There was one bathroom, with the lavatory cistern high on the wall and a sit-up bath which would have cramped a pygmy, and two bedrooms, both small enough for the single beds within them to look large. Herbert had one room; his mother Mary had designs on the other, on the grounds that she was ill and needed constant looking after, but Herbert had so far resisted. Living with one’s mother was for serial killers, queers, and Italians only.
He wondered how long it would be before he succumbed; for she was ill, of that there was no doubt. He had taken her to Guy’s Hospital that very morning with a recurrence of breathing difficulties, and the fog would hardly be doing her any favors.
He phoned the hospital, sat through stretching minutes as his call was passed from one ancient switchboard to another, and finally got through to the duty nurse on Mary’s ward, who told him that his mother was asleep and that her condition was unchanged.
He said he would visit tomorrow, and the nurse promised to pass the message on.
Having piled the fire with extra coal, banked it to ensure maximum warmth, checked that the windows were sealed tight against everything which came from outside, Herbert was left alone with the silence.
He thought of his colleagues finding warmth in the press of their wives’ bodies and the glow of protection over their children which every man carried in him like a birthright, and reflected, not for the first time, that of all the truths he sought in his work, the most indisputable of all was also the easiest to find; that it was precisely because he was alone that he could afford to seek, and that he was alone not because he had chosen to be but because every turn his life had taken had ensured it.
December 5, 1952
FRIDAY
Herbert turned the radio first on and then up, to drown out the clattering of the milkman in the street below. The newsreader said that Jomo Kenyatta was being tried in Nairobi for association with the Mau Mau. Imprisonment would not harm Kenyatta’s political prospects, Herbert thought; the British authorities in India had locked Nehru up during the war, and he had not done badly since. Had Herbert been a betting man, he would have put money on Kenyatta eventually running the place.
Unexciting news came and went in unexciting tones. Herbert listened for a while, summoning up the enthusiasm to move; then, with a huge effort, rolled out of bed, stumbled over to the window, and pulled open the curtains.
The fog had thickened into a greasy, heavy swirl which was condensing in oily drops on the windowpanes. It had hardly been worth the trip. He should have been a bear, he thought; any self-respecting grizzly would have taken one look outside and hibernated until April.
He was not due back on duty until two o’clock that afternoon, but he had told Tulloch he would be in after breakfast. True, he owed Tulloch nothing, but he felt obligated to the man in the Long Water, whoever he had been. In death as in life, anonymous or otherwise, he deserved the best the Metropolitan Police could give him.
Herbert rang the Hyde Park station, where Elkington, keener than a factory full of mustard, was already at his desk. Herbert asked that Elkington bring a police diver and meet him by the Peter Pan statue in an hour.
Elkington could do it in half an hour, if that was better.
No, it was not better. An hour was fine.
The weatherman came on the radio to announce that London had suffered a temperature inversion during the night. The air near the ground had grown colder, effectively trapping itself beneath the lid of warmer air above. Unable to rise vertically and with no wind to disperse it laterally, this shallow layer of low-lying, dense, frigid air was now totally inert.
The Port of London Authority had announced that all navigable sections of the river were fogbound, and that river traffic had ceased in its entirety.
A perfect day for hunting murderers, in other words.
It was breakfast time, but day and night were pretty nebulous concepts when the fog was so dense. It was noticeably more opaque than last night; dirtier, too. Herbert thought of all the millions of domestic fires which would have been lit in the past few hours, of the power stations which stood sentinel on the Thames at Barking and Woolwich and Deptford and Battersea and Fulham, of all the vehicles belching smoke as they crawled blindly round town; and when he peered closer he was sure he could see streaks of amber and black in the mist.
Back in Kensington Gardens, he walked straight past the Peter Pan statue without noticing. Only when he heard the muted splashing of the fountains at the top of the Long Water did he realize that he had gone too far. He turned round and retraced his steps on the landward side of the path, holding his right hand out like a blind man’s cane so as not to miss the railings around the statue.
Elkington was already there, together with an assortment of others, Flew and Hare among them.
“Terrible, this fog is, absolutely awful,” Elkington said with relish. “Coppers are abandoning their Humbers for bicycles or their own two feet. The river police have tied their boats up and are doing their patrols on shore. The smash-and-grab men will be harvesting fast, sir, mark my words.” He could hardly have sounded more thrilled.
For his part, Herbert could have done without Elkington’s particular brand of schadenfreude this morning. “Where’s the diver?” he asked.
“Right here, sir.” Elkington pointed to a young woman alongside him. Herbert could have sworn he saw a flourish in the gesture; and then he was no longer thinking of Elkington at all, as his entire attention was focused, almost against his will, on the woman.
It was not that she was beautiful—although she was certainly that—more that she seemed so exotic, so incongruous, in this freezing fog-bound city. Her skin was olive beneath hair black as night; Herbert saw almond eyes, a nose the elegant side of aquiline, lips like lightly plumped pillows. She was short and slender, but something in her carriage suggested a wiry strength. She could have been a biblical queen, brought early to her throne. She looked to be in her early twenties.
