and the sunlight was streaming through the windows onto the Persian rug where the little girl was sitting with a toy workbox and pieces of felt. She'd been entrusted with a small pair of scissors with rounded ends which she was using to cut shapes from the material. She smiled and held one up. It was better cut than her others. A red star cut from felt, still with a few strands of cotton where it had been pulled from a soldier's cap...

I wasn't sleeping. I was chain-smoking. I looked terrible. Colleagues in the House would recommend doctors and specialists who'd helped members of their family or friends. One of the Party Whips had started to look at me out of the corner of his eye, as if he'd marked me down as a potential problem. Women, boys, worse? He didn't know but he'd seen that sort of thing before and it was his job to sniff these things out, nip them in the bud if he could. And, if not, then the Party interest would have to come first. I tried to keep my mind off it by working even harder, even longer hours. I'd be sitting there in the small office I shared with two other MPs long after they'd both gone home. The only people still there were the cleaners. One of them, an old Cypriot woman, would take a quiet peak at me round the door, just to make sure I was alright. Sometimes she'd pop in briefly and recommend some Greek folk remedy. One morning, I arrived to find she'd left me a small present wrapped in brown paper. A folk remedy? It was a cheap tin icon with a picture of the saint on printed paper. He was dressed like a Roman soldier, but his face had been scratched out with pencil...

I think I'd had about as much as I could take. It was like being bullied at school but here there were no holidays now to peg out for. Everywhere I went, they seemed to be waiting for me. I could see now that I'd never been strong. I just looked the part and that had got me by. Oh, I worked hard, and in a good cause, but everything about me was built on that one great lie. They knew it and they were not going to let me forget it. The end, of course, came in the most banal of ways. I stopped outside the Tube Station on the way home to buy The Evening News. There was going to be some headline the Whips had been worried about. I hurried down to the Tube and it was only when I sat down on the train that I could see the newspaper-seller had made some mistake. Instead of The Evening News, he'd given me an old copy of the Daily Worker. It was crisp and white and had been lovingly ironed as though it was The Times delivered on a silver tray in an upper-class Victorian household. It was the very neatness of the folds and the pressing that were so terrifying. I could visualise the hands that would have picked it up and read it. This beautifully folded paper had a finality to it, like a judgement or a death sentence...

And that was where the manuscript ended. Being a good journalist, I checked the manuscript and the typescript for discrepancies, but the lady in Muswell Hill had done a good job. I had read all there was. I resealed the envelope and passed it back to the Boss through his secretary on the Monday morning. It wasn't till after midnight at the end of the week that he called me to come in for a night-cap.

He poured us each a drink and held up his hand when I was about to say something. I managed to check it out, he said, after a fashion and some years later. Put it this way, I met a man who had known Baxter before the War. What he told me made some sort of sense of this 'Haunting'.

My source was a strong man and I liked him and believed him. But he was an alcoholic between drinks and not someone my Editor would have felt comfortable risking the paper's reputation on. And soon after I met him, the drink killed him. So that was that, you might say. My Boss smiled, aware that he'd no right now to keep me on tenterhooks.

Most Newspapers do Charity work as well, you know. It's not just the politicians and their wives. My old paper back in the Fifties used to have a big thing for reformed alcoholics, particularly ex-Servicemen. There were a lot of them on the street at that time. Not being able to find a place in Civvy Street. I was up in Glasgow at a home we were supporting. I met one of their residents, an old-time Scottish Commie who'd been a docker before the War. We were talking about this and that and he asked me whether I'd ever had a scoop. For some reason I mentioned Baxter as one that got away. You could say that, said the old docker, laughing loudly.

It turned out the docker had been in Spain in the International Brigades. He got there in the early days when it was all a bit rag-taggle. He was at the Front in a small group. Six Brits and a Greek-Cypriot who'd joined them because he spoke English. They were looked after by a real soldier, a British Major who kept an eye on them from Brigade Headquarters.

They'd got to know each other quite well in the two weeks of makeshift training before they reached the Front. They'd even been allowed to fire off five or six rounds at tin-cans as target practice. Although most of the tin-cans survived.

In addition to the docker, there was a young lad from Battersea. He lived in one of those terraced houses down near the Power Station and had never left London in his life. His Dad had given him six packs of Woodbines as a parting gift. He was eking them out to remind himself of home. In complete contrast, there was a merchant-seaman who'd travelled the world and got drunk in every port. When there was no alcohol, he was fine. But show him a goatskin of red wine, or six bottles in a bodega, and you'd lost him for the rest of the day. There was a University lecturer who'd left his job to come to Spain. The Party wanted to use his talents in the propaganda struggle but he wanted to be at the Front. He always had a book in his pocket. He didn't say so himself, but the Major told them the lecturer had published an article in one of those thick monthlies, on Hegel and Marx, the Major said. There was also a real dopey lad who had a heart of gold and who loved animals. He was always looking after the mules. He used to carry a cigarette card in his wallet of some glamorous Spanish actress. He was always hoping he'd meet her when she turned up one day with the other celebrities visiting the Internationals. The Major had a look at the card and told them later that the actress was Mexican and in Hollywood. But he said it was better not to burst the lad's bubble. We all needed dreams to help us get by. There was also another dreamer, a political dreamer. A keen young bloke from Watford. He'd been a Party-member since before birth. He'd even sewed a red star on his beret. But you should have seen him when charging for an attack in the training, said the docker. Out to save World Socialism single-handed. Like a bloody whirlwind, he was. And then there was Panos, the Cypriot. His mother was a Greek from Rhodes. She had an Italian passport, he said, and she didn't know why he wanted to go to Spain. He was Baxter's No.2 on the machine gun. Oh yes, Baxter was there.

Last of all, there was the Major. The old docker got almost dewy-eyed when he talked of the Major. Always striding around with his shiny long boots and his swagger stick and his handsome young Spanish batman, a good-looking young man, all white teeth and hair oil. The Major was the son of an East End butcher, no better than the docker, but he'd got himself promoted from the ranks to be an Officer in the Great War, so he had what it took. And that was all that mattered to the docker or to the rest of them. They'd have followed the Major anywhere. In Spain, you see, they didn't care who you were or who you were pretending to be. They could forgive all that so long as you showed you had guts and judgement. You needed both to be of any real use there. The docker laughed as he described how the Major would order his batman to iron his newspaper for him, on the rare occasions he got one.

The Major knew what had happened, that Baxter had panicked and run when the Moors attacked, abandoning the machine-gun which would have soon jammed when the Cypriot tried to fire it on his own. They didn't have a hope then, against regular soldiers. The Major knew the docker was the only other one to get out alive. But neither of them had time to report it. They were both hit in the same artillery barrage the next day. The Major died instantly. The docker took six months to recover in hospital and could never go back to the Front. The Party weren't interested in his story. They didn't want a scandal. Cowardice wasn't the sort of story that would help them win wars.

Now you can see why I never got it published, said my Boss.

Chapter 3 - Joining the Dance

The following year, it was Abigail's turn to host our reunion, eight former History students all now forty years adrift from our three years together at College. And this time we were in Abigail's small 1820s house in a side-street beside Richmond Green. She'd packed her husband and daughter off for the evening and was able to give us a guided tour of the ground-floor, for those who had 't been there before. I particularly remember the tiny room she'd turned into her study. On one wall there were shelves of box-files. Some of my more interesting old casework, she said. On the other wall there was shelf upon shelf of cookery books, recipes from every country you could name.

How did you manage to grab this study for yourself, asked Harrington. Didn't your husband or your daughter want the space for themselves? Abigail smiled. It was my Barrister's salary that bought us this house in the first-place and I needed somewhere to work where I could sit up preparing my cases till two in the morning without disturbing the others. And yes, there's nothing like stopping to read a good cookery book to give you the strength to get that casework done.

The meal she served lived up to her reputation. A Sephardic chicken dish followed by pears stewed in Marsala. One of the best meals I'd ever eaten, let along one cooked by a Supreme Court Judge.

When we were all sitting in her living-room again with our coffees, Harrington piped up. Well, Abigail, that was delicious. I have no doubt the story you are about to tell us will be just as superb.

Oh, I'm not telling a story tonight, laughed Abigail. I am just the cook and bottle-washer. Rachel and I have already planned that she'll be the one with the entertainment. We turned to Rachel, some of us with slight disappointment, having been looking forward to some perfectly crafted plot from Abigail's brilliant mind.

I hope you'll all forgive me, said Rachel, I don't have Giles' journalist's gift for words or his story-telling skill. I've had to make a few notes, if that's alright. And she pulled a folded sheet of A4 from her handbag. I've always been better with pictures than words, so I've had to put down a few things to jog my memory and make sure I don't drift off-track. I'm going to tell you about something that happened to me thirty years ago. I don't know whether it would count as a ghost story but it's all I could think of that might interest you.

I really enjoyed reading History with you at College but, as you know, I changed direction when I graduated. I'd always been an amateur artist. (Giles and I both smiled, remembering the excellent watercolours Rachel had exhibited while still at College). I was never talented enough to be a professional, but I did want to work with my hands. After graduating, I was out of work for a year, just doing temping and other odd-jobs, until I got a place on an Art Restoration scheme at a public Gallery. I was there five or six years and was very happy. I think I found my role as an art restorer. The research drew on my History training but I was working with my hands.

Things changed in my late-twenties. My marriage broke up and I shan't bore those of you who don't know them with the details. I was a bit wrecked and one of my friends said a new challenge would help me to get through it. So, I made the jump, left the Gallery and set up as a freelance restorer. The work wasn't well-paid or plentiful, but I did get a helpful six months as the assistant restorer on a project to restore the Fifteenth century wood panel paintings of Saints in a Church in East Anglia. The paintings had been painted over at the Reformation and the Saints had been lost under a new surface of severe Protestant texts, making the point, I suppose, that under Protestantism, the parishioners would be able to read and no longer needed pictures to help them get closer to God. I can't say I believed it myself. I don't think literacy levels had improved that much.

But I really enjoyed the work, using the x-ray images to decide what was underneath and then beginning the delicate process of trying to reveal the original painting without damaging it. And the work was a success. It went so well that we even got a long write-up with photos in one of the art magazines. I guess in those days I was more photogenic than my boss. His photo wasn't as prominent in the final article. It was me standing next to one of the restored panels with my name in the description. And it was that which got me my next job, in the Baltics.

For one of the newly independent States was looking for a restorer to do some work on one of its most famous religious paintings. It was a late 15th Century Dance of Death by the Master of Hamburg. The painting, or series of paintings, had been taken to Moscow in the Soviet period and had been fully restored there. But it was thought that the paintings needed a closer look, a health-check you could say, and for understandable reasons this independent Baltic Republic didn't want anything to do with their old Russian masters. They'd latched onto me from the article they'd seen, even though this Dance of Death was painted on canvas and my published expertise was with wood panels. Perhaps they just missed that in the article. Anyway, I jumped at the chance and went. I was there for six months over one very magical Winter.

The paintings were in a beautiful white-walled church in the old part of town. Walking to work from the small flat they found me was like walking through some old European fairy tale. Long icicles hanging from snow-covered rooves and the thick snow swept up into huge piles at the side of each pavement. In fact, the only downside for me were those pavements. I've been scared of ice since I was a child, when one of my friends slipped and broke her leg. Before I left England, a friend had bought me a pair of calf-length Swedish boots, thinking the Swedes would know about snow, and I use to progress slowly along the pavements sliding my feet in front of me, as if I were a trainee tight-rope walker setting out on her first trip across the Big Top. The locals used to glance at me and smile, but they seemed sympathetic and gave me the benefit of the doubt as a foreigner.

The church itself was freezing. There was heating but I used to keep my coat on when I was working and I was alright. It's always such a relief to be allowed to work on your own and to be your own boss. That makes up for so much. Obviously, it was still a newly independent country and you couldn't expect everything to be in place. For the first couple of weeks, the Institute I was working for couldn't get access to a working x-ray machine, so I had to start just by observation which is not how we did it in East Anglia,

The Dance, as I say, was painted on a series of canvases, of which only the first few had survived. They showed devils leading mankind towards its inevitable end. A somewhat stately procession of Emperors and Kings, nobles and clergy, a text in Latin beneath each figure with a short dialogue between Death and each man or woman. Those paintings which hadn't survived would have taken us down through the social order to the peasant working on the land. But all we had were the upper classes.

What struck me immediately was the painting of a priest. It just didn't look right. It didn't seem to fit naturally into the composition and there was no Latin text beneath his feet. He seemed to have missed out on his own dialogue with Death. Unlike the other figures, he hadn't had the chance to express himself. And unlike the others, he lacked their patient resignation. In fact, his face was turned outwards towards me with a look of despair. It was particularly haunting in the afternoons when the natural light was fading and the church would come alive with the subdued shuffling sound as if the mice in the woodwork had decided it might be safe to come out for the night.

The second week I was there, I started to pore over the surface of the paintings with a magnifying-glass, to learn what I could about the visible surface of the brushwork while waiting for the x-ray machine to become available. To tell you the truth, I didn't learn a great deal, but that might have been due to my lack of expertise rather than anything else. The one breakthrough I made was on the unhappy priest. I could see with the magnifying-glass that there was a line of some later over-painting (18th Century perhaps) round his wrists and leading to the hand of the smiling devil in front of him. The more I looked at it, the more I came to the conclusion that, beneath this over-painting, his hands were tied and that, unlike the others, he was being dragged along by the devils.

I put this to my project supervisor at the Institute at one of the weekly meetings I had with him each Friday. He was a middle-aged man, always wearing the same dark-grey suit and very old black shoes. He looked as though he'd spent long years in the Soviet system learning how to keep his head down. But he was very helpful and friendly, and I think he understood English much better than he would let on. He always claimed that Russian was his only foreign language and we'd be joined at our meetings by Lia, one of his assistants, who would act as interpreter. She was in her early twenties and all the men in the Institute went crazy over her long legs, her smile and her short, boyish blonde hair. All the men apart from my supervisor, I should say. The two of them clearly got on well but it was like being with a loving father and his daughter. I used to enjoy our Friday meetings.

I made my points about the priest, about the 18th Century over-painting and what looked like the rope beneath it. The supervisor didn't dismiss it but, quite rightly, he decided that we should await the x-ray results before deciding what to do next. It took another week for the x-ray machine to become available. Until then, there wasn't much more I could do but pore over the surface of the paintings with a magnifying-glass before standing back to look at the whole composition of each painting from a distance. I never tired of doing that. The paintings were so gorgeous that I had to keep pinching myself to make sure it was real, this privileged job of mine. Only the mice would get on my nerves in the late afternoons as they stared their shuffling. But on two or three evenings, Lia put her head round the door unannounced and took me off to tour the small bars and restaurants with her old student friends.

