From Fitzroy’s Private Diary (Extract 173)

One of an agent’s greatest obstacles is bias. By this I mean not that one prefers blondes over brunettes, but rather when one finds themselves set on a certain course, there’s a tendency to want to make evidence fit in accordance with what has already been determined.

For example, thinking that it simply cannot be a husband’s footsteps I hear on the stairs, for the lady in question has assured me that he is away for a further week (in this case, she was mistaken, and I was forced, for the sake of the her reputation, to make a hasty exit via a second storey window).

So, the lesson here is to trust only reliable sources. I’ve always found redheads like myself to be quite trustworthy informants. Still, it’s only through thoroughly engaging with said assets that one can truly assess their merit, so that’s a cross that one simply has to bear.

However, bias can work on many levels. For a while, Alice kept getting mixed up with murders, and dragging me into the investigations. I’m familiar, of course, with assassinations, executions, and just damn bad luck, but murder is another thing altogether. Figuring out which civilian has killed another civilian is generally something I’ll happily leave to the police. It’s frequently dull and tawdry. Money, lust, jealousy, and occasionally reputation, are the main motives that prompt civilians to kill one another. There’s no wider political game, or ramifications, and I’m as keen on solving your average murder as I am getting my teeth drilled, or listening to a parson’s overly long sermon.

However, it was clear that if I was to get through such episodes, I needed to explain to Alice that you mustn’t force one piece of evidence to fit in with the rest. This is an all too common mistake among ordinary people. They invest their pride and reputation in being right, so having honed in what they believe is the guilty suspect, they’ll continue to uncover evidence to back that up, no matter how circumstantial it may be.

This is not something a spy can do. So many lives rest on the decisions we make in the field. We’ve got to keep an open mind. That is to say, it’s always easier to assume that everyone is guilty, traitorous, or whatever, but we must examine new evidence, and equally reexamine old evidence, in the face of whatever information has most recently come to light.

Alice proved to be exceptionally adept at this. I believe I can only think of two occasions on which she became remarkably pig-headed, and that’s quite an achievement for any woman – or any man, for that matter. It was probably her ability to examine matters from all angles that first interested me in her. That, and my interest in examining all her angles, of course.