“Detective Inspector Smith, meet Hannah Mortimer,” Elkington said.
Hannah put out her hand for Herbert to shake, and missed his fingers by three inches. Her eyes were staring without focus at a point over his left shoulder.
“It help me if you say something,” she said.
The foreign undercoat to her accent—Eastern European, he thought—could not entirely disguise the hint of insolence in the statement. Elkington stiffened in proxy embarrassment; Herbert stifled an absurd desire to laugh.
“How do you do, Miss Mortimer?” he said.
Her sightless eyes swiveled slightly towards his face, as though she were a radio astronomer picking up return signals.
“I know what you think,” she said.
“What?” Herbert asked.
“You wonder how blind person can be diver.” He said nothing; it was exactly what he had been thinking. “My answer is very easy,” she continued. “River and lake beds are filthy dirty; most of the time, you can’t see a thing. You want to find things, you must feel for them. So your sense of touch must be accustomed. There are many blind divers, in actuality.”
She invariably emphasized the first syllables of words, Herbert noticed, irrespective of their proper pronunciation—accustomed, actuality, wonder.
“I’m sure there are,” Herbert said mildly. “OK. I want you to look for”—he caught himself, and stumbled over the next words—“I mean …”
“You can use words like ‘look’ and ‘see.’ I know what they mean. For me, is no bother to hear them.”
Herbert was glad that she could not see the rouge of embarrassment on his cheeks; the flush was too deep to pass off as reaction to the cold.
“So, you want me to find—what?” Hannah asked.
“Anything that might tell me who the man was, or why he was killed.”
Sheathed in a bulky wartime diving suit with heavy boots and a metal helmet, Hannah stepped into the Long Water as easily as a seal would and vanished from sight.
Herbert turned bac
k towards the statue.
Peter Pan stood atop a bronze tree stump which swarmed with fairies, squirrels, mice, and rabbits. His right hand was raised, as though hailing a cab; in his left he clutched a set of pan pipes.
Herbert remembered the layout from the previous night. The statue was bounded from behind by an array of flowerbeds and shrubbery, and from in front by the Long Water.
The water was cordoned off by a railing, presumably for the safety of the children who congregated at the statue. Either side of the railing were sections of hedges and small trees. The body had been found beyond these, where the path gave directly onto the water, presumably for launching small boats in the summer.
Random sounds floated past Herbert, distorted and lacerated by the fog. He heard voices, engines, footsteps, though he could tell neither from which direction they came, nor indeed whether they existed outside of his imagination. Perhaps they were caused by atmospheric interference, like static on a radio set.
Splashings from behind the curtain of mist were for him the only proof of Hannah’s existence. Herbert could not see her; twice he almost shouted, asking if she had found anything, before realizing she would not hear him from under her huge brass helmet.
Tinker Bell stretched lovingly up from the tree stump towards Peter. A pair of fairies embraced; a sprite chatted with a squirrel which squatted on its haunches with its paws clasped out front.
Herbert called Elkington, Flew, and Hare over.
“Right,” he said. “We’re going to search this place top to bottom. I’ll take the area round the statue. Flew, you take the grass to the north; Hare, to the south. Elkington, you search the path and shrubbery by the water. Divide your sectors up into grids and do it methodically: up, down, left, right, like you’re mowing a lawn.” He looked at them each in turn. “What are you looking so boot-faced about, Flew? Worried you’re going to crease your uniform?”
Other detectives might have thought themselves above crawling around on all fours, but Herbert was happy to get down and dirty with the juniors. He knew that if one wanted something done, nine times out of ten, the best way was to do it oneself.
He started in the immediate vicinity of the statue. Within minutes, the knees of his trousers were dark with dew. When he wiped his face, small strands of grass clung to his cheeks like a beard.
He stamped his feet, wiggled his fingers inside his gloves, and hoped that clenching his teeth would let the oxygen through and keep the sulfur out.
The flowerbeds were next. He picked his way through clumps of winter weeds and felt the heaviness on his shoes as they came up trailing chunks of mud.
He gathered the others together after half an hour; too soon for them to have finished their searches, but Herbert could sense they were flagging, and a break would keep their minds fresh and minimize the chances of them missing anything.
They pooled discoveries: a used condom, a sodden copy of yesterday’s Daily Express—the best possible use for it, Herbert thought—an empty tin of Spam, and a box of matches.
Elkington had found the majority of items, of course; all of them irrelevant.
Herbert heard a sudden chatterbox of sounds, all from Hannah: snapping her fingers, humming, clicking her tongue, anything to get the return signal of an echo, be it the sharp, distinctive click of a building or a tree’s softer sigh.
He would have thought that smooth, open spaces would be easiest for her, but he saw that in fact they were the most difficult; in a park there were few orientation marks, and hence few ways for her to tell where exactly she was.
