The Thirty-Nine StepsAge-adapted version

I came home from the city one afternoon in May, tired and bored with everything. I had been three months in England without finding anything that suited me. I was thirty-seven years old, with enough money to live well, but so restless I could hardly stand myself.

That day I had wandered among the brokers, read newspapers about trouble in the Balkans and about a Greek named Karolides, some prime minister, whom the papers called the one wise man standing in the way of war in Europe. I remember thinking I might try to get work in Albania. It sounded like a country where a man could stay awake.

Just before six I walked home to my flat near Portland Place. I had been to a music hall, but the show was dull, and the air too warm.

I was about to go in when someone touched my elbow. A slim fellow with a short brown beard and small, sharp blue eyes stood there. He lived on the top floor, I knew. His voice trembled, and he gripped my arm with his hand as if afraid someone would pull him away.

Could he talk to me a little, he said. Before I could get annoyed, he was inside my hallway. Almost before I had closed the door behind us, he darted through the rooms and checked the back door. Then he pushed the main door shut, slid the chain across, and pulled the curtains as if the moon might tell secrets. He apologized politely, but with a voice that did not quite obey him, poured himself a huge whiskey and soda, and drank it in three long gulps.

When he set the glass down, it cracked. Sorry, he said, a little upset tonight. You see, at this moment I am dead. I sat down in the armchair and lit my

pipe. Either he was mad, or he was making fun of me. He shook his head, as if he heard my thoughts. Not mad, he said. Not yet. He needed help more than any man had ever needed it. He said he was an American, from Kentucky, named Franklin P. Scudder. He had traveled and written and been a war correspondent and got mixed up in the small states of southeastern Europe. Some of what he told me I could recognize from newspaper names and old stories. He was not just anyone, I could feel that. He said he had gone too deep into politics and secrets, to the place where laws and fine speeches no longer meant anything. Down there, behind governments and armies, there was a movement that worked in the dark, he said. Clever people, some who wanted to see the world burn so they could build new things, and some who just wanted to profit from the fire. He spoke quickly and low, as if the walls were listening. The goal was to make the great powers trip over each other. Then everything would fall into chaos, and those who had laid the tripwire could do their work. But there was one man, he said, who had ruined many of their plans. A name I had seen in the papers: Karolides. He was coming to London on the fifteenth of June for a great international meeting. And those who hated him had decided he would not go home again. Scudder said this was not a simple threat. It was a piece of evil craftsmanship, planned down to the smallest detail, with decoys and cover names and blame that could point in the wrong direction. He himself had picked up the trail down in Tyrol, in Budapest, in Vienna and Leipzig, and closed the circle in Paris. When

he understood what was going to happen, he did the only thing he thought could save him: he let the world believe he was dead. To do that, he had taken a dead body from a coffin, placed it in the bed in his own flat, made a believable scene, and disappeared in disguise. He was good at disguises, and sometimes laughter flickered in his eyes as he told me about it.

French-American, diamond buyer, film student, cinema man with ski films from Norway, and finally a businessman with lots of papers. He had mixed his tracks across several countries. Still they had found him again.

Now he was here with me, because he was sure he could not manage alone any longer. I felt I liked the little man more and more.

His jaw clamped together like a trap when he got to the point. He said that if he could only stay alive until the fifteenth of June, he could break their plans. If he did not, they would win. He spoke of the danger to Karolides coming from a place so high and fine that no one would suspect it.

He mentioned a woman's name, Julia Czechenyi, said the word Black Stone, described a man who lisped, and an old man with a youthful voice and eyelids that could drop down like a falcon's hood. He spoke of death too, in a strange and calm way, as if he saw a summer meadow beyond a hill. If he went out, he said, he would hope to wake to a mild day and the smell of hay.

And even as he said it, his hands shook so the glass rattled. I made up the guest room. He went into the bathroom, and half an hour later a completely different man came out. Clean-shaven, hair trimmed, English manners in his

back and voice. A Captain Digby, he said, from the Gurkha regiment. No longer the American way of speaking. He even had a monocle.

I had to laugh, and at the same time I understood that this man could fool anyone. He lay down in the smoking room, I in my own room, and I felt more alive than I had in a long time. Maybe things did happen in this city after all.

The first few days went well. He read, smoked, wrote small notes in a black pocketbook. In the evenings we played chess. He was much better than me and beat me every time. On the third day he grew restless.

He hung up a list of the days until the fifteenth of June and crossed off one day at a time with red pencil. Sometimes he fell into deep thought. Other times a shiver ran through his body and he asked me quietly if I really trusted my day servant, Paddock. It was not his own skin he was afraid for, I understood that. He was completely focused on completing his task.

Then came the evening I will never forget. I had dined with an engineer and returned at half past ten. The flat was dark. I switched on the light in the smoking room and felt ice in my stomach. There, in the corner, lay Scudder with his arms thrown out.

