In the midst of this squalor the Princess lay still, absolutely still. Even when the inquisitive fly crept into her ear she did not stir. She did not feel it, for she was dead.

* * *

“I think,” said Detective Chief Inspector Brett Nightingale, “we’ll stop here in the High Street. There wouldn’t be room to turn in Bright’s Row. Back to that van.”

The police car reversed gently and came to a standstill. Nightingale stepped from the back into the northern end of Islington High Street. He had seen it before only in daylight; by night it appeared even more of a survival from the past. Its narrow curving course and pavements sloping to a central runnel recalled the village long engulfed by the city. The high, flatfaced buildings crowded on either side, their ground floors of tiny shops bedizened at this time with dusty Christmas decorations, belonged unmistakably to London; but to the last century. Nightingale looked at the tawny window, full of umbrellas, by which he stood. ‘Cane Repairer’ was embossed in white letters across the glass. About two hundred yards away the Green, the village green, what remained of it, was flanked by a Music Hall. He remembered an undertaker’s, with coffins and brass urns illuminated in the window; and in suggestive proximity a shop sheathed with blue and white enamel, advertising that a long-dead proprietor had been ‘Agent for Female Pills, by the King’s Letters Patent, 1743.’ Nightingale shrugged, and shivered. His breath curled away from his nose in a vapour. If the cold weather tightened its grip, he reflected, they could have skating on the Thames as well.

He put his hands in his overcoat pockets and walked away from the car and the cane repairer’s shop, turning off the patchily lit High Street into the cul-de-sac of Bright’s Row. The left side of the road was a fenced bombed space; the right side, a short terrace of small, crouched houses, reminiscent of pictures in social histories of the nineteenth century. Nightingale looked along the empty street, at the luminous red and green and flowered squares of thinly curtained windows. At least the neighbours seemed to be minding their own business. Possibly, at the advent of the police, some of them were even removing evidence of it. The quiet was almost blatantly discreet.