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He wrote, as requested, and signed an illegible signature. Patricia took the slip and perused it as though checking for obscenity.

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” she said.

“Thank you so much.”

“You’ll have to read it here.” Usual practice was to sign files out and take them back to one’s own office, but this clearly could not apply to a visiting detective. “There are a couple of desks round the back.” Patricia pointed through a forest of metal shelving.

Herbert smiled his heartfelt thanks; he knew she was running a considerable risk in helping him.

Patricia disappeared, her voluminous skirts giving her the appearance of a galleon under full sail beneath a helmet of hair that would have pleased a Valkyrie.

Herbert looked at the photographs on her desk; one each of her five sons, ranging from twenty-five through fifteen years of age, all immortalized in sepia at points various around her throne.

Patricia kept a small transistor radio on her desk, and Herbert listened to it while he counted back the minutes. The Automobile Association was being besieged with calls. The previous evening it had been motorists asking for advice on conditions, and this morning the same motorists were ringing back to moan that they had been misled. Thinking that the fog would last only a few hours, the AA had apparently suggested that people park in side streets under lampposts and leave their lights on to warn drivers of their presence. Now all those cars had flat batteries, and the AA vans could not find their way through the fog to give them a jumpstart.

Patricia came back in short order, plopping a small manila folder in front of Herbert and bustling onward without interruption. A small queue of those wanting to take out or return files had already built up in her brief absence.

Herbert opened the file and began to read.

Kazantsev seemed to be a bona fide
Izvestia
journalist. He had arrived in London nine months ago, and had been placed under intense surveillance until the end of June, when surveillance had been discontinued “due to lack of any espionage activity on the subject’s part.”

During that period, he had visited the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens on only three occasions, all for simple administrative purposes pertaining to press accreditation or visa requirements.

This at least Herbert felt confident believing; there was probably no building in London which was watched with greater zeal than the Soviet Embassy. Five’s Watchers stationed themselves in cars parked outside (which were renumbered and repainted every few months) and in buildings opposite. They were constantly filming the comings and goings, and would inevitably requisition every new and improved listening microphone on which Five got its grubby hands.

There was good reason for the endeavor. Of the entire Soviet Embassy staff—and, among adversarial countries, London was Moscow’s second most important station, behind Washington—only about a third were genuine diplomats. Another third belonged to the MGB, Soviet civilian intelligence, and the final third were attached to the GRU, military intelligence.

Translations of several of Kazantsev’s articles were attached to the file. One had been dismissed by an anonymous scribble in the margin as “dreadful boring rubbish,” but in fact the majority seemed to Herbert to be interesting and eminently readable.

That in itself meant nothing. If one could write well enough to pass oneself off as a journalist, then the
espionage world was one’s oyster. Unlike diplomats, reporters could go anywhere, from slums to palaces and all points in between, meeting people from every walk of life. It was a rare journalist who could keep secrets like a spy, but that did not mean such people did not exist.

Perhaps if Kazantsev had been posted to London in the days when Herbert was a Watcher, he would have been tailed more efficiently and Five might have been less inclined to dismiss him as a bog-standard correspondent. No reporter Herbert had ever met would have searched the house in Cholmeley Crescent the way Kazantsev had. Floorboards and skirting boards were the mark of a professional, someone who’d learned their craft in MGB school, not on the news desk at
Pravda
or Tass.

Whatever the Five files did or did not say, Kazantsev was a spy, of that Herbert was certain; and foreign espionage was the one thing that the police would always leave alone. Robbers, rapists, even murderers were ten-a-penny, but international intrigue meant politics, and the police liked to stay as far away from politics as possible.

This was Herbert’s dilemma; the one he had been facing, in one form or another, since the moment he had learned of de Vere Green’s involvement.

On the one hand, this was clearly an espionage case, even if Herbert did not know exactly how. The sensible thing to do, therefore, would be to hand it over to Five and be done with it.

