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“Me too. And I promise not to tell you who did it.”

Herbert laughed. “Assuming it’s not canceled, like everything else seems to be in this fog. Right, I must be getting on. You’ve been most helpful.”

“Anytime.” Papworth shook Herbert’s hand in both of his. “I mean it. Our business shouldn’t mean that we forget basic humanity, you know.”

The doorman at Leconfield House greeted Herbert like an old friend. Hardly surprising, Herbert thought, given that this was his third visit here in just over twenty-four hours. Any more of this, and they would be giving him his old pass card back.

De Vere Green wasn’t there, the receptionist said. Herbert was just wondering how best to get to whichever
vast country estate was that weekend playing host to de Vere Green, when the receptionist added: “I think he’s gone to a funeral.”

Herbert asked to see Patricia, who proved, as usual, the fount of all knowledge.

“What funeral?” she said. “The poor chap who drowned the other night.”

“What?”

Herbert grabbed Patricia’s phone and dialed the Murder Squad.

“Tyce.”

“It’s Smith. What the hell’s going on? Max Stensness is being buried, and no one told me?”

“I only found out myself an hour ago. If I’d known where you were, I’d have called you.”

“Who authorized this?”

“Scott.”

“Scott?”

“Old man Stensness called in some favors, put pressure on the right people … you know how these things work, Smith.”

Herbert sighed; he knew all too well.

“It’s the old school tie, and I don’t like it any more than you do. Look; if you really need to, we can always exhume him afterwards.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Don’t take it out on me, Smith. I had nothing to do with this.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” Herbert thought for a second. “You don’t happen to know where the funeral’s taking place, do you?”

“Highgate Cemetery.”

Of course.

*  *  *

Herbert stood at the edge of the cemetery and watched, finding the role of observer to be unexpectedly satisfying, like shrugging on an old, favorite coat and feeling it settle just so on one’s shoulders.

There was a score of people huddled by the graveside, shrouded in lung-shaped plumes of breath as they followed the order of service. De Vere Green was right in the middle, as though he had somehow been a major part of Stensness’ life. Perhaps he had, Herbert thought, chiding himself for his lack of charity, for there did not seem to be many people of Stensness’ own age there, not many who looked like friends.

Herbert wondered what the clientele at his own funeral would be like.

He let his gaze roam over the mourners. Sir James was there, of course, with his arm round Lady Clarissa, and she looked every bit as bad as he had intimated to Herbert; her features were sunken and birdlike, markers of the terminally ill.

Max had been an only child, so there were no siblings.

Herbert spotted Wilkins and Rosalind, she looking rather magnificently severe in black. Next to them were others whom Herbert pegged as fellow scientists: a man with a strong jaw, features as sharp as they were open, and the merry, knowing eyes of the super-bright; another with wispy hair and protruding eyes who kept looking around with the horizontal scanning gaze of radar, and seemed to have dressed not only in a hurry but also in a darkened room, as his garb was a scruff of mismatched clothes and trailing laces.

The scientists were all men, apart from Rosalind. In the sidelong glances they gave her, even in such circumstances, Herbert saw their suspicion of her. There was something slightly off-kilter about a woman who would choose a field of research so demanding, where absolute dedication was a given. Dedication in a man suggested a priestlike quality, a willingness to selflessly serve a higher cause; but in a woman, it smacked of failure—failure to marry, failure to reproduce, failure to fit comfortably into the boxes society decreed.

Marie Curie apart, Herbert could not call to mind a single woman scientist, and he guessed that the same held true for most people. Science seemed such a
male
profession, in the most British sense of the word; not simply masculine but a specific type of man—upper middle class, a product of one of the older, provincial universities.

The service, short as it was, finished, and Stensness’ coffin was lowered jerkily into the ground.

Sir James clearly had clout, Herbert thought; not only to have a body removed from police custody without the knowledge of the investigating officer, but also to secure a plot in Highgate Cemetery.

