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Herbert thought quickly. The
Izvestia
offices would not offer much privacy, and he knew that the MGB did not like to use rendezvous points in central London, as they felt there were too many police there. Dead drops were one thing—Herbert had in the past spent fruitless days watching the lamppost outside 2 Audley Square, an exercise so futile it had made him seriously question the point not only of his job but of existence itself—but they involved by their nature no human contact, so the risk was deemed permissible.

When it came to actual meetings, though, the MGB preferred slightly more remote locations: Wimbledon post office, the bandstand in Hendon public park, Chelsea Town Hall, the ABC café opposite Ealing Broadway underground station.

The answer came to Herbert in a flash.

“Do you know the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens?” he asked, and the swift, slight inhalation on the other end of the line told him two things: first, that Kazantsev did indeed know it, and second, that he knew, too, why Herbert was asking.

Fog did not mean a day off for the lamplighters, that curious vampiric breed whose working day began at dusk. In fact, their services were even more important than usual. Visible only from directly beneath, the amber lights mounted halfway down what were now invisible lamp standards seemed to hang unsupported in the air. Even the pigeons, denied their usual landmarks, were on foot.

Herbert had been on the go since early morning, and yet he felt no fatigue. Perhaps this was what happened to all men who had experienced war; they tried, usually without realizing, to recreate those memories, seeking out jobs which involved long hours of tedium interspersed with brief snatches of action.

He thought of all the times he had sat at his desk meandering through paperwork, resolve and energy seeming to ebb away like oil from a holed sump, and wondered whether what he had was not so much a disease of despond as one of extremes, where he could starve or binge, stay awake for days or sleep for a week, walk in wet cement or run on a hamster wheel.

He had a couple of hours before he met Kazantsev, and there was little real progress he could make until he had spoken to the Russian; so, having rung the Royal Free and ascertained that the damage to Elkington amounted largely to a splitting headache, he set off for Guy’s Hospital to see his mother.

The journey was a tortuous one, involving three separate trains however one cut it. At Embankment, Herbert watched a man stand close to the edge as the train approached, and knew the man was wondering how much he would be missed if he simply stepped off the platform a moment ahead of the arriving engine’s silver snout and let the grim laws of physics do the rest.

Herbert’s mother had a long list of things she abhorred, and suicides were right at the top. One could not kill oneself, she said, because one’s life was not one’s own. One was the steward of one’s life and body, but they were not one’s to destroy. Only weaklings committed suicide, she said, and there was no greater damnation in her eyes than being a weakling.

She and Herbert had discussed the issue of suicides
on many occasions, and in the end they had simply agreed to disagree.

At London Bridge, Herbert fought against the commuter tide, instinctively looked left and right along the tramlines as he crossed the road, even though London’s last tram had been decommissioned five months before, and followed the labyrinthine trail through the hospital corridors until he found his mother’s ward.

Mary was sufficiently ravaged by age and illness for no amount of makeup to be truly effective, though God knew she had given it a go. Lipstick firmly in place, foundation and mascara just so, her hair perfectly brushed. Still Herbert’s eyes were drawn to the way her translucent skin hung from her bones, and to the liver spots which dotted her neck.

He stood and looked at Mary for a good few seconds before she noticed him.

“Herbert! I didn’t see you there.” She glanced at the watch which hung loosely from a twig-thin wrist. “What time do you call this?”

“I’m late. Sorry. A man was drowned in the Long Water last night.”

Mary held up an admonishing hand. “Stop, Herbert. You always try to tell me what you’re up to, when you know full well I hate hearing about all that palaver. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner you find a new job, the better. If you never have to deal with another dead body again, it’ll be too soon.”

“I’m a murder detective, Mama. Dead bodies pretty much come with the job.”

“Enough! Murders mean murderers, and murderers are dangerous. One day the dead body will be you,
God forbid, and where will I be left then? But you never think about that, do you? Ah, enough of that. Come give your old mother a kiss.”

She clung on to him a beat too long for comfort, and then pushed him away with unexpected sharpness.

“Good grief!” she said. “You smell as if you’ve been down a coal mine all day.”