The x-rays when they came were a revelation. The one really interesting point was the priest. I had been right about the rope. It was later over-painting to hide the fact that he was being dragged along by a devil. But the real revelation, which I could never have got with the magnifying-glass, was that the priest too was a later addition. The x-rays clearly showed the grass and bushes of the green landscape on the original layer of paint. For some reason, he had been added on top of them as an afterthought. We would need to analyse the pigments to find when the priest had been added.

My supervisor was happy for that to go ahead and the results came back suggesting that the priest had been added in the late 16th Century, around a hundred years after the Dance had been painted. The question was what we should do next. I set out my case for full restoration, removing the priest and returning the painting to its original late 15th Century state. My Supervisor could see the logic of that as my arguments were carefully translated for him by Lia at one of our Friday meetings, but it was not something I could expect him to decide himself. It would have to go to the Minister of Culture. He would discuss it with the Minister and arrange for all three of us to go and meet him, so I could present my arguments.

I remember so vividly the brilliant blue cold bright morning when Lia picked me up at my flat to walk with me to the Ministry. As befits a Ministry of Culture, it was in a beautiful and large 19th Century wooden house of the kind you can still see in photographs of Siberian cities like Krasnoyarsk, the kind that have lop-sided wooden fences around them. Here, though, they'd taken the old fences down and made an open space which in Summer would have been cleanly-swept cobbles. But now, in Winter the whole expanse was three feet deep in shovelled snow. All that was left was the flag-stoned path, thirty yards long, leading to the Institute's door, a path which I could see was covered in a horrific layer of sheet ice.

Lia saw me hesitate and laughed. We have a saying, she said, a proverb. When the ice is thick, you have to dance. I must have looked dumb-struck, dancing on ice having a somewhat different meaning in English.

Watch, said Lia, and she quickly hopped, skipped and danced her way to the Ministry door, swinging round to smile back at me. See, she called. She then repeated the performance, sliding the last few yards, bumping into me, hugging me tightly and spinning us both round to stop us falling. Come on, she said, now we'll do it together.

She slipped her arm through mine and led me out onto the icy path. I was terrified but I could feel her strength and confidence begin to surge through me as she held me firmly, pulling us out to dance our way the thirty yards to the door. When we stopped at the steps to the entrance, I was utterly drained but elated.

The meeting with the Minister was not so exciting. We sat at a long table in his office with views down towards the Baltic. I remember a line of those Soviet-style bottles of mineral water, the ones with strange-looking pond stuff floating in the bottom. I always did my best to be polite, but I always tried to avoid the mineral water if I could. And, if not, I'd just take a few sips from my glass, so as not to disturb what was at the bottom. I made my arguments in favour of verisimilitude with Lia heroically translating. But I think it would have just been a step too far for a newly independent State to risk 'ruining' one of their significant works of art. They'd be cautious about laying themselves open to Russian charges of ineptitude.

The Minister was very kind and complimentary about my work. Perhaps as an olive-branch, he said we should have a word on the way out with his assistant who would arrange us a meeting with the Head of the National Archives. The latter had been briefed about the addition of the priest and was intrigued by it.

A week later, Lia and I found ourselves in a small room in the Old Library with another friendly but slightly older middle-aged man in another grey suit. He asked me to repeat what he'd already heard, just to be sure of it. He sat there nodding as Lia interpreted my account. When I'd finished, he took a long drink of his mineral water, bottom and all, and said he'd like to tell us a story. He didn't know if it was relevant to our discovery but that we might be interested to hear it nonetheless.

In short, the Master of Hamburg's Dance had only survived at all because of the brave actions of one man. In the Reformation when the Protestant iconoclasts (if that's the right word) were vandalising the former Catholic churches, tearing the religious art from their walls and destroying it, the mob here had been frustrated by the priest of the church where I was working. To stop the mob from entering, he had locked himself inside the church and poured molten lead into the locks. By the time they arrived, they couldn't get in and, with other churches to wreck, they moved on. After a few days, the mob's passion had subsided, as one usually finds with mobs. Friends of the priest tried to rouse him but, getting no answer from inside the church, they had to organise fifteen strong men with a stout oak beam to use as a battering-ram to smash in the church door. Inside, they found the triumphs of medieval art still intact and the Death unscarred in its place on the walls. The priest, however, was a broken man. He was sitting by the altar, his head in his hands, rocking backwards and forwards mumbling something about being dragged against his will into the dance.

And that's how he remained for the forty years until he died. He was well looked-after with a small room in a townhouse in the Old City, with board and lodging and care provided by its grateful towns-people who now valued the Art they had tried to destroy. But he never regained his sanity. He just kept rambling about being dragged into the dance against his will. I have no explanation, said the Head of the National Archives, for who might have painted him into the Dance by the Master of Hamburg. Nor can I say when it was done. But you say the Science points to the late 16th Century.

Rachel paused and put down her page of notes. I must confess I have always been sad that I couldn't get them to agree to remove the priest from the Dance of Death. He was a brave man and he never deserved to belong there. I suppose all one can say is that the dead or the devils are neither grateful nor forgiving.

The only thing I should add is something that happened later in my time there. It's no secret to tell you that Lia and I became inseparable while I was there. I don't think I had ever been that happy before. It was certainly the turning-point in my life. She took me once to see her perform with a national dance troupe. Dancing was her great hobby. I remember when the line of young women came out onto the stage, all in long brightly-coloured national dress and white fur hats, Lia the third in the line, looking for all the world like some perfect but benign Snow Queen from the fairy tales. What struck me was not the costumes nor even Lia's smile. It was the shuffling noise their feet made as they came out onto the stage, when they were ready to begin their dance.

Chapter 4 - Ghosts in the Machine

I don't have a ghost story to tell you, I'm afraid, said Harrington. Cathedrals and haunted medieval paintings are not really my sort of thing. I enjoyed the three years I spent studying History with you all at College but, since then, I've had my feet firmly on the ground in the real world, running flat out most of the time. If you want to stay at the top in Business, you have no other choice.

Is it true, interrupted Richard suppressing a smile, that you made your first killing a year after College when you bought a tanker of frozen orange pulp while it was sailing from Latin America to Europe, and that you sold it on for vast profit before it docked?

Come now, Richard, said Abigail, let Harrington get on with his story.

That's right, Richard, said Harrington. For once suppress your VSO background. We know you're a teacher and a Liberal Democrat Councillor, but it's Firms like mine that bring in the money to yield the tax to fund the NHS.

Gentlemen! said Abigail.

Thank you, Abigail, I'll continue, said Harrington, straightening his tie.

As I say, this is not a ghost story, but it was terrifying while it lasted and we in the Firm never got to the bottom of it. It was shortly after we moved into our new London offices. You probably read the coverage when we moved in early last year. It was very high-profile. The architect won an award for the design and we were shown to be in the front rank as regards providing facilities for our staff, in-house creches, clinics. We also got a lot of praise for our work to help the local community by creating a public park, a rose garden beside our building. Think how much that land is worth where we are in the City!

I read somewhere, said Richard, that the rose garden is on top of an old cemetery and that was why you couldn't build on it.

Quiet, Richard, we all chimed in. Let Harrington tell his story.

And it was not just the rose garden, said Harrington. We agreed to stop the development project for six months to allow London University to carry out a complete archaeological rescue dig before we started on the foundations. In effect, they were digging with our Firm's money and everything they found has gone to the Museum of London.

Harrington paused to take a sip of his after-dinner malt whisky. Working on our HQ site, they found the corner of a Roman bathhouse with one good geometric mosaic as well as a Roman coin hoard which was probably buried there in the late 4th Century, long after the bathhouse had fallen into disuse. And then, of course, there was the usual range of burials under the rose garden site. One of them, though was out of the ordinary. It was a mass grave of jumbled bones. They identified at least eight skeletons, all men, which they dated to 1600-1700, but the skeletons, as well as being jumbled were incomplete. They'd also died by violence. There were so many knife-cuts that one of the archaeologists described them as "butchered bones". Unidentified casualties from the English Civil War. The Bishop of London led a small religious service when the bodies were re-interred.

But that's not what my story is about. I should say here that what I am going to tell you is not common knowledge and I'd be grateful if you would keep it within these four walls.

Even Abigail had to suppress a smile at this. We'd always liked Harrington and we'd known at College that you just had to aim off for his pomposity.

My story, said Harrington, is about cyber-crime. In fact, it's about one of the most sustained and determined attacks my Firm has ever experienced. And not just my Firm. It went far wider in the City than just us.

It started on a Sunday. I was head of Research at the time. For us, Research is a loose term which covers a lot of territory; Due Diligence, Commercial Intelligence, Strategic Risk Assessment, all that and more. Anyway, it was our Cyber Security people who rang me up. The Board wanted me and some of the other Division Heads in immediately with no reasons given over the phone.

There were about a dozen of us around the President's long table, all wearing our casual clothes. We'd all dropped everything to get there. Jennifer, the Chief Finance Director, had her two-year old on her lap. Our creche doesn't open on Sundays. Those who'd already been briefed looked ashen and that helped brace the rest of us for what was to come. Jennifer's two-year-old was the only one who looked cheerful as he sucked at his organic rusk. The President turned it over straight away to the Head of the Cyber Team.

In short, said our Cyber expert, over the last three hours we've been subjected to a lightning storm of sophisticated, varied and fast-moving attacks. They are ongoing. At first, we thought it was a case of malfunctioning algorithms, but after the first few minutes we realised we had a much bigger problem. These were malware attacks and of a sustained intensity and range that neither I nor any of my team have ever seen. Whoever it is has been deploying the works against us. Trojan horses, root kits, key loggers, man-in-the-browser, botnet attacks, phishing and ransomware but without anyone asking for the ransom. We've been countering with the machine learning algorithms we have. Some of the attacks have used server-side polymorphism.

What does this all mean in layman's language, asked the President?

I can best describe these attacks, said our Cyber expert, as a huge tidal surge trying to smash through our dams to destroy us. Our counter measures are like having 30,000 small Dutch boys out there, each one of them with his finger in a hole in the dam. We are just about surviving.

And who have you spoken to outside, asked the President? Are we in this alone?

I've spoken to the National Cyber Security Agency (NACSA). They are giving us all the help they can, but they are being very tight-lipped about the extent of these attacks.

I think that's one for you, said the President, turning to me. Can you get that man in your Due Diligence team to talk to his old friends? It would be useful to know if our competitors are up against the wall as well. And who does the government think is attacking us, criminals or State actors?

The rest of the meeting was taken up with planning for what I might call a Doomsday Scenario. We agreed on the work we all had to do overnight to be ready to brief our clients and chief investors when, as seemed possible, the malware attackers released all their data and corrupted and distorted all their and our financial transactions. What on Earth would we be able to say to them?

But by nightfall, the Cyber Team were reporting a falling away in the attacks. It was as though the black hat attackers, whoever they were, had decided to leave us in peace. Indeed, nothing happened to us for the next few days. The one event, so to speak, was a Police raid on the office of a National Trust property North of Hampstead to confiscate their computers, following a tip-off from GCHQ. The Police went in mob-handed with armed officers and dog teams which proved to me that the malware attacks had been directed at significant infrastructure targets, not just us. The Police raid must have shocked or intrigued all the old age pensioners on their day out in that National Trust tea-room.

The range of the Sunday attacks was confirmed by my colleague in Due Diligence. He was ex Intelligence Service and recruited for his ability to plug into his old contacts when we needed it. He was a rather austere fellow. A man of few words with me. But people who'd worked closely with him said he did have a sense of humour. It was all a question of whether he trusted you and your ability to deliver, they said. Anyway, he earned his money on the Monday. The Sunday attacks had apparently hit all our main competitors in the City, as well as the Stock Exchange and other financial institutions. The Bank of England had also come under sustained attack, but its defences were more robust than any of ours.

And so there we were, licking our wounds, so to speak, counting our blessings and very thankful we had not had to go into the Doomsday briefings for our clients and investors. It would have been the end of us, if we had. No more in-house creches, clinics or Christmas bonuses. Nothing at all, in fact.

Which is why we felt it even harder when the full force of the second wave of malware attacks hit us on the Wednesday morning. And this time round, I confess that some of our little Dutch boys were blown back from the dam by the full force of the water. Our Investment and Lending arm was particularly badly hit. The malware began to trigger false transactions with massive sums being chalked up to client accounts. Personal financial data of key investors began to disappear from our screens and we had no idea where it had gone. The strange thing, which made it even worse, I guess, was that we didn't receive a single ransomware demand for payment. If we'd had a demand for £6,000,000 in Bitcoin then we would have at least known that there was a way out if we'd had to take it. But we were being subjected to ruthless and determined attacks in complete silence.

The President was supportive in a grim-faced way and showed the right signs of leadership, but even he was getting fairly terse down the phone to the Head of the Cyber Team and to me and the Due Diligence Team. Things became worse mid-morning when the Cyber Team revealed that some of the attacks were being launched from the Chief Finance Director's personal lap-top and we had to suspend her and ask her to leave the building just to be on the safe side.

My Due Diligence guy was reporting that our competitors and some of the financial institutions were also in meltdown. The Stock Exchange was paralysed by rogue transactions. Small investors with a £2,000 portfolio of investments in a couple of FTSE 100 firms were now bidding to buy 30% of the shares of major Oil Companies, and their bids were being approved. The Stock Exchange had no choice but to cease all trading for the day. You probably remember that and the "software failure" it was ascribed to in the Media.

And this time round the Bank of England was also suffering. Four members of the Bank's Prudential Regulation Committee had resigned, run away more like it, by lunchtime. They didn't know what to do in these unexpected circumstances and they just couldn't take the pressure. Luckily for the Bank, there was a woman on the Committee who'd worked for a few years as a mental health nurse before she qualified as a Chartered Accountant and ended up in banking. She had more experience of the real world and had the grit to hold the rest of the Committee together.

The one positive thing my Due Diligence guy was picking up was that the attacks were confined to Britain and to London.

However, we could see the extreme level of the Wednesday attacks and the threat the City was under by the surge of support we were getting from NACSA. GCHQ had clearly pulled out all the stops and had also taken all the help they could from their foreign partners. Late on Wednesday evening our Cyber Team were delivered a fix by NACSA. We didn't know whether it came from GCHQ directly, from the Americans, from other partners or, indeed, from some reformed former black hat hacker sitting in his bedroom in Barnsley. Wherever it came from, it put an end to these sustained and determined malware attacks.

