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“Your ideal case, then.”

Herbert chose to ignore this last remark. “There’s not much more I’ll be able to do tonight, so I’ll come in tomorrow morning after breakfast and take it up from there.”

“And put in for overtime, no doubt.”

The last time the topic of overtime had come up, Herbert remembered, Tulloch had contended that the whole system was skewed. The men who needed the money for their families were the ones who couldn’t afford the time to make that money, he said; in contrast, the ones who had the time to spare had nothing to spend the money on.

Herbert had suggested that he do the time and Tulloch take the money. Tulloch had thought that a splendid idea.

“Well,” Tulloch continued, before Herbert could answer, “everyone else here’s too busy to waste time on a poof in the drink, so you’re more than welcome to it. You’d know their haunts better than us, that’s for sure. What about the scene?”

“I’ve sealed it off, of course. I’ll have a proper search done in the morning, when there’s enough light.”

“Gordon Bennett,” Tulloch said. “We
have
taught you something after all.”

And he hung up.

South Kensington tube station was more or less at the bottom of Exhibition Road, so Herbert managed to find it by the simple expedient of walking straight, dodging
the hardened drinkers who had headed for the private clubs after lunch—membership on the spot for five shillings—and remained there as afternoon slid to evening, nursing their cut-price whiskeys and bemoaning their luck. South Kensington and Earls Court were full of such places, never-never lands of clipped mustaches, army-style overcoats, and old school ties.

Seven years on from the war, they were still weary, still clinging to their Micawberish feeling that something would turn up. War veterans were prematurely and preternaturally aged, their careers ripped apart by the conflict; many of them had stepped aside so as not to get trampled underfoot by younger men desperate to fill their shoes.

Herbert found a Piccadilly Line train heading east almost at once. The tube system was still free from fog;
strange days indeed
, he thought,
when those malodorous and claustrophobic tunnels were cleaner and brighter than the real world above.

He sat in a near-empty carriage, flicking through the notes Rathbone had given him. There was little of surprise and even less of encouragement within them.

That the blond man had been drowned against his will was now almost beyond doubt. Threads of wool, presumably from his killer’s clothes, had been found under three fingernails on the right hand and two on the left. His right hand had also been clutching silt and weeds, presumably fixed in a cadaveric spasm.

Rathbone could have written most of what followed in Greek for all the sense it made to Herbert, but, whatever he said, Herbert was happy to take his word for it.

Bilateral hemorrhages on the shoulders and chest followed lines of muscle bundles and were therefore
consistent with violent tearing, itself indicative of a struggle. Such symptoms could be confused with putrefaction, but extravascular erythrocytes provided histo-logical proof of a true hemorrhage. Moreover, petechial hemorrhaging inside the eyelid and on the eyeball itself were indicators of excessive premortem adrenaline, as were the abnormally high histamine and serotonin levels. Such indicators were all consistent with murder.

It was Herbert’s patch all right.

Since homosexuals were proscribed by law, it followed that they had an underworld. As Tulloch had insinuated, Herbert knew full well where the gates to this particular Hades were; the queer pubs, in the first instance, such as the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, the Golden Lion on Dean Street, and the Duke of York on Rathbone Street, where the landlord, whom a Five report had once superfluously described as “eccentric,” liked to cut off customers’ ties and display them as trophies.

The Fitzroy was especially notorious, not just for the marines and guardsmen who packed in there on Saturday nights looking for a quick pickup, but for the eclectic quality of its straighter clientele; Dylan Thomas (who apparently liked to pick fights with the guardsmen), the hangman Albert Pierrepoint, and the Satanist Aleister Crowley had all drunk there, Crowley evidently inventing his own cocktail of gin, vermouth, and laudanum. When the police had raided the place and the landlord been charged, the court had heard that “there can be very little doubt that this house was conducted in a most disorderly and disgusting fashion.”

Failing all other leads, Herbert would trawl such establishments, hopefully with a name for the dead man
and a photograph of him which did not include a mortician’s slab and a face rendered puffy by drowning.

