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Breathless, though more from the adrenaline of thwarted progress than the rigor of the exercise, Herbert adjourned his hunt to go and answer a call of nature.

As he aimed at the porcelain, he looked around, trying to work out where
he
would have hidden something of vast importance. And then it came to him.

Forcing himself to finish peeing, he buttoned his fly, put the toilet seat down—see, he thought, he
would
have been a good husband—clambered onto the seat, and reached up toward the cistern.

Starting at the far right-hand corner, he walked his fingers slowly round the cistern’s inside edge, fighting the natural inclination to keep his fingertips dry; toilet cistern water was no more or less clean than shower water, after all.

Halfway along the front side of the cistern, his fingertips brushed something rubber, and he almost jumped for joy.

He pulled hard enough to rip away the strip of adhesive tape he knew would be there, and away came his prize.

A condom.

Not just any old condom, however. This one held something inside, and it had been tied at the neck, like a balloon, to keep its contents dry.

The knot was so tight that undoing it with fingernails alone would have been virtually impossible. He tore it with his teeth, careful not to harm what was inside.

No one ever used condoms for the taste, Herbert thought, hawking from deep in his throat as he pulled the neck open and extracted the contents.

Whatever he had been expecting, it had certainly been more earth-shattering than what he found.

The condom contained an article from Wednesday’s
Times
concerning revisions to the Queen’s Coronation celebrations next June.

There was a map of the route: a circuit of central London, running almost straight past his flat, he noticed, which was nice of them.

Someone, presumably Stensness, had ringed many of the place names. That apart, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Herbert almost missed it. In the bottom right-hand corner, in tiny but legible writing, was a sequence of letters:
XXX CCD GVD RCC DPA XXX CDK S.

They must have made some sense, he supposed, but damned if he could see what.

He read them again.

XXX CCD GVD RCC DPA XXX CDK S.

If anything, they seemed even more incomprehensible second time round.

Herbert consoled himself with the thought that, having had more than his fair share of excitement for one morning, he was hardly in the best shape for code-breaking.

He tucked the mysterious
Times
article into the inside pocket of his jacket, spent twenty further unproductive and increasingly halfhearted minutes looking through the rest of the house for anything vaguely relevant; and then, checking in advance that the coast was clear, he left 43 Cholmeley Crescent.

It was even money that at least one of the goons was waiting for him at Highgate station, so instead of retracing his steps back there when he reached Archway Road, Herbert instead turned down the hill. Archway station was a good ten or fifteen minutes’ walk, but it was time he could spare if it meant getting away undetected.

He passed under the high road bridge which every year contributed more than its fair share to the capital’s grisly suicide tally, and remembered something Freud had said about human life being one long struggle against the death instinct.

Not for him, Herbert thought; not right now, at any rate. He could not remember the last time he had felt this… well, not necessarily happy, but certainly
alive.

The ruck with Kazantsev must have done him good. There was nothing like being in danger to give a man vitality. Men who sought to protect the body at all costs died many times over; but those who risked the body to survive as men had a good chance to live on.

He had not enjoyed his birthday so much in years.

These thoughts must have distracted him, for before he knew it he was not only at Archway station but also virtually at the ticket barriers, and it was then that he saw the man he had christened Bob.

Bob was wearing a different coat, by which Herbert surmised that it was reversible and Bob had simply turned it inside out. Even if Herbert had not recognized Bob’s face, however, he would have known him by his shoes. Whatever opportunity Watchers enjoyed to alter their clothes during surveillance, they rarely had the time or inclination to change their shoes. Bob was wearing the same shapeless, mildly unattractive brown laceups that Herbert had spotted on the tube journey up from Leicester Square.

There was another reason Herbert noticed him. After sudden movement, the second thing to avoid at all costs when carrying out surveillance was “ballooning”—drifting round with no apparent purpose.