We were able to pick up the broken pieces, repair the damage, brief our clients and customers as necessary and breathe a great sigh of relief. We learnt afterwards, through my Due Diligence guy's contacts, that the City of London had only survived as an ongoing concern due to the vintage of the malware attacks. They were all based on malware that had been developed a year before and were thus fixable. The reason they nearly destroyed us was the determination and sheer ruthless way in which they were deployed. And the supreme manoeuvrability of those carrying out the attacks. GCHQ apparently described the attacks as "wildfire". They had never seen attacks carried out with

such rigour and without any apparent aim other than to destroy. No ransom was ever requested and no perpetrator was ever identified. All in all, we were lucky to get through it.

So not a ghost story as such, said Harrington, more a tale of ghosts in the machine. But I should be very grateful if you wouldn't pass it on. We need to keep up the reputation of the City of London more than ever now, if Britain is going to continue to generate the income it needs to pay for our Health and Schools and other Social Services.

We sat there in silence for a while until Richard lent forward from the sofa where he was sitting.

Your new building, he said, it's in Upper Thames Street, isn't it? I was thinking of your dead bodies, your "butchered bones" in the rose garden.

Oh, come on, said Harrington, we are talking about malware not 17th Century skeletons.

Well, said Richard, it's just that your rose garden is on the site of the old churchyard of All Hallows the Great, long since demolished. And I was thinking of Cromwell's head.

Cromwell's head? said Abigail.

Yes, he was dug up at the Restoration when he and other Roundheads had their corpses hung, drawn and quartered and their skulls put up on display. It took a long time but eventually Cromwell's skull found its way home to his friends at his old Cambridge College, where it remains today safely buried, held securely and respected. I was thinking of this because All Hallows was one of the main churches used by the Fifth Monarchists.

I can see you never went to Professor Wilkinson's lectures when you were at College, said Richard, looking at Harrington's expression of bewilderment. I know Wilkinson was viewed as an eccentric but his lectures on the radical religious groups of the 1650s were a highlight for me. The Ranters, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Muggletonians, the Fifth Monarchists, some of whom survive today albeit in different forms.

I liked Professor Wilkinson, said Richard. At a time when everyone was starting to see History through modern eyes, 'The Diggers as Proto-Marxists', 'The Socio-economic Factors behind the English Civil War', Wilkinson stuck to the old belief that "the past was another country". If you wanted to understand the Ranters or the Fifth Monarchists, then you had to put yourself in their shoes and see things through their eyes, not ours.

And the Fifth Monarchists, of course, were the ones who took their millenarian radicalism to the most extreme. One of their leading figures, Major General Thomas Harrison, who had a house in Highgate, was hung, drawn and quartered alive at the Restoration, as a regicide. Which was why, on a Sunday in January 1661, 40 or 50 Fifth Monarchists, led by a wine-cooper called Thomas Venner, put on their helmets and breastplates and picked up their swords in a chapel in the City of London and stormed out to capture St Paul's Cathedral, to destroy the existing order and to pave the way for the Fifth Monarchy when Jesus would come down to rule on earth.

Under a banner with the motto, "The Quarters Upon the Gates" in memory of Harrison and the other Roundheads, the Fifth Monarchists fought off an attack by the Trained Bands (I suppose the Police you'd call it in modern language), before retiring North during the night to bivouac up in in Ken Wood. They stayed up there for a couple of days before storming back into the City of London on the Wednesday morning. And this time it was all-out war. Contemporary witnesses describe the Fifth Monarchists as well-armed, well-disciplined and manoeuvring around the City with great rapidity "like wildfire".

They first appeared in Threadneedle Street where they routed the Trained Bands on guard there. They then made their way via College Hill and Cheapside to Wood Street where they repulsed an attack by King Charles II's Life Guards. "It is Jesus who leads us," shouted Thomas Venner.

But under continued attacks by the Life Guards and Trained Bands, the Fifth Monarchists had to fall back. Small groups of them then held out for as long as they could in buildings in the City. About ten of them made their last stand in The Blue Anchor Inn near the Postern. The Life Guards had to climb up the neighbouring building and tear off the tiles from the Inn roof so they could fire down on them. The Fifth Monarchists fought to the death. They were offered quarter but refused it. The only ones who were taken alive were those who were too badly wounded to stand.

The survivors were tried and the majority, sixteen of them, sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. Only three sought for mercy. The rest were drawn on hurdles to Tyburn, which was just as well since they too badly wounded to stand. Venner's deputy, Roger Hodgkins, a button-seller, called down vengeance from Heaven on the Crown, the judges and the City of London as he was dragged away to be hung and quartered. Like Cromwell, their heads and quartered bodies were put up on display as a warning.

I just wonder, said Richard, whether it was like Cromwell's skull. Did the Fifth Monarchists' supporters manage to collect some of those butchered bones and inter them in their churchyard at All Hallows? I know this is all just coincidence and I am not suggesting anything more than that. But if you were a Fifth Monarchist now, who would you attack? The Crown and the judges no longer preserve their same influence. And you wouldn't go looking for a seat of power in our current government, would you? But the City of London, the financial institutions and the multinational finance companies based there, well that might be something of interest to the Fifth Monarchists, if they still wanted to overturn the existing order.

But where, in Hell's name, would the Fifth Monarchists have discovered malware, expostulated Harrison.

Perhaps in Hell, I said. If you'd spent 350 years in Heaven, it must get pretty boring, just that ethereal music over the tannoy all day. You'd speak to newcomers, find out what had been going on in the world, learn what you could. And in Hell, too, I am sure there'd be a small, determined group of resisters who would club together despite the torture to share the latest knowledge in making their plans to escape. And if anyone did have the sheer determination needed to escape from Hell then, from what Richard's been saying, I guess the Fifth Monarchists would be top of the list.

Chapter 5 - Mr Westgrove

Our reunion dinner the following year found us in the small dining-room of a Derbyshire rectory. Stephen was the vicar there and he'd invited us all to stay for the weekend. We'd arrived in dribs and drabs from Friday night to Saturday morning, depending on how important we were or on how much we wanted to get away. We'd been treated to a guided tour of the plague village of Eyam and then of Little John's grave (for the Robin Hood enthusiasts), while the more adventurous amongst us had followed Stephen on a quick scramble on the Dales to end up on a high, scarred hillside where we'd walked over and admired a depression in the barren ground which could well have been the remains of an old Roman quarry. We'd already had more fresh air than most of us got in a month.

The Roman quarry had been the best part for me. Standing high-up on that bare hillside, imagining how very bleak it would be in the wind and rain, it was a rare chance to be where Nature was once again elemental, to be back in a world that had been home to our ancestors. A world of hill-forts and track-ways and clean open air. A place of hard living where few would have survived beyond their thirties.

Not a problem that we'd had to face that weekend. Stephen's wife, Claire, had cooked us a huge pot of cassoulet, followed by pear tart and cream. With the bottles of red wine all drunk, we felt quite smug and at peace with the world as we sat round the table with our coffees and Armagnac.

I imagine that you think because I'm a clergyman, said Stephen, that I'll have some special insight to offer you on the spiritual world, that it's a small step from administering to people's souls to their demons and that I must have travelled in a world where you have never been. Sadly, I must confess that I have never seen a ghost or a spirit or a demon. I was once asked to perform an exorcism but, luckily for me, it coincided with my move to another parish and I escaped having to perform a service that would have been difficult for me to carry out with conviction. It fell to my successor to make that leap back to the Middle Ages and I can't say I'm sorry that I missed it.

But that exorcism does take me back to the story I shall tell you. For although I do not believe in ghosts, I once knew a man who had met them, indeed had made a study of them. He was a man I much admired in a strange sort of way. I suppose you could say the exorcism was for him and, had I been forced to carry it out, I would have done so and would have put the best face on it that I could, for his sake and in his memory.

I was still single when I was first ordained and my dream was to be sent to an inner-city Mission, somewhere where I could roll up my sleeves and try to help where that help was truly needed. It was a shock, therefore, when they sent me to a parish in Surrey. It seemed an odd choice for them to make. You'd have thought they'd have sent someone with a family. But it was to a small stockbroker town I was sent, a town beneath the North Downs and still surrounded by green fields. A town for commuters, but where the locals could still remember when there had been a dairy farm by the church and when the cows were driven through the town twice a day on their way to the fields and back again. A practise that had been stopped because of complaints by the new commuter generation who objected to the halting of traffic and to the cow-pats on the tarmac.

I threw myself at this respectable safe Home Counties parish as though it had been a deprived area in an inner city or a disaster zone in the Third World. But there were no immediate problems to tackle, no mountain that had to be climbed. It was more a question of a daily and weekly routine, punctuated every so often by the death of an elderly resident or the sickness of a child. I think they must have been puzzled in those first few months as I rushed around like some sort of latter-day crusader. But I am sure they just shook their heads and smiled and waited for the slow pace of their world to subsume me.

It was only after those first few months that I got to know Mr Westgrove. He was a milkman and much-liked not just for his cheerfulness but for his side-line. For what marked him out from his colleagues was not just that he was still unmarried in his late fifties, but the brass plaque fixed to the gate-post of his cottage. A plaque which was lovingly polished by Mr Westgrove himself and which read, 'W.H.Westgrove, HERBALIST, Pneumatoid Arthritis and Rheumatism cured, Mon & Thurs, 6.30-8.30pm.' I remember mentioning this to the town Doctor who, surprisingly, spoke highly of Mr Westgrove.

Oh, Mr Westgrove is very useful to me, said the Doctor. He is a good herbalist. There's no quackery or black magic about him. Everything he knows comes from Gerrard and Culpeper. He's a sympathetic listener and his cures do help people. He charges next to nothing and they love him for it. But he's also a good psychologist. He knows when to give the hypochondriacs some plain syrup to calm them. And he can also tell when his patients have something seriously wrong, which is when he'll pass them on to me, whatever their hang-ups about Doctors and hospitals. Just as I'll pass them to you, Vicar, when there's nothing more that Science can do. Mr Westgrove's a great help to me. He frees up my Surgery from the worriers with nothing wrong and from those with the minor ailments that he and Culpeper can cure. He's also very well-read, said the Doctor, and a demon at Scrabble.

Which is how I got to know Mr Westgrove who invited me round one Friday evening to play Scrabble after I'd consulted him with an old knee injury from College rugby. He'd prescribed me camomile flower oil and it worked, and he laughed when I'd looked so surprised.

Mr Westgrove was a very methodical man. Every Friday evening, he'd record the scores of our games in a special notebook and it was he who always won. He had all the herbalist's vocabulary from Culpeper which I'd never heard of, words such as lohoch and electuary. But the main reason was that he was just phenomenally well-read. Those were the days when small Public Libraries were heaving with books and when you could fill out a form and order what they didn't have from some central store. Mr Westgrove had been a regular at the Library with his orders every Saturday morning and his knowledge was much broader and usually much deeper than mine.

He seemed never happier than when talking about herbalism. Culpeper is my Bible, he said, even if I don't share his belief that it's the individual planets which govern all plants. I'll just skip the bit on 'government', Venus, Mercury and the like, and move straight to where Culpeper describes the 'virtues' of a plant. And, like Culpeper, I follow Dr Reason and Dr Experience. I make notes of all the treatments I use and of the results. You have to be guided by reason and learn from experience. That applies to herbalism as much as to anything else in life.

His cottage garden was full of his useful plants. Even the damask roses, he explained, had their medicinal properties. His one regret with sticking to useful plants was that he'd never grown chrysanthemums, one of his late mother's favourites. He'd grow them when he retired, he said. Though it wasn't clear whether he meant as a milkman or a herbalist.

So the two of us muddled along quite well together with our Friday Scrabble sessions, drawn together by the fact that we didn't quite fit in that pleasant commuter town. Both of us were respected in the community but both of us were fish-out-of-water, single without family. And both of us had our baggage-train of learning to drag behind us, Mr Westgrove's perhaps more useful than mine.

And I would never have guessed there was another side to Mr Westgrove had I not mentioned, one Friday evening, that I'd heard a local rumour about a ghost that was said to haunt the lane out of town towards the dairy farm where he worked. He smiled as I described the place where the lane ran past the last houses and then crossed the stream before running uphill for a hundred yards through a sort of shaded hollow, high banks of earth on each side, tall trees growing on them, their branches reaching out to form a canopy over the road. An unusual and gloomy place where the trapped cold air hit your face with a sudden chill. On one side, there were rhododendrons clinging to the steep bank. On the other, there was a mass of huge exposed tree roots, gnarled and worn and scarred, from the tall trees that covered the lane. More than once, I'd been told, cars at night had crashed into those huge bare roots, swerving, their drivers claimed, to avoid a woman in the road. Although my own view was that it was probably due to the alcohol, given that they were driving home from the Pub out past the fields.

Oh, the headless woman, snorted Mr Westgrove. And will you meet anyone who's actually seen her? No you won't. And I've always wondered what they are supposed to do with their heads, those headless ghosts. I mean, take this woman, has she got a head? Has she mislaid it somewhere? If she's got a head, what does she do with it? Carry it tucked under one arm, hold it up repeatedly like some footballer brandishing a trophy, or does she walk towards you holding it in her outstretched hands beseeching you to kiss its lips? The whole thing's just ridiculous.

I can see you don't believe in ghosts, I said.

On the contrary, said Mr Westgrove, I have seen hundreds of them. I have had a lifetime's experience recording each encounter and analysing them, which is why I feel so strongly when the ignorant prattle on about this so-called headless woman. Only the ignorant would ever assume that ghosts were terrifying or threatening. How many times have you met a mad axeman, Vicar? Why should ghosts be any different?

Seeing me sitting there speechless, Mr Westgrove smiled and went over to the sideboard. He opened the wooden doors and took out a pile of solid black ring-binders. My 'ledgers', he said.

Opening Volume One, he described for me his first meeting with ghosts. It was late one Sunday evening, he said. I was out in the Bluebell Woods, searching for figwort. The dog-walkers had all gone home and I had the woods to myself, or so I thought. I was working my way slowly through the trees when I became aware of them. A feeble grey crowd of wraiths, softly keening to themselves, desperate and dithering, wanting to approach me but too afraid to do so, as forlorn and empty as they had been in life, like a wet mist or a damp cloth on your face, beseeching me with their greyness, as if failure was at any time attractive. I could see they were harmless so I walked right through them. They parted for me like a flock of sheep in a rain-soaked field. So that's ghosts, I thought to myself.

Over the months that followed, Mr Westgrove took me through his 'ledgers'. He'd made a study of ghosts, was an expert in the field and was proud of it. He had a gift, it seemed, for noticing them, for observing what most of us could not see. With the passing of the years he'd acquired quite a knowledge of them. He knew their ways and their limitations. They weren't all as timid and feeble as that first crowd he'd met in the wood. Some of them were like robins when you're digging in the garden. They'd come right up to you, glad of your company. Then, of course, there were the haughty ones, stand-offish and arrogant, expecting you to approach them, with the requisite awe and humility, as if they were Film Stars you might see in the street and go up to, ever so politely, for their autograph.