The mourners broke ranks and began to file away from the graveside. De Vere Green moved smoothly among them; a word for the scruffy Martian string-bean with bug eyes, a hand on the shoulder of the man Herbert took to be Stensness’ father, and a peck of sympathy for the mother—this, by some distance, the most human, humanitarian, and humane gesture Herbert had ever seen de Vere Green make.

And then de Vere Green had run out of people to console. The moment he was left all alone, he wiped
away a tear from halfway down his cheek.

It was not the tear that made Herbert start; it was the look that came after it, a thousand-yard stare of utter devastation, the kind of expression found only on the face of a man whose world has crumbled and who knows not what to do. The mask had dropped.

Herbert saw all this, and he knew. He
knew.

There was a wake being held in one of the pubs nearby. Herbert fell into step beside de Vere Green as the mourners wended their disjointed way there.

“I always find wakes pretty mawkish, to be honest,” Herbert said.

“I have to say, I tend to agree with you.”

“Shall we go somewhere else?”

De Vere Green looked puzzled at Herbert’s apparent solicitousness, but not suspicious; and that in itself showed how deeply Stensness’ death had cut him, because de Vere Green was suspicious of the man who sold him his newspaper and the man who shined his shoes.

“If you like,” he said.

They walked back through Waterlow Park, and Herbert felt a sharp jab of guilt at hitting a man when he was down as low as de Vere Green was—even after all de Vere Green had done to him. But he went ahead and did it anyway; not for vengeance, but simply because he needed answers. The pragmatist in him knew that this was as good a time as any, and probably better than most, to get them.

“How long had you and Max been lovers?” Herbert asked.

*  *  *

De Vere Green tried to bluff his way out of it; he was too much of an old hand not to.

What an absurd suggestion! Had Herbert lost his mind?

You get that upset at the death of all your informers?

All my informers are alive, Max apart.

No; this was different. Herbert knew what he had seen.

Herbert was mistaken.

No, Herbert was not. And here was something else. Whatever Stensness had offered de Vere Green, he had offered to Washington and Moscow, too.

Impossible.

Ambrose Papworth, Sasha Kazantsev—Herbert had spoken to them both.

Well, if they were involved, then it was definitely Five’s case.

Perhaps; but it was now Saturday, and Five being Five, nothing would be done until Monday morning, by which time anything could have happened. De Vere Green had lost Burgess and Maclean over a weekend; who knew what he might lose this time?

Clumsy, dear boy. And somewhat beneath you, if truth be told.

It made sense now; why de Vere Green had been so keen to propagate the Coronation theory, because that would let him take control of the investigation, which would in turn allow him to bury his own involvement in the whole farrago.

Ridiculous.
But said with notably less conviction than before.

Here was what was going to happen. De Vere Green could tell Herbert the truth, in which case
Herbert promised to spare him as much as he possibly could; or de Vere Green could continue to hold out, in which case Herbert would regard him as fair game, at least as much as anybody else he might be investigating, and probably more, and he would not hold back for a moment if—
when
—he found something damaging.

Five minutes to think about it?

Of course.

“You always were a good Watcher, Herbert,” de Vere Green said. “You always saw things very well.”

With most people, the confession would have come in four stages; first haltingly, then with the jittery beginnings of confidence, thirdly in an uncontrollable gush, and finally with the dwindling eddies of the almost spent.

De Vere Green was too much of a professional for that. He told Herbert the story in clear, measured tones, pace and cadence never varying, as though he had been waiting a long time to unburden himself.

Maybe he had.

There were no wooden boxes, metal grilles, or murmuring priests in Waterlow Park, but as a confessional it was more than adequate.

De Vere Green had been entranced by Stensness from the moment he’d met him, of course he had. There had been something of the Ganymede about Stensness, with his blond hair, which he would push back from his forehead every few moments, and the unlined quality of his skin, as though he had sprung into the world fully formed and life’s vicissitudes had simply washed off him.

This was eighteen months ago—yes, round about
the time of the Burgess and Maclean business. Stensness and de Vere Green had met at some party or other, a ghastly boring official drinks thing. De Vere Green had sounded him out there and then: help your country, pass over some scientific data, get a bit of pocket money, that kind of thing.

