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highly visible uniformed coppers and shuffled into a side room to sit out the
occasion in something resembling a bad version of a dentist’s waiting room. Nothing to read and nothing to do.
    ‘What’s that?’ said Troy as a uniformed copper pushed the door to.
    ‘It came yesterday, sir.’
    It looked like a ten-foot-long wooden spoon.
    ‘It’s a ten-foot-long wooden spoon, sir. It was left on the doorstep. The PM ordered it brought in at once before the press saw it. We’re to get rid of it as soon as the
Russians are safely out of the country.’
    Troy looked at the label attached to the monstrosity.
    ‘From the League of Empire Loyalists. We fear it may not be long enough for tomorrow’s dinner.’
    ‘What do you think it means?’ asked the copper.
    ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Troy. ‘A long spoon to sup with the devil.’
    There had been a curious reception for the two emissaries of Satan, from the minute the train slid into Victoria station; and a curious form of protest. And what they both had in common was that
they were lukewarm. Neither welcome nor dissent seemed to have feeling or meaning to it. Neither could muster a crowd large enough to cut through the roar of the traffic. This particular protest
lacked wit. Whilst the duty copper might be the dimmest of flatfoots, and possibly the only person in Britain who had not heard the cliché, it was a symbol so obvious as to be pointless. The
cliché of clichés. The League of Empire Loyalists were hardly typical of the British, a nation of non-joiners; but at the same time they were—the nation of non-joiners was also
the nation of endless committees and self-appointed bodies. This was simply the silliest of many, the association of old men who had failed to grasp the way of the world since 1945. As Rod put it,
describing so many of the institutions of the country from the Carlton Club to the magistracy, just another League of Little Men.
    Molloy, with the practised skill of a career copper, had perfected the knack of sleeping bolt upright. Clark, as ever, had a book. Troy was the one who was bored. He wondered if he could get
away with stretching his legs. He opened the door quietly. There was a hum of voices, a solitary young copper standing in the hallway. Troy expected a reprimand, but the man simply nodded and said
a quiet, ‘Evenin’, sir’, as though Troy had every right to be wandering about. Emboldened by this he strolled as casually as he could up the staircase past endless portraits of
previous incumbents from Walpole via Palmerston and Disraeli all the way to Churchill, to the first floor and the reception rooms. The hum of voices grew louder. English and Russian. He could hear
someone almost shouting, and deduced that this was translation for the deaf. He was gazing out of a front window when a door behind him opened, the volume surged and he saw what he momentarily took
to be an elderly waiter shuffling towards him. It was not an elderly waiter; it was an elderly Prime Minister, a portrait come to life.
    ‘Harumgrrum werrumbrum,’ said Churchill.
    Troy understood not a syllable. What could the former leader of the western world, the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the Second World War, possibly have to say to him?

§9
    The following evening, just before dusk, they took a launch down the Thames from Westminster Pier to Greenwich, one of the pleasantest trips London could offer. It had its
effect. A man who talked nineteen to the dozen had shut up by the time they slid under Tower Bridge. Khrushchev did what any man with the slightest poetry in his soul would do. He stared. London
changed from the dwarfing magnificence of St Paul’s, hogging the horizon with not a building to equal it for height or breadth, to the dark depths of the East End, a skyline slashed by the
blades of cranes and derricks, shoreline fretted by a hundred wharves and harbours, flashing with the rumpled black-and-red sails of countless Thames