We're in the same line of business, he joked, the spiritual. But then this talent of mine to spot ghosts has never done me any good, not like my knowledge of herbs and simples. No, the ghosts are just a hobby. I record what I've seen in the same way some men stand on the platform at Clapham Junction Station train-spotting, writing down the numbers of railway carriages. I write down what I've seen but I don't suppose my ledgers would be of any use to anyone when I'm dead.

I asked him once what he'd learned from these ghosts. Nothing, he replied. They never speak. They are just there in the background, some of them whining. It seems very prosaic really, the world of ghosts. But then I've been reading Swedenborg recently. Do you know his first contact with the other world, with angels and the like, was when he saw a man sitting in the corner of a tavern dining-room? The man suddenly turned to Swedenborg and told him not to eat too much. The man turned out to be Christ, apparently, and it was Swedenborg's first brush with the unknown. You can't get much more matter-of-fact than that. Tell that to these people here with their melodramatic headless woman.

I must admit I tended not to press Mr Westgrove on his experiences with ghosts. I liked him and I got on with him and I enjoyed his company over Friday Scrabble. As I say, he was well-read and interesting. I guess all of us know friends who have a quirk of some sort. You just skirt round it. And it was not as though Mr Westgrove would raise it himself. He'd seen ghosts, he'd known them and, although he recorded his knowledge, I think he found them pretty boring. There was nothing about them to interest him as there was with herbalism. They weren't useful in any way.

And so it was not ghosts I thought of a year later when I first noted a change in Mr Westgrove. He was clearly not well. He seemed to be nervous and easily-distracted. He still won every game at Scrabble but when he concentrated on reaching a high-score square, it would be with a word like 'fraught' or 'uncertain'. Gone were the days of the Culpeper vocabulary. I wondered at this but then Dr Reason told me that this was Scrabble not a Ouija board. Mr Westgrove was choosing the words. They weren't messages from some other world.

I raised my worries with the Doctor. I remember waiting in his Surgery for the last patient to leave. It was a deliberately cheerful room with a sunlit oil-painting of an English holiday beach scene on one wall and brightly-coloured copies of 'The Huckleberry Hound Comic' and 'Look and Learn' magazine on the coffee-table to help keep the children's minds off their illnesses or their treatment. The Doctor nodded when I described Mr Westgrove's symptoms but he said he'd examined him and that there was nothing wrong with his heart that he could see. He wondered whether it was anxiety, some external worry that was inducing these 'symptoms'. But then Mr Westgrove had always been too practical. He was not someone who would worry himself into an early grave.

I must admit I was still worried and, when I got the chance, I had a quiet word with the manager of the Dairy. He agreed he'd noticed a change in Mr Westgrove. He was uncharacteristically jumpy. He'd take things the wrong way. He'd never snapped at his colleagues before. He'd arrive back at the Dairy in a cold sweat, grey in the face. They all wondered if he had heart problems.

I was wondering how I might raise my concerns as tactfully as I could when Mr Westgrove himself touched on his problems at one of our Friday evening sessions. He looked up from the Scrabble board and asked me, out of the blue, whether I had ever had doubts in my faith. Did I ever fear that I might have got it all wrong, that my beliefs had been misguided or false?

It was a rhetorical question because he carried on without waiting for me to reply. He was in his late fifties, he said, and he was wondering for the first time in his life whether he might have missed something in how he saw the world and understood it. He was wondering if there was something blindingly obvious that might have escaped him. You build up a body of knowledge, he said, based on your experience. The more you know, the more you understand. At least, that's how it had always seemed to him. But there were times, he added, when you could sense that something was coming, something which you would have to face on your own, as you did with all the big things in life.

I didn't know whether he was talking about his herbalism or his 'ledgers', his encounters with ghosts. In either case, I didn't know what to say. How can anyone in their mid-twenties talk about Life with a capital 'L' without sounding pompous? So I turned the question back on him by asking what Culpeper would have said.

Mr Westgrove looked at me sadly. I don't think Culpeper ever reached the point where Dr Experience outstripped Dr Reason, he said. I don't know how to explain it, he added. It's as though there is a great weight bearing down on me. The pressure leaves me short of breath and anxious. It's as though something malign is sucking the oxygen from my lungs, something evil that's determined to leave me lifeless.

I made all the sympathetic noises about overwork and stress and the need for a holiday. He'd never mentioned that he'd ever had one. He nodded and smiled but I could see that he wasn't really listening, that his mind was far away.

The following week I tried to find out what I could about the headless woman in the lane to the Dairy, in the gloomy stretch between the high banks which Mr Westgrove would have to pass twice a day. I spoke to a lot of the older people but all I got was the same gossip. A headless woman that haunted the hollowed lane, causing accidents through her malevolence. Some said that she'd been murdered there several centuries before but no-one knew the detail or could explain how she'd lost her head. Just as no-one I spoke to had ever seen her, though they all claimed they knew someone who had.

I then tried the Library to see if any folk-tale had been recorded. I should tell you that the assistant librarian there was a beautiful young woman with long brown hair. She had a gorgeous figure. 'Willowy' is the word, I guess. I remember her to this day.

Stephen glanced across at his wife, Claire, and grinned.

It's where Stephen and I first met, she said smiling. We have poor Mr Westgrove to thank for that. I and my colleagues tried to discover something about the headless woman, something that might help. The senior librarian remembered having seen a reference to her in a self-published pamphlet that had come out thirty or forty years before. The pamphlet, by an amateur local historian, long-since deceased, had referred to an earlier book on Surrey folk-lore. We found that book but there was no reference to the headless woman. We never tracked down a copy of the pamphlet. That's the problem with the self-published ones. They are a labour of love, vanity mostly, but when they do contain some nugget of interest, you can never find them. They don't make it into libraries and they don't survive.

The climax, when it came, was a few weeks later, continued Stephen. They found the milk-float abandoned at an angle in broad daylight on that stretch of lane between the high banks. Mr Westgrove was pressed up against the tree roots, as though he was trying to climb them to safety. The terrible expression on his face was one that I shall never forget. It reminded me of those texts we had to translate for our Classics A Levels. The life-destroying stare of the head of Medusa. The writhing snakes around her head.

The Doctor examined him and made the only judgement he could. Mr Westgrove had died of a massive heart-attack. It was death by natural causes.

What can I say? My experience has all been with questions of the soul, the spirit within. The external spiritual world of ghosts and demons is beyond my ken. It's something I would have to leave to Swedenborg and Mr Westgrove. No ghost has ever approached me whining in the woods.

The Doctor and I did take a look round Mr Westgrove's cottage before the house-clearance people went in. His only relative was a second-cousin in Australia. The proceeds from the cottage and contents would be sent out to him there. There are two things I remember about Mr Westgrove's cottage. The first was the bonfire patch at the bottom of the back-garden. He'd been burning things recently and I could see a few charred plastic scraps and the metal rings from Mr Westgrove's 'ledgers'.

The other thing was this. And Stephen went over to the bookcase and came back with a large, early 19th Century leather-bound book. It's his copy of Culpeper, he said. He'd left it on his dining-room table with a note, bequeathing it to me as a gift "should anything happen to him", in memory of the Friday evenings he'd so much enjoyed.

We leafed through the Culpeper which was heavily annotated in neat pencil. In two or three places a passage had been side-lined in heavy ugly red crayon. There was one right at the beginning of the book marking out Amara Dulcis, also known as Mortal, Felon-wort and Bitter-sweet. Amongst its other properties, it was "excellently good to remove witchcraft in men and beasts."

The locals insisted I carry out a service of exorcism in the lane between the high banks, said Stephen. But I, or rather we, were moved to another parish and the exorcism was left to my successor.

No, I can't say that I believe in ghosts, said Stephen, but I often wonder what it was that Mr Westgrove saw.

Chapter 6 - The Ghosts Within

I'm like Stephen, said Abigail. I can't say I really understand the world of external ghosts. I regret to say I've never seen a spirit or a demon. My life has been quite humdrum and normal. My experiences as a lawyer and as a judge have kept me rooted in the real world and in the problems we all make for ourselves. I've always seen sorting out those problems as my contribution. And, as for the Law, well I've never seen it as some free-standing and independent framework, some perfect model against which you compare the facts of the case and from which you devise some solution. To me, the Law has been more like a border to our ragged lives. It helps us to make sense of all the strangeness and error we fall into.

The Law is like a plain wooden frame around one of those 18th or 19th Century samplers sewn by young girls. Many of those samplers can be charming and attractive, but they are always the work of an amateur. They are all so very human, with their misspellings and their mistakes, which is why I love them so much. My husband bought me my first sampler from an antique shop twenty years ago. It's early 19th Century and has a wonderful embroidered text. "Labour for learning before you grow old/ For learning is better than silver or gold." I have a collection of a dozen or more now, but that one is still my favourite .

All samplers are exercises in stitch-work, with the alphabet sewn in capital and small letters, the lines of numbers from 1 through 9 to zero, the names and ages of their creators. But some are quite beautiful with houses and trees, the Garden of Eden, a favourite pet. And all of them are set off by their plain wooden frames. Without the frame, they would appear tatty and crude. I've enjoyed my career in the Law. I've enjoyed being the plain and boring frame that helps order and set off the lives of all those clients or 'cases' that I've dealt with.

Christ, I'm getting pompous! It's time I started to talk of someone apart from myself and of issues far-removed from the legal profession, you'll be relieved to hear. As I say, I have no experience of ghosts or demons. All I can tell you is a story about the ghosts within.

When my husband died five years ago, he'd already been ill for more than six years. Some of you will know that he suffered from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a degenerative disease of the brain. I am not going to depress you now with the details of what it's like to see someone you love destroyed by such an illness. All I'll say is that, during his illness, there were sudden moments of absolute lucidity when he would return to us and when I'd catch a glimpse of the person I'd married. I remember once we were walking in the country, my husband completely silent as usual, when he suddenly raised his head to look at the amazing sky and he began to speak clearly and with precision for a few sentences about the cirrus clouds above us, their specific properties and their defining characteristics. And then the curtain came down again. The ghost of his former self was gone and I was back with the silence.

Sadly, my husband was not the first person I'd seen to die from FTD. My uncle suffered from the same disease and died in his early sixties. When I was a girl, I used to visit my aunt and uncle for a couple of weeks each Summer at their house with its beautiful garden in Sussex, which they'd bought when they came back from Washington, which turned out to be his last overseas posting in the Foreign Service.

My parents sent me down there to Sussex every year for the fresh air and I loved it. When I was small, I'd always wanted a pony, but ponies don't go with a life in West London. My aunt and uncle's neighbours had a farm and being allowed to ride the horses there was as close as I ever got to my dream.

My story, though, is from a time when my uncle was already very ill. He could still walk and get around the house and garden unaided, but it was as though his mind had left us for some other world for much of the time. Although there were still occasions when he could speak clearly and rationally and at length.

I remember the Summer when I was twelve years old. My aunt used to walk my uncle down to his greenhouse at the bottom of the garden in the morning and leave him there till lunch. She'd gone round the greenhouse and carefully removed anything that might do him harm. Where there had been several pairs of scissors hanging from nails in the wooden frame, she'd replaced them with small canvas bags filled with pieces of green garden-twine which she'd cut to different lengths. They served my uncle's purpose and he didn't seem to notice the difference. He could still go on with growing his flowers from seed and potting and re-potting them on.

His speciality were plants from the Himalayas and Western China. Himalayan gingers, blue poppies, Tibetan tree peonies. He'd sit me down on the deckchair in the greenhouse and talk me through the Latin names of the Roscoea and Meconopsis in his small pots, all waiting for the day when they would be big enough to be planted outside. He treated me as an adult and an equal which was probably why I liked him so much and enjoyed listening to him talk all morning in the greenhouse and more than forgave him his lapses into total silence.

It was perhaps because of his illness or because I was only a twelve year-old girl that he started to talk to me about his work in the Foreign Service. I had the impression these were things he hadn't spoken about before and that it was almost as though he was talking aloud to himself, forgetting that he had an audience. Some of what he spoke about, I understood. A lot of it I remember. It was a different and memorable world he was painting.

Abby, he said to me one day, don't believe all the nonsense they'll tell you about ghouls and ghosts and monsters. Take it from me, the only ghosts you'll ever need to worry about are the ghosts within, the ones you carry around inside you. The ghosts of your mistakes and the ghosts of those things you should have done, but never did. Those are the only ghosts you need to watch out for. And it is always the latter that are the most terrifying and haunting.

For, despite our best efforts, we shall all of us make mistakes and those mistakes will have consequences. But you can't allow such mistakes to grind you down and torment you. If you've done your best and failed, that's just human and it will happen to nearly all of us. You can't undo those mistakes. The best you can do is to learn from them. You will carry them always as a ghost within but, believe me, they are not the most terrifying. If you are a half-decent human being, the kind that would only commit evil by accident, then the chances are that you will only ever be haunted by the things you haven't done. By those failures to act. By standing motionless when you should have taken one step forward.

I sat and listened and it was as though he was delivering a lecture. But, instead of an auditorium, there was just the greenhouse and this twelve year-old girl.

When we make mistakes, he said, remember that we are not alone, that there have been worse mistakes which, if we are lucky, we shall have had the good fortune to have learnt from. There are many times when we have been deceived by our enemies. You only have to think of The Trust or Das Englandspiel. We fail so often to read our enemy's play-book, never suspecting that most of them will repeat what's worked for them before. We, of course, go to great lengths to craft something new every time we take action, because we always over-estimate our enemy's intelligence. They don't make the same mistake with us.

At this point, my aunt popped her head round the greenhouse door to walk us back for lunch, asking us if we'd had a good time re-potting. My uncle smiled and we went back up to the house for our cheese salad.

The next morning when his mind eventually switched from the blue poppies to the past, he returned to the subject of the ghosts within.

I had a friend and colleague once, he said, who worked with me when I was attached to Special Branch in Cyprus. It was during the EOKA Rebellion. I was based in Nicosia and my friend was down in Limassol. It was the time of 'The Murder Mile' when off-duty British soldiers were being assassinated in Ledra Street in Nicosia. It was often the same MO, a young man with a handgun walking quickly up and firing a few rounds before running off. We eventually caught Nikos Sampson. He's the gunman that everyone remembers, because of the part he later played in the 1974 Coup against Archbishop Makarios, but there were others.

My friend in Limassol got a walk-in, an informant, a nineteen year-old Greek-Cypriot girl. It turned out her brother was one of the gunmen. They lived in Limassol and he carried out his attacks in Ledra Street at Saturday lunchtime, when everyone was out before the shops shut for the weekend. He'd be driven up to Nicosia the night before in a truck owned by an EOKA colleague on its way to deliver fresh fruit for the market.

