‘A Mrs Fergus and her daughter used to live in that flat,’ she said. ‘I checked. They left before the V-2s.’

‘I remember them,’ said Basset.

‘What did they look like?’

‘Irish.’

‘It’s pretty obvious that it wouldn’t take much to bring down the rest of the house,’ said Winnie. ‘Who’d choose to live there now?’

‘Someone who didn’t want to pay rent.’

‘It’s a man, according to Jim.’

‘Any description?’

‘His exact words were “that bugger on Falcon Road”.’

‘Narrows it down,’ said Basset. He carried on cleaning his nails with a used matchstick, applying the same concentration and thoroughness that he brought to every task. He was a volunteer in his fifties, a lathe worker in a tool factory, laconic, pallid and sporting a set of poorly fitting false teeth which gave him mouth ulcers, the only thing she’d ever heard him complain about. He arrived on time for every shift at the Post, never swore, never panicked and barely showed anxiety, even at the height of the night Blitz, when it had been merry hell from dusk to dawn. He was the sort of person who ought to get a medal after the war but who probably wouldn’t, and he was absolutely nothing like any of the characters in Avril’s book, which Winnie had finished the previous evening. And for ‘finished’ one could substitute the phrase ‘thrown across the room’. What was especially galling was that Avril had managed to get all the detail right – the parameters of an incident, the timings, the procedures, the almost unbearable slowness with which Heavy Rescue dug in search of casualties, the exhaustion, the dirt, the chaos of an ever-changing landscape. It was the people and emotions that were all wrong, and the idea that the Wardens’ Post was a cauldron of simmering lust in which every glance could be pantingly misinterpreted, and then acted upon later that evening under the raw pale moon that thrust through the panes, thrust again, yes, and again! Death, in Avril’s novel, was inevitably followed by sex, whereas in Winnie’s experience, what one yearned for most after dealing with a corpse was a bath or a beer. And no one in Tin Helmet ever discussed the sort of topics that were regularly chewed over at Post 9, such as what you could put in a gas meter instead of threepences, or how much Churchill actually drank; they never told terrible jokes, they never did the crossword or compared chilblains – no, it was all sliding obliquities so that you had to re-read every half-page to work out what they were actually talking about.

‘Biscuit?’ asked Basset, reaching for the tin.

‘It’s empty, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ll bring some in. The missus got a tin from the lady she used to clean for.’

‘Nice.’

‘Soft-soaping her. Wants Min to go back after the war.’

‘Will she?’

He shook his head. ‘She says she’ll stay on, helping at the day-nursery, if they’ll have her, loves it there. What about you, Chief?’