A long knife stood through his heart, close to the floor, like a nail. A sharp, white stillness in the room, and then a wave of nausea. I covered his face and searched the entire flat. No windows open, no traces. It was half past ten, and I understood that my life had just changed direction.

Now several things became clear to me. First, that what Scudder had said was true. They had found him

in the end. Then, that they would probably come after me now. He had stayed with me for four days. Even if he had not told me everything, they would assume he had. If I called the police, what could I say? That a stranger had come as a dead man and asked for help? That we had disguised him as an officer? That he was murdered, and I had no papers to show? I would certainly have been arrested, maybe charged with murder. And even if I were believed, what good would it do? If the British government were warned now, they would keep Karolides at home, and everything would go as the enemies wished. Scudder had reckoned with several outcomes, even this: that if he were killed before the fifteenth of June, someone else must take over. Then I saw the task clearly before me. I had to disappear, stay alive, and try to stop what was planned. I had to carry Scudder's cause forward. I slept little that night. At dawn I had an idea. I cut my beard short, put on old tweed clothes and rough boots, stuffed a shirt and a cap in my pockets, took fifty sovereigns and strapped them around my waist under my shirt. Then, just as the milk cart came into the hallway, I asked the milkman to lend me his cap and disguise for a bet. He laughed and gave them to me for a silver coin. I took the pails and went down the stairs as if I had always done it. Down in the street I turned into a side street, set down the pails behind a plank fence, and threw away the disguise and cap. And just then, in emptying my pockets, I found something in the smoking room's tobacco jar that I had not noticed before. A

small black book. Scudder's notebook. I reached St. Pancras without a ticket and jumped onto a moving train. The conductor cursed me up and down, but finally sold me a ticket to Newton-Stewart. I spoke broad Scots, as if it were the only thing I could do. All day I rolled northward. I dared not go to the dining car, but bought a basket in Leeds and shared a little with a woman with a child. I sat long with Scudder's book. It was full of numbers, lines, and some printed words I did not understand. Hofgaard, Luneville, Avocado, Pavia. It was a code, a key somewhere. But where? Later I got off at a small station in Galloway. The moor was brown, the lochs blue, the air fresh and smelling of peat, like from a distant coast. I felt free and young, like on a trip in spring weather. I got shelter with a shepherd couple and learned a thing or two about cattle prices. Next morning I walked in the opposite direction from the day before, just to confuse anyone who might be following. At the station I saw in the paper that the milkman had been arrested, but quickly released. The police were searching further north. A small paragraph mentioned me as the flat owner, written so clumsily it almost made me laugh. Nothing about foreign news or Karolides. The train stopped over a culvert. I jumped out into the hazel bushes, but a dog heard, and a drunken shepherd rolled after his own dog and made such a messy scene that it luckily drew attention away from me. I crept like a fox through the heather. When I finally reached a height, I saw far away a monoplane. It circled low over the valley I had come up from. I was suddenly certain, without anyone telling me:

the plane was looking for me, and it was not the police behind it. I understood that the moors were not safe cover if they had the sky on their side.

In the valley ahead, smoke rose from a house, and a person leaned against a bridge. I went there. It was a young man with glasses and a long clay pipe.

He quoted things he had read, with a grin in his eyes. I asked if the house was an inn. He nodded politely and said he was the innkeeper.

He was young for such a place, I said. He told me about his father who was dead and his grandmother who lived there. He dreamed of writing books and traveling the world. I looked at his little house with the fire in the hearth and the mountains behind, and I liked the boy. He invited me in, gave me a room with a view over the plateau, and let me use his study with bookshelves and a windowsill to sit on.

I sent him for the newspaper on his motorcycle and told him to watch for strange people, cars and planes. In the afternoon I sat alone with Scudder's black book and chewed on the numbers. The rhythm of the numbers had a pattern, but the key word was stuck.

In the middle of the day I suddenly remembered the name he had mentioned in the dark at home: Julia Czechenyi. He had said it was the key. I tried it. After a while the codes began to make sense. I sat completely pale when I understood what I was reading.

Scudder had tricked us both. What he first told me was just a cover. The real matter in the notes was worse. On the fifteenth of June, not just one man was to be killed. Our plans for

the home fleet's position during mobilization were to be handed over to a French envoy, but an organization called the Black Stone would take them on the way. Everything was set for the country to receive a surprise as great as a crash. Honey and friendly words were to be used, then a blow in the dark, with mines and submarines ready around the coast.

Inside the notes there was a sentence repeated several times, in parentheses: Thirty-nine steps. Once with an addition: Thirty-nine steps, I counted them, high water 10:17 evening. I did not understand it. But it stuck in me like a needle that I knew I must find again later.

When this sank in, I heard engine noise. Two men came in a car and asked my innkeeper about a fellow who looked like me. He described me exactly, down to my boots. One had bushy eyebrows and dark eyes, the other smiled all the time and lisped a little. They were polite and no foreigners to look at, said the innkeeper.