The girl was sick of the bloodshed. She'd seen a photo in the papers of the wife and children of a British Sergeant her brother had assassinated. She was also scared for her brother. She wanted him arrested and sent to prison where he'd be safe. She didn't want him to carry on till he was killed in a shoot-out. The problem for us, she said, was that we'd have to arrest him with the gun in his hand. The way it worked was that a boy on a bicycle would hand her brother the gun in a side-street moments before her brother turned into Ledra Street for his attack. The best she could do would be to warn us on the day of the attack.

The plan my friend agreed was simple. If her brother had left for Nicosia on a Friday night, then she would walk along a stretch of the promenade of the Limassol sea-front between 0930-1030 on the Saturday morning. My friend would be sitting half-way back inside one of the sea-front Cafes from where he could see her pass. That would be enough for him to phone through to me in Nicosia.

But the first time she gave her signal, he missed her. He was there the whole time and fifteen minutes either side but he just didn't see her. A British soldier was shot dead in Ledra Street around 1pm. It was my friend's fault. The girl had walked by, but with her sister and her sister's small daughter. For some reason he couldn't explain, my friend had been fixated on looking for a girl on her own. She was in tears when she met him as agreed a few days later. In tears and angry.

The next time she walked along the front, three weeks later, my friend saw her. He phoned me with the warning and her brother was arrested as he turned into Ledra Street with the gun in his hand. He served a few years in prison and was released with the rest at Independence.

My friend, though, was destroyed by his failure. It haunted him to death, eating away at his insides. He died an alcoholic. But I tell you, Abby, that is not the worst sort of ghost to carry around inside you.

At which point, my aunt again interrupted us and we filed up the garden for lunch.

It rained heavily that afternoon and my aunt decided to confine us to the house in case we caught our deaths in a chilly greenhouse. My uncle and I sat in his study, in silence for most of the time. At one point, though, he got up and took a small silver box from the mantelpiece. He told me that it was a 19th Century 'Gau', a Tibetan reliquary. The silver front was decorated with hand-punched letters in Tibetan script. He explained what each one meant, their holy properties, but I don't remember them now. There was a small glass window in the front, behind which was the model of a Goddess. I do remember that. It was Tara, the Goddess of Compassion who protects from fear. My uncle then took out a sheet of plain paper and laid it on his desk. Placing the Gau face-down on the paper, he carefully prized open the metal back. The Gau was full of what looked like brown and yellow dust, some of which spilled out onto the paper. A pilgrim would have acquired this Gau at some special monastery or shrine, my uncle said. Dried flowers and plants from the holy site would have been carried back home in the Gau by the pilgrim as a permanent link to the shrine.

The next morning, back in the greenhouse, my uncle showed me a small pot of what looked like grass. It was a special project which he was very proud of. He'd taken some of the dust from the Gau and planted it. Over the years he'd tried to grow it on everything, on blotting paper and on every compost mix that he knew. He'd eventually managed to get this one small plant to germinate.

It looks like grass, I said.

That's probably what it is, my uncle replied. But it's grass from a Free Tibet, from a time when the Dalai Lama ruled Tibet from Lhasa, a time when lamas rode around the country carrying ritual phurbas, or daggers, which they would use to exorcise demons. I have a phurba in my study. It's a blunt blade for ritual or 'medicinal' use only and it's decorated with skulls and horses' heads and Naga dragons spitting snakes, all symbols of power. I'd show it to you but I think your aunt has hidden it, fearing I might use it do myself harm. He laughed and then added, I'm not mad, you know, Abby.

I asked my aunt about the phurba. She said she couldn't remember where it had got to but she said my uncle had always been fascinated by Tibet. It had started when he was a boy at Rugby School. In the 1920s, a Minister in the Tibetan government had decided that they ought to try and learn what was useful from Western Science and technology. As part of that programme, they sent a dozen Tibetan boys to Rugby where your uncle became best friends with one of them. And then, of course, we were at the High Commission in New Delhi for four years, my aunt said, where Tibet was one of your uncle's responsibilities.

In my last few days there that Summer, my uncle emerged from one of his silences as we sat in his greenhouse and began to talk about his time in Delhi, in the years after Indian Independence.

I think I've told you, Abby, that the worst of the ghosts within are those that belong to the things you failed to do. They are far more haunting and terrible in my experience than the ghosts of your mistakes. They linger and grow. They become stronger each year. They were born with your failure to act and they will live with you and dog you till you die.

We were in Delhi during the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 and that's when the ghosts inside me first appeared. When the Chinese army marched into Kham in eastern Tibet in October, the Tibetans fought back. But a regional governor defected to the Chinese, signed a treaty with them and the Tibetan resistance fell away. Sitting in the High Commission in Delhi, I was still getting reports from Kham, passed hand-to-hand along my loose network of contacts in Tibet. It often took a long time for those reports to make their journey, but I suspect I was getting the news from Kham as quickly as the Tibetan government in Lhasa.

The next steps were at the United Nations where El Salvador sponsored a motion by the Tibetan government protesting at the Chinese invasion. And that was the time we should have acted. The Chinese had a foothold in Eastern Tibet but international pressure might still have pushed them back. We, the British, had a duty to help. We'd invaded Tibet ourselves in 1904. After that we became, if not Tibet's protecting power, then at least her guiding power in the first half of the 20th Century, to the extent they needed a guide. We had a responsibility to speak up and to act. But what did we do? Nothing. We abstained at the UN vote.

I remember arguing with my boss at the High Commission. But he was old-school. It's not our job, he said. We just provide the facts. Policy we leave to the men in pin-stripe trousers, to the diplomats and the politicians.

I couldn't let it rest. I wrote letters to London. I wrote a paper for the High Commissioner, which my boss hated me for. More importantly, I lobbied every contact I had in the Indian government, but they didn't want to rock the boat with China, having bilateral problems of their own.

I should have done more, Abby. I failed to act. I should have resigned and gone public. I should have campaigned for Tibet. I knew what was happening in Kham and I felt a personal duty to the Tibetans even if my government did not. My boss told me I'd gone native. For him that was the worst abuse he could deliver.

The Tibetan resistance later formed an army, Chushi Gangdruk or 'Four Rivers, Six Mountains', the traditional name for Kham. But the Chinese continued to consolidate their grip. In 1959, Chushi Gangdruk had to help the Dalai Lama to flee into India, which was when the real war began. But Chushi Gangdruk were a medieval army that moved in thousands with their families, their horses and their yaks. They wouldn't take advice to split up into smaller groups and switch to guerrilla warfare. Once the Chinese had built roads and air-strips throughout Tibet, Chushi Gangdruk were straffed from the air, hunted down and destroyed. Some of them are still resisting from exile, based in Mustang and supported by the Americans, but they are restricted to small cross-border raids. The resistance now is mostly spiritual, as the Dalai Lama and his exiled government keep the ideas and the culture and the inspiration of Tibet alive.

I'm sorry if I'm boring you, Abby, he said, but this is so very important. You must always act when you can. It's your duty as a human being. If you don't, then you'll be haunted and dragged down by the ghosts within. They will torment you till you die. You'll dream of them when you sleep and you'll wake to find them sitting by your bed. They are like a coldness that never leaves you, however close you draw to the fire. They are a reminder that everything you later do or say is irrelevant. They have caught you and they will never let you go. Whatever you do in life, Abby, remember this. Remember your uncle. Please.

He then released his tight grip on the arms of his chair and lapsed back into silence.

The next Summer I visited them, my uncle never spoke at all. He was still taken down to his greenhouse each morning, but he just sat there rocking himself backwards and forwards in his old wooden chair, clutching the small pot of Tibetan grass, now dried up and dead. I would sit with him and talk of ponies and riding and of how much I enjoyed talking to him about his plants and about Tibet and his experiences, but there wasn't a flicker of recognition.

I next went down there in the Winter for his funeral. When we were standing around his open grave, my aunt stepped forward with that little pot of dried grass, tipping the soil into his grave "to remind him of the things he had loved". I gasped so loudly that my mother looked down at me. I managed to turn my gasp into a sob and my mother smiled and squeezed my hand. I think that was the worst part for me, seeing that soil tipped onto his coffin, knowing that death would be no border to his ragged life and that his demons would follow him into the grave.

Chapter 7 - A Sound of Singing

Our annual reunion the next year found us, unexpectedly, back in a private dining-room at Rules restaurant in Maiden Lane. In sad circumstances, for the first of our number had died, the first of us who'd arrived at that small College to study History over forty years before. Harrington, the richest of us all, had fallen suddenly ill and had died within six months from a brain tumour. Like everything about him, Harrington's will was exuberant, loud and larger than life. He'd left a small fortune to the University to set up a Chair in Business Studies to be named after him, and to our old College to establish a number of scholarships in Economics and in Business Studies for UK and foreign students. Nothing for History. He'd put his money where his mouth had been, in his 'real world'.

He also left a strange bequest of £30,000 to Abigail, "because she's the most reliable of you lot." Under the terms of the bequest, she was to use the money to book and pay for dinner at Rules in a private room for our annual reunions, "for as long as we lasted, or until the money ran out." He'd signed off the bequest, "Cheers!"

We'd done justice to him in his honour by dining and drinking well, and we now sat with our coffees and port ready for our traditional pair of ghost stories to round off the evening.

I imagine Harrington would have said there's too much bloody History in the story I'm about to tell you, said Richard. So out of respect to him, I'll try and keep the History part short and move on quickly to the 'real world', although it won't be Harrington's world. But he might have enjoyed this all the same.

As you know, I did try to be an academic. I stuck with the College after graduation and signed up for a PhD in Byzantine History. Initially, it was going to be on some aspect of the monophysite and Melchite schism in the 6th and 7th Centuries, but I soon got distracted and started looking at Byzantium's links to the world beyond its borders. As when the Empress Theodora sent her priest Julianos south from Egypt to convert the African Kings of Nubia, creating that lost outpost of Byzantine culture in Africa which survived for 700 years cut off from the Empire by the Arab invasion of Egypt. An African Byzantine world epitomised by the beauty of those wall-paintings from their sand-buried cathedral at Faras. God, The Virgin and the Saints surrounded by Greek inscriptions, their hands resting in protection on the shoulders of the Nubian Kings and dignitaries. Saints and Kings all dressed alike in the ornate and jewelled robes of the Byzantine Court. Perhaps the fabulous forgotten world of Prester John.

But, sadly, after a year I had to accept that Academia was probably not for me. I think the problem with Byzantine History was that I soon got sick of the brutality of the Imperial family. All those blindings of deposed Emperors, the murders of siblings. It seemed more Ottoman that Greek.

What I was better suited to, of course, was aid work, mainly in Africa. It's that which kept me happily occupied for over thirty years before I came back and switched to teaching. Like a fair number of people of my generation in the Aid world, I got into it through the side door, by answering a small advert in 'The Guardian' seeking English-language teachers for secondary schools in the Sudan. You turned up at the Sudanese Embassy Cultural Office in London and, as far as I could see, if you had a degree of any shape or form you were accepted and taken on for a year for a salary of about £1,500 pa. I could never work out where the Sudanese Government got the funds for that salary, although there was a rumour that the whole scheme was Saudi-funded.

So with twenty others and after a false-start in London for a few days when our plane was cancelled (at that time, they'd only fly when full), we found ourselves in the Arrivals Hall at Khartoum in front of a dusty and non-working carousel, our luggage tipped out in a pile on the ground. It was my first introduction to the world I would love.

After a couple of weeks in Khartoum and a geographical lottery of job-allocations, I was on an old turbo-prop aircraft flying North to Nubia. The plane was flown by a British expat veteran of The Battle of Britain, complete with a handlebar moustache. He clearly loved flying and I imagine Sudan Airways Internal was the last company on earth which would still employ him at his age.

When the plane landed and I bounced the few miles across the desert to the small town in the back of a Toyota pick-up truck, that was the last of the technological world for me for the next year. The world which had been waiting for me there was one of peace and of silence, where time for most people was still measured in seasons.

I think it was the silence that had the most profound effect on me at first. The town had a market-place and a few hundred yards of tarmacked roads, but they quickly petered out into the desert. When flying in from Khartoum, you could see that Nubia in those days was really just the thin line of the Nile with a narrow green strip of cultivation each side. The rest was just the desert. And the desert belonged to silence. It couldn't fail but to heighten your senses.

As did the intense heat, the brilliant blue of the sky, the star-studded blackness each night. There were no half-measures. What mattered there were the simple things. Well-water in a chipped enamel bowl, the shade of a mud-brick wall, the warmth of a blanket at night. So much of my former life had become simply irrelevant.

Where I was lucky was in having landed by chance in the Sudan at the start of a working life in Africa. The Sudanese were interested and friendly and curiously tolerant of a young foreigner who had no discernible skills beyond the ability to speak English. And their own wealth was something I could only begin to unlock as I learnt more Arabic, writing words in a notebook as I heard them, learning just enough to get by. Enough to sit and talk to a farmer about his crops, about how he was planting a wind-break of trees so it would be ready for the future when his son would run the farm.

If I don't talk much about my work as a teacher in the Sudan, it's because I don't think it was of much value for the Sudanese. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing and I made it up as I went along. I remember searching through the school storeroom at the beginning of the year to see what books there were to use. After a quick count, and bearing in mind that there were fifty or more boys in each class, it came down to a toss-up between two battered twenty year-old editions of 'Edited Versions of the Classics Produced for African schools'. It was either Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility' or 'Moby Dick'. I opted for the latter, even though the biggest fish the boys had seen was a foot long and came from the Nile. I didn't think they would be able to relate to Jane Austen's concerns. I think the most useful thing I did in the whole year was to hand my two copies of English-Arabic dictionaries to the two brightest boys when I left. Most of the others, I just tried to keep amused. I am sorry to say that nearly all the education came my way.

And I learnt a lot there which helped me in my later work with Aid and Development. I remember travelling in the East of the Sudan during the school holidays and meeting a man who'd been in politics in Khartoum. He pulled up his jellabiya to show me the knife scars on his stomach to prove it. Sick of the infighting, he'd switched to work for the Co-operative Movement. His job was to sort out problems, to get things done. One of the examples he gave was how the Government, flush with foreign funding, had built a huge dam in one of the regions. The only downside was that the water catchment area was the only cultivatable land in the area. He'd worked out a compromise with a system of walls to keep some of that land above water for farming. I learnt a lot in the Sudan.

But using that knowledge would be for the future. This story is about my time in that small Sudanese town and about the heightening of senses. For if you live in a place where you feel Time has stopped, then Past and Present will tend to lose their meanings. And as your senses become heightened, you begin to be aware that the Past is all around you, pressing in on the Present whenever it can. Not threatening or intimidating, but slow and calm and as natural as the flow of the great river, without which Nubia would be only sand.

