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The average Joe could have a good crack at naming at least half of England’s monarchs, but science really was an alien discipline; either one spoke the language or one did not, and Herbert knew on which side of the fence he sat.

The first thing he saw on Stensness’ desk was, at least, something with which he was familiar: a typewriter, dark green metal and pretty cumbersome in appearance. Herbert poked around it, more in hope than expectation, and found nothing out of the ordinary. No secret compartments, no incriminating documents still wound round the roller, not even a trace of typescript on the ribbon.

That last brought him up short.

Typing any kind of text left indentations on the ribbon, no matter how faint. If one was skillful and patient enough, one could decipher pretty much anything typed within the past few weeks.

The only way a ribbon could be as clear as this was if it was new—and it certainly did not look new, for the material was beginning to wear at the edges, and it had lost the glinting sheen of one straight out of the box—or if it had been boiled. Boiling ribbons eradicated the typescript.

Boiling ribbons meant that Stensness must have had something to hide.

Herbert felt his ears twitch, as though he were a terrier.

Maybe there was something here after all.

There were more machines on Stensness’ desk, and more still in the storeroom on the far side.

Herbert looked through all of them, and again came up blank. One small piece, presumably a spare part, looked as though it could have been familiar, but he could not place it, and eventually he conceded that his imagination was playing tricks.

It would have been helpful if the machines had been labeled, he thought; but why should they have been, when the only people using them would know perfectly well what they were for?

He went back to Stensness’ desk, a little deflated.

Apparatus apart, there was nothing there which he would not have expected: two adjoining piles of books, about the same height, all with scientific titles; a long wooden ruler half-hidden under a manila folder; and an old metal mug from which an assortment of pens bristled.

Herbert opened the books one by one and flicked through them, hoping to find something pressed between the pages.

When he found nothing, he held each book horizontally by the spine and shook hard; perhaps he had missed something first time round.

Ten books; ten blanks.

He put the books back in their piles, picked up the metal mug, tipped the pens out, and looked inside the mug, to see if Stensness had hidden anything there, perhaps taped to the sides or the bottom.

Nothing.

Nothing on the base, either, when Herbert turned it over. He scooped up the pens and began to stuff them angrily back into the mug; and he stopped.

One of the pens was much heavier than the others.

He took the lid off and pressed the nib against the back of his hand. It left a mark of blue ink. So it worked. That in itself proved nothing, he knew; and with a swirling of exhilaration, Herbert knew what he was going to find.

He unscrewed the nib from the main barrel of the pen.

There was a small ink sac within the nib itself; but it was what was in the barrel itself that excited him. He shook it gently, and into his palm popped a small metal cylinder, no more than a couple of inches in length.

He turned this cylinder vertical, and almost yelled for joy. The ends, as he had expected, were not solid metal, but glass: small lenses.

“What is it?” Hannah said, as attuned to emotions as a shaman.

Herbert looked at the desk, at the books, and the ruler, and then again toward the storeroom, where most of the apparatus was stored. The answers came tumbling through his mind with the speed and mechanical accuracy of handcrafted cogs.

He pulled the ruler from underneath the manila folder, and saw that it had a small hole drilled through the middle, perhaps half an inch in diameter.

In four quick strides he was back in the storeroom, hunting for the piece of metal he had thought familiar.

There it was, a tiny knurled cylinder; half as long as the one in the pen, but twice as wide, and instantly
recognizable the moment he knew what he was looking for.

Herbert went back to Stensness’ desk, where it took him scant seconds to arrange everything in the correct place.

The books he kept in their piles but moved nine inches apart.

The ruler he placed across the top of the stacks, so that it served as a bridge.

Then, adjusting things slightly, he took the uppermost book from each pile and placed it on top of the ruler, one on each side, to hold it in place.

The knurled cylinder from the storeroom fitted exactly into the hole in the ruler.

“Herbert, what the hell you do?” Hannah asked again.

“Microdots,” he said. “Stensness was making microdots here.”

“Microdots? What is that?”

“Ways of hiding lots of information in a very small space.”

He took her hand and placed it on the left-hand pile of books. “Go up until you get to the ruler,” he said. “Then feel along the top of the ruler. When you get to a metal cylinder, that’s halfway. There’s another pile of books on the other side.”

She ran her hand up, right, and down, as he had instructed.

“The metal cylinder is a microdot camera,” Herbert said. “The top opens to allow the film to be inserted. Then, working downward, there’s a spiral spring, a disc to hold the film in place, the film itself, a container for all the lens stuff, and a cap which doubles as a shutter;
we’re talking long exposures here, up to several minutes sometimes. The ruler holds the camera at precisely the right height above the table; there’s no adjustable focus on these things, they’re far too small for mechanisms like that. He puts the documents on the table, between the books, directly below the camera, makes sure the whole thing is well lit, and takes the photographs. And with this”—Herbert passed Hannah the second cylinder, the one he had found in the fountain pen—“he can view the microdots to make sure they came out OK.”

“But where are the microdots themselves?” she asked.

“Oh, they’re the size of a full stop, you can conceal them in any document you like …” And already he was pulling the
Times
article from his pocket.

Herbert turned on Stensness’ anglepoise lamp and held the paper beneath it, tilting it this way and that to find the gleam where the microdot film caught the light.

There was none, at least not that he could see, but the method was not foolproof; some types of film were matted, making them harder to discern under illumination.

He put the Coronation map down on the desk and studied it again.

He was looking for a full stop, perhaps more than one, but there were hundreds on the page. It would take hours to study them all.

The place names which Stensness had circled, he thought. Perhaps that was it.