“It’s the fog, I suppose.”

“Huh! More rubbish to wreck my poor old lungs.”

There were four other beds in the ward, all currently empty but all clearly in general use; their sheets were rumpled, and magazines rode up the pillows like tidemarks. Mary was in a nightdress and dressing gown, sitting at a table next to her bed. Three pillows were piled on the table and she was leaning forward onto them so that they supported her chest. Her forearms rested on her thighs.

“Some damn fool breathing exercise they’re making me do,” she explained. “Complete waste of time.”

The rattle in her throat as she inhaled told a different story, as did the ocher nicotine lagoons on her fingertips. For Mary, asthma and bronchitis came together, squeezing her airways and filling her lungs as though they were toilet cisterns. Advanced cases came in two categories: overweight blue bloaters and underweight pink puffers. Mary was definitely one of the latter.

“It would help if you didn’t smoke, you know,” Herbert said. If one smoked when one had a chest disease, he thought, one was either mad or tired of life; and his mother was not mad.

Mary’s eyes blazed defiance. “Hogwash! Smoking’s good for me. It relaxes me, so I’m less likely to get an
anxiety attack. Anxiety attacks are deadly if you’ve got what I’ve got. Aren’t they? Herbert?”

It took Herbert a moment or two to realize that she was talking to him. His attention had been far away, turning over various permutations of Stensness, de Vere Green, and Kazantsev.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“That’s right. Absolutely.”

A nurse came bustling in. She was mid-forties, seemingly five foot cubed, with a red face beneath ginger hair fading in places to gray.

“This is my son Herbert,” Mary said.

“Nice to meet you,” the nurse said. Her accent was Irish. “I’m Angela.”

“He’s a detective at Scotland Yard, you know,” Mary added.
“Very
important job, but dreadful hours. He hardly ever visits, and he never brings anyone around. How’s he ever going to meet a nice girl when he works all the hours God sends?”

“I
am
here, you know,” said Herbert.

“Sounds like you have an interesting job,” Angela said.

Herbert opened his mouth to reply, but Mary was in there first. “Don’t waste your time asking, Angela. He’s never allowed to talk about his cases. Very hush-hush. Top secret. Now, that clipboard looks ominous.”

Angela brandished said clipboard in Mary’s general direction. “Foods for Mary Smith to avoid,” she read. “Dairy products, pork, sausages, ham, bacon, tomatoes, malt vinegar, red wine, white sugar, chocolate, and common salt.”

“What?” shrieked Mary, torn between genuine horror at this prescription and gusto at the prospect of a
good-natured haggle toward compromise. “Are you trying to starve me to death, or bore me there? Was the National Health founded for this?”

“Five small meals a day rather than three large ones. That way you’ll avoid that awful gassy feeling. The distension in your abdomen presses up against your diaphragm, compressing the space available for your lungs and making your breathlessness worse.”

“If you’re going to put me on that kind of rabbit food, you can at least give me a room of my own.” Like all bullies, Herbert thought, Mary pushed forward when the going was soft, and pulled back the moment she encountered serious resistance.

Angela turned to Herbert. “They all say that when they arrive. Give her a day or two, and she’ll be best friends with everyone here.”

“Rubbish!” shouted Mary.

“Forty-eight hours till you’re playing bridge, or my old ma’s a Dutchman.”

“Never!”

Herbert saw the relish of this sparring on both their faces, and felt briefly and shamefully envious. This nurse had known Mary less than thirty-six hours and already they had established a joking, careless rapport which he could never hope to emulate.

The bonds between mother and son—between this mother and this son, at any rate—were too tangled and entwined for Herbert ever to feel truly comfortable. It was just the two of them; his father had died at Passchendaele before he was born, and he had no siblings. So they swirled around in an endless pas de deux, caught between responsibility for and watchfulness of each other.

It was not until Herbert left the hospital that he realized: his mother, preoccupied as ever with herself to the exclusion of all else, had forgotten his birthday.

Seeing his mother often left Herbert feeling suffocated and needing air, even air by now noticeably brumal, so he walked across London Bridge and reflected that the fog was good for at least one thing; it hid some of London’s unlovelier vistas.

