He turned left on to Swains Lane, zigzagged through the back streets until he was sure they had not somehow got on his tail again, and arrived at Cholmeley Crescent.
Number 43 was on the apex of the bend, pretty much equidistant from both entrances into Cholmeley Park. It was a two-story semidetached house, with a yellow front door on the left-hand side and bay windows on the right, on both ground and first floors.
It was an entirely unremarkable building. Herbert wondered how many similar façades across the city also hid dark secrets.
Herbert walked up to the door and rang the bell.
He waited several seconds, expecting to see Elkington’s face appear at the window, or at least to hear him moving around inside; but there was nothing.
With intrigue blending subtly into alarm, Herbert rang the bell again; and again no answer came.
He walked away from the house, all the way down the road and out of sight, for the benefit of whoever may have been watching from inside.
He counted ten interminable minutes on his watch, and retraced his steps to the house.
Splaying the fingers of his right hand, he pressed lightly on the area round the lock. It gave slightly; on the latch, he surmised, rather than deadlocked.
He took a small steel card from his pocket, inserted it into the gap between door and jamb, and wiggled gently until it found the lock’s tongue and pushed it back.
Ah yes; this was one of the many things they had been taught at Leconfield House. The trade referred to it as “covert search;” most people would have called it “breaking and entering,” which was basically what it was. Five had long been bugging and burgling their way across London, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.
As far as Five was concerned, there was only one commandment—the eleventh: “Thou shalt not get caught.” Some wag had once suggested amending the service motto from regnum defendere, “defending the realm,” to rectum defendere, “cover your backside.”
They had all laughed uncomfortably, because it had rung very, very true.
Herbert was a police officer now, defender and enforcer of the law in a way he had never been at Five; but old habits died hard.
Herbert opened the door with painstaking slowness, waiting for a creak, but the hinges seemed well oiled, and he was inside without a sound. He examined the lock as he stepped through the now open door, and saw that it had not been forced.
He stood statue still for a few moments, listening for any noise.
Silence.
There was a kitchen straight ahead and a living room to his right, which looked out onto the street through the lower of the two bay windows. He saw a couple of slightly threadbare sofas, a writing bureau, books crammed with hunched shoulders onto whitened shelves; and Elkington lying on the floor, his wrists bound behind his back with a necktie, his ankles strapped together with a belt, and a tea towel stuffed in his mouth.
When Herbert went closer, he smelt chloroform; but Elkington was moving, so the dose could not have been lethal.
Herbert squatted down by Elkington’s face. Elkington looked at him with wide eyes, and then glanced up toward the ceiling.
His attacker was upstairs. Herbert nodded, to show that he had understood; then he put his finger to his lips, to signal that Elkington should be quiet when Herbert untied him.
Elkington’s turn to nod.
Herbert wriggled the makeshift gag free, allowing Elkington to gulp down lungfuls of breath. Then he undid the tie round the wrists and the belt round the ankles, and helped Elkington to a sitting position.
“Rub them, get the circulation back,” Herbert whispered.
Elkington was all for getting to his feet and rushing upstairs, but Herbert stayed him; better to wait a few minutes and get his limbs working again.
The bottle of chloroform was on a table nearby.
“How do you feel?” Herbert asked.
“Pretty woozy.”
“How many times has he applied the chloroform?”
“Three or four; I can’t remember.”
“Was he here when you arrived?”
“Must have been. Caught me clean by surprise.”
And that was a couple of hours ago, Herbert thought.
He looked around the room, and remembered what Rosalind had said about Stensness having housemates; it was hard to imagine the same person reading Thackeray, Wisden, and raunchy Victorian threepenny pamphlets, though all appeared cheek-by-jowl in the bookcases, and the selection of prints on the walls—imitation Stubbses through Punch cartoons to luridly kitsch tigers prowling stylized jungles—also seemed extravagantly catholic.
Elkington pushed himself a trifle unsteadily to his feet. Herbert raised his eyebrows, and Elkington nodded; yes, he was all right.
They went upstairs, slow and silent, Herbert in the lead.
There were four doors on the first floor: one straight ahead of them as he stood on the landing, two to their right, and one directly behind.
He tried the one straight ahead first. It was spare to the point of spartan; a single bed, a wooden chair, and a tatty chest-of-drawers, on which was a copy of the Evening News. He recognized the headline as yesterday’s.
Stensness had been dead since last night, and would hardly have had time to come back here between leaving the Festival Hall and going to the Long Water.
This was therefore not his room.
Next along was the bathroom, which would have benefited greatly from the services of a cleaner, and the room along from that belonged to Stensness, which Herbert surmised from several facts, all occurring to him more or less at once.
Firstly, the place looked like a bomb had gone off. Drawers had been overturned, the clothes inside spilling out as though from a burst suitcase. The mattress had been upended against the wall, down which it was now slowly sagging, kinked in the middle as if it were bowing to him. Oblongs of white on yellowing plaster blinked shyly, denuded of the pictures that had covered them.
