On the very top shelf sat a cardboard box. I had to stand on the chair to reach it, which wasn’t easy as the thing was on castors. The box was very light, suggesting little, if anything, inside. I brought it down on to the desk. There was a piece of black cord attached to it at both ends, not so much to hold it closed, rather to provide a strap by which it could be carried. I opened it to look inside, but it was empty. There was printing on the underside of the lid, enough to tell me what had once been stored within.

  PACKING OF RESPIRATOR

  The Respirator should be placed in box with …

  I didn’t read all the details. This was where O’Connor had kept his gas mask. The box didn’t look at all dog-eared, so I guessed it was a new acquisition. The mask itself had been in no state to examine for wear and tear when I’d last seen it, strapped to O’Connor’s dead face as he lay on that slab in the morgue beneath Brighton nick.

  There was nothing else to examine on the shelves, so I began to go through the desk drawers. But they were mostly empty. A few contained bits of stationery: pencils, blank paper, a stapler. In the bottom right drawer was a pile of brown envelopes of a style that was instantly familiar. It was one such that O’Connor had handed me to take to Tremaine in London; and one very similar that I’d bought for myself as a replacement, to conceal the fact that I’d opened the first and examined its contents.

  I picked up the pile to see if there was anything underneath, and noticed a certain stiffness to it, more than I’d expect from a stack of mere paper. I flicked through them. All were empty except one, nestling between the others. I’d no doubt as to what I would find inside. I looked over my shoulder – I didn’t want Sylvia to witness the truth of what her lover had done for a living – but the door was still closed. This time the envelope wasn’t sealed. I tipped it up and let the contents spill over the desk.

  It was as I’d expected: a second set of prints of the photos O’Connor had taken of Rachael and Metzger, if it really was Metzger. That Geordie accent threw the whole thing into question. It was unsurprising that he should keep copies – who could tell how many times over he might be able to sell the same images? I looked inside the envelope but there was no sign of the negatives. Perhaps O’Connor had kept them at his office, and they’d been taken in the burglary. He’d been wise to keep these separate.

  I looked through them, one at a time, though I wasn’t sure I needed a reminder. I’d seen them before and had remembered them well enough to reproduce them on paper. But, since then, I’d met Rachael. We’d spoken. I might almost have considered her a friend, and she’d offered me more than that – or perhaps less. Looking at the pictures meant something quite different now, something wrong, and all the more exciting for it. But I didn’t stop. Now what I was looking at was real, more real than the first time I’d seen them, more real even than when I’d drawn them. Since then I’d been close to that body, touched it, if only on the hand and the arm. What I could now see in front of me had been hidden then only by the weft and warp of the thinnest cotton.

  And, on top of all that, these images constituted evidence. They had to be examined thoroughly for anything that might lead to O’Connor’s killer. It was a good job that this last excuse lurked somewhere at the back of my mind, because I did notice something. Some of the photographs were unfamiliar to me, even though they were all much of a muchness. There were in total perhaps five distinct poses of the two bodies, and for each one several images with only slight variation in the position of a head, or a limb, or some other body part. It was as if O’Connor had waited and then taken a cluster of shots in tight succession. But, in terms of those slight variations, some of the pictures were new to me.

  I counted them: there were twenty-five in all. That meant nine more than I’d taken up to London, which posed several questions. Was twenty-five the full set, or might there be still others that O’Connor had taken? And were there only two sets of prints: this and the one I’d given to Tremaine? And – which intrigued me most, though I had no hint of an answer – what had happened to those other nine from the first set?