I wrote on a slip of paper some German words about the Black Stone and that Scudder had waited a couple of weeks, that things might be too late, that Karolides might change his plans. The innkeeper delivered the note. The dark one turned pale, and soon after they drove off.

I got the young innkeeper to go to Newton-Stewart to tip off the sheriff. Then, early next day, I saw another car coming from the opposite direction.

I jumped out of the window, rolled into a thorn bush, slid down a stream bank and got to the empty road behind. There stood the car. I started it, sat in the driver's seat, and crept out onto the plateau. Behind me I heard furious voices from the house. Then I drove as fast as I could.

It was a clear May morning, the roads narrow and white, the heather smelling like an oven. I gripped the wheel, but my thoughts pulled me back to the white pages I had read. I had been put on the wrong track, but in the book lay the real story, and it was ugly.

The fifteenth of June was not just a date. It was a sentence. And thirty-nine steps – that must mean something important.

For a moment I thought of writing to the Prime Minister, but how would he believe me? Who was I, other than the owner of a flat where someone had died, and a man who had just stolen a car? I had to keep moving and be ready when the moment came.

By midday I rolled into a village. The postmistress and a constable stood reading a telegram. The constable waved me to the side.

I nearly stopped, but something in my stomach shouted no, not now. I put in the gear and slipped away. The policeman grabbed the hood and got my fist in his face. Not a nice thing to do, but I could not stay.

Then I drove back roads, up a corkscrew pass, then east on a poor cart track. Then I heard the plane again, further south, quickly approaching. In the open I was at the mercy of wings. I raced down a hill at full speed, into an avenue, and into a small wood where I had to ease off.

Then another car roared right in front of me. I honked the horn, but too late. I jammed on the brakes and flew straight into the hedge. My car sailed through like butter and then fell fifty feet down into the riverbed. A branch hit me in the chest and held me back so I hung in the hedge,

before I landed softly in nettles. A tall, young man in a leather coat and glasses came running, full of apologies. My fault, he said, cursing himself as he pulled me to his house three minutes away.

It was a kind of hunting lodge among pine trees. He laid out suits for me, and I chose a blue one. Then he poured me coffee and ham, and by the fire he told me why he was in a hurry.

He was a candidate for Parliament and had a meeting that evening. The main speaker had reported sick, and now he had to give the whole speech himself. He wanted me, supposedly from the colonies, to say a few words about free trade. I had a weak relationship with all that, but I saw that saying yes might give me the friendship I needed.

I agreed. He was a pleasant, decent, young man, a bit naive, and spoke with warmth about horses and shooting. I like such people: genuine folk.

Afterwards we ate a late supper in a cheerful room with deer heads on the wall. I saw in his eyes that he was a man I could trust. Then I told him everything.

From the evening I met Scudder, to the chess moves in hotel rooms and ditches, to the code in the black book. I told him about men who smiled while they lied, and about heads that bobbed up and down behind hedges and fences. I said that if he wanted to do his duty as a law-abiding citizen, he must give me to the police.

But he looked me in the eyes and shook his head. He asked what I had worked at in Rhodesia. I said mines. Then he smiled. Not a job that weakens nerves, he said, and went to fetch a large hunting knife. He

threw it, and I caught it in my mouth with an old trick I had learned. He laughed and said he believed me. He would help. He wrote a letter to his godfather, a man in the Foreign Office named Sir Walter Bullivant. In the letter it said that if someone calling himself Twisdon came before the fifteenth of June, he was to be trusted. As proof we had a word, Black Stone, and a song: Annie Laurie. Sir Walter had a country house in Berkshire this weekend. So Sir Harry gave me his oldest, most worn tweed suit, shaved off the rest of my beard, and gave me a map. My goal: to get up into the heights before dawn. I got to borrow a bicycle. At dawn I threw the bicycle into a bog hole and took to the heather on foot. It was like standing on the roof of a world. The roads lay like white threads, and the valleys were great green bowls. But from the east came the drone of the plane again, and for the first time I felt pure fear. They had found me. Soon a ring of men would move over the hills. I considered everything I could. No cover, only short heather, bare grassy slope and white road. In a little bay along the road I found a roadman. He was about my size, but more round-shouldered, with a week's beard and glasses with thick horn frames. He was dead tired after his daughter's wedding the night before, hardly knew what day of the week it was, and cursed his job when he looked at the pile of stones by the roadside. A new road inspector was supposed to come and inspect today, he said, and he was afraid of getting fired. He had only worked here a week. I told him

to go home and lie down, and I would do the job and meet the inspector for him. He stared at me, then grinned, and said all right, all right. His name was Alexander Turnbull, but everyone called him Specky because of his glasses. He explained what I had to do: fill the wheelbarrow from a little quarry and wheel it up to build a new stone pile. I borrowed his glasses and a hideous ragged cap. He took my jacket, waistcoat and collar home in a bundle. I took his pipe, a short, ugly stub, and put it in my mouth. Then he took his body home to bed.