An experienced operative would always look as though he had a purpose, even if it was nothing more than waiting for someone. But Bob was making such a show—eyes darting, pacing back and forth, constantly checking his watch—that he would have looked odd even to … well, even to Hannah Mortimer, Herbert thought, even to a blind girl.

Bob was so busy looking around that he had not seen him yet. Herbert turned his face away from him
and went as quickly and unobtrusively as possible through the ticket barrier. Rather than standing on the escalator and letting it carry him down to the platform, Herbert walked down the left-hand side, the better to put distance between himself and Bob, not daring to turn back to see whether Bob was following.

Luck was on Herbert’s side; a southbound train arrived on the platform at exactly the same time as he did. One usually had to endure a wait of several minutes. Judging by the tightly packed carriages, there must have been a long interval since the last train. The Northern Line had probably been hit by cancellations or delays caused by the fog, in town if not out here.

Herbert squeezed himself on board and burrowed through the crowd, the better to be out of sight if Bob had followed him down.

The doors stayed resolutely, obstinately open. Herbert supposed that, when it came to the underground, a quick exit as well as a smooth entrance was too much to ask.

Come on
, he silently urged. Seeing Bob had been a shock; Herbert would not be able to relax until the train had resumed its journey without Bob.

Still the doors did not shut.

Herbert rained unspoken curses on whoever was responsible; idiots trying to drag outsize suitcases on board, or a driver who had hopped off to chat with a mate, or the signal controller keeping the light on red—or all of the above.

And there was Bob, running onto the platform. Since no one was still waiting, he knew he would find Herbert on the train or not at all.

Bob stood for a moment, seemingly unsure of what to do.

He could not have been certain that he had seen Herbert, or else he would have leapt into the nearest carriage—which happened to be Herbert’s—and started looking the moment the train moved off, after which he would have had, perhaps literally, a captive audience.

No, he was hesitating because he knew that if he got on the train and Herbert was not there, he would have abandoned his post upstairs for no reason, and would therefore have been in for an even bigger carpeting than the other two stooges.

Close, Herbert willed the doors.
Close.

Bob moved toward the train.

He was a few yards from the door through which Herbert had entered the carriage. If Bob got on now, he would surely see Herbert. Yes, there were people crammed in tight, but it was still hard to hide in such a confined space.

Herbert looked toward the far end of the carriage, and saw with dismay that even if he could force his way through the crowd before Bob got on board, it was still not nearly far enough.

Unbidden, a snatch of Watcher training floated to the surface.

Conventional wisdom ran that the average person would look for a follower at a distance of between ten and twenty yards, which was exactly the range at which most people preferred to follow.

One was therefore less likely to be spotted if one hung back further or, counterintuitively, if one got closer.

If one got closer.
Herbert was faster than his own thought. He was already moving back through the
crowd, toward the door, as though Bob were an old friend whom he was going to embrace.

Herbert’s haste made him tread on someone’s foot and elbow another person in the kidneys, and with a flurry of muttered apologies he kept going.

Bob got on board at exactly the same moment Herbert reached the door.

It seemed inconceivable that he would not see Herbert, for he was right in his face, close enough to have been lovers. Herbert had to trust in the theory with blind, counterintuitive faith.

Bob looked over Herbert’s shoulder, literally over his shoulder, at the rest of the carriage, scanning their faces for any sign of the one closer to him than everyone else.

The doors hissed, in apparent preparation for closing, and Herbert choked back an absurd desire to laugh. Having spent so long, or at least what had seemed so long, wanting the doors to close, now he was desperate for them to remain open just a few more seconds—long enough for Bob to consider himself mistaken and step back onto the platform.

Miraculously, that is exactly what Bob did.

The train was too crowded, and Herbert was too shaken, to attempt to decipher the strange scrawl at the bottom of the Coronation map. He pulled the list of conference delegates from his pocket and, holding it in jittering hands, scanned it for Kazantsev’s name.