  I looked through the pictures again, sorting them into the ones I’d seen before and the new ones – trying to discern precisely which those extra nine were. It wasn’t too difficult; my memories were clear, reinforced by repeated recollection. Then I examined the nine in detail, to see what was different about them, what clues there might be that I’d not seen before, and most of all to determine just why they had been excluded. Moments earlier my focus had been solely on the image of Rachael, but now I concentrated more on her bedfellow. As I’d noted before, Rachael had a tendency to look straight at the camera, as if she was well aware of its presence. I’d since established that she was. And that was when I noticed what was different about these nine. In the others, Metzger’s face had been in profile or sometimes obscured completely. Tremaine himself had complained on that score. In these, however, he could be seen from the front – fully recognizable to anyone who knew him. It made no sense. Why would O’Connor exclude the images that best depicted the target of the blackmail? They would be the first that Tremaine wanted, so that he could show them to Metzger and leave no doubt as to the strength of evidence against him. Or perhaps that was what had already happened. I hadn’t entered this story at the very beginning. Perhaps mine was not the first delivery that O’Connor had made to Tremaine.

  There was a knock at the door behind me. I quickly gathered the photos together and slipped them back into the envelope. Sylvia entered a moment later, but she had no chance to see them.

  ‘I was wondering if you wanted a cup of tea or something,’ she said.

  I looked at my watch, remembering I had a train to catch. I stood up. ‘No, I’ve got to be going.’ I held the envelope up in front of me, not wanting to make any suggestion that she should take a look at it. ‘Is it all right if I take this away with me?’ I didn’t bother to mention the notebook in my pocket. It was too small for her to notice, anyway.

  ‘Please do,’ she replied, with a hint of vehemence. ‘I don’t want to see them again.’

  I felt my cheeks turn crimson. She knew what was in the envelope. She had seen them. It hardly mattered whether that had been while O’Connor was still alive, or after he had not returned, and she’d begun searching for some clue as to his whereabouts. Perhaps he’d even shown them to her, to add spice to their relationship. Somehow I doubted it. But, whatever had happened, she and I had both seen the pictures and we each knew that the other had. They might as well have been laid out on the desk for both of us to admire. For want of anything to cause a distraction, I reached into my pocket and handed her my card.

  ‘Call me,’ I said, ‘if anyone comes round asking questions. Or … if you need anything.’

  She took the card, but I knew she wouldn’t call.

  CHAPTER 13

  I was in London again. This time I’d travelled up from Hove Station, just a few minutes’ walk from Sylvia Clay’s flat. It still brought me into Victoria. Once again I’d spent the journey clutching an envelope full of dirty photographs. It was a risk, but not a huge one. There was even a thrill to it, the sensation of how close I was to public humiliation if anyone were to discover what I was carrying; much the same thrill you get from taking a tart to see your mother and pretending she’s your sweetheart. And, anyway, there’d been no time for me to go home and get rid of them. Just like the preceding Saturday, I had an appointment to keep: a little earlier this time, at 7 o’clock. The big difference was that the man I was meeting tonight was quite unaware that I was coming.

  I knew what he looked like now – Metzger. I’d got clear pictures of his face. The guesses I’d made from my drawings hadn’t been too bad – I’d learned that from what Rachael had told me – but, based on what I’d sketched, you could have walked past the man in the street and missed him. And I needed to recognize him when I saw him. If I saw him.

  More troubling was what he sounded like. Rachael could have been mistaken about his having a Geordie accent, but she’d seemed confident about it. I certainly couldn’t imagine how she could have mistaken German for that. The simple explanation was that he’d been disguising his voice but, if so, it was an obscure accent to choose. Perhaps it had just been some awful attempt to speak like a native Englishman, and the best sense that Rachael’s ear could make of it was to interpret it as Geordie. On the other hand, Metzger might not be a simple diplomat; he could well be a spy. That could mean he had been trained to mimic the voices of a dozen different British regions. I would soon find out.