On the other hand, a murder had been committed; and Five, whatever else they might or might not do, would be neither especially concerned with bringing the killer to justice, nor particularly qualified to do so.

And this was not even to mention Herbert’s own personal interest. He was tired of being the outsider fobbed off with the nothing cases. This was his chance to do something special, to use his experience and contacts; and to show Tyce that his support, as welcome as it had been unexpected, had not been misplaced.

Herbert was turning all this over in his head when his thoughts were interrupted by voices from next door. There was only a thin partition wall between the desk where he was sitting and de Vere Green’s office. And de Vere Green was angry; angry enough for his voice to carry through the partition with some ease.

“What do you mean, lost him?” he was saying.

“He gave us the slip in the cemetery, sir,” came the reply, from the man with the estuarine accent whom Herbert had heard on Egyptian Avenue in Highgate Cemetery, when he had been hiding in the burial chamber.

Herbert stopped breathing. It was de Vere Green who had ordered him followed.

“And that was the last time you saw him?” de Vere Green asked.

“Yes, sir.”

If the other two goons were also in there, they did not dissent. When it came to the incident at Archway station, Herbert thought, Bob must have decided that discretion was the better part of valor. His sense of self-preservation was evidently better than his aptitude for surveillance.

It was serious enough, Herbert thought, that the goons had come here in the first place. The Watchers did not operate out of Leconfield House for fear that they would be too identifiable to the Soviets. Instead,
they were based in an unmarked four-story Georgian house on Clarence Terrace, on the southwest side of Regent’s Park. Herbert knew that building as well as he did his own flat. In his capacity as a senior Watcher, Herbert had come to Leconfield House more often than most; the majority of Watchers would visit Leconfield House once a year, if that.

“So where is he now?” de Vere Green barked. No
dear boys
here.

Herbert could not resist. He stood up, walked round the corner, and into de Vere Green’s office, where he amused himself for a brief moment by trying to work out which of the four men looked most astonished by his appearance.

“Right here,” Herbert said.

The argument raged for fifteen minutes, going first back and forth, and then nowhere.

De Vere Green, scattering
dear boys
around like confetti, assured Herbert that the decision to send the Watchers—long since banished from the room—to follow him was nothing personal. He simply wanted to know where Herbert went and what he found. In fact he was rather hoping, gentleman to gentleman, that Herbert would be so kind as to share such information with him.

No, Herbert said; this was a murder investigation, plain and simple. If de Vere Green had anything to contribute, he should say so; if not, he should leave well alone. De Vere Green was clearly hiding something, Herbert added; why else would he have had him trailed? And how was Kazantsev, whom Herbert had found in Stensness’ house, involved?

De Vere Green would not, of course, presume to speak for Kazantsev, but the correspondent’s very presence indicated that this was way out of a detective inspector’s league. Herbert should simply turn it over to Five and be done with it.

This was not a request; that much was clear.

Herbert thought of what Tyce had said, about loyalties, and jurisdiction, and he made the decision almost without realizing. If de Vere Green had nothing concrete to show that Five merited control of this case, then Herbert would not hand it over.

After a stretch of mutual, glowering, silence, de Vere Green tried another tactic.

He feared, he said, that Stensness’ murder was a matter of national security. Not necessarily in and of itself, but perhaps as part of wider ramifications. He would tell Herbert what he knew, if Herbert in turn told him what he had managed to find. They could help each other.

A tacit admission, Herbert said, that de Vere Green had been economical with the truth in the first place.

An occupational hazard of their mutual trades, de Vere Green replied. Deal?

You first.

“I, er, I …” De Vere Green steepled his hands, which was as penitent as Herbert had ever seen him. “I misled you, dear boy. Earlier.”

Herbert said nothing, ushering de Vere Green to fill the silence, which he did.

“I told you that when I saw Stensness at the conference, he said he didn’t have anything new for me. That was not, in fact, true …” De Vere Green paused, his inner thespian never far from the surface. “He told me he had something that would change the world.”

“Change the world?”