Stensness had turned him down flat. He didn’t think much of the government, or the country in general, and the only cause he wanted to help was that of science itself.

Young, idealistic, naïve, hotheaded—and, for de Vere Green, utterly irresistible.

De Vere Green had scribbled down his phone number and asked Stensness to call if ever he changed his mind. Fat chance of that, Stensness had said; but he’d pocketed the number in any case. If anything was to hook Stensness, de Vere Green had seen, it would be the secrecy of the whole thing.

For months, de Vere Green had wondered if Stensness would call. Wondered, desired, waited, like a teenager with a crush. He had wanted, he knew, nothing more than an excuse to see Stensness again.

Months turned into a year, and in that time de Vere Green had forgotten about him, more or less; even lonesome bachelors couldn’t maintain crushes indefinitely, not without a little oxygen of encouragement.

Herbert reflected that he had always thought of de Vere Green as curiously asexual; as likely as not to be found at his club in St. James’ on any given night, happy in the company of men who were as shy of their emotions as he was of his own, untroubled by the trials and tribulations of anything so base as sexuality. Clearly he had been wrong.

And then, out of the blue, a few months back, Stensness had called.

He wanted to meet up. More, he had wanted to take de Vere Green up on his offer.

On his offers, plural, come to that: the spoken one, and the unspoken one.

They had become lovers that night.

De Vere Green had not been so cockstruck that he had failed to inquire about Stensness’ change of heart. Stensness said that he had been to Moscow in the summer—a piece of information that it had taken de Vere Green no more than a minute to confirm—on some sort of cultural exchange program.

Herbert knew the type of thing: fatuous exercises in which each set of visitors saw exactly what their hosts wanted them to, no more and no less.

But Stensness said that he had seen enough to realize that the Soviet Union was not all it advertised itself to be, and few men were as disillusioned as idealists who had suddenly lost their heroes. He had maintained his membership of the CPGB, but only in order to funnel information to de Vere Green. To this he had added whatever snippets of scientific discovery he thought might be interesting or useful.

They had seen each other perhaps once a week, always discreetly, always in de Vere Green’s bachelor apartment. De Vere Green had asked Stensness to move in—ostensibly and for form’s sake as a lodger—but Stensness had refused. He wanted to keep his own life. De Vere Green had understood, and he had respected Stensness for it, but of course he had wanted it otherwise.

This was de Vere Green in the raw, Herbert knew;
an aging man, head over heels in love with a beautiful youth he knew would never be his.

Stensness had loved what he had seen as the glamour of de Vere Green’s job. For Stensness, as de Vere Green had surmised long before, the whole thing had been a game, replete with secret codes and furtive meetings, and the thrill of this would have palled for him much quicker than de Vere Green could ever have tired of Stensness’ looks and enthusiasm.

Stensness had been the one thing in his life that de Vere Green had not shared, he said. Nothing in the files, and nothing with the Americans.

So Herbert had met Papworth? A good man, Papworth, and on the side of the angels. But if de Vere Green was to lick a man’s backside, then he would at least like to be given the choice, rather than find himself shanghaied into it by the dictates of international politics.

Herbert asked, what about Stensness’ parents?

Good question. As far as de Vere Green knew, Sir James had been aware of Max’s communist leanings, but had treated it very much as a passing phase.

Like homosexuality?

Quite so. That was the only way Sir James could have dealt with it; otherwise he would have had to face the possibility that his son might have ended up like, in his own words, those damn mountebanks Burgess and Maclean.

Lady Clarissa?

Not a clue. Sir James had kept it all to himself. In Lady Clarissa’s eyes, Max had remained unsullied, perfect, like all sons were to their mothers.

Herbert could have begged to differ, but anyway.
What about Max’s informing? Had they known about that?

Absolutely not.

Sure?

Positive.

All right. Back to the topic in hand; the conference, and the rendezvous.