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much as the navigation. I don’t want to end up in Niagara Falls. Literally.” Despite his protestations, Miles had begun to manoeuvre himself into the ideal napping position.
    “I think I can remember how to do this journey from earlier today. Sleep if you need it.”
    “No, my body clock’s already all to pieces. Talk to me and keep me awake or I’ll never get over the jet lag.” Miles yawned, then shook himself, forcing his body to sit upright and behave itself. “Tonight still feels a bit unreal. It was like…”
    “It was like what?” Roger regretted that they weren’t already home, or driving the back roads of Sussex where he could easily find a lay-by to pull in and let himself concentrate on his partner’s concerns rather on the road. With all they’d heard and witnessed today, he didn’t feel happy about finding a parking place on these back roads.
    “Like I was back in one of my dreams. I had the sort of feeling I get during them, when we’re about to go into battle. Don’t laugh, please God don’t laugh.” Miles kept his eyes fixed on the traffic ahead.
    “I don’t think I am laughing.” Maybe Roger’s sharp intake of breath had seemed like the start of one of his more sarcastic outbursts, the mutual mocking which the pair normally so delighted in. “I’m just astounded. Talk about it, please.”
    “I’m not sure I can. Maybe if it had been the other way round, you could find the right words to describe it. I felt…” Miles paused, clearly struggling to find exactly the term he wanted, “I felt like I was aglow. More alive than I’ve ever felt and yet like nothing was real.” He began to chuckle. “Maybe you were right to laugh. It sounds absurd. It is absurd.”
    “It wasn’t absurd back there. You were different somehow, unlike the Miles I thought I knew.”
    “Is that a bad thing?”
    “Bloody hell, no. Like I said, you were magnificent.” Roger reached across and touched his partner’s arm, suddenly aware of at least one potential advantage of not having to change gear. “I wouldn’t mind seeing you like that again. In our bedroom, for a start.”
    “Cheeky bugger.” Miles squeezed Roger’s hand then placed it back on the steering wheel. “Two hands for the ship, please.” He yawned again, although he sounded more alert now. “I felt magnificent. Like I could have taken on the world.”
    “Remind me never to get on your wrong side. I’d hate to see what scheme you’d come up with for getting rid of me. A perfectly executed plan of action. Alexander would have been proud.”
    “Ah. I think I’d better confess something right now.”
    Roger couldn’t help take a sideways glance, although Miles’s face couldn’t be read in the meagre light. “I don’t like the sound of that. Been arranging to meet our friend the lawyer for a little light dalliance over the files for the defence?”
    “Daft beggar. No, it’s much worse than that. My perfect plan. I didn’t have one.”
    “What?” Roger was glad he wasn’t driving on a narrow country road with a ditch at the side or they’d have been in it.
    “I didn’t have a plan, not a detailed one, anyway. That’s why I couldn’t give you any particulars when you kept asking for them.” At least Miles sounded suitably ashamed.
    “You busked. We went back there at the risk of getting our heads kicked in and you were busking.” There was a risk of Miles getting his head kicked in right now and it wouldn’t be the Phillipsons doing the kicking.
    “You wouldn’t have let me come if you’d known. And it wasn’t quite as hazy as you make out. I had an idea while we were in bed, you know, doing it, and it got clearer and clearer as we drove down. By the time we met Strauss I knew what I had to ask him.”
    “And when did the rest of your grand scheme come together?” Roger didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’d been had good and proper.
    “I don’t think I dare admit that. It was when the Phillipsons