I transformed myself as best I could. I opened my shirt collar and let my neck get brown, rolled up my sleeves to show scars on my forearms, kicked my boots white with road dust, tied my trouser legs together below the knee with string, rubbed dirt into my cheeks and pushed a little dust into my eye corners so they stung. In his lunch bag there were scones with cheese, and a bottle of cold tea. I put a local newspaper on his bundle and trudged off with the wheelbarrow, heavy and slow like a professional. I almost fell in love with the rhythm of it. The stone pile grew steadily, the sun crept up, my mind went blank.

A little Ford with a round, young man in a bowler hat stopped. Was I Alexander Turnbull? I nodded. I was the road inspector, he said, spoke a few kind words about road surface and disappeared.

The disguise held. At midday a large car crept slowly down the hill. Three men got out and came towards me. Two of them I had seen before, through a window: the thin dark one with bushy brows, and the fat one who always smiled.

The third looked like a countryman, in clumsy knee breeches and with a watchful eye. They made conversation, pointed at my boots, which were too good for a roadman. I said I had got them from a gentleman at the shooting last year. They lingered, looked at the old newspaper lying by the bundle. Was it interesting to get the paper so early? they asked slyly. The town paper came on Saturday, I answered. I was six days behind. Finally they left. I got a cigar, which I sniffed solemnly before putting it in the bundle. Ten minutes later they were back, waving cheerfully from the car. Such people did not trust anything. I could not keep up this road work all day. Any moment Specky might stagger out into daylight, and then I would be done for. I decided to go down to his hut at nightfall and slip over the hills in the dark. But then another car came up the road. It stopped to light a cigarette. I saw the driver, and nearly shouted. His name was Marmaduke Jopley, a stockbroker I had met once. A type who lived by flattering young gentlemen and old ladies. I jumped right into the back seat and put my hand on his shoulder. Now it was my turn, Marmie, I said, and his eyes became as big as plates. He whispered my name and that I was the murderer. Sit still, I said, and give me your coat and cap. He dared not do otherwise. I put on his fine driving coat and cap, started the engine and turned the car. The onlookers along the road saw us pass as if everything were in order. When we got out onto the moor, I stopped, turned the car neatly the right way, gave him back his hat and coat, and let him

go. Thank you very much, I said. You were useful after all. He disappeared down the road with the car's lights like a red dot in the dark. I had behaved like a highway robber that day, but it saved my life. I slept out on the moor that night, in the lee of a big stone. I had neither coat nor waistcoat, and all I had left of food was half a bag of ginger biscuits. Hunger gnawed at me, but I was in better spirits than I had been for a long time. It was almost like a game. My shoulder ached from the fall through the hedge, but I slept a while. At grey dawn I woke to the sound of stones singing under the feet of men. They were spread out across the hillside like a drive in a hunt. I crept up into a crack and got over to the back of the height before they saw me. Then I showed myself high up in silhouette, let them see me, and disappeared back the same way, so they ran in the wrong direction. It was like playing chess in the heather. Finally I came to a stream, with a white cluster of houses in a fortification of trees. I saw chimneys smoking. A house with a glass veranda stood under a bank. I ran there and hammered on the door. An elderly gentleman sat behind a desk inside the veranda door, surrounded by books and glass cases with coins and stone axes. He looked like a friendly professor, round in the cheeks, with a shiny bald head and big glasses that he peered over. In the window behind me, dark specks spread across the heather. The old man raised his binoculars, looked, and smiled faintly. Go in there, he said calmly, pointing to a door. You

will be safe. I went into a small dark room that smelled of chemicals. The door locked like a safe. The smell and the stillness made the hairs on my neck stand up.

Why so cheerful? Why so quick to help? I felt sick from hunger and smoke and suspicion.

At last he opened the door. He stood there again in daylight, polite and calm. They have gone, he said, and blinked slowly. And then he said my name.

Not Twisdon. The other one. Then I understood that I was face to face with one of those Scudder had described.

The old man could drop a hood over his eyes like a falcon. I thought in a flash that I would take his throat with my hands, but two servants suddenly stood behind me and pressed cold pistols against my ears.

He asked kindly if I would explain what I had been up to lately. I put on a sour face and pretended I was a casual poor fellow, Ned Ainslie, who had found some gold coins in an abandoned car. I got cold pie and beer.

He spoke to me in German in the middle of the meal, but I pretended I did not understand anything. I claimed I had done nothing but be hungry and unlucky. He became uncertain, but not so much that he did not call for his car.

A Lanchester was to come in five minutes. I was led into a damp storeroom with corn sacks and crates, in a corner of the old farm. The door was locked from outside.

It was pitch dark. I fumbled and felt a handle-like edge in the wall. With my braces as rope I got a cupboard door open. In there were lanterns, thin oiled cloth, spools of copper wire, boxes of chemicals, a tin with detonators and fuse.