It began with the most obvious places, like the graveyard in the dunes out of town where bleached bones stuck up from shallow graves in the sand, with scraps of shroud forced up and in view, free again to blow with the breeze.

And then there were those things left abandoned in the desert itself. The Egyptian temple in the sands across the river, two lines of stone with hieroglyphs showing as clean and precise as when first cut. Or the traction engine, perfect and un-rusted, still standing where it had been abandoned fifty years before, memorial to some uncompleted project to build an artificial lake and canal way out in the desert to increase the cultivatable land.

And the much smaller things, like the hurricane-lamp, its glass all gone, lying broken in the rubbish on the dunes. And, in the centre of town, those two metal rings fixed into the ground on a patch of weed-covered wasteland. Each ring marked 'Slazenger'. The last vestiges of a tennis-court and all that remained of the Colonial District Commissioner's Residence. And I swore sometimes that I could even hear the ripple of laughter and English voices from some long-forgotten tennis afternoon.

But then, of course, there were the living ghosts. The way the sand was whipped up by the wind to form shapes that hung in air, like men running forwards, their arms outstretched, as if desperate to greet you. And the story the local people told of a Russian woman who'd come to work as an engineer, but who'd married a Sudanese husband and now lived in purdah in a village up-river. A living ghost whom no-one saw.

But it was the sounds that began to haunt me. For it was my sense of hearing that became most acute, as though I could listen in on wavelengths that I'd never imagined had existed. And whether it was the wind in the graveyard, or the old man at the school who came out each evening to lay the dust by sweeping an old water-can across the yard, I began to hear an undercurrent beneath their sounds. It was a sad sound of quiet singing which I could hear hidden in the wind or lost in the soft splash of the water-drops hitting the ground.

And I came to look forward to this undercurrent of sound which became a hallmark of my time in Nubia. For I took it to be some softly murmured Byzantine liturgy from the cathedrals and churches of those Nubian Kings, as though 700 years of History had not been lost and as if their music, which we could only imagine, was still playing as this undercurrent to our lives.

I heard it beneath the Sufi chant at a festival and beneath the plaintive Sudanese pop music from the cassettes in the truck-drivers cabs, the endless chorus of "Ya Habibi" (My Love). I heard it when travelling, sitting high on a hill above the town at Sinkat while waiting 36 hours for the next train. Sitting there next to a small memorial cairn to Douglas Newbold "Who loved these hills and these people," listening to the sing-song cry of the small boy in the town below, selling twigs for teeth-cleaning at five-pence a time.

I heard it beneath the roar of the Third Cataract, that crashing rush of water which was itself a Hymn to Transience. I heard it beneath the ululation of the women, whether in fear in the landing-craft crossing the Nile when the water slapped over the sides, or in pleasure at the wedding ceremony when their Pigeon Dance began. It was the one time I saw the women unveil their heads, uncovering their black oiled hair glistening as they danced, swaying from side to side with their arms outstretched, the tension amongst the young men crackling through the crowd like swift-running flames.

And I came to love that undercurrent of sound which I would listen out for, wondering whether I was the only one there who knew it for what it was, this long-lost liturgy of the Nubian Byzantine Church. I could imagine it sung in their last years at Faras, when the Cathedral walls were almost engulfed by the rising sand. When the congregation were forced to brick up the windows and tunnel down to the main door so they could enter to pray, in fear of the pressure of sand against the walls. A congregation determined to persevere, as befits a lost outpost of Byzantine culture, as heroic as the last Palaeologus Emperor seizing his sword and running out into the front-line as the Turks breached the walls at Byzantium.

For someone who's spent most of his life doing practical work, Richard laughed, I confess I have always been an incurable romantic.

And I would have left the Sudan with my romance intact if it hadn't been for a bad bout of illness. I used to catch dysentery there almost every other week and I lost two stone in my time there. But I remember once it was worse than usual and I'd been off-work for a day or two. The morning I was on my feet again, it was a Friday, my one free day, and I walked down to the river at dawn. I was still pale from the dysentery. Tall and thin, I could probably have passed for a ghost myself, sitting there beneath the palm trees in the grey light of dawn, staring out at the empty river. I was hollowed out by the illness and I suspect my senses were raised as never before, or since.

Which is when I saw them, a succession of dhows sailing down-stream, sailing North towards Egypt. Dhows as I'd seen so many times before. Except that these flew the white flags marked with the double-armed yellow cross of the Byzantine Christian Kings of Nubia. The dhows were filled with people, women and children mostly, and I could see they were Southerners. They were captured slaves from the South being sent to Egypt by the Nubian Kings. It was the annual tribute the Kings paid to the Arabs of Egypt, a tribute paid for hundreds of years to buy off the Arabs and prolong Christian Nubia's freedom.

And I heard the sound that came from the dhows, just a murmur of song, kept quiet so as not to provoke. This was the undercurrent of sound in all that I'd heard. Not a Byzantine liturgy or a lament for a lost Byzantine Nubian world. It was the soft singing of slaves.

Chapter 8 - The Final Page

Lance looked around the table at us, gave us one of his knowing smiles and began.

I suppose Joseph Stalin must hold the record for the production of ghosts, he said. I mean, there are others like Hitler and Ghengis Khan who have set industrial scale slaughter in motion, but it can only be Stalin who really stacked up the numbers all on his own, sitting in his office each night signing off the lists to be shot, deciding on the target quotas for killings which would be sent out to each Republic and region of the Soviet Union. How many were executed in those two years of Terror in the late 1930s? 800,000 wasn't it? That's a lot of ghosts. It makes Robespierre look very second-rate.

I once saw an exhibition of photographs, he continued, black-and-white mug-shots taken from the KGB files at the time. Men and women of all ages and backgrounds, pulled off the street and shot within days to fill the quotas and ensure the policy of liquidation was a success. I remember one was a young hairdresser in Moscow. She'd once done the hair of the wife of the Japanese Embassy Second Secretary. The file said she was convicted without trial charged with espionage for Japan. Her photo shows pure innocence and incomprehension. And then there was the photo of an elderly civil servant. He'd been an Army Officer in WWI. He just looked very tired and puzzled.

There's something about any individual who can calmly sign an order to kill. And you have to wonder don't you? Are God and the world asleep? How do these people get to live out their natural lives? You'd think at the very least they would choke to death on a fish-bone. Sadly, though, the laws of chance seem to act independently from any sense of natural justice. Some poor child who's never harmed anyone will get the fish-bone.

This is all pretty grim, Lance, I said. Is it leading anywhere? Are we going to get a ghost story?

My apologies, said Lance, I was just trying to get myself in the right frame of mind for the macabre. Can I say, though, before I start that I've always been grateful that you invite me to these reunions. It can't be often that Abigail, a Supreme Court Judge, sits down for a fine meal with someone who's done time. Ten years I've spent in prison, six and four. The second, though shorter, was the worse. You just get sick of it. It's the boredom, the pettiness of it all. I don't suppose any of you have been excited to find an Agatha Christie on the weekly book trolley? I shared a cell with a London Cypriot once and I tried to get him to teach me Greek, but his Greek was just dialect he'd learnt from his grandmother. I think the family, second generation, spoke English at home. "Pame spiti" seemed to be the main ingredient. "Let's go home." Not an option he or I had at the time. So I never got to learn Greek. I didn't learn much in prison, except patience.

What I do have in common with you all is that I really enjoyed studying History at College, particularly the Russian History paper. And I enjoyed finding out what I was capable of. I never knew I could learn a foreign language before. It had never occurred to me or to my Secondary School teachers, but at College I started Russian-language classes and surprised myself by how well I did. The Russian language lessons certainly helped me with the Russian History paper which was my only First.

But for a scholarship boy like me, from a school that had never sent anyone to Cambridge before, the three years at College were mainly my chance to see how the other half lived. I guess at best you thought I was a wide-boy. I certainly turned bad pretty soon after graduation. But then you could say I was just following in the family tradition. My Dad had a small swallow tattooed on each hand.

My Dad had never given up. He died in prison, of old age. I think it was the memory of that which set me thinking about retirement when I was still in my early fifties. I didn't want to end up the same way as my Dad. So I started to think about one last job, big enough to fund me for the rest of my life. I'd decided that this big job would be the final page to my career of crime and, God knows, it was about time my career of crime began to pay. I think I could have earnt more as a Tube driver than I ever did as a criminal. But, as I say, I was following in the family tradition.

My dream was to 'earn' enough from one last job for me to buy a flat somewhere within walking distance of a great library. A flat in one of those white, modern Brunswick Square blocks would have suited me down to the ground. I've always kept my Reader's Card for British Library, renewing it when I got out of prison. A Brunswick Square flat would have been in nice easy reach of the British Library. And I've always liked those white futuristic blocks with their balconies and wide plate-glass windows.

And, if I'd had to go on the run abroad somewhere, then I'd have had a choice. I learnt Spanish after I left College, mainly because I lived with a Spanish girl for a few years in London. On the run, I wouldn't have wanted the Costa Del Sol, too much like Little England in the sun. No, I'd have probably opted for Buenos Aires, somewhere in walking distance of Borges' Library.

I've always thought I should do some proper research, you see. I thought I'd like to write a book about a Civil War. I wasn't fussed which. Russian, Spanish or English would have done equally well. The true horror of war and conflict is too often disguised, ameliorated you could say, by the notion that you're fighting some alien 'other'. With a Civil War, there's no such obfuscation. You're killing your own kith and kin. I've always wanted to study a Civil War properly. I've always thought Civil Wars are the best judge of a nation's character. Yes, some serious research is what I had in mind when I'd done my last big job.

I think it's the planning part of crime that I've always enjoyed the best. Having been born with a brain, I thought I might as well use it. Getting stuck in to the complex planning, the targeting, that was always my forte and I'd built up quite a reputation in the right sort of circles. It's why I never found it difficult to find good people willing to come in with me when they knew I was onto a new job. For this last one, though, I decided to keep it simple and just work as a pair. That made it an easy choice for me. I'd worked off-and-on with Trevor for years and his Dad worked with mine. It was the perfect team for what I had in mind.

What neither I nor Trevor had, of course, was the capital. I don't know how much you know about London crime. You'd be surprised how much it resembles the business world nowadays. If Harrington was here, I'm sure he'd recognise the scene I'm about to paint for you. A smart office in the West End with front-of-office staff that looked as though they'd walked straight out of a modelling agency and who sounded as though they'd been to Cheltenham Ladies College. Probably had, some of them. Once you were into the inner sanctum, there were three middle aged men in Saville Row suits ready to weigh up your business proposal.

On the other side of the long conference table sat me and Trevor. Trevor was in his cleanest jeans and best black leather jacket. I was in a suit. The one I'm wearing now. Trevor left the talking to me and I made the pitch. I was asking for £20,000 in cash as my 'start-up funds'. Once the job was done, they'd get £200,000 back from me and Trevor. They didn't ask or even want to know the details of the job we were planning. They just needed reassurance there would be no violence, which they correctly identified as a greater risk. But they knew my track-record and Trevor's. We were what Dixon of Dock Green would have called 'honest criminals'.

So we walked out of their office and past the Cheltenham ladies with £20,000 in used tens in a couple of expanding black briefcases. All very proper, we must have looked. Our backers trusted us and, if the job didn't succeed, well they could probably live with a few such failures and still reap a handsome tax-free return on their investments year-on-year. On the rare occasion that a team tried to do a runner after a successful job and not pay, then these investors could always hire outside contractors, with power-tools and sawn-off shotguns, to make an example of the offenders. But they knew they could trust us. We'd always been a class act, me and Trevor.

And what was this job, you ask, this job which was to fund my early retirement and historical research into Civil Wars? It was a bank branch in central London, at the bottom of Marsham Street, down near where it runs into Herrick Street. At that time, there was a nondescript-looking bank branch on the corner there. What made it special for me was that I'd heard a few years before on the grapevine that this innocent-looking branch office had a basement where they stored the bullion for all branches of that bank in South-East England. It was that which made it a target worth planning for.

Always being a touch old-fashioned, "retro" they'd call me now, I decided that we'd tunnel into it. I spent a few days pacing out distances between the bank and neighbouring buildings. Quite frankly, there was no real risk of anyone getting suspicious. You can get away with a great deal as long as you're dressed smartly. The only risk was that they'd pore over the CCTV after the job was finished, when they would identify me as suspicious. So for that I wore light disguise. In my case, that simply meant growing a beard and wearing a pair of glasses with plain glass. I could simply return to being clean-shaven when I began my new life in Brunswick Square or Buenos Aires.

A hundred yards from where I judged the bank-vault to be, there was a small, block-like brick-built shop. It had been built when they put up the estate of flats. There were several of these shops, all the same size, all with the same brickwork as the surrounding blocks of flats. This one was one of those shoe-repair and key-cutting businesses, run out of a single room. I started to get my keys cut there and had all four pairs of my shoes repaired. I got chatting to the Afghan owner about his children and about his son and daughter and about his ambition to get them both into College. His plan was to give up the lease on this shop and take on another somewhere in London where the State Secondary schools had a better reputation. He wanted to give his children the chance they'd need.

To cut a long story short, I nodded vigorously, said I'd just come into an inheritance, that I wanted to settle down having spent twenty years doing small jobs in Africa and that I could offer him £12,000 to buy the remaining three months of his six-month lease. The deal was done and I handed over £12,000 from our expanding briefcases.

So there we were, with our own shop for three months. It was a bit like 'The Red-Headed League', but if a plan's worked once, then why not repeat it? Neither Trevor nor I knew anything about shoe-repairs but, luckily, locks had always been one of Trevor's specialities. So he took over the key-cutting and we were able to make it look as though we were a going concern. Although we did close a good few hours earlier each day than the Afghan, to give us more time for our real work.

The only problem for me was that I started to have minor health problems. I'd always been fine up till then, but I seemed to be developing tinnitus. There was always this scraping noise in my ear-drums. It was proof, had I needed it, that I'd been right to look for this one last job. It was high-time I found the money I needed to buy a flat and settle down to some useful research before it was too late. None of us are going to live for ever, as poor Harrington has just proved.

We quickly got into a routine. Mid-afternoon we'd shut up the shop and pull down the blinds. Behind the shop-room, there was a tiny kitchen and a store-room. The kitchen was six feet closer to the bank vault, so that's where we decided to dig. We kept it simple, doing most of the work by hand. Power-tools might be OK for contractor hit-men, but when you're trying not to disturb the neighbours, then working by hand is better. It took us one whole night to break our way through the kitchen floor and make a hole wide enough to start digging. Then there was the loose rubble base the shop was built on. That took another night.