Before then, however, would come the usual, tedious routes to finding out someone’s identity. Dental records could be checked, fingerprints matched, public appeals launched; all involving a level of manpower the police could ill afford. The force was desperately short of men, particularly in towns and cities, and had been so ever since the war. Too many young men had died for it to be otherwise.

Herbert alighted at Green Park. Advertisements greeted him like old friends:
Good Mornings Begin With Gillette.
The pubs were closing; through doors pushed briefly open, he heard the usual landlord banter. “Arses and glasses!” “Haven’t you got homes to go to?” and “Let’s be having the company’s glasses,” all pronounced with the tired, ersatz flourish of the provincial actor.

The journey had taken ten minutes, and yet it was like going from one world to another. South Kensington and Mayfair might have been continents apart; London could change faces in a heartbeat, a street.

Where there had been sad sacks, now there were men a decade their junior, the generation who had not been sent away to fight and who consequently brimmed with energy and vigor; spivs with padded shoulders and pencil mustaches, who winked with conspiratorial jauntiness as they checked the time on their Cartier watches and lit cigarettes with gold-plated lighters.

Some called them con men; they themselves would say that times were changing and, perhaps as never before in Britain, the race was to the swift. The pubs they frequented had once been the preserve of the
domestic servant seeking ale and dominoes. Now they were crowded out by wide boys and posh girls.

It was change, all right; whether it was progress was a different matter.

Herbert fancied a nightcap before closing time, but one glance through the window of the Chesterfield pub put him off going in there. The place was brimming with Five officers, most of whom he recognized, and most of whom were also doubtless drunk and loudly discussing matters of national security.

Five’s oppressive regime and culture of secrecy had with grim inevitability fostered an endemic culture of excessive drinking. The Chesterfield was almost an official service watering hole, so much so that it was known within Five as Camp Two. Camp One was the Pig & Eye Club on the top floor of Five’s HQ, Leconfield House, established precisely to avoid too many people decamping to the pub; but the woeful lack of atmosphere within the club ensured that decamp they did.

This was, as if Herbert needed any reminding, the outfit charged with defense of the realm.

He walked through Shepherd Market, a curious enclave of passageways which sprouted pubs, bistro restaurants, galleries, antique shops, and brothels in more or less equal quantities. Herbert lived in the heart of the Market—his flat gained in the desirability of its location what it lacked in size—and as he approached his front door he saw through the fog that someone was standing on the pavement outside.

“You look like how I feel,” a female voice said, when he was close enough to make out her features. “Anything I can do to help?”

Herbert smiled. It was Stella, the doyenne of Shepherd Market tarts, universally known as “the Auld Slapper,” a name bestowed with affection or bile according to whether one had come across her sunny side or her dark one. She could be piercingly understanding and bitterly funny, but behind the façade, the set of her mouth and the waves of dullness in her eyes betrayed her.

Tonight, her makeup looked as though it had been applied by a plasterer. Dark roots streaked through her badly bleached hair. Business was clearly slow.

Propriety should perhaps have prompted Herbert to rebuff her, politely but firmly. Corporeal weakness had him following her gloomily upstairs.

Outside the office, Stella was the nearest thing Herbert had to a friend; seven years older than him, perhaps she was in a strange way the elder sister denied to an only child. She was also, rather unimpressively, the extent of his sex life.

That part of proceedings was over in short order, as usual. Stella made her habitual crack about the oldest profession in the world encountering the second oldest, and Herbert made his equally customary reply that he was no longer a spy, and that even if he had ever been one, he could not possibly have told her. It was a routine as old and sagging as the bed on which they had bounced with a distinct lack of luster.

He dug a couple of pound notes from his pocket and handed them over. He always paid; if he was to be in debt to her, he wanted it to be for her companionship rather than her services. Correspondingly, she never feigned ecstasy, and he would no more have wanted her to do so than he would have expected the
grocer to hand over his shopping with piercing yells of fake rhapsody.