And right at the back in a box lay small grey blocks of a substance I knew from mining work. Lentonite. A piece of it could tear down a wall. The chance of blowing myself to pieces was great, but the chance of surviving without trying was zero.

I closed my eyes and prepared a small charge. A quarter piece. A fuse.

A detonator. I pressed it all into a crack at the floor, under a sack. Then I crawled under the window sill and lit the fuse.

I prayed silently that I would wake again. The world turned yellow, then white. The air burned, and the wall disappeared with a bang that knocked my brain empty.

Something heavy fell on my shoulder. The dust was thick and stinking. I staggered towards the free air, my feet found a wooden sluice with running water. I tumbled down into a water channel and let the cold water take me. I slid through the mud up to the mill wheel, squeezed through the axle hole and fell flat into a layer of old chaff and straw on the inside.

There I lay, vomiting and breathing and listening. Shouts outside. A streak of smoke from the house.

I peered through a crack and saw outside a round belt of trees. Inside it, surprisingly green grass. A secret landing field for planes. If a plane landed there, everyone else would think it just flew over the hill. A clever solution.

I felt a rare rage against them and how smart they were. But I lay as still as a mouse.

Only in the dark did I dare come down from the dovecot I had crawled up into, and creep out through the grass. At the edge of the wood I ran into a thin string two feet above the ground. If I had put

my foot in it, a bell would have rung. I crept around that too. I walked all night, through soaking wet heather, cold and sick, until dawn. I washed my face in a stream and knocked on a cottage. There lived Specky, sober and freshly shaved on a Sunday morning, dressed in black and with a Bible in his hand. He looked at me as if I were a ghost, but something in my face made him remember. He helped me in and laid me in a box bed in the kitchen wall. He locked the door every morning, went out to work, came home every evening and said nothing. He gave me milk, bread, cheese, and let me lie and sweat out the fever that came after the explosion and smoke from the blast. After five days I was on my feet, after ten I was able to walk. That morning a drover passed by with cattle. His name was Hislop and he was a friend of Specky's. I gave the old roadman five pounds for board and lodging, which he took reluctantly, and went with the drover eastward through the valley. Blue sky, brown knolls, green meadows, larks and streams. Everything was beautiful, but I felt the day of the fifteenth of June drawing near. I was almost empty of ideas, but not of will. I slept a little in the heather and then walked to a station. I took the night train south, changed at Crewe, at Birmingham, on to Reading, and finally, at dusk, I got off at Artinswell. A river ran along a little waterfall by an old mill. The water was so clear it looked like glass, and in the ditch banks there were white water flowers like foam. I leaned against the bridge railing and automatically whistled a tune. Annie Laurie. A huge man

in untidy flannel clothes and a wide hat came up from the riverbank with a rod in his hand, and he whistled the same tune. He nodded kindly and looked out at the water. The water is clear, he said. He pointed to a fish I could not see until he showed it. One could have sworn it was a black stone, I said. He laughed dryly, and let a couple of notes of Annie Laurie slip out again.

Then he said with his back to me: Isn't your name Twisdon? I said no at first, then yes, forgetting my own cover name in the moment. He smiled and said a conspirator must keep track of his own names. His face was of the kind you trust without thinking. He looked at me with eyes that could be both joking and hard as stone.

Then he suddenly raised his voice and scolded me for begging instead of working. A young man drove past in a cart and waved. Afterwards the fisherman pointed to a white gate a little further on. My house. Wait five minutes, then go in the back.

I did as he said. A butler, grave and quiet as a church bell, took me in, led me up the back stairs and into a room with a view of the river. There lay clean shirts, suits, ties, shoes and hairbrushes on a chair, as if I were expected. Sir Walter thought my friend Reggie's clothes would fit, said the butler. I bathed and shaved and put on nice clothes.

Then my host came into the dining room, and I recognized him only after a glance: Sir Walter Bullivant. He told me to eat first, talk later. I told everything afterwards, in a cluttered, warm study with books on shelves and trophies in corners. He smoked a cigar, leaned over

the fireplace and listened. Sometimes he laughed until his eyes grew wet, like when I described the political speech at Sir Harry's. When I told him about the old man in the highlands who could drop his eyelids over his gaze like a falcon, he became serious and made me repeat every detail.

He said I could forget the police. He had received a letter from Scudder, written and sent before he died. In that letter it said that if anything happened, a friend at his place should not be blamed. He had also investigated me as well as he could. I was safe from the law.

But he was uncertain about everything else. Much of Scudder's views he thought sounded like a novel. He doubted that anyone would really kill Karolides, for most states in Europe had nothing to gain from it. He said this about big politics in broad terms, and I saw that he had seen enough to doubt romantic stories.

Right then the telephone rang. He was gone five minutes, and when he came back, his face was pale. He apologized to me. He said Karolides had been shot dead at a few minutes past seven that evening.