The two main problems we faced were dumping the spoil and the risk of nosey or angry neighbours. On the first, we just filled up the store-room. That kept us going for about six or seven days. When it got too much for the store-room, then we had to close the shop. We spoke to our customers and put up a sign saying that we were closed for refurbishment but that we'd be reopening shortly. The advantage of closing was that we could work through the day and had prefect cover for the noise we were making. The downside was that the refurbishment seemed to be going on for too long when there was no sign of rubbish being taken out or of paint and cement sacks and new fittings being taken in.

We'd probably have been alright if it hadn't been for Mrs Armitage. She was a cantankerous old widow who lived on the ground-floor of the closest block. She'd come in and had some keys cut and come back and complained that they didn't work smoothly. Trevor had gone round to her flat and later told me there was nothing wrong with the keys he'd cut. She was just one of those lonely old people who liked to make a fuss, he said. Once we'd shut the shop, I'd spot her trying to peer in every time she passed by. I'd marked Mrs Armitage down as our likely Nemesis.

Mrs Armitage aside, we just pushed on as best we could with the digging. For me, the tinnitus was the real problem. The work I was doing with my spade underground didn't help. Any noise in the confined space of the tunnel would be amplified and make the sound in my ear-drums worse. I'd even hear the same scraping sounds whenever I woke during the night. The bloody noise was haunting me. I was beginning to worry that the tunnelling was getting to me, that sooner or later I'd just lose it.

It was funny because the tunnel itself was fine and Trevor didn't seem to have a problem. We'd stripped all the wood from the shelves in the shop and store-room to make struts and supports. It was just the noise in my ears which was insufferable.

I had to admit, though, that the digging was slow-going. We'd kept it up for twelve days but we didn't seem to be getting much nearer to the bank. We'd nearly used up all the spare space to dump the soil and Mrs Armitage had been round once banging on the door, shouting about the noise.

We can't keep this up, said Trevor.

Let's give it three more days, I said.

Trevor nodded and that was the end of our discussion. We'd never been ones for long conferences, Trevor and me. We'd worked together for years, as I said. We didn't need words. We were on the same wavelength, or so I thought.

We just kept digging. We'd take it in one-hour shifts, one digging, the other taking out the dirt. I think the digging was worse, never knowing how far you could risk carrying on before you needed to stop and laboriously wedge in some more struts. The temptation was always to cut corners and push on as far as you could. Being so tired didn't help.

I remember I was digging on our fourteenth day. My arms ached, I was gasping for breath in the confined, damp, stinking tunnel and all I could hear was the wretched scraping and scraping in my ears, deafening me. The tinnitus was just getting worse and worse. We'd given ourselves one more day but I didn't know if I'd even be able to last out that long. And it was at that point, as I gripped the pick head for the millionth time and rammed it into the wall of soil, that I broke through into emptiness. But it wasn't a bank vault and I wasn't alone.

For a filthy hand reached through the hole and then a head and a body. It was a man, covered in dirt, tears of joy running down his face, shouting at me in Russian, 'Bolshoi Spasiba', "Thank you, Thank you.' And then he was through the hole. He dropped the pick in his hand, gave me a broad grin and then bear-hugged me, shouting and laughing, clapping my back.

And then there was a sickening thump in the tunnels behind both of us and everything went black.

Trevor would never have managed to dig me out on his own but, as he was trying to, the Police kicked in the door of the shop, Mrs Armitage hopping from foot-to-foot behind them. Just as they were about to try the door, they'd heard the roar of the tunnel collapsing and they'd barged in. They were in time to help Trevor pull me out on my own. And so it was that Mrs Armitage, whom the Police had finally listened to, proved to be my salvation rather than my Nemesis.

That was my final job and it was curtains for my planned retirement. It would be neither Brunswick Square nor Buenos Aires. Instead, it was a seven-year sentence in an Open Prison. As I say, we'd never used violence in our careers, Trevor and me, and I think the judge was quite sorry for us. He probably gave us some extra marks for effort. All that digging.

There was a bit more technology in my second stretch in prison. Once a week I'd get a one-hour computer affairs lesson when we were allowed onto the internet. It was supposed to equip us for employment outside. I managed to do a bit of research for a few minutes each lesson, when the teacher was talking to one of the others. At that time, I wasn't interested in Civil Wars but in the man in the tunnel, grinning at me and slapping me on the back.

All I could find out in those internet sessions was about the old Millbank Prison which, in the 19th Century, covered most of the ground where the Tate Gallery and those red-brick Millbank Estate flats stand now. The North wall of the prison would have run along where my bank branch stood. The Prison started life as a model Penitentiary, but in the 1840s it became just a holding prison for convicts awaiting transportation. And in 1870 it became a military prison. It finally closed for business in the mid-1880s and was then pulled down. You can still see the red prison bricks because they were used to build the ground-floor walls of the Millbank Estate flats.

That was all I could learn in prison. When I was let out after four years of my seven year sentence, the first thing I did was to send a large bunch of flowers to Mrs Armitage. I signed the card 'From an Admirer.' I then went to the British Library to find my Russian tunnelling friend.

I found out that two members of the Russian terrorist group 'Narodnaya Volva', 'People's Will', had been arrested in London in Autumn 1880. They'd been part of a group of four sent to London to assassinate the Russian Ambassador. One of the Ambassador's previous posts had been Governor of Kiev where he'd overseen the executions of Narodnaya Volya members. The terrorist team in London were picked up during the planning stage, penetrated it is assumed by the Okhrana, the Tsar's Secret Police. Two of the terrorists managed to slip the net. The other two were jailed. Because they were terrorists, it was decided it would be safer to put them in the Millbank Military Prison.

Which was where the two started planning their escape. Security wasn't as good as it would be in a high-security prison nowadays. One of them spoke good English and he managed to get a few words with other prisoners when they were in the exercise yard. He learnt that there was a store-room up against the North wall and that, inside the store-room, there was a second room down some steps at the back. It was disused and the floor was just stamped earth.

I don't know how but they managed to break out of their cells one night, carrying the jug of water from each cell and the few scraps of food they'd managed to save up. They headed straight for the store-room, picked up the tools they needed and began to dig. Looked at logically, their plan was impossible. But desperate men don't stop at logic.

The brilliant part of their plan was that the guards assumed they'd made it over the huge walls somehow. Why would anyone break out of their cells to remain hidden away in prison? So while the manhunt continued outside, they just kept digging as hard as they could. They were lucky not to be disturbed by any visits to the store-room. Luck always plays its part. None of us can survive without it. But on the third day, their tunnel collapsed. One of them managed to fight his way out through the falling earth but he could do nothing for his friend who was further in. He ran for the guards for help but they took one look at the collapsed tunnel and decided it would be better just to leave it. The dead Russian was left where he was buried when the tunnel collapsed.

That's what I found out in the British Library, said Lance. The internet is great for instant facts about something you know little about, but it's still the great libraries that will help you dig deeper, so to speak.

I've always thought I was very lucky to get out of our tunnel alive. That job did indeed turn out to be the final page of my career. I was lucky when I got out to be offered a role on a course for ex-offenders, lecturing to school-children. 'Crime Doesn't Pay', that sort of thing. It helped set me on a different course. I get by now buying and selling small antiques, pre-Revolutionary Russian silver if I can get it, but anything will do. I rent a stall a couple of times a week at the London antique markets. I never got that flat in Brunswick Square, but I'm alright. I tried to get Trevor to help me with the antiques but he never could go straight. He's back inside now. I suppose I was lucky in having the gift of the gab. It allowed me to do these talks for school-children. I tell them about the tunnel and its collapse, but I don't mention the Russian in the tunnel. They'd think I was mad and I don't want to lose the money I get for the talks.

My 'tinnitus' was cured as soon as I was pulled from the tunnel. I've always wondered why Trevor could never hear the scraping noises. Perhaps my love of Russian History and the fact that I can speak Russian made me more susceptible.

The one thing more I ought to tell you is what the Russian was saying as he bear-hugged me, just before the tunnel came down. He was screaming with joy, shouting at me, "Skolka zeem, Skolka lyet!" Loosely translated, it means "It's been a Hell of a long time!"

Chapter 9 - The Consul from Tunis

It's interesting how so many of our stories seem to belong to our first few years after College, I said. Perhaps it was the excitement of finding ourselves suddenly launched into the real world after all those years in the rarefied atmosphere of Academia. Perhaps it was just because we were younger then. The colours always seem brighter and sharper when you're young, the experiences more heightened. We were also probably a lot more trusting back then, less sceptical. I wonder if that's what made us more susceptible to ghosts and strange phenomena. I wonder if I'd even recognise a ghost if I met one now.

But that's enough about aging, enough gloom and despondency. I shall tell you a story about when I myself was young and susceptible. It was in my first year after College, before I'd decided to switch to Archaeology and go back for a PhD. Like most of us, I needed to work to pay the rent, I wanted to travel, but I had no idea of what I would or could do in the long term. So I did what a lot of people did back then. I invested my last £200 in a one-week crash course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. The course was worthless. How could it not be for just £200? But my investment bought me a certificate I could show to prospective employers and my week's training did at least teach me the jargon, enough perhaps to convince prospective students that I knew what I was doing.

And it got me a job, on an initial six-month contract, at a Language Institute in a small quiet town on the Mediterranean coast in southern Spain. The Director was very kind. He seemed immensely impressed by my University, even if he hadn't heard of my College. The University name alone was kudos for him and his Institute. It was more than enough to get me in the door and to give me the benefit of the doubt.

I settled in fairly quickly. Whatever the work, there's something continental and civilised about working 8-12 in the morning and 6-8 in the evening. I managed to get most of my marking done between noon and 2pm, have a quick lunch and still have several hours off for Siesta. For in those days, the Siesta was still a set part of life in such towns. The whole place shut down. It was almost as though you could hear the inhabitants' quiet breathing. I could imagine my Director lying on his bed on a white cotton coverlet, no doubt in silk pyjamas, his cigarette carefully stubbed out in an ashtray on the bedside table, beside a half-filled glass and a carafe of water . And it was a simple step from that one scene to picture the whole town at rest on their beds, not so much sleeping as dormant, peaceful and out of this world, as if awaiting some act of magic to restore them.

Not being middle-aged myself, I only lasted a couple of afternoons of that before I had to take to wandering through the deserted streets after lunch, preferring to be part of life, however hushed and stilled that life might be.

I'd walk up to the small park on the hill, the gravelled paths all leading to the centre-piece, a circular stone basin now dried-up and dusty, with a statue in the middle of some solid-looking nymph, respectably dressed, who once would have poured water from her jug. But the fountain was turned off and there was no trickle of noise to disturb the parched parterres and the empty wooden benches.

Down in the town, everything seemed just as restrained. The shops were shuttered and there was no breeze to disturb the tattered bull-fight posters which were peeling from the stone walls. 'Stasis' is what I think one would have called it.

But on my second or third afternoon, I did eventually stumble across some vestiges of life. And it was in an unlikely place, in one of those 19th Century covered arcades of small shops. On the corner as you went in, there was an 'Ultramarinos', one of those old-fashioned looking stores selling coffee and spices, things which were once seen as exotic products from 'Overseas' in the days when the world for most people was still very small.

Inside the arcade everything was just as antique. The dusty stone floor had clearly been made to look like marble and it would have shined when it was clean and new. On either side there was a row of small, glass-fronted shops, their windows with much-worn gilt wooden frames. In their prime, they would have given the illusion of luxury. But now they just looked sad, like a Duchess after the Revolution, trying determinedly to cling on to a sense of privilege and aristocracy while being ignored by everyone around her.

In pride of place on one side was an old Stationery shop, so old and unsuccessful that some of its merchandise from past decades had now found a new role as decorations. It was one of those places where time had stood still. On one side wall of the window there were battered picture-frames crammed full of old postcards of Spanish beauties from long before the First World War. Guerrero, La Belle Otero, La Tortajada, actresses in long, low-cut dresses wearing improbably-large hats made of feathers. While the wall on the other side of the window had been completely papered with small chromolithograph cards depicting heroic scenes from the First World War, cards given away free by a Barcelona chocolate company and collected presumably by some former-owner's now long-dead son.

Opposite the Stationery shop there was the one oasis of life in the whole Siesta'd town, a small plain Coffee-shop with four or five tables inside and a couple of tiny metal tables for two outside on the dusty stone floor of the arcade. It was owned, as I discovered, by Mahfoud, a retired wrestler. He was originally from the Spanish Sahara and he appeared to cater for the waifs-and-strays from North Africa who'd found themselves living and working in this town. All men, they either had nowhere particular to go during Siesta or they preferred to sit out the few hours gossiping or falling into silence at Mahfoud's before they'd return to their jobs or to their families, if they had one.

I soon made it a habit to kill an hour or more each afternoon, sitting at one of the two outdoor tables with a small Spanish-English dictionary and a copy of a second-hand Spanish comic book I'd picked up on the market. Mahfoud would come over and comment encouragingly on my attempts to learn Spanish and he'd then chat for a bit between customers, mostly with sign-language. I learnt he'd been a wrestler the day he produced an old photograph from his wallet showing him at the height of his career when he'd been in the Spanish national team. He took me inside to show me the framed posters from his bouts on the walls, his Arab clientele all nodding approvingly.

It became a very pleasant routine, my afternoons at Mahfoud's I gradually began to build up a little basic Spanish with the help of the speech-bubbles in the comics. I even learnt some words of Arab greetings from Mahfoud and his clients, greetings which, however stilted, meant so much to all of us when I used them. I suppose it was proof that I was making an effort, that I was trying to climb over the wall between us.

It was the second week of my visits there that I first saw him. A tall, thin, well-dressed figure carrying a cane in his hand, ambling without purpose along the arcade, pausing to look into the shop-windows, smiling or leaning forwards on his cane to peer in at an object more closely. Grey-haired with a military bearing, what struck me first about him was that all his clothes were tailor-made. From his tan-coloured frock coat to his white trousers with straps under the instep, and with the silver pommel on his walking cane, he had gentleman written all over him. And it was odd, as he walked slowly along the arcade that neither Mahfoud nor the others in the Coffee-shop so much as glanced at him. The gentleman with the cane had clearly become as much of a fixture in their lives as the dusty Stationery shop and the 'Ultramarinos' store on the corner.

The odd thing was that he only seemed to appear once a week each Friday. All the same, he was a diversion of sorts in that quiet town and I'd look out for his arrival on Fridays and was happy when, on his fourth appearance, he briefly turned to me in passing and nodded. It was as if he'd let his guard down and I felt that we'd struck up an acquaintance. Although I imagined that, if he were some Spanish grandee, we might still have to wait until we'd been formally introduced.

