I could see the canal bridge now; the place where Charlie Nutter died. There’s a streetlamp on the opposite side, one of the few remaining white ones. Its light illuminated the bridge and glazed the murky water. The path on which I stood was dark: on this side of the canal I could not be seen by anyone. For a moment, I stopped, and saw two men standing on the bridge. But neither man was Winter. One was Johnny Harrington. The other was David Spikely.

9:06

The last time I’d seen Spikely, he was twenty-one, and looked forty. Now he is almost forty, and looks far younger than he did then. His hair has grown back; he looks fit and relaxed, and he has lost a great deal of weight. Even so, I knew him at once. Something in his walk, perhaps. Or perhaps it is simply the fact that, although he may forget any number of other things—his glasses, overdue library books—a St. Oswald’s Master never forgets a boy for whom he was once in charge.

I pressed my back into the hedge that runs alongside the bridle path. A weeping willow, leafless now, but trailing a curtain of pale fronds, served as additional camouflage. If I stayed without moving, I could remain unseen. Through the smoke of Bonfire Night, I could smell the sleeping canal; that dank and somehow melancholy scent of abandoned things left to decompose. Small sounds came from the hedge at my back; maybe a mouse or a small bird.

I listened: Spikely and Harrington were clearly awaiting someone. They stood there side by side on the bridge, Harrington looking impatient, Spikely in a gabardine coat like a gentleman spy from a forties film noir. Neither spoke, and I noticed that Spikely was carrying a sports bag, much of the kind that St. Oswald’s boys use to carry their schoolbooks.

Was this what Winter had meant me to see? Was it an exchange of some sort? Or were they waiting for someone else with whom to conduct their business? There came the sound of a car on the road. Then, headlights swept the bridle path, and for a moment I was blind, caught like a moth in the full beam. The two men had their backs toward me, otherwise I would have been seen. But my two ex-pupils were too preoccupied by the arrival of the car to look at the path behind them; and when they turned back, the car was parked, its headlights off, and I was in darkness once more.

But I had recognized the car. I’d seen it only the other day, outside a house in White City. Most recently (and memorably) used by the perpetrators of the theft of a hundred and fifty Honours Boards—

It was Winter’s blue Peugeot.

9:08