Satisfied that she had found the right place, Hannah pulled off her helmet and shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said.
“You’ve finished?”
“You joke? What it is, I’ve found nothing so far. You ask me to search this water; that’s what I do. I have made less than half the job. Go and have a cup of tea, if you want. I come and get you when I find something.”
Hannah’s damnation of weakness and self-pity stung Herbert. For the second time in as many hours, he was glad that her blindness prevented her from seeing the flush which rose ashamedly to his face.
Herbert was no stranger to patience. He had spent much of his life waiting, with no guarantee of success and with only his own thoughts for company. This was no different. He watched Hannah clump back to the water.
“Come on,” he said. “Back to work.”
Five minutes became ten; ten became thirty; thirty became an hour.
Then, suddenly, thrillingly, Herbert saw a patch of undergrowth torn flat, the earth beneath dotted with footprints.
He caught his breath, dropped his shoulders, and took his time.
The footprints were jumbled, their indentations overlapping as they twisted in different directions and pressed down to varying depths. He could make out at least two separate sole designs; there might have been more, but it was impossible to be sure.
Twigs had been snapped and leaves crushed across an area perhaps eight foot by three; large enough, in other words, to have been caused by a prone man, especially one who had been moving, perhaps struggling.
A ring glinted dully in the gloom. Herbert picked it up. Gold, no inscription, entirely ordinary. Not the corpse’s—there had been no ring marks on his fingers. It could be something; it could have belonged to the killer. But it was probably nothing; it might have been here for days, weeks, months, years.
Hannah appeared again, and this time she was holding something. In the haze, Herbert thought at first that it was a dead animal. Only when she handed it to him did he see that it was a tweed overcoat.
The overcoat whose whereabouts he had pondered at the autopsy? He hoped so.
He turned it over and over, noticing as he did so two things.
Firstly, it was exceptionally heavy. It was waterlogged, of course, but even that could not account for the weight. When his hands gripped at uneven lumps inside the pockets, he realized the reason: stones, packed hard to weigh the body down.
Secondly, the coat was torn in several places; specifically, at the collar, the left armpit and cuff, and on the right outside pocket.
“Was the lake bed sharp?” he asked.
Hannah shook her head. “Not especially.”
Then the rips in the cloth would probably have come from the dead man’s struggle with his killer, or from trying to take his coat off to avoid drowning; or both. The Long Water was a lake, so there was no current which could have separated body from coat postmortem. If the victim had managed to get the coat off, therefore, he would have been at the end of his tether when doing so; too weak to do anything after that except slump back into the cold water, this time for good.
Elkington, Flew, and Hare watched as Herbert laid the coat flat on the ground and began to search through it.
There were five pockets—two on the outside flanks, one at the breast, and two inside—and each had been stuffed with stones. He pulled them out and sent them skittering across the path.
No name tag inside the collar. Not surprising. They were not at school anymore.
In the right-hand inside pocket, Herbert found something hard and flat. His first thought was that it felt like an identity card, but it could not have been; such cards had been abolished earlier in the year.
When he brought it out, he saw that he had been both right and wrong.
It was an identity card, but a university rather than a national one. It was laminated—hence still legible after a night in the water, rather than reduced to pulp—and it announced its holder as a graduate student of King’s College, London.
More importantly, it gave Herbert a name: Max Stensness.
“You have something?” Hannah asked.
“We do indeed. A name. Thank you very much.”
She punched the air in delight. “Is my pleasure. Maybe you come to dinner tonight?”
She ran the two sentences together, as though they were part of the same thought process, and it took a seco
nd or two for Herbert to take stock of what she had asked.
“I couldn’t possibly,” he said.
Hare made a noise that was part cough and part snicker.
“What else do you do?” Hannah asked.
Flew had covered his mouth with his hand. His shoulders were heaving, and he was making small trumpeting noises into his palm.
Herbert pointed at Hare and Flew. “You two, take the coat over to Scotland Yard, and get it logged as evidence.”
They scurried away like miscreant pupils from a headmaster’s study, openly laughing long before they were out of earshot. Herbert noticed that Elkington had stepped a few yards away; clearly the man had some redeeming features after all, he thought.
Herbert turned back to Hannah.
“Well, for all you know, I could be going home to my wife and children.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Good. Then you can come to mine. Number 14, Frith Street, in Soho. Top bell.”
Herbert toyed briefly—very briefly—with the idea that this was some kind of pass. Not that he would have known one if it had hit him in the face, for it had been so long since he had been intimate with a woman who did not charge for her services. Nor did he think that someone like Hannah would have been in the remotest bit interested. He was twelve or fifteen years her senior, for a start. It had clearly been a social invitation, therefore, which in itself was as rare as a sexual advance.
Herbert wondered if this was what learning a new language felt like.
“That would be nice.” Was that what one said? It was what he said, at any rate. “I’d like that.”
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