So it came as an unexpected surprise the following week when he wandered across to my table and asked in polite and impeccable English if he might join me. I got up to shake his hand and quickly offered to get him a coffee as we sat down. He smiled and shook his head, thanking me with a slight wave of his hand.

But if you don't mind, he said, I would rather like to smoke one of these. And he took a plain and much-used silver cigarette case from his pocket, opening it to reveal a few hand-rolled Havana cigarillos and some loose matches. Putting a cigarillo between his lips, he took out a match and leant down to light it by striking it on the sole of his shoe. Settled back in the chair, he drew on the cigarillo and smiled.

It's my one weakness, he said. A nasty habit I picked up when I moved here to live with my daughter, when I retired. My daughter's quite strict with me, so I have to limit myself to one when I'm out on a Friday afternoon. It's my one luxury of the week.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, while he enjoyed his cigarillo and while I sipped at my long-cold coffee. When he'd finished his cigarillo and stubbed it out on the ground, I ventured to ask him how he'd known I was English. By the cut of your jib, he replied, smiling at me. It takes one to know one. He then gathered up his cane and rose to leave, shaking hands and thanking me for our conversation. As I watched him walk off along the arcade, I wondered what conversation he was referring to.

The following Friday I was amused to see that he didn't dawdle to peer into the shop windows but walked straight up to my table, shook hands and sat down. Once again he refused my offer of coffee and took out his silver cigarette case. But this time, before the ritual of lighting up, he reached across and shook my hand again. The name's Colonel Partington, he said. Formerly Her Majesty's Consul in Tunis. I introduced myself in turn and he said he was very glad to have met me. We then sat in silence for ten minutes while he smoked his cigarillo.

With the Colonel seeming to be a man of few words, I tried to get the conversation going by explaining what I was doing in southern Spain, describing my work as a teacher at the Institute.

He nodded at me and said that he envied me. I can't say I care much for retirement, he said. It's a kind of Limbo and certainly not something I would have chosen. I have always been an active man, you see. First in the Army and then, for more than thirty years, in the Consular Service. I have never been happy unless up and doing. And now look at me. I'm like a ship high-and-dry. He then slapped his thigh and laughed. What a load of poppycock I'm talking! But I must be off. My daughter will be expecting me. My apologies for boring you. So good to have had this chat.

I watched him as he strode away. There seemed to be more of a spring in his step this time. An eccentric Englishman, I thought, retired and at a loose end, happy to have a few words with a compatriot.

Over the next couple of Fridays, I began to realise just how reticent the Colonel was. He would never volunteer anything, seeming happy just to sit and smoke and listen to the sound of my voice. But when I did manage to get him talking, prompting him with some question that interested him, then he would talk freely and at length about his past and his career. For me, who had never been outside Europe at the time, it was fascinating to hear his stories of another world.

He'd been in Spain before, he said, during the War. But it wasn't clear to me which War he meant. Asked if he spoke Spanish, he said just a few words. He'd had an interpreter with him all the time during the War, a young Spanish boy who did all his translation for him. And now, in retirement, well, the truth was he'd lost the desire to learn new things. Don't look at me like that, he laughed. You'll probably end up the same way. Give it forty years.

But it was Tunis that really got him talking. He said he'd been Consul there for three decades, something I found hard to credit. I knew friends who'd gone into the Foreign Office and they were not planning on spending more than three years in any one place. It was part of the attraction of the job. But perhaps things were different in Colonel Partington's day? Or perhaps this English eccentric was just a fantasist, making it all up?

But, if he was making it all up, he clearly had a vivid imagination. He described the two-storey Arab town-house they'd lived in. It was built round an inner courtyard. The ground-floor was for the kitchens, the servants and the store-rooms. On the first floor was the Consul's office, their living quarters and a wide verandah with a view of the harbour and the sea. Many was the day he would stand up there with his telescope trying to identify the colours on a Western ship approaching the port. It was a red-letter day when a ship flying the Union Jack came into Tunis.

And yes, he did say 'they'. His wife and children would sometimes work their way into his reminiscences. His wife, it seemed, had often been sickly in Tunis. The heat there, he said, could wear down the best of people. It had got to her nerves, he said sadly. After they'd lived there several years, she suddenly took against sitting up on the verandah. They'd be up there during Siesta, his wife on a chaise longue, when she'd start and scream and point to the low parapet that marked the edge of the verandah. Lucy, Lucy, she would shout. She was convinced their small daughter Lucy, their first child, was about to topple over the parapet and fall into the street below. It was just the heat. For Lucy had been dead for five years by then, said the Colonel sadly. She had died of fever aged two in their first year in Tunis. She lies in the Protestant cemetery, the Colonel added, with her mother beside her now.

But the references to his family were few and far between. He was a professional man, devoted to his job, and it was the job that came first. Mostly he talked about the French. It seemed the French were his arch rivals in Tunis. Both Britain and France were keen to secure the overland trade routes to Central Africa. For that, they needed the help and the permission of the Bey of Tunis. That was my goal, said Partington, to secure dominance of those trade routes for Britain. That was the strategic reason why I was there, and it was for that that I worked so hard on the successive Beys and their advisers. Mine was a constant competition to wrong-foot and outwit the French. I should think my machinations against the French in Tunis probably took up two-thirds or more of my despatches back to London.

Trade in what, I asked? I suppose I was thinking of rare metals used in the nuclear and other high-tech industries.

Ivory, gold dust and ostrich feathers, replied the Colonel.

And is there money in ostrich feathers, I asked?

The Colonel looked incredulous. Ladies' hats, for God's sake, he replied. It's worth a fortune, the trade in ostrich feathers.

I confess that, at that point, I was beginning to doubt the Colonel's sanity. I was wondering if madman should be added to fantasist in my efforts to describe him.

So it was probably just as well for our friendship that work kept me away for a couple of Fridays. I had to run a series of mock exams to prepare the Institute's students for the real external exams they would have to take at the end of the term. So for two weeks I and my students worked through the Siestas, testing and retesting their knowledge and their exam technique.

When I next had a chance to go back to the Café on the first Monday afternoon I was free, I asked after 'the Englishman'. Mahfoud shook his head, adding that I was the only Englishman he knew. But he said he was glad to see me back and he brought me my usual coffee and small carafe of water without asking.

When the Colonel reappeared on Friday, I asked him about all the despatches he'd sent to London during the long years he'd been in Tunis. It must have been difficult keeping up a dialogue with your bosses at such a distance , I said, but I guessed that telegrams and the telephone would have helped.

The Colonel looked thoughtful for a moment and then shook his head. It's not for a government servant to criticise his superiors, he said sternly. You forget I'd been in the Army. My job was to obey and to get on with the orders I'd been given.

I could only assume from his reply that there had been many occasions when his despatches had gone unanswered. And I began to feel quite sorry for him, in a way. There he had been, a thoroughly professional and dutiful man, putting his work for his government before all else, determined to secure the best he could for his country. Yet, all the time, without the slightest inkling of how he might have been regarded by his superiors in London, without any proof, in fact, that they were reading, let alone considering, his lengthy despatches, or indeed valuing all his work in Tunis.

As the weeks went by, I found it was safer to keep the Colonel away from France and French "designs in North Africa", as he termed it. It only annoyed him and seemed to ruin his Friday afternoon smoke. Instead, I tried to steer him to what interested me, to life in Tunis and to local customs, to a vibrant and colourful world I had never known. He talked of his audiences with the Beys, whom I presumed still held some honorary position even after French rule and then Independence. He talked of his local staff and of his "dragoman", the young son of an Armenian trader who spoke six languages, Arabic and English included. It was this dragoman who went everywhere with the Colonel, explaining to him as best he could the world they were living in.

They are a very superstitious people, the Arabs, the Colonel said to me one afternoon. They are always seeing ghosts and djinns, imagining them, rather. In fact, they are liable to see ghosts around every corner. The locals said the ghosts were souls lost in Limbo, some such nonsense. I had a real problem once with the servants, he added. For some reason they took against going into one of our ground-floor store-rooms. It was a dark, dry place which was useful to keep terracotta jars of oil, sacks of dried beans and vegetables, chopped wood for the Winter. Oh yes, it can get very cold in an old Arab house in Tunis.

Anyway, they became scared to go in there, mumbling something about djinns. I asked my dragoman what it was all about. He said they claimed to see the ghost of a lady in there, a Faranji, a European. They wouldn't go near the store-room. Luckily, my doorman and gatekeeper was a big Sudanese fellow. He went into the store-room brandishing a large kitchen knife, saying no ghosts would scare him. When he came out alive, the others calmed down a bit. The dragoman arranged for a Sufi Dervish to come by the house and chant prayers in the store-room. That seemed to do the trick. We didn't have any problems after that. It's funny, really, my late wife had had that store-room cleared out at one point. She'd fitted it up with calico awnings and a day-bed with a small Arab side-table for her water jug. She used to sit out the worst of the Siesta there, after she'd got too scared up on the verandah where she was always imagining she was seeing our late daughter tumbling over the parapet. After my wife's death, we'd turned her Siesta room back into a store-room. As I say, I always preferred the verandah myself.

At the mention of his wife, I asked where they'd gone for their annual holidays, assuming that they took them. How often did they get back to England? It's funny you should mention that, the Colonel replied. We were there ten years before we got our first leave. I remember writing a letter to the Department. They came back quite quickly approving three-month's leave. We spent the Summer in Italy. It was a relief to my wife to get away from the heat, though I was champing at the bit to get back by the end. As I say, I've always been an active sort of fellow, never happier that when I'm doing something.

One afternoon, once we'd known each other a good few months, I ventured to ask the Colonel about why he'd left, about why he'd taken retirement. He looked uneasy and fiddled with his cigarillo case before replying.

I didn't decide to go, he said. I always wonder if it was because I'd stuck my neck out a bit too far the year before. I'd written to the Department suggesting, just suggesting, mind you, that perhaps I could be up for a knighthood, what with my thirty years of Service and my time in the Army before that. I never got a reply, but I did wonder whether I'd annoyed them with that.

And was that why you left, I asked?

No, said the Colonel, somewhat shiftily. It was that bloody incident with the French Consul. Excuse my French, he laughed.

The Colonel would not be drawn on this 'incident' but it seemed it was that which cost him his job.

I can't complain, he said. They asked me to leave and gave me a couple of months to get my affairs in order. My youngest daughter was by then married to a fine chap in the Service. He's the Vice Consul here. They very kindly gave me a berth for my retirement. I had nothing back in England and there was nowhere there I could have called home. Which is why you find me here, enjoying your company, annoying you with my cigar smoke each Friday. It's a habit I couldn't get out of, you see. Friday, the holy day, was the one day in Tunis no-one bothered me. I'd go for a stroll, take the air for a bit. Which is why you find me here on a Friday. I couldn't break the habit.

Asked what he did now during the rest of the week, he said he was reading about the Peninsular War. A lot of these fellows who write these books have got it completely wrong, you know, he said, slapping his thigh for emphasis.

I suppose I could have allowed this all to drift on for ever. The Colonel was clearly enjoying our Friday afternoon chats, as I was. It wasn't as though he was doing anyone any harm. On the contrary, you might argue that this was his punishment and that I should allow it to continue. Because for all his strengths, his devotion to duty and his selflessness, the faults were there for all but him to see. His complete inability to doubt or question his superiors, even when it was apparent to an outsider that there must have been times when they dismissed him as an eccentric and even occasions when they held him in contempt. And then, of course, there was his treatment of his poor wife and children. Oh, he undoubtedly loved them, would have done anything for them. It was just that he failed to see what they needed. If it had been pointed out to him, carefully by a friend, that his devotion to duty might have been in itself a form of selfishness, then I'm sure he might have acted differently. It's just that it never was pointed out to him and his wife went to an early grave as a result. He had no notion of the sacrifices that he and his family had made.

I suppose we are all cautious about playing God. What swung me, though, the tipping point, you could say, was that even then, in the arcade, the Colonel appeared to have absolutely no idea of what had happened to him. To leave him to continue in that Limbo would, I felt then, have been like walking past a dead body on the road. Whoever it was, it was your responsibility to see it decently buried.

So, with the impetuousness of youth, I decided to take the matter into my own hands, to put him out of a misery he wasn't aware he was in. What I would need was something to shock him out of his current state. I should have to play the Devil's Advocate and find a catalyst to make the explosion happen. It turned out to be easier than I thought.

I steered the conversation one afternoon to the French, to their designs in Africa. That alone was enough to make the Colonel's blood boil. I then suggested quite mildly, as if I thought it was a wholly reasonable thing, that perhaps France was right to have become a Republic. It was perhaps the fact that they were a Republic which explained their success in Foreign Policy and more generally. In fact, you could argue that the British Monarchy had outlived its usefulness...

At this point, there was a sudden crash and I felt a searing pain in my left hand which had been resting on the metal table. The Colonel, who had brought his cane down on my hand in an outburst of utter fury, was gone. It wasn't that he'd stormed off in a huff. His chair was still upright beside the table. It was just that he had, from one moment to the next, disappeared. And the only signs of his passing were the smashed glass and water carafe lying on the ground and the bright red weal across the back of my left hand.

The noise brought Mahfoud running out of the shop, shaking his head and looking puzzled. He called for his son to come and sweep up the glass. Seeing my hand, he lead me through the shop and into the back-kitchen to his wife, whom I had never seen before. She put my hand under the cold tap and then bound it up with a clean white cloth, tut tutting in Arabic, advising me, I guessed, to be more careful.

I must admit I was surprised that Mahfoud never once mentioned this 'accident' when I went back to his Coffee shop each weekday as usual. I was also surprised that neither he nor the others there seemed to have found it strange that I should have spent so many afternoons mumbling quietly to myself, the sole customer at the outside tables. I suppose it just didn't matter to them. After all, I was a foreigner and I'd been mumbling in a language they couldn't understand.

As for Colonel Partington, I never saw him again. And, of course, I switched from History to Archaeology. I probably would never have learnt any more about him if it hadn't been for the Internet and Wikipedia over the last few years. It's a godsend when you want to discover a few basic facts about something we know nothing about.

Partington can be found in the footnotes to the histories of North Africa. His Army Service in the Peninsular War against Napoleon is there, as is his thirty years as Consul in Tunis trying unsuccessfully to thwart French designs on Africa. In fact, his whole life is there, condensed to a few paragraphs. There's even a mention of the 'incident' that finally cost him his job. He'd allegedly struck the French Consul with his cane. I could imagine him doing it. After thirty years of his relentless but ultimately frustrated efforts to block French designs, he had to watch powerlessly as his own Government gave in and acquiesced to French aims in Tunis. It must have seemed like the end of the road for the Colonel, not realising, of course, that another long road was about to begin.

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