—

Superintendent George Moth shuffled through the papers on his desk and took out the report of the raid on the radical bookshop. All such tactics were supposed to be cleared with his signature on a piece of paper before being put into action. He knew what he should do, which was to kick up a rumpus and haul the maverick inspector over the coals: quite apart from the insubordinate act, the raid had been a fiasco.

It was Saturday morning and he had no need to be in his office, but the alternative was to be at home where he would feel compelled to spend the day trying to do something to persuade Esther to snap out of her misery. He could hardly bear being near her, she made him feel helpless and hopeless. Somehow she had fallen back into her old role of keeping house but, whereas in the years before she married she had brought the breath of life to the house, she now smothered it with her alienating grief.

There seemed to be nothing that he could do. He had known instinctively how to deal with his own grief over Anne, work and work and, after a few weeks of painful celibacy, some urgent couplings with Effee Tessalow – ungentle because she was not Anne – until he found that he could go for a day without feeling the stab of self-pity and misery.

But Esther was not a man. Her whole life had been domestic and, until Bindon’s wounding, had been happily so. Being a woman, she was unable to leave, as he had been able, the place from whence stemmed all the minutiae that fostered heart-ache.

George Moth had never been able to decide whether he was a good father to his children. He wished to be, he wished most desperately to be good now that Esther needed him. He had wished to be when Jack had gone off to war. It was that desire to make the lives of his children as bearable as he could that had prompted him to make the first move of reconciliation with Jack after their row at Mere and the subsequent silence between them. But Esther was not a man. George Moth would have known what to say to Jack in similar circumstances. He did not know what to say to his daughter. To enquire after her health sounded as though she was getting over a cold instead of the violent death of a mad husband.

For some reason he now found it more difficult to swamp himself with his work than he had that other time. Then, he had been a detective-inspector, always with a reason for tramping the streets, always with an interesting, suspicious death to deal with, a trail to follow, a hunt to be organized, an arrest and a case to be made. Now that he had risen to a superior rank, he was more desk-bound.

He had never understood why he had been selected for work in the Special Branch. Surely his superiors could not have known that his son had more than a passing acquaintance with one of the Listed Persons. Did they know now? George Moth doubted it, for whenever a report on the Islington nest came before him, the woman was referred to as Ruby Bice or Red Ruby.

And if they did uncover that piece of information? As he felt at the moment, he hardly cared whether they covered up their own inefficiency with a reprimand or blamed him for not giving notice of it and reduced his seniority.

He read the report again, seeing between the lines how that clever mob, two of which he had weekended with at Mere, had made the police raiding-party appear like a music-hall turn. He put the report into a folder and the folder into his private cabinet.

When he was ready he would speak unofficially with the inspector, tell him that he was a fool and that he might have jeopardized some more important surveillance of the department’s. What he was doing, in fact, was to try to see that Otis did not come to anyone else’s notice. The trouble was, in planting a young constable with local connections right in the path of the Islington nest, there was always the danger that the man’s allegiance might topple over into his home camp. After all, a good many men in the ranks of the police had little reason to be loyal to the Force. Their wages put them on the poverty line, their hours were long and unsocial and the work often harrowing, boring or dangerous. But, as like himself, there were always idealistic young men ready to believe that it would all soon change.

He had tried to persuade Esther to have Otis visit her, thinking that he might get some guidance then about how to handle Esther’s grave situation. For grave it was and worrying to live with one’s daughter and see her slowly starving – emotionally and physically. But Esther had seemed to loathe the idea. ‘Not Otis Hewetson. She is so…? When I saw her at the interment she was so… so full. I’m sorry Father, but not now.’

George Moth guessed that he knew what Esther meant. Otis was ‘full’ – of life, of ideas, of passion, of enthusiasm. And her body was as wholesome as her mind. She had looked splendid. Her bright hair and healthy complexion had glowed against her long jet ear-rings and the black velour of her hat. Her voluptuous body had looked healthy and softly taut beneath the silk of her jacket and skirt. Dreadful as the occasion had been, George Moth had kept looking at her, finding her figure a haven for his strained eyes. He had wanted nothing more than to turn his back from the awful, awesome, hole-in-the-corner burial. Painful to him, and mercifully uncommented upon, was the contrast with that of that other soldier’s ignoble suicide, when the ignoble Sir Norbert Clermont was interred in his own, consecrated, tomb. George Moth’s heart had broken for his pathetic daughter.

He felt around at the back of a deep drawer, pulled out a bottle of malt whisky, stood it on his desk, thought better of it. If he went there at midday, then she might have returned to Lou Barker’s.