Kazantsev was not listed. Nor was any other Russian, for that matter.

Herbert checked three times, on the last occasion running his finger down the list name by name, and
having to consciously stop himself mouthing the words as though in remedial class.

Definitely not. No Kazantsev, no Russian.

Hard as it was to credit, it seemed to Herbert that de Vere Green had been telling the truth: the conference was nothing to do with this case at all.

Instead, it seemed that the Coronation was somehow involved, and that could only be bad news; not least because it would elevate this case to levels far too stratospheric for one as lowly as he.

Well, if he had to give it up, he would do so only when he was forced, and not before. In the meantime, he needed more information; in particular, he wanted to find out as much as he could about Kazantsev, and there was only one place to go for that.

At Leicester Square, where Herbert changed trains, wisps of smog could now clearly be seen, even this far beneath ground.

He passed a bride and groom, the latter in his tailcoat and the former in her wedding dress, turned almost black by the grime. A phalanx of ushers and bridesmaids bobbed around them.

“We’ve already got married,” the groom was explaining to a passerby, “but this is the only way we can get to the reception. There are no taxis left on the streets, and even if there were, there’s no way they could see where they’re going.”

“Just look at my dress,” the bride said. “It’s ruined!”

“Well, it’s not as if you’ll be needing it again,” the groom replied.

“Cheeky!” she laughed, and slapped him softly, playfully.

Two happy faces, Herbert thought; there were not
many others around, that was for sure. Certainly de Vere Green would not be looking too happy when he got wind of what Herbert was about to do.

When he returned to Leconfield House, Herbert asked not for de Vere Green but for Patricia Drummond-Francis, queen of the Registry.

“Herbert!” she cried, hurrying through the foyer to greet him before kissing him, hard and wet, on both cheeks. “How’s life in the force? Why is it you never come back and see your old friends anymore? What are you doing here?”

The last, Herbert thought, was a question in which Patricia could justifiably have put the emphasis on any one of the five words involved.

“I need a peek at one of your files,” he said.

“You were snaffling around here this morning.”

“News travels.”

“Is this something to do with that?”

Herbert nodded, knowing that Patricia would understand his reluctance to go back to de Vere Green so soon. She shared Herbert’s opinion of his former boss, and knew, too, that when dealing with a man like de Vere Green, the more information one had to hand before battle commenced, the better.

Patricia led Herbert back through the security gates and into the Registry, where all the files were stored. The contents took up the entire ground floor, with its bricked-up windows and steel grilles; and rarely had anyone presided over a fiefdom with such benign firmness as Patricia did.

Her underlings were all daughters of high society or service families, straight out of Roedean or Swiss
finishers, with a strictly tripartite vocabulary (“yah,” “really?,” and “nightmare,” the latter elongated through several syllables) and little ambition beyond marrying as quickly and suitably as possible. “If I’m going to be bored,” they would trill, “I’d rather be bored by a lord!” Patricia worked them like a headmistress and read their minds as though telepathic.

Had she been a man, she would have been director-general by now; had she been a man, and had she dressed the part, too, that was. Patricia’s default garb was old corduroys and patched jerseys dotted with the few clumps of earth that hadn’t stuck beneath her fingernails.

Her true nature—ruddily outdoorsy, hunting and jolly hockey sticks—offset the way in which she carried her head tilted slightly back, a mannerism she had adopted not through any notions of perceived superiority but (and it had taken Herbert a long time to work this out) to disguise the incipience of her double chin.

“Oh,” she said, “and happy birthday.”

“How on earth did you remember that?”

“I remember everything, Herbert,” Patricia said with mock grandiloquence, holding the pause for a perfect second before laughing.

“You’re a wonder.”

“One of the seven. Now, what’s the name?”

“Alexander Kazantsev.”

“Write it down.” She pointed to the pile of request slips. She may have been on Herbert’s side, but she still maintained a theatrical devotion to the rules.