Next morning at breakfast he read cable messages. He had been on the phone all night. A French general named Royer, some sort of deputy chief of their general staff, was to cross the North Sea a day earlier than planned. He was the one who was to receive the document with the home fleet's disposition.

They had done everything to make the plan as secure as possible. Royer was to dine with Sir Walter's chief, and then come to Sir Walter's house where four men would see him: a man from the Admiralty, Sir Walter himself, a secretary, and a general. There the papers were to pass from

the British man to the French general. Afterwards Royer was to go to Portsmouth, then to Havre by destroyer. No solitary moment would be possible for thieves.

Then Sir Walter said something I did not forget: Enemies clever enough to find out our first plan are clever enough to read the change. The plan could only succeed for them if they took everything without us noticing. If we suspected danger, everything must be changed, and then they failed. Therefore the most dangerous possibilities were not the noisy ones, but the quiet ones.

He asked if I could drive a car. I became his chauffeur. We rushed into London that morning, through dusty main roads in June, past blooming gardens and glittering rivers.

He took me straight to Scotland Yard, introduced me to a stern gentleman, and said this was the Portland Place murderer. The stern gentleman tightened his face and said that his department had been following me for some days, but that I was now of course free to return to my life, for everything was cleared up. Hearing that was like getting a backpack off my shoulders.

I ate at the Savoy and smelled the scent of an expensive cigar house. But I could not relax. It was as if everything in my body was shouting that I had one job left and soon no more time.

That evening I ended up face to face with Marmaduke Jopley in Jermyn Street by chance. He recognized me, shouted that I was the murderer, and a constable came. I could have explained everything. Instead, my irritation boiled over, I dealt a couple of blows, and ran.

I sprinted across St. James's Park and into Queen Anne's Gate. At Sir Walter's there were cars outside, but the butler let me in and shielded me from the commotion outside. Several rang the bell.

A crowd quarrelled at the door, but the butler froze them away with a look. While I waited in a little alcove in the hall, a man came walking in whom everyone in the country would recognize, in a coat and with the kindly face one had seen a hundred times in the paper. The First Sea Lord. He was let into the meeting.

A few minutes later he came out again. In passing, our eyes met for a second. An involuntary gleam of recognition shot through his eyes. Then it was gone, and he left.

A numb thought came to me. I rang his house and was told he had come home half an hour ago and gone to bed. Then I understood that the one who had walked out the door at Sir Walter's was not the head of the Navy. It was a shadow wearing his uniform.

I went straight into the meeting room and laid out what I had seen. Five faces looked up, surprised and angry. Sir Walter tried to spare me the interruption, but I insisted.

They called the butler again and rang up the Sea Lord. He was at home and in bed. They understood the seriousness.

The French general Royer then told a little story. He had been fishing by a river in Senegal once. His mare stood by a tree, restless and stamping. He saw her in his side vision all the time, he thought.

She was there. Only when he came over to throw his coat over her back did he feel the raw smell and see that it was not a horse. It was a lion, a man-eater, that had eaten the mare an hour ago and been completely still the whole time while he fished. His brain had filled in the picture with what he thought should stand there.

Such a mistake was easy to make when one was occupied with something else. A familiar face in the wrong place could be enough to fool even experienced eyes. In this way a stranger could sit in a room full of chiefs and leaf through the papers, and no one would notice what was happening. How to find them now? Everything would slip away if they got out of the country before we changed everything. We needed a clue that no one else knew. Then I remembered the words in the black book. Thirty-nine steps, high water 10:17. If Scudder had written it like that, it was a clue. Not a dock stair, not a ferry stair with lots of people. A stair that was hit by the tide, on an open stretch of coast, a place where a small boat could put out at full flood. And a place with several stairs, otherwise the number would not be given. We stormed over to the Admiralty. I leafed through tide tables with my hands full of paper and my head full of sea. 10:17 matched many places. We had to narrow it down. Between Cromer and Dover, I said. Not a large harbour, no scheduled boat then. A place with small cliffs and hiding places for secret steps. A coastguard officer was fetched in the middle of the night. He was an old sea dog with a steady back and a smell of tar. We described what we were looking for. He thought for a moment. In Norfolk there were a few. But they were too open. Then he mentioned a place in Kent, near a town called Bradgate. A high white chalk cliff called The Ruff. There were villas with private stairs down to a strip of beach. I looked up Bradgate. High water 10:27 p.m. on the fifteenth of