  On the train I’d read through O’Connor’s notebook, working backwards on the presumption that recent entries would be of the greatest significance. It wasn’t much help, though. He’d not imagined it was going to be read by anyone else, and so it mostly recorded fragments of information too detailed for him to trust to his own memory: engagements, addresses, telephone numbers and the like. There were a few meetings with Tremaine listed, in advance of the one I had kept, but that was no surprise. I’d heard from Tremaine himself that he and O’Connor had been in contact for some time, arranging to put Metzger in the frame. The earliest mention of him occurred about a month before. ‘Call Ralph Tremaine’ followed by a telephone number. Next to it O’Connor had added a note: ‘Gilbert case? Lt Cdr?’ O’Connor had remembered him in the same way I did. There was one final note beneath that; in different shade of ink, so presumably added later: ‘Dudley?’

  All I knew of it was that it was a town in Worcestershire. I’d never been there, nor could I imagine any connection with the Gilbert case. But then I came across the word again a few pages earlier, and realized it could signify something else. It was included in a list, a list of what seemed like surnames – nineteen of them in all. Dudley was the sixth one down. In that context it made far more sense as the name of a person than of a place. Some of the entries on the list had ticks against them, others crosses. Dudley had a tick. The last four had no mark at all. There was another name I recognized there: Remick. I immediately thought of Percy Remick, the bookie who’d come to O’Connor’s funeral. It might be a simple coincidence, but it wasn’t that common a surname. On O’Connor’s list Remick had a tick. Come to think of it, some of the other names on the list could have been bookies as well. There was one I recognized called Reece, and a Corbett too. Both of them worked at the Brighton track. They were just surnames, but with three out of the nineteen having the connection, the odds were that it was down to more than mere chance. And who better to ask about odds?

  But that wasn’t for today, and I wasn’t even sure it was worth following up at all. It was a tenuous link, even if the two Dudleys were connected. From Victoria I walked up Buckingham Palace Road, past the palace itself and into the Mall. It was a longish trek but there was no direct Tube route, and I didn’t know the busses well enough to be bothered with them. When I was almost at Trafalgar Square, I saw the Duke of York Steps rising to the left, crowned at the top by a column commemorating the said duke. I went up them and found myself at my destination: Carlton House Terrace. It didn’t take me long to find number 9, the German Embassy.

  It was a quarter to seven. If Metzger stuck to the timetable his colleague had given me that morning, then he should be leaving work soon. It wouldn’t be dark for another couple of hours, so I’d have no trouble in recognizing him, not now that I knew what he really looked like. Across the road from the embassy was a little park reminding me of Eccleston Square. I couldn’t see a way in and suspected it might be private, belonging to the big houses beyond. Even so, after a quick glance around, I leapt over the fence and took up position in the bushes. From there I had a clear view of the embassy’s front door. There must have been other doors too, but I could only watch one at a time. If he didn’t come out this way tonight, I’d try a different exit another day.

  I had only a few minutes to wait, but the time passed slowly. Finally, I heard a clock somewhere beginning to chime, and counted the full seven strokes of the hour. A couple of minutes later the door opened and two women emerged. Chatting to each other, they headed away down the Duke of York Steps. After that, out came a man on his own but he was far too short to be the one I was after. Then two more men appeared. The one on the right was too old, but the other must surely be Metzger. At that distance I couldn’t see his face clearly, and besides, he had his hat pulled down low, but I felt confident it was him. He paused to light a cigarette and do the same for his colleague, then the two of them descended the steps to the pavement. I was half-expecting to witness the curtly raised arms of the Nazi salute and an automatous ‘Heil Hitler!’, but instead they exchanged nothing more than a cheery ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ and set off in opposite directions.

  I followed Metzger, who was heading north, towards Regent Street. The area wasn’t crowded, but there were enough people travelling in both directions that I could keep track of him without the risk of raising his suspicions. At Piccadilly Circus he went into the Tube station. I saw him heading down to the Piccadilly line, but then lost sight of him as I bought my ticket. I had to guess which direction he was taking – and got it wrong. He was nowhere to be seen on the eastbound platform. Thankfully, it was only a short dash through to the westbound side and I made it just in time to see him boarding a train. I managed to jump on a couple of carriages further along. The train trundled west, eventually emerging from the tunnels into the evening sunlight. He finally got off at Barons Court and walked a few hundred yards to reach a street that would have fitted in just as well in parts of Brighton as it did here in London. He stopped at a large house, presumably split into flats, and reached into his pocket for a key.

