Free Visibility by Boris Starling Page A

smell of failure. The shadow of the war still hung heavily over Britain, and nowhere more so than Leconfield House. During the war, most fit and dynamic young men had opted to join the fighting services, forcing Five to recruit—how to put this charitably?—more idiosyncratic characters from the law and the theater, from Fleet Street and Oxbridge.
    The good ones were merely dim and dreary, or harmless eccentrics; the bad ones were venal and pernicious. Nepotism was not so much an unspoken principle as official policy. It was widely said in Leconfield House that the answer to the question “How many people work in Five?” was “About half.”
    Run a security service? Herbert thought. This lot couldn’t even run a bath.
    That Five had not uncovered Stensness’ homosexuality was therefore no surprise.
    “What were you talking to Stensness about at the conference yesterday?” he said.
    “I asked him if he had anything new for me,” de Vere Green replied. “He said he hadn’t, but there was a party meeting coming up so he’d get back to me in the next week or so.”
    “Did you know you were going to see him at the conference?”
    “Not at all.”
    “So what you were talking about was nothing to do with the conference?”
    “Correct.”
    “Was it a shock?”
    “Was what a shock?”
    “To see him there.”
    “Nothing in this business is a shock, dear boy.”
    The fog crawled past. It was a gray, obscene animal, a deep-sea predator, drifting with the minutest slowness, draping itself round Leconfield House’s gun ports which had been installed during the war in anticipation of Nazi parachutists landing in Hyde Park and marauding down Curzon Street. Rumor had it that they were still manned on Sundays in case a mob from Speaker’s Corner decided to go on the rampage.
    The occasional passerby loomed suddenly out of the gloom, was dimly visible for a few moments, and then melted once more back into the murk. The world seemed to have shrunk to a circle barely a cricket pitch’s length in diameter; beyond that small clearing of clarity, armies could have been massing without Herbert’s knowledge.
    Herbert stopped by his flat, found Cholmeley Crescent—the street on which Stensness had lived—in an
A to Z
map of London, memorized the names andlayout of every street within a half-mile radius, and set out for the tube again, this time with a copy of
The Times.
In the time it would take him to get up to Highgate, he could do nine-tenths of the crossword.
    He took the Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square.
    A sequence of letters
(5,4); C-H-A-I-N M-A-I-L.
    Not quite enough room for a Yankee in the colony
(5); K-E-N-Y-A.
    At Leicester Square, he changed for the Northern Line.
    Turned over French bed in a French town
(7). A French bed:
lit
, and backwards—“turned over”—made
til.
That left a four-letter French town into which “til” would fit.
    Herbert flicked through the names of French towns in his head. Paris, Marseilles, Avignon, Bordeaux, Lille … All more than four letters.
    Lyon fit, but he could find no way in which “til” could be inserted to make a word.
    Then came Lens, and he had it: L-E-N-T-I-L-S.
    Cycling coppers; the first four times as good as the second
(5,8); P-E-N-N-Y F-A-R-T-H-I-N-G.
    A day for football in Yorkshire
(9); W-E-D-N-E-S-D-A-Y.
    Herbert was not so absorbed in the crossword that he did not observe his fellow passengers from time to time; and so it was, somewhere between Euston and Camden Town, that he realized he was being followed.
    There were three of them, all men, dressed in blacks, grays, dark blues, and browns; the usual urban camouflage of a fifties man, but to Herbert’s eye, in this particular place and at this particular time, colors that were determinedly—perhaps too determinedly—neutral.Two of them were sitting on the opposite side of the carriage from him, at an angle of ten and two o’clock respectively; the third was on his side of the aisle, about four