Secondly, the person responsible for all this, and presumably for the attack on Elkington, was still in the room. He had his back to Herbert, but his head was turned slightly as he rummaged through a pile of papers, so half his face was visible—enough, at any rate, to see that he had a mustache.
Thirdly, he had not noticed Herbert yet.
By law, let alone anything else, Herbert should have identified himself as a police officer before proceeding, but to have done so would have cost him his chief advantage in this situation, which was the element of surprise.
Violence went against most instincts which Herbert possessed, but he knew it was the only way. He took a quick step forward and launched himself at the man’s back.
The man must have sensed Herbert at that point, for at last he began to turn, but Herbert was already on top of him.
He knocked the man forward onto the bed. With the mattress gone, the man hit the solid base with enough force to smack the wind from his lungs. Herbert half rolled over the top of him, catching the man’s head with his knee. The man lashed out with his right fist as Herbert went past.
The man had a decidedly un-English cast to his features. His face was doughy, like a soufflé improperly risen; the edges seemed slightly blurred, undefined. His mustache squatted beneath a nose pockmarked with archipelagos of burst blood vessels; his eyes were hooded, his forehead was extravagantly creased, and his dark hair was arranged into one of the most atrocious comb-overs Herbert had ever seen.
Still gasping for air, the man hit out at Herbert again.
Herbert grabbed one of the man’s great slablike ears and cracked his head down onto the bed base. When he squirmed from Herbert’s grasp, Herbert took hold of his jacket by the collar and pulled it sharply upward, over his head. This brought the man’s arms upwards, too, which Herbert had hoped would disable him further, but in fact it was in this state that the man landed his first serious punch, a flailing roundhouse which caught Herbert halfway betw
een neck and jaw.
Elkington now joined the fray; but the chloroform had clearly affected him more than he had thought, or at least more than he had wanted Herbert to think. The man caught Elkington across the temple with a kick as the young policeman came across the room with head lowered, and Elkington’s legs crumpled beneath him as he sank to the floor.
Herbert clung on to his opponent’s jacket, more through stubbornness than any great tactical imperative. It came so far over the man’s head that he clearly reckoned divestment to be the best option.
With an ungainly wiggle of his shoulders, the man freed his arms, leaving Herbert clasping the jacket against his aching mandible like a security blanket.
The man muttered something Herbert could hardly hear, let alone understand. But it gave Herbert an idea. Attacked by a complete stranger, the man had not once cried for help, which suggested he was operating alone. If he could be tricked into thinking that Herbert had backup …
Herbert stuck the index and middle fingers of his right hand into either side of his mouth, ignoring the flare of pain from his jaw, and whistled as loud as he could.
The man looked at him first in surprise and then in alarm. A quick glance out of the window, another to see whether Herbert was bluffing; and then, clearly unwilling to risk it, the man shot out of the door and down the stairs as if scalded.
Herbert heard the front door open and slam closed, and the house was silent again.
He sat back against the upended mattress and took deep breaths until he had returned to something approaching calm. His jaw was tender, but did not seem to be broken; he could still open and close it, though not without a click at about halfway. If he had ever played rugby, he would probably have found the sensation less novel than he did.
When he let the man’s jacket slide to the floor, something fell out onto his leg, so obvious that he cursed himself for not having looked for it before. A wallet.
An identity card had brought Herbert to this house; now, it seemed, such a card would take him through the next stage as well. According to his press accreditation, Herbert’s fellow pugilist was Alexander Kazantsev, London correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Izvestia.
Herbert called an ambulance for Elkington, and it arrived within ten minutes; the air was still clear up here, and so there were no traffic delays.
He felt guilty about what had happened to Elkington, of course he did; and the ambulanceman’s snap diagnosis that any injury would be temporary provided only partial balm.
For his part, Elkington seemed most concerned at his evident failure to impress upon Herbert any sign of policing skills suitable for the Murder Squad. As they loaded the injured man into the back of the ambulance for the journey to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, Herbert promised that he would call by later, or at the very least phone.
When they had gone, Herbert turned back to more immediate matters; specifically, what Kazantsev had been looking for.
Herbert could hardly fault Kazantsev for the thoroughness of his search. Now that he, too, had taken the time to root through the paraphernalia of Stensness’ bedroom, he saw that Kazantsev had missed precious few possible hiding places.
The back of every picture had been slit, pillows and cushions sliced open (whatever knife he had been using for the purpose, Herbert counted himself lucky that Kazantsev had not been holding it during their struggle), floorboards ripped up, and chunks torn out of skirting boards.
It was a shame that Kazantsev was Russian, Herbert thought; he would have fitted in just fine at Five.
Herbert took up where Kazantsev had left off, expanding his search beyond Stensness’ bedroom to the rest of the house. It was not even lunchtime; the housemates would be at work for hours yet.
He felt round the inside of the oven, lifted every tin and jar in the larder, looked through the cupboards under the kitchen sink, rummaged through the soil in a window box now winter fallow, unscrewed the bases of lamps, pulled books from shelves to look behind them, felt behind paintings and mirrors, shook out curtains, went through overcoats and jackets with a pickpocket’s nimbleness, and turfed clothes from cupboards in heaps whose untidiness spoke of his growing desperation; for, at the end of this gargantuan search, more than an hour in the execution, Herbert had found precisely what he reckoned Kazantsev had come across—to wit, nothing.