Seven years after the war, vast tracts of the city were still little more than rubble; broken walls slid into bomb craters, exposed rooms blinked in surprise, and darkened gaps between buildings were so many entrances to hell. Ruined areas became patches of jungle; cracked houses leaned heavily on sagging wooden buttresses.

The faces which loomed from the murk were sallowed by years of privation. For most, meat and two veg meant beige mutton and two forms of overcooked potato. It was no wonder he felt down; the whole city must have felt down.

Herbert arrived at the Peter Pan statue twenty minutes early. He had wanted to be there with half an hour to spare, but the fog forced him to walk slowly, for fear that he would bump into something or someone he had not seen until it was too late, and once he had taken a wrong turning and had to retrace his steps.

Kazantsev came out of the fog like a wraith, absent one moment, present the next, with seemingly no transition between the two. The shock made Herbert catch his breath. The Russian was bigger than he remembered.

“You have my jacket?” Kazantsev asked.

“If you have the answers.”

“Give me your questions, and I’ll see whether I’ve got your answers.”

His English was impeccable, Herbert thought. But then again, MGB agents attended Moscow’s School of Foreign Languages, so it would be. The Soviets were many things, but amateurs rarely.

Herbert took his police badge from his pocket and flipped it in front of Kazantsev’s face. “Remember who you’re dealing with,” he said. “Detective Inspector Herbert Smith, New Scotland Yard. You attacked me.”

“No, Inspector. You attacked me.”

That much was true, Herbert conceded silently. “You chloroformed my colleague.”

Kazantsev’s eyes darted to a spot over Herbert’s left shoulder, and in a trice Herbert knew, and was moving; round Kazantsev’s back, one arm encircling the Soviet’s neck and the other emerging from his pocket with a small kitchen knife, which he had taken the precaution of bringing from his flat.

Whatever Kazantsev was involved with, it must be important, Herbert thought. The Soviets were not usually so brazen as to take on the police with such directness.

“How many?” Herbert hissed.

“Three.” Kazantsev knew what he meant:
How many men waiting?

“Where?”

Kazantsev motioned with his head. There was one at the point where he had looked earlier; one on the path south between where they were standing and the bridge; and one the other way, north toward the Bayswater Road.

Herbert turned Kazantsev to face north. “How far?” he asked.

“Twenty, thirty meters.”

“Walk,” Herbert said. “The moment we clear the hedges on the left-hand side, we take to the grass. We go exactly where I say. And if you make a sound, this knife goes all the way through your coat. It’s easily sharp enough.”

Kazantsev’s people may have been out of sight, but they were not out of earshot. One shout from Kazantsev and they would come running.

Herbert and Kazantsev stepped onto the grass and walked in an arc across it, easily wide enough to bypass Kazantsev’s colleague, who was presumably still standing on the path, oblivious to anything happening beyond five feet of his nose.

Without the comfort of stone beneath his feet, and the knowledge that stone meant path meant destination, Herbert felt a touch panicky.

After a few strides, he could no longer tell where they were going, and in such fog he trusted his own sense of direction not a jot.

He kept his breathing neutral, so as not to transmit his worry to Kazantsev, and consoled himself with the fact that, even if they were not heading directly toward the Bayswater Road, they would at least be putting distance between themselves and Kazantsev’s reinforcements.

After what could have been twenty yards or three miles, for all Herbert knew, he decided that fortune favored the bold, and that they had taken a sufficient detour.

He steered Kazantsev a little to the right.

And there they were, back on the path again, right by the Marlborough Gate.

More luck than judgment on Herbert’s part; but, as Napoleon had said, a lucky general beat a good one any day.

Herbert and Kazantsev passed through the gate and onto the pavement which ran adjacent to the Bayswater Road. Herbert thought for a moment, and then remembered trailing a Czechoslovak dissident to a place round the corner from where they were standing.

Most people remembered pubs because they had been there with friends; Herbert remembered them because they were natural sites for the voyeurism which, since he had been trained and paid a salary for it, he had chosen to call surveillance.