Free The Dark Chronicles by Jeremy Duns

managed to isolate him within weeks, and nobody was in any doubt who really ran things when Chief was away. But he didn’t have the title, yet – and it was by no means a certainty that he’d get it.
    This meeting was held every Monday morning at this time, andwas known as ‘the Round Table’, although none of us were knights and the table was, in fact, rectangular. Farraday had just arrived and taken his place in his usual corner; he was now busily checking that his cuffs were protruding from his jacket sleeves by half an inch. Seated immediately to his right, and directly facing me, was Pritchard. In a crisp, narrow-cut pinstripe suit and woven silk tie, he didn’t look in the least as though he’d been sipping Riesling in a Soho jazz club less than nine hours ago.
    After the war, Pritchard had joined MI5, where he had eventually become Head of E Branch: Colonial Affairs. When it had finally become clear to the Whitehall mandarins that it was suicidal to have intelligence officers posted in former colonies with no official links to the Service, which was responsible for all other overseas territories, E Branch had been taken over, and Pritchard had moved with it. Coming from Five, and being a Scot to boot, had initially made him a deeply suspected outsider, especially as many of the Service’s old guard had been forcibly retired at the same time he joined. However, he was also a decorated war hero, independently wealthy, and staunchly right-wing, and within a few months of his joining the Service he had been taken up as a kind of mascot by its rank and file: their man on the board. While in Five, Pritchard had been converted to the Americans’ idea that British intelligence was still penetrated by the KGB, and he’d devoted a great deal of time and energy to examining old files and case histories in the hope of catching another mole. He’d brought this zeal with him to the Service, and it had made him a lot of high-ranking friends. Chief and Osborne had initially been all in favour of Pritchard’s ‘hunting expeditions’, as his periodic attempts to uproot traitors were known, but now felt that he and his clique were stoking an atmosphere of paranoia and distrust. I tended to agree.
    Naturally, I had watched Pritchard’s entry into the Service and subsequent rise in popularity within it with considerable unease – the tall bespectacled ghost I had met in a farmhouse in Germany in 1945 was, for obvious reasons, the last person on earth I wantedto work alongside, especially as he now seemed on a drive to find moles inside the Service. I had been appointed Head of Section at an unusually tender age, partly due to Father’s near-mythical status within the Service and partly due to Chief’s patronage. Now Pritchard had caught up with me, and although Africa was one of the smaller Sections, there was already talk of him in the corridors as a potential Deputy Chief, or even Chief, somewhere down the line.
    Also seated around the table were Godsal, who headed up Middle East Section, Quiney, responsible for Western Europe, and Smale, who was standing in for Far East as Innes was on leave. They all looked harmless enough, with their schoolmasters’ faces and woollen suits, but I was under no illusions: they could be lethal. One ill-timed gesture, one misplaced word, and they would pounce. Technically, treason still warranted the death penalty. If I were exposed, I had no doubt they’d apply every technicality in the book. So: tread carefully. I needed things to go my way.
    Osborne pushed a garishly cuff-linked sleeve to one side to examine his wristwatch. ‘I was hoping Chief would be able to start us off,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t seem to have arrived yet.’ His piggy little eyes, buried behind thick black frames, darted downwards, as if he thought Chief might be about to emerge from beneath the table.
    ‘Strange,’ I murmured under my breath.
    ‘Did you say something, Paul?’
    ‘Sorry,’ I said,