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Mary Smith died in 1954, of complications arising from asthma and bronchitis.

Sasha Kazantsev, who did not enjoy diplomatic immunity, was convicted of attempted kidnapping and spent five years in Belmarsh prison. On his release, he
was returned to Moscow. He was never heard from again.

Ambrose Papworth recanted his confessions to the murders of Richard de Vere Green and Max Stensness. He was tried in the United States on counts of treason, convicted, sentenced to death, and, in October 1956, was executed at Sing Sing.

The news of Josef Mengele’s death in the bowels of Tower Bridge was never made public, to spare the United States both acute embarrassment and international opprobrium at having harbored arguably the most notorious war criminal of them all.

Neither London nor Washington therefore made any attempts to dispel the impression that Mengele had after the war fled to South America, firstly to Paraguay and then to Brazil.

A man widely thought to be Mengele died on a beach near the Brazilian town of Embu in 1979, after suffering a stroke while swimming. In 1992, the results of DNA tests were published purporting to prove that the body was indeed that of Mengele, and this was almost universally accepted as fact.

In truth, however, DNA tests at that time were far from infallible, especially when applied with lax regard to proper procedures, as was the case in this instance. But, as it so often does, the world saw what it wanted to see.

Mengele himself would surely have been tickled pink by the vast irony that DNA, his holy grail, was used to “prove” that a stranger’s body was his.

Stella Chalmers was killed in a car crash in 1967. Herbert read one of the lessons at her funeral.

Both Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig were found guilty of the murder of PC Sidney Miles. Bentley
was hanged at Wandsworth prison on 28th January 1953 by the executioner Albert Pierrepoint; Craig was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, and was released in 1963.

Herbert and Hannah married on Saturday, 30th May 1953, four days before the Queen’s Coronation. After Mary died, they moved to America, where Herbert joined the police force in Princeton, New Jersey, and Hannah continued to apply her talents as a polymath.

They had two children, a girl and a boy, and lived in America for more than thirty years, only moving to South Africa in 1977, when Herbert was sixty. Too old to be a policeman by then, he turned his hand to news photography, working on the Johannesburg
Sunday Times.

It was on that newspaper that I first met him, in 1987, and on that newspaper where he told me the first part of this story. In the years that followed, when I was back in London and he had retired to Knysna on the famous Garden Route in the Cape, we continued to correspond, and gradually two things became clear: that he wanted me to write his story as a book, and that he did not want to be around to see it. He was still bound by the Official Secrets Act, and he was not a disloyal man. But he wanted his story to be told, and he wanted it to be told in full.

The Great Fog of London lifted on 9th December 1952. Fifty-two years to the day later, Herbert Smith died. He was eighty-seven.

Hannah still lives in Knysna, and is visited often by her two children.

They are called Esther and Alexander.

Boris Starling. London, January 2006