“Change the world.”

“Meaning what?”

“Dear boy, if I knew
that
, we wouldn’t be in this fix.”

“What did he propose to do about this something?”

“He didn’t say. Just that he would contact me shortly.”

“Shortly? Not last night?”

“That is correct.”

“He didn’t give a time or place?”

“No.”

“And that was it?”

“That, dear boy, was very much it.” De Vere Green smiled wryly. “Quid pro quo.”

So de Vere Green had lied earlier. What else had Herbert really expected, knowing what he did about the man? At any rate, de Vere Green was proving more cooperative now, and there was much he knew that Herbert wanted to know, too.

So if Herbert really wanted to find out who killed Max Stensness, and why, he needed all the help he could get.

Herbert pulled the map of the Coronation route from his pocket and handed it to de Vere Green. “I found this taped to the inside of the toilet cistern,” he said.

De Vere Green winced momentarily, presumably at the unspeakably plebeian nature of the word
toilet.

“I’ve no idea what it signifies,” Herbert added. “But I’m sure it must be involved somehow, if only for the lengths that Stensness had gone to in order to hide it. Had he simply left it out in the open, one unobtrusive paper among many, I doubt I’d have noticed it.”

De Vere Green studied the paper. Some place names had been ringed; ten or twelve at a quick count,
among them the Houses of Parliament, Marlborough House, and Piccadilly Circus.

They could, Herbert thought, have passed for doodles, the kind of patterns a man would make while waiting on the phone or bored in a meeting; but when the same patterns were hidden in a condom in a toilet cistern, that was a different matter entirely. The mundane became instantly suspicious.

“God help us,” de Vere Green said. “God help us all.” He looked up at Herbert. “You realize what this means?”

“What?”

“That the communists want to assassinate the monarch.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” Herbert said, more as reflex than anything else, for he knew that the Coronation map must mean
something
, and de Vere Green’s theory was as good as anything he could come up with.

“Dear boy, what else do you think the marked points are? Locations for sandwich stalls? If you work here long enough, you end up believing six impossible things before breakfast. Why is it so ridiculous? The Americans are paranoid about communist attempts to kill their president, aren’t they?”

“The Americans are in thrall to that lunatic McCarthy,” Herbert said. “It’ll be a tragic day if we ever follow suit.”

“And by extension,” de Vere Green continued, as though he hadn’t heard, “the British worry that our prime minister is also at risk, especially after the way he and Roosevelt diddled Stalin at Yalta. Stalin hasn’t forgotten, you know. Uncle Joe will remember slights
against him till the end of time. But, unlike the president, Mr. Churchill is not head of state, is he?”

“The monarch’s role is largely ceremonial.”

“Perhaps, but the importance of this queen to Britain goes far beyond her official role. She’s young and glamorous; people are looking to her to help this country finally slough off the lethargy of war and restore Britain to its rightful position at the top table of world affairs.”

Spoken like a true patriot
, Herbert thought. “It still makes no sense,” he said.

“On the contrary, dear boy. You have no idea how well you have done to obtain this information. There have long been rumblings of some large underground movement planning what I believe they refer to as a ‘spectacular.’ This must be it. What, indeed, could be more spectacular?”

“But
how?
And
why?
”

“If you keep thinking in such narrow-minded, conventional patterns, dear boy, we’ll never solve this.”
We
, Herbert noted; not
you
, but then again not
I
either. “Any act of fanaticism makes sense if one is sufficiently warped to see the logic. The Cold War is chillier and more intense than ever before. Remember what happened a couple of months ago? On that godforsaken archipelago off Australia?”

Herbert nodded; the British had successfully exploded an atomic bomb, making them the third country in the world to have nuclear weapons.

“There you are,” de Vere Green said. “That makes it two against one. Poor odds for Stalin, who is, according to every piece of intelligence coming out of Moscow, increasingly paranoid and unpredictable, even by his
own legendary standards. He has legions of men obedient and resourceful enough to do something like this.”