kissed the Madonna reverently, without even a trace of mockery, then stroked the blade against his right cheek.
‘You have a wife, Mercier,’ he said gently, and his face never lost its peculiarly saintly expression for a moment. ‘An invalid, I understand?’
‘Monsieur?’ Mercier said in a whisper, and the heart seemed to stop inside him.
‘One word, Mercier, the slightest whisper, and I cut her throat. You follow me?’
Mercier turned away, stomach heaving, and started to be sick again. Rossiter stood up and walked along the deck and stood in the entrance of the wheelhouse.
‘All right?’ Jacaud demanded.
‘Naturally.’ Rossiter took a deep breath of fresh salt air and smiled. ‘A fine morning, Jacaud, a beautiful morning. And to think one could still be in bed and missing all this.’
Fog rolled in across the city, and somewhere in the distance ships hooted mournfully to each other as they negotiated the lower reaches of the Thames on the way out to sea. Fog – real fog of the kind that you seemed to get in London and nowhere else on earth. Fog that killed off the aged, choked the streets and reduced one of the world’s great cities to chaos and confusion.
Paul Chavasse abandoned his taxi at Marble Arch and whistled softly to himself as he turned up the collar of his trenchcoat and passed through the gates of the park. There was only one thing he liked better than fog and that was rain. An idiosyncrasy with its roots somewhere in youth, he supposed, or perhaps there was a simpler explanation. After all, both rain and fog enclosed one in a small private world, which could be very convenient at times.
He paused to light a cigarette, a tall handsome man with a face as Gallic as the Pigalle on a Saturday night, and the heritage of his Breton father was plain to see in the Celtic cheekbones. A park keeper drifted out of the shadows and faded without a word, a thing which, considering the circumstances, could only have happened in England. Chavasse went on his way, unaccountably cheered.
St Bede’s Hospital was on the far side of the park, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity in spite of its worldwide reputation. They were expecting him, and when he called at Reception, a porter in a neat blue uniform escorted him along a series of green-tiled corridors, each one of which seemed to stretch into infinity.
He was handed over to a senior lab technician in a small glass office, who took him down to the mortuary in a surprisingly modern lift. Chavasse was conscious of two things the moment the doors opened – the all-pervading smell of antiseptic so peculiar to hospitals, and the extreme cold. The vast echoing chamber was lined with steel drawers, each one presumably holding a corpse, but the object of his visit waited for him on an operating trolley covered with a rubber sheet.
‘We couldn’t get him into one of the boxes, worse luck,’ the technician explained. ‘Too bloated. Stinking like last year’s fish, or worse.’
At close quarters, the smell was quite overpowering, in spite of the preventive measures which had obviously been taken. Chavasse pulled out a handkerchief and held it to his mouth.
‘I see what you mean.’
He had looked on death many times in most of its variations, but this monstrosity was something new. He stared down, a slight frown on his face.
‘How long was he in the water?’
‘Six or seven weeks.’
‘Can you be certain of that?’
‘Oh, yes – urine tests, the rate of chemical breakdown and so on. He was Jamaican, by the way, or did you know that?’
‘So they told me, but I’d never have guessed.’
The technician nodded. ‘Prolonged immersion in salt-water does funny things to skin pigmentation.’
‘So it would appear.’ Chavasse stepped back and replaced the handkerchief in his breast pocket. ‘Thanks very much. I think I’ve seen all I need.’
‘All right for us to dispose of him now, sir?’ the technician enquired as he replaced the sheet.
‘I was forgetting.’ Chavasse took out his wallet and produced a printed disposal slip. ‘Cremation only, and all documents to the Home Office by tomorrow.’
‘They’d been hoping to have him in the Medical School for dissection.’
‘Tell them to try Burke and Hare.’ Chavasse pulled on his gloves. ‘Ashes to ashes for this boy, and no funny business. I’ll see myself out.’
When he had gone, the technician lit a cigarette, a slight frown on his face. He wondered about Chavasse. There was a foreign look about him, but he was obviously English. A nice enough bloke - a gentleman, to use an old-fashioned word, but something wasn’t quite right. It was the eyes, that was it. Black and completely expressionless. They seemed to look right through you and beyond, as if you weren’t there at all. The kind of eyes that Jap colonel had had, the one in the camp in Siam where the technician had spent the worst three years of his life. A funny bloke, that Jap; one minute full of the milk of human kindness, the next smoking a cigarette without turning a hair, while they flogged some offender to death.
The technician shuddered and unfolded the slip of paper that Chavasse had given him. It was signed by the Home Secretary himself. That did it. He carefully stowed it away in his wallet and pushed the trolley through into the crematorium next door. Exactly three minutes later, he closed the glass door of one of the three special ovens and reached for the switch. Flames appeared as if by magic, and the body, bloated with its own gases, started to burn at once.
The technician lit another cigarette. Professor Henson wouldn’t be too pleased, but it was done now, and after all he did have it in writing. He went next door, whistling cheerfully, and made a cup of tea.
* * *
It was almost two months since Chavasse had visited the house in St John’s Wood, and returning was like coming home again after a long absence. Not so strange, perhaps, when one considered the kind of life he had led for the twelve years he had been an agent of the Bureau, the little-known section of British Intelligence that handled the sort of business no one else seemed to know what to do with.
He went up the steps and pressed the bell beside the brass plate that carried the legend Brown & Co – Importers & Exporters. The door was opened almost immediately by a tall greying man in a blue serge uniform, who positively beamed a welcome.
‘Good to have you back, Mr Chavasse. You’re nice and brown.’
‘Glad to be back, George.’
‘Mr Mallory’s been asking for you, sir. Miss Frazer’s been phoning every few minutes.’
‘Nothing new in that, George.’
Chavasse went up the curving Regency staircase quickly. Nothing changed. Not a thing. It was just like it had always been. Lengthy periods in which damn-all happened, and then something broke through to the surface and the day needed twenty-seven hours.
When