Dressed again, Stella stroked Herbert’s cheek with the backs of her fingers.

“Be careful what you wish for,” she said.

This was one of her favorite sayings, and he knew how it finished.

“Because it might just happen, right?”

“Right,” she said. “And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

Herbert’s flat was nothing to shout about; a small kitchen area with a porcelain sink, a wooden draining board, and a small cupboard in the coolest part of the larder which served as the next best thing to a refrigerator. The pictures on the wall of the living room were plain and the furniture even plainer; most pieces carried the “Utility” mark, designed for newlyweds and those whose homes had been destroyed by the war. How they had ended up here was anyone’s guess, and Herbert was not much inclined to try and find out. They had come with the flat, and that was that.

There was one bathroom, with the lavatory cistern high on the wall and a sit-up bath which would have cramped a pygmy, and two bedrooms, both small enough for the single beds within them to look large. Herbert had one room; his mother Mary had designs on the other, on the grounds that she was ill and needed constant looking after, but Herbert had so far resisted. Living with one’s mother was for serial killers, queers, and Italians only.

He wondered how long it would be before he succumbed; for she
was
ill, of that there was no doubt. He
had taken her to Guy’s Hospital that very morning with a recurrence of breathing difficulties, and the fog would hardly be doing her any favors.

He phoned the hospital, sat through stretching minutes as his call was passed from one ancient switchboard to another, and finally got through to the duty nurse on Mary’s ward, who told him that his mother was asleep and that her condition was unchanged.

He said he would visit tomorrow, and the nurse promised to pass the message on.

Having piled the fire with extra coal, banked it to ensure maximum warmth, checked that the windows were sealed tight against everything which came from outside, Herbert was left alone with the silence.

He thought of his colleagues finding warmth in the press of their wives’ bodies and the glow of protection over their children which every man carried in him like a birthright, and reflected, not for the first time, that of all the truths he sought in his work, the most indisputable of all was also the easiest to find; that it was precisely
because
he was alone that he could afford to seek, and that he was alone not because he had chosen to be but because every turn his life had taken had ensured it.

H
erbert turned the radio first on and then up, to drown out the clattering of the milkman in the street below. The newsreader said that Jomo Kenyatta was being tried in Nairobi for association with the Mau Mau. Imprisonment would not harm Kenyatta’s political prospects, Herbert thought; the British authorities in India had locked Nehru up during the war, and he had not done badly since. Had Herbert been a betting man, he would have put money on Kenyatta eventually running the place.

Unexciting news came and went in unexciting tones. Herbert listened for a while, summoning up the enthusiasm to move; then, with a huge effort, rolled out of bed, stumbled over to the window, and pulled open the curtains.

The fog had thickened into a greasy, heavy swirl which was condensing in oily drops on the windowpanes. It had hardly been worth the trip. He should have been a bear, he thought; any self-respecting grizzly would have taken one look outside and hibernated until April.

He was not due back on duty until two o’clock that afternoon, but he had told Tulloch he would be in after breakfast. True, he owed Tulloch nothing, but he felt obligated to the man in the Long Water, whoever he had been. In death as in life, anonymous or otherwise, he deserved the best the Metropolitan Police could give him.

Herbert rang the Hyde Park station, where Elkington, keener than a factory full of mustard, was already at his desk. Herbert asked that Elkington bring a police diver and meet him by the Peter Pan statue in an hour.

Elkington could do it in half an hour, if that was better.

No, it was not better. An hour was fine.

The weatherman came on the radio to announce that London had suffered a temperature inversion during the night. The air near the ground had grown colder, effectively trapping itself beneath the lid of warmer air above. Unable to rise vertically and with no wind to disperse it laterally, this shallow layer of low-lying, dense, frigid air was now totally inert.

The Port of London Authority had announced that all navigable sections of the river were fogbound, and that river traffic had ceased in its entirety.