  I continued walking towards him, not knowing what I would do next. If I timed it right, I’d reach the door just as he opened it. I could have taken him by surprise, bundled him inside, and perhaps forced him to confess. But that would be a preposterous risk. It would be better, for now at least, to talk to him, to discover what he was prepared to tell me before trying to extract what he was not. He’d found his key and was halfway up the steps to the front door when I came level with him.

  ‘Herr Metzger?’ I said. ‘Herr Ernst Metzger?’

  He turned and looked at me. ‘That is correct.’ He spoke English but his German accent was clear. It was certainly not the Geordie that Rachael had mentioned. ‘How might I help you?’

  I didn’t reply. It was the first time, since he’d emerged from the German Embassy, that I’d managed to get a clear look at his features. I could feel my jaw hanging open and I knew I must look like a fool, but I could think of nothing to say. Whatever his accent and whatever his name, this was not the man in the photographs.

  *

  The train journey back home gave me time to think, but I came to no conclusions. I’d managed to regain the power of speech and begin a conversation with Metzger, but only to confirm what I already knew. He was Ernst Metzger and he worked as a representative of the Reichskirchenministerium in the German Embassy. That could still be a cover for espionage work, but what did it matter now? Metzger had not been with Rachael in room 235 of the Metropole Hotel. Metzger was not the victim of blackmail. Metzger had nothing to do with any of it. And, if that was the case, why had I come to London to find him?

  Inspector Marchant had given me the name. He’d pretended to be doing so as an act of conscience because he couldn’t stand seeing a murderer go unpunished, but that might have been a ruse. He could just have made the name up. No, that didn’t work. There was a Metzger working at the embassy; Marchant couldn’t simply have guessed that. He’d have needed to do some research – detailed research. Metzger wasn’t just any old name plucked from the telephone directory. Moreover, he had a passing resemblance to the man in the photos: the age, the build, the height, the hair. That would have taken more investigation than Marchant could have found time to do. The name must have come, just as Marchant claimed, from Tremaine.

  Perhaps Marchant had been aware he was lying to me, perhaps not. It didn’t matter. Clearly Tremaine had the resources to know every face in the German Embassy, and so to pick Metzger’s as the one that best matched the photographs. He’d then made sure the name got passed on to me. As to why, I couldn’t guess. He must have assumed, correctly, that I’d go and find Metzger. Was Tremaine hoping I’d do his dirty work for him, and kill Metzger in vengeance for the death of my former partner? It would be a ridiculous gamble and, anyway, it would fail as soon as I saw Metzger close up and – as was the case – recognized that it wasn’t him in the photos with Rachael.

  Except, of course, that neither Tremaine nor Marchant knew I’d seen the full set of images – the extra ones that I’d found at Sylvia’s flat and was still carrying with me. None of the photos I’d originally couriered to London featured a clear shot of Metzger’s face – or not Metzger’s but somebody else’s, as I’d so recently discovered. If I’d seen only that first set, would I have still thought it was Metzger in them when I encountered him face to face? I went through the images in my mind. It was plausible; in profile, the two faces were alike enough. The drawings I’d done to try and extrapolate the entire face from what I’d seen were closer to the extra photos than to the real Metzger, but I’d have dismissed that as a mistake on my part.

  And then it hit me: I’d been looking at this whole thing arse about face. I hadn’t been given Metzger’s name because he had a passing resemblance to the Mr X of the photographs. Metzger had come first. He was a German spy, and Tremaine was trying to blackmail him for the good of the nation. But something had gone wrong and they hadn’t been able to catch him in the act. Perhaps he wasn’t even a philanderer at all. So they’d found someone who looked sufficiently like him – this Mr X – and got him to pose with Rachael, then selected only the pictures that showed his face at an angle from which it could be mistaken for Metzger’s.