June. The coastguard smiled and said that at The Ruff, high water was ten minutes before Bradgate. Then everything fell into place. If one of these stairs had thirty-nine steps, we were there. I asked for a car and a map, and a man from the police named Scaife came along in the passenger seat; he had been in the navy and knew a destroyer we saw off the coast later. We raced southeast through the night. At dawn I stood on the beach at Bradgate and saw a small destroyer rocking offshore, and further out I glimpsed a lightship. Scaife got keys to the stair gates from an agent in town. He went to count the steps while I sat in a hollow in the cliff and kept my head down. After a while he came back with a folded paper. The numbers varied, but one was 39. I could have shouted. We telegraphed London and asked for six men, whom we distributed among different inns. Then Scaife crept around a red brick house on the edge of the cliff, with a veranda, tennis lawn and flower beds. It was called Trafalgar Lodge and belonged to an elderly gentleman named Appleton, a retired stockbroker. He was single, generous, and had been there a week. Everything about him and the house was nice and normal. No neighbours suspected anything. A mile and a half out lay a small white yacht at anchor, with a white naval flag, and the name on its stern. Ariadne. Two of the crew spoke locally, and a young officer was smilingly polite and perfectly English in his speech. Everything was innocent. The rest of the afternoon I watched the house. The old man came out in white trousers and blue jacket, looked at the sea with field glasses, sat on the bench and read the paper.

A younger, slim man in blue hit tennis balls across the net with him, and a chubby one with clipped hair laughed loudly every time he failed a volley. A third came cycling with golf clubs on his back and was greeted with noise and laughter. They called to each other as friends do, talked about handicaps and the June warmth, and ordered lemonade from the maid with a tray.

Everything was so British that I felt stupid and mean, like a boy accusing three fathers of stealing a bicycle when they have just paid for ice cream for the children. Were these really the men who had chased me across the moors, who had smuggled in an airfield in a wooded hollow, who had tied me up with pistol barrels at my ears? I stood in a garden in an empty neighbouring house and peered, and my head filled with Peter Pienaar's words.

He was a scout I knew in Rhodesia, the best I have ever met, one who before he became a proper man had lived on the wrong side of the law. He once said that disguises were nothing. Hair and beard and glasses could fool some, but what counted was the atmosphere. Change your surroundings and change your soul at the same time, then you would fool the best in the world.

It was not about trying to look different, but about looking exactly the same on the outside, while the inside was new. He told how he once begged a black coat off a fellow in a town, went to church, and sang hymns from the same book as the man who was looking for him, and he escaped because no one thought to look closely in the madness of the unlikely.

With these words in my head, I went to the gate at half past

nine and rang the bell. A sweet girl in an apron received me, asked my name, and showed me into the smoking room. It smelled of cigars, brass polish and tidy housekeeping. A group picture over the mantelpiece showed smiling boys in college jackets.

My nerves fluttered and I would have gone back immediately, but the girl had already announced my name. In the dining room the eldest rose and came towards me, calm and polite. Perhaps we should sit in the smoking room?

I sat down and said I thought we had met before, and that they knew why I had come. He curled the corner of his mouth in a half-nervous laugh and said I should state my business. I said I had an order to arrest them for the murder in Portland Place. The chubby one said I was mad.

The dark one smiled quite charmingly and said they would naturally help the law. One said that Miss Nelly would laugh until she cried when she heard someone had finally disturbed their peace. Everything was so believable that I wanted to apologize and leave.

But I held on to Pienaar in my head, and we played bridge to let me think. I played terribly. The old man lit a cigar and laid his cards a little low in his lap while his fingers drummed on his knee in a certain rhythm that made something in my memory strike sparks. Exactly that way his fingers had drummed on his knee in the room on the moor, that day his men pointed pistols at my ears.

In a second all doubt vanished. The faces changed for me. The dark one had the knife in Scudder's heart written in his eyes, the chubby one had a thousand masks instead of one face, and the eldest was cold and clear and ruthless

as steel. The clock struck ten, and the old man suddenly said that Bob must catch the train. His voice was too smooth.

I said calmly that he must postpone the journey. The young one cursed and said I must stop this nonsense. The eldest offered to bail for his nephew, but his eyes narrowed in that famous birdlike look, and I blew the whistle in my pocket.

The lights went out. Someone grabbed me around the waist. The dark voice shouted something in German about a boat. I saw two of our men on the lawn. The young one jumped through the window, over the fence and onto the road in three leaps.

One of our men was right behind him, but at the stair gate down to the beach the gate was locked. The old man struggled free in the moment, threw himself at a lever on the wall, and a thud far below in the ground answered. Chalk dust billowed up through the shaft by the stairs.

Someone turned on the light. His eyes glowed with fire. He said they had triumphed.

Then his gaze burned not only with triumph, but with a fanatical pride that told me that for him this was not just a game. For him this was a lifelong calling. He was more than a spy. He was a cold patriot for the wrong country and the wrong cause, and in my shoulders I felt a sudden sore respect for the opposition we had met.

We put handcuffs on him and on his companion. I said quietly that I hoped his companion on the beach enjoyed his victory, for the yacht Ariadne had been ours for an hour already. The destroyer had been lying ready offshore all day and had snapped her up. Where the three had planned to put out tonight, no one

would go on board. That evening we had won.