Stensness’ life, or at least the part of it for which he had left evidence at home, seemed to have been as pedestrian as the vast majority of people’s lives: bills paid and pending, a bucket-load of cheap thrillers, and slim files of interdepartmental memoranda which could have cured even the most recidivist insomniac.
Breathless, though more from the adrenaline of thwarted progress than the rigor of the exercise, Herbert adjourned his hunt to go and answer a call of nature.
As he aimed at the porcelain, he looked around, trying to work out where he would have hidden something of vast importance. And then it came to him.
Forcing himself to finish peeing, he buttoned his fly, put the toilet seat down—see, he thought, he would have been a good husband—clambered onto the seat, and reached up toward the cistern.
Starting at the far right-hand corner, he walked his fingers slowly round the cistern’s inside edge, fighting the natural inclination to keep his fingertips dry; toilet cistern water was no more or less clean than shower water, after all.
Halfway along the front side of the cistern, his fingertips brushed something rubber, and he almost jumped for joy.
He pulled hard enough to rip away the strip of adhesive tape he knew would be there, and away came his prize.
A condom.
Not just any old condom, however. This one held something inside, and it had been tied at the neck, like a balloon, to keep its contents dry.
The knot was so tight that undoing it with fingernails alone would have been virtually impossible. He tore it with his teeth, careful not to harm what was inside.
No one ever used condoms for the taste, Herbert thought, hawking from deep in his throat as he pulled the neck open and extracted the contents.
Whatever he had been expecting, it had certainly been more earth-shattering than what he found.
The condom contained an article from Wednesday’s Times concerning revisions to the Queen’s Coronation celebrations next June.
There was a map of the route: a circuit of central London, running almost straight past his flat, he noticed, which was nice of them.
Someone, presumably Stensness, had ringed many of the place names. That apart, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Herbert almost missed it. In the bottom right-hand corner, in tiny but legible writing, was a sequence of letters: XXX CCD GVD RCC DPA XXX CDK S.
They must have made some sense, he supposed, but damned if he could see what.
He read them again.
XXX CCD GVD RCC DPA XXX CDK S.
If anything, they seemed even more incomprehensible second time round.
Herbert consoled himself with the thought that, having had more than his fair share of excitement for one morning, he was hardly in the best shape for code-breaking.
He tucked the mysterious Times article into the inside pocket of his jacket, spent twenty further unproductive and increasingly halfhearted minutes looking through the rest of the house for anything vaguely relevant; and then, checking in advance that the coast was clear, he left 43 Cholmeley Crescent.
It was even money that at least one of the goons was waiting for him at Highgate station, so instead of retracing his steps back there when he reached Archway Road, Herbert instead turned down the hill. Archway station was a good ten or fifteen minutes’ walk, but it was time he could spare if it meant getting away undetected.
He passed under the high road bridge which every year contributed more than its fair share to the capital’s grisly suicide tally, and remembered something Freud had said about human life being one long struggle against the death instinct.
Not for him, Herber
t thought; not right now, at any rate. He could not remember the last time he had felt this… well, not necessarily happy, but certainly alive.
The ruck with Kazantsev must have done him good. There was nothing like being in danger to give a man vitality. Men who sought to protect the body at all costs died many times over; but those who risked the body to survive as men had a good chance to live on.
He had not enjoyed his birthday so much in years.
These thoughts must have distracted him, for before he knew it he was not only at Archway station but also virtually at the ticket barriers, and it was then that he saw the man he had christened Bob.
Bob was wearing a different coat, by which Herbert surmised that it was reversible and Bob had simply turned it inside out. Even if Herbert had not recognized Bob’s face, however, he would have known him by his shoes. Whatever opportunity Watchers enjoyed to alter their clothes during surveillance, they rarely had the time or inclination to change their shoes. Bob was wearing the same shapeless, mildly unattractive brown laceups that Herbert had spotted on the tube journey up from Leicester Square.
There was another reason Herbert noticed him. After sudden movement, the second thing to avoid at all costs when carrying out surveillance was “ballooning”—drifting round with no apparent purpose.
An experienced operative would always look as though he had a purpose, even if it was nothing more than waiting for someone. But Bob was making such a show—eyes darting, pacing back and forth, constantly checking his watch—that he would have looked odd even to … well, even to Hannah Mortimer, Herbert thought, even to a blind girl.
Bob was so busy looking around that he had not seen him yet. Herbert turned his face away from him and went as quickly and unobtrusively as possible through the ticket barrier. Rather than standing on the escalator and letting it carry him down to the platform, Herbert walked down the left-hand side, the better to put distance between himself and Bob, not daring to turn back to see whether Bob was following.
Luck was on Herbert’s side; a southbound train arrived on the platform at exactly the same time as he did. One usually had to endure a wait of several minutes. Judging by the tightly packed carriages, there must have been a long interval since the last train. The Northern Line had probably been hit by cancellations or delays caused by the fog, in town if not out here.
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