‘You’d better find him a doctor then, hadn’t you?’ Garvald said and turned away.

He vanished into the fog and the sound of his whistling hung on the air for a moment, then faded eerily. The small man stayed there, crouched beside the Irishman, the rain soaking through the shoulders of his cheap coat.

It was the tune – that damned tune.

He couldn’t seem to get the sound of it out of his head and for some reason he could never satisfactorily explain afterwards, he started to cry, helplessly like a small child.

2

And then there was the night with a cold east wind that swept in all the way from the North Sea like a knife in the back, probing the alleys of the northern city, whistling along the narrow canyons that divided the towering blocks of flats that were the new housing developments. And when the rain came, it was the cold, stinging rain of winter that rattled the windows like lead shot.

Jean Fleming sat on a hard wooden chair in the main C.I.D. office at Police Headquarters and waited. It was a little after nine and the place seemed strangely deserted, shadows crowding in from the corners, falling across the long, narrow desks, filling her with a vague, irrational unease.

Through the frosted glass door of the room on her left, she was aware of movement and the low murmur of voices. After a while, the door opened and a heavily built, greying man in his early forties beckoned to her.

‘Superintendent Grant will see you now, Miss Fleming.’

She got to her feet and went in quickly. The room was half in shadow, the only light a green shaded lamp on the desk. It was simply furnished with several filing cabinets and a map of the city on the wall, divisional boundaries marked in red.

Grant was past feeling tired in any conscious sense, but a persistent ache behind one eye and a slight involuntary shiver, which he found quite impossible to control, seemed to indicate that he was under attack from the Asian flu that had already placed something like a fifth of the entire force on the sick list.

He opened a drawer, took three aspirin tablets from a bottle and washed them down with a glass of water. As he reached for a cigarette, he glanced across at the girl on the other side of the desk.

Twenty-seven or -eight and Irish-looking, dark hair razor-cut to the skull in a way he didn’t really approve, but it certainly gave her something. The heavy sheepskin coat had cost anything up to forty pounds and the knee-length boots were real leather.

She sat down in the chair Brady brought forward and crossed her legs, giving Grant the first lift he’d had that night. She arranged her skirt carefully and smiled.

‘You don’t remember me, Mr Grant?’

‘Should I?’