For seven weeks later the whole world knew that it was not the beginning of peacetime that awaited us. The war came. I enlisted within the first week, and because I had experience from Matabeleland, I got captain's insignia straight away. But I think that in many ways the job I did before I put on the uniform was the most important.

This is what I want someone who is twelve years old and loves stories to know about the weeks from when I stood in a doorway and saw a man who said he was dead, to when I stood in a bright house by the sea and saw another man drop his gaze like a falcon. It was about being afraid and pretending you are not, about taking responsibility for a stranger's task even if it costs, and about understanding that those who are most dangerous are often the ones who smile the most. It was about the sounds you never forget – the knife falling with a little thud through a heart, the engine growling like a cat in the heather, the whistle that splits the night into before and after, and the slow, almost friendly voice of an old gentleman who hides the world's most dangerous secrets behind spotless manners. It was about managing to believe in something in the midst of doubt and fog, and finding a word in a black book, thirty-nine steps, that finally led us together on a beach where the waves stood just high enough.

I have sometimes imagined the young innkeeper by the waterfall again, he who dreamed of Kipling and Conrad and all the great things. He got his story. Perhaps he later sat and wrote about a man in tweed, a lost stranger who promised him an adventure. His life

seemed quiet, but in the quiet room outside the window waited an old fisherman on a bridge whistling an old tune, and a whole side of world history was shaped by silent steps down a chalk stair at high tide that June. Some evenings after the outbreak of war I have caught myself taking a deep breath, like that night I lay behind a dovecot edge and stared at a secret landing field in a wooded hollow.

The air grew thick with smoke and their plans, but also with something else that is hard to put into words. I think it was the certainty that sometimes we must be more than ourselves so that things do not go as wrong as they could. And sometimes it just takes a bit of luck, a good eye for small movements, and the ability to stay calm under pressure, even when the dust from a blasted wall still itches in your throat.

When I left Trafalgar Lodge that night, the sea was black and friendly, as if it did not quite know what role it was to play in what was coming. Out there the destroyer cut a dark notch in the horizon, the Ariadne was taken, and inside the house sat two men in handcuffs and a plump housemaid with a pale face.

The old man fixed his gaze on me one last time. He had lost, but he did not know the word, I was sure of that. I walked down the cliff and stood at the gate to the stairs.

I counted in my head. Thirty-nine. A small thing in a country full of stairs. But here, right here, the numbers were the entrance to a door that must not be opened. And it was my job to make sure that door stayed closed, that very night.

Later, in green uniform

with brass buttons, I stood in a camp and watched boys from all over the country learning to march. Some were as young as the boy at the inn, some as sturdy as old Specky in his Sunday suit. Some had senators for uncles, some had rarely tasted anything but potatoes. All stood under the same sky and lifted their gaze towards the same future.

And it struck me that those weeks when I ran, slept in the heather, lay on a windowsill in a mill and counted steps on a white stair, were a kind of training, not just for the legs, but for the heart. To persevere. To keep course. To keep faith that there are moments when an unknown man must do the right thing for another unknown man.

For Scudder, who said that death could be like falling asleep tired and waking to a mild day. For Sir Harry, who smiled and threw the knife so easily and believed in me. For the innkeeper, who dreamed of stories and got one right before the wedding arch. For Specky, who did not ask a single question, but put milk on the table and closed the door. For Sir Walter, who smiled with tired eyes and was stiff in the neck against terrible news on the telephone. For Royer, who remembered a lion in the shadow of a mare and told it as a lesson to us all.

So that someone might walk safely on a beach with water flowers and hear a man whistle an old song, someone must find the way through night and dust and deceive silent men who can hood their eyes like a falcon. Sometimes, when I see a white stair down to the sea, countable if one has time, I think of everything that could have happened, but did not, because someone took

the chance they got. It makes me quiet. And then I sing softly the same tune. For it has a strange strength in it.

Annie Laurie. It was in the air that evening by the little river. It bound me together with the only man in England who had both power and patience to believe a stranger's story. And it was truly used as a password in a world where words seldom mean anything.

That evening it meant much. Perhaps more than I can explain, even though I have now explained all I can. I know that this is still only a working version of the story, and that the fine-tuning can wait. But the thread in it is clear.

A man who was bored opened the door for another man who said he was dead. A book of numbers became the key to a puzzle of maps, coasts and stairs. An old gentleman with a friendly smile turned out to have falcon eyes that could darken the world. A young man with a lisp drank lemonade after tennis and was as dangerous as a snake. A roadman fell asleep after his daughter's wedding and held his finger on my fate without knowing it.

An empty dovecot under the scorching sun saved me. A mouthful of ginger biscuits kept me alive when hunger was a fist in my stomach. And a few seconds on a bridge, with a tune in the air and a fish that was impossible to see because it looked like a black stone, became the place where history and everyday life merged. All this was the road to thirty-nine steps and a tide hour. It is enough for a whole book, but it is also enough for a child to grasp what is at stake when someone must stand on guard, even when they would rather sleep.