Crude, sure; but if Stensness had been in a hurry, he might have taken the chance.

Herbert looked at the circled place names, and the first he saw was Regent Street. The word
Street
had been abbreviated to
St.

St.
, with a full stop.

He put the viewer to his eye and zoomed in on that stop.

Nothing; just a tiny circle of finest
Times
ink.

And now he saw the pattern; every place name Stensness had circled had at least one dot somewhere in it.
St. James’ St., St. James’ Park, St. James’ Palace, Victoria Embt., Trafalgar Sq., Piccadilly Cir., Marlboro. Ho., Northd. Av., Parlt. St., Hyde Park Crnr., Oxford St.
, and
Regent St.

He scanned them all, one after the other, and each time nothing, nothing, nothing.

Damn Stensness
, Herbert thought. Damn him and his ridiculous schoolboy obsession with tradecraft, damn him for playing at these games which had killed him. Damn Stensness, most of all, for dangling the prize just out of Herbert’s reach, beckoning him so far and no further, as though Herbert were Tantalus in the underworld, destined forever to be given that most cruel of commodities: unfulfilled hope.

Herbert cursed loudly. Hannah put her hand on his shoulder.

“What is it?” she asked.

He told her, as calmly as he could, what he had—or, more precisely, had not—found; and she laughed.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he said.

“Herbert, don’t be like that. What did I tell you yesterday?”

“You told me lots of things.”

“No; well, yes, but I mean, what did I tell you about way you think?”

“You said I think only with my eyes, like all sighted people.”

“And now, you do that, exactly.”

“How?”

“Because you
see
something—here, circles—and for you they are answer, because your eye go to them. But they are not answer. So he give you wrong direction. What you do now, is you turn your eye off. What your eye say, you think opposite. No; don’t look at the paper again”—how was she always ahead of him?—“that is point I make. Shut your eye.
Think.”

Herbert could have done without the lecture, but he knew Hannah was right.

Stensness had hidden something in that article, he was sure. And he had drawn circles around various places, knowing they would be taken as indicators, whereas in fact they were nothing of the sort.

If the microdots were not where the circles were, therefore, they were where the circles
were not.

Only now did Herbert turn back to the map, knowing what he was looking for: a place name which had a dot, but no circle round it.

Herbert found it more or less instantly, checked to see that there were no others, and then put the viewer to his eye and homed in, this time on London’s most famous Gothic edifice: the Houses of Parliament—or, as written here,
Ho. of Parlt.

And they were there, two little microdots, clear as day through the tiny lenses.

They made their way back to Hannah’s flat, Herbert checking behind them every so often but seeing no one. The air was clearer below knee level, strangely, and once or twice he squatted down to peer through this unexpected corridor of clarity; but Hannah hurried him
along, for she was cold and wanted to get home, so he could not fully assuage his paranoia.

He did not know how long they could count on remaining alone in the laboratory, and he did not want to have to explain himself to any wandering biophysicists.

Besides, the contents of the microdots were sufficiently baffling to require further study, perhaps hours’ worth—time he wanted away from de Vere Green, or Papworth, or Kazantsev, or anyone else who might have found out where he lived.

The moment they were inside Hannah’s flat, Herbert put the radio on; his constant companion for so long, it seemed, maybe even some kind of security blanket, an unfailing voice through the quiet in his life.

All bus and train services bar three had been withdrawn, it said.

The AA were now appealing to people to leave their cars at home, as conditions were the worst they had ever known.
Tell me about it
, Herbert thought, having just seen how abandoned vehicles were littering the streets as though London were a metallic battlefield. They’d had several near misses and two actual hits: Herbert barked his shin on a Sunbeam Talbot, Hannah smacked her hand on a wing mirror.

The emergency services were becoming more stretched by the hour; police rushing to crime scenes hidden by the fog, ambulances trying to save those whom the pollutants were killing, fire engines struggling to quench blazes inadvertently started by people desperate to keep warm.

The newsreader reeled off a litany of burglaries, assaults, and robberies: a cinema manager robbed of the
day’s takings on the Edgware Road; a post office safe blown open in Isleworth; thieves had smashed the window of a jeweler’s in Brixton and made off with the display; and in Great Windmill Street, the offices of boxing promoter Jack Solomon were lighter to the tune of twelve boxes of cigars, a case of whiskey, a camera, two fight films, and £50 in cash.

Herbert listened to all this as he sat at Hannah’s kitchen table. Then he phoned Tyce again.

No word on de Vere Green as yet, Tyce said. He had spoken to Scott, who had pledged to contact Sillitoe immediately. There was nothing now they could do but wait.

Herbert told Tyce what he had found in the lab, and gave him Hannah’s number; he would be here until further notice.

When the call had finished, Herbert looked through the viewer at the microdots.

The first one, after the
o
of
Ho
, appeared at first glance to be one of those inkblot tests that psychiatrists gave patients to assess their state of mind. It was in black-and-white, and it was a circle, divided roughly into an inner and an outer ring.

The outer ring was more or less uniformly dark, all the way round.

In the inner ring, which was lighter, four horizontally striped lines radiated out from the center in an X-shape.

The lines were not quite at right angles to each other, so the X appeared to have been squashed slightly from either side; it was taller than it was wide.

There were therefore four lighter areas, almost diamond-shaped, in the spaces between the limbs of the X.

At the center was a small circle, brilliantly white.

It could have been anything, Herbert thought; absolutely anything.

The other microdot, after the
t
of
Parlt
, was another piece of code; much longer than the scrap written in the corner of the map, and therefore many times as baffling.