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“I could really do with someone else to help me on this.”

“Smith, I haven’t suddenly magicked a squadron of detectives into existence. We’re as stretched now as we were last night. Get some of the bods from Hyde Park to do your legwork.”

Herbert looked at Elkington. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“Good. Keep me posted.”

Tyce was as curt as Tulloch, but without the latter’s vengeful bile. It was not that Tyce actively disliked Herbert; more that he regarded him as being on some sort of eternal probation, where every case was a test not only of his skills but of his character. If he was to impress Tyce enough, Herbert thought, he would be in.

There were several aspects of his job that Herbert found objectionable. Autopsies were fairly vile; most murderers were hardly charm personified; and there was the
nagging sense that, however well he did his job, it would never be enough, because he was primarily trying to find culprits of crimes already committed rather than stopping future offenses.

As far as Herbert was concerned, however, all these paled into insignificance when set against the one thing he truly hated having to do: breaking the news of a murder to the victim’s family.

There was no easy way; the only easy way was not to do it in the first place.

One had to judge pretty much instantaneously the type of people one was dealing with: those who needed soft-soaping and a long lead-in to the dreadful news, or those who appreciated it when one spoke plainly and got straight to the point. Even when one got it right, of course, one still had to deal with the initial blast of shock and anger, as often as not directed straight at the messenger himself.

Herbert could have sent Elkington, of course—if the man really wanted to join the Murder Squad, then this was where his apprenticeship started—but that would have been to shirk his own duty.

So instead he had sent Elkington up to Max’s home in Highgate—43 Cholmeley Crescent—with instructions to secure the place and see if he could find anything which might pertain to the murder. Herbert would join him there when he had finished with Sir James and Lady Clarissa.

They lived in Edwardes Square, a tall, thin house with a pub on one side and rather pretty communal gardens across the road. As a detective, Herbert was not in uniform, but Sir James knew there was trouble the moment he opened the door; his antennae for danger
had doubtless been honed to perfection by years in the corridors of power.

“Yes?” he said, eyebrows curling up on themselves in suspicion.

Herbert introduced himself and asked if he could come in.

Sir James paused for half a beat—Herbert wondered whether he was going to ask him to use the tradesmen’s entrance—before taking a pace backwards and allowing Herbert through.

They went straight into the study; no offer of tea, no sign of Lady Clarissa, and no small talk about the fog. A straight talker, Herbert decided.

“I’m afraid your son Max was found dead last night,” Herbert said.

Sir James’ head jerked back a fraction, and that was the extent of his shock. He had not been a mandarin for nothing, Herbert thought.

“How?” he asked.

“Drowned. In the Long Water. We’re treating it as murder.”

“No one would have wanted to murder Max.”

“You don’t know if he had any enemies, undesirable friends, anything like that?”

“Max was a scientist, Inspector, not a criminal.” Sir James tapped his fingers against the desktop. “He’ll have to be buried immediately, of course.”

“Sir James, I can appreciate your anxiety, but please understand that, while the case remains open, your son—your son’s body, I should say—is evidence, and therefore must be treated …”

“Listen to me, Inspector. My wife is very ill. She has, at most, a couple of months to live; more likely
weeks, perhaps even days. I have to look after her twenty-four hours a day. I am not going to let her go to her grave with her son still in a mortuary. Do you understand?”

Parents should never outlive their children, Herbert thought; it was not in the natural order of things. “I am doing all I can to find your son’s killer, Sir James.”

“That is as may be, Inspector; but your department are not, are they?”

“I’m sorry?”

“They send me an inspector.” Sir James rolled the word out of the side of his mouth, as though it were a bad smell. “A single inspector; no one higher. I would imagine there are plenty of victims who get better treatment than this. Is my son less important than them?”

All men were equal below the turf, Herbert thought.

“Sir James, if you are unhappy with my assignment, please ring Detective Superintendent Tyce at New Scotland Yard…”

“Young man, I will ring the commissioner himself. Now, if you’re going to look for my son’s killer, you won’t find him in here; so you may go.”

The station attendant at High Street Kensington said the next train was five minutes away. Herbert sat on a platform bench and read the conference pamphlet Rosalind had given him.

The speeches and panel discussions were as esoteric to a layman’s eyes as he would have expected; science really was a different language, he thought. He flicked through the pages, reading little and understanding less, until he reached the list of delegates at the back.

Each delegate was listed, along with his institution
and country. There had been about a hundred people there, representing a healthy selection of nations. British apart, there were Americans, French, Swiss, Canadians, Swedes, and Portuguese.

Speakers were marked with an asterisk; there had been six sessions, four of them individual lectures, the other two panel discussions. The topics looked suitably obtuse; manna for the scientist, Herbert thought, but anesthetic for the layman.

He was halfway down the list, skipping through the list of British delegates, when his gaze, attention, and heartbeat skidded to a halt pretty much simultaneously.

De Vere Green, Richard. University of Cambridge.

Herbert knew Richard de Vere Green, and he knew, too, that he was not affiliated with the University of Cambridge, at least not officially. De Vere Green’s institution was altogether closer to home. He had been Herbert’s boss at Five.

Elkington and Highgate could wait; Herbert took the underground back to Green Park. Someone had left a copy of the
Express
, and Herbert flitted idly through the classifieds and the promotional contests—
Win a car! First prize a Humber Super Snipe, worth £1,627. Second prize an MG Midget, £825
—before turning to the gossip column, spiritual home of those whom he envied and despised in equal measure.

Lord Beaverbrook had declared that the gossip column was the most important part of the paper, and had therefore decreed a list of those never to be mentioned favorably. No one knew for sure who was included, but prime suspects included Charlie Chaplin (suspected communist), Noel Coward (queer), and Paul Robeson
(a bit of both, not to mention the color of his skin).

