From Fitzroy’s Private Diary (Extract 172)

The world I live in means you have to constantly watch your back. I try to avoid knowing too much about current operations, but the longer I stay in the service, the more knowledge I acquire. It’s very annoying. Of course, one always wants to know what one is doing, but I’m quite happy to let all the other blighters get on with their jobs and just focus on my own.

Becoming a repository of knowledge puts you at risk on a lot of levels. There’s the straightforward capture and torture. I can normally keep myself out of those situations – although, even I’ve been caught in the past. Not that I’ve ever given anything up, you understand. But one round of torture makes a bloke quite keen not to have a second, and you end up watching your back even more after that.

Then there’s the capture of someone one cares about, and they get tortured until you give up whatever it is the enemy’s looking for. It’s one of the main reasons my liaisons are not of the long lasting variety. Still, there’s Alice now, although I rather think anyone who tried to capture and torture her would be in for a bit of a surprise. That and a fair deal of pain. Being my protégée she is, to say the least, exceptionally capable.

However, thinking about this sort of thing can make a man truly paranoid. I’ve seen it happen to chaps in the service before; the jumping at shadows, the suspicion that every stranger is an enemy agent, and the one occasion you forget to sit with your back against the wall is the time that somebody will stick a knife in it. Makes it awful difficult for some of the chaps to attend a large banquet when undercover at a country house weekend. I mean, one can hardly move the furniture around, can one? That’d be damn rude.

My personal take, when in just such a situation, is to perform an assessment of the environment, and who’s present in it. Pick out any obvious candidates to watch and then, apart from knowing where the exits are, go with the flow. I rely on my wits and my sharp reactions to save me from unexpected danger. I don’t take risks. Well, actually I do, but then I’d rather be a bit of a loose cannon than someone who is overly risk averse.

Having a partner helps too. I’m mystified as to why more agents don’t have female partners. There’s so many places you can go undercover posing as a couple and, above all, you can watch each other’s backs. Alice is very good and sensible about these sorts of things and will give a man the benefit of the doubt right up until she has to stab him in the eye with a hat-pin.

So, I’ll carry on keeping a level head and dealing with the enemy whenever and wherever they pop up. Life is for living. One can’t spend it always looking over one’s shoulder and being afraid. You’ve got to square up and look danger in the eye, not shy away from it. Scares the willies out of the enemy too. If you look confident enough, they’ll always assume you know more than you do. And, with my indomitable confidence, charm and guile, it generally makes the ladies swoon, and the enemies flee. Even so, it’s just as well that I’m also light on my feet, because there are times when I find myself having to dodge both husbands as well as adversaries.