The
Express
was a dreadful paper, which was one of the main reasons Herbert liked it, and its interest lasted precisely the length of an average tube journey, which was recommendation enough for any journal. Today, however, he read the
Express
primarily to avoid thinking about de Vere Green, an exercise which proved predictably futile.

At Five, Herbert had been a Watcher. No, he had been
the
Watcher; the best surveillance operative in the entire service. Being a Watcher was like playing the drums; almost anyone could do it, but very few people could do it well.

In the opinion of all those qualified to make such a judgment, Herbert had been outstanding. His eyesight and hearing were both very good, he was a quick thinker and capable of reacting well to the unexpected, and he was endlessly patient, a master of the gentle art that was doing damn all convincingly.

And he was the nearest thing to an invisible man. He was neither dwarf nor giant, not revoltingly ugly nor sickeningly handsome, midway between beer barrel and string bean. In short, he was the kind of person one would pass in the street without noticing.

Many people were just different enough from the norm—whatever that was—for a stranger to notice them, even for a couple of seconds.

Not Herbert. He was entirely nondescript, exceptional only at being unexceptional.

It was not hard to imagine what
that
could do to a man’s psyche.

But back to de Vere Green—and back, too, to Donald Maclean.

May 1951, eighteen months ago. Five had been tailing Maclean for months, looking for fresh evidence of his treachery; they already had enough to hang him several times over, but their proof had been gained from coded messages sent to and from Soviet stations and decrypted under the Venona program.

To seize Maclean on such evidence would have been to alert Moscow that their ciphers had been cracked, which would have caused more problems than it solved. So the order had gone out: catch him with his fingers in the sweetie jar.

Maclean was followed in London only; the Watchers were called off every night when he boarded his train back home to Tatsfield, on the border between Kent and Surrey. De Vere Green—at that time head of A Branch, under whose auspices surveillance fell—had decreed there was no point in following Maclean farther than Charing Cross.

Outside London, Soviet officials’ movement was restricted. They were therefore unlikely to venture forth for contacts that could just as easily have been made in town. Besides, Tatsfield was a small village; it would have been virtually impossible to watch Maclean there without attracting attention.

It was de Vere Green’s call, and it was, notwithstanding everything that happened later, exactly the right one.

Six foot four, and wearing a shabby tweed coat and crumpled trilby at a time when the fashion was for Anthony Eden homburgs, Maclean was easy to follow. He knew that Five were on to him, too, though he probably thought they should have been embarrassed at having to tail a member of the upper classes. “I’m in
frightful trouble,” he would tell people. “I’m being followed by the dicks.”

Alcohol made him indiscreet. Herbert once got close enough to him in a pub to hear Maclean say, “I’m working for Uncle Joe. I’m the English Hiss.”

Friday, 25th May, was Maclean’s birthday. That lunchtime, the home secretary had signed an order authorizing his interrogation, to begin the following Monday. As he arrived at Charing Cross to catch the 5:19, Herbert was immediately struck by the change in Maclean’s demeanor. Usually he walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed into his pockets, but that evening he seemed to walk down the platform with a spring in his step. The brim of his hat was up all round and he was wearing a jaunty bowtie. He seemed in good spirits, for once.

Then Maclean turned and waved, and Herbert knew.
He knew.

Maclean could not have been sure exactly where his shadows were, but he waved anyway, before leaping easily onto the train. Perhaps he thought he was being stylish, but Herbert thought it arrogant; idiotic, too, in what it revealed.

Herbert went to the nearest phone box, barged an old lady aside without ceremony, and rang de Vere Green, who was off to the country and did not want his weekend disturbed.

“Dear boy,” he said, “don’t be so ridiculous.”

Herbert persisted. Something was up; de Vere Green had to send men down to Tatsfield immediately. Hang the expense and the likelihood of the surveillance being blown.

“You cannot have heard me,” de Vere Green said,
steel beneath his tongue as the suave Establishment bonhomie vanished. “There is nothing to worry about. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, fear not.”

Saturday was a half day in Whitehall. Herbert met Maclean’s usual train, and there was no sign of him; nor on the two subsequent services.

Detention at ports and airports needed the home secretary’s permission, and there was no way to get
that
without going through endless stifling strata of gradism and bureaucracy.

The deputy branch assistant director would pass it up to the assistant branch director, who would hand it on to the branch director, who would take it to the deputy director-general of the entire service, who might or might not give it to the director-general himself, who might mention it to the home secretary when they next met over a whiskey, but only if he remembered in between praising the beauty of the minister’s teenage daughter and discussing prospects for Laker and Lock down at the Oval.

And when a decision
had
been made, it would be passed back down the ranks with the same excruciating slowness, a trickle of water rolling slowly through hanging gardens, and the chance to act would have vanished.

In six years at Five, the most sensible words Herbert had come across had been scrawled in an anonymous appendage to a memorandum: “This case is of the highest possible importance, and therefore must be handled at the lowest possible level.” It was laughably, sickeningly true.

Anyway, the weekend came and went, with the great and the good doing things that were no doubt both
great and good. The panic started on Monday, by which time Burgess and Maclean were halfway to Moscow. They had taken a midnight ferry on Friday from Southampton to St. Malo, where they had met Russian intelligence officers who had given them false papers and a route via Vienna.

During the search of Maclean’s office, Herbert found a piece of his doggerel:

Naturally, there was an inquiry; naturally, it was a farce; and, naturally, there was a fall guy.

No, said de Vere Green, none of the Watchers had contacted him that Friday evening to apprise him of their suspicions.

Yes, of course he would have expected them to; particularly Mr. Smith, who had operational command and with whom lay all tactical responsibility. Maclean had
waved
, and still Mr. Smith had not thought to tell de Vere Green.