sights on the target. Despite brandy, hangover, strenuous exercise, the pistol never wavered.
He was at the Metropolitan Police Additional Headquarters before eleven, a ridiculous Gothic building from which passers-by expected to hear groans and sighs, perhaps muffled screams. The building had in fact been a warren of legal offices and dismal flats before the expanding police, already bursting out of New Scotland Yard, had acquired it ‘temporarily’. Its blackened stones were grim at best, horrible in the rain, and now that it was an annexe for the police, it had the air of a prison. The vast and sombre exterior led visitors to expect inside huge, shadowed vistas with topless staircases and vaults and chains; as it was, Denton was merely irritated by what he found - a setting for bureaucratic tedium. Long, uncarpeted passages led to enclosed staircases with, nonetheless, dark newels and banisters, and here and there were floors that sloped, others that abruptly took a step up or down. It was said that new occupants got lost in trying to get about the building. It made the hung-over Denton dizzy.
On the third floor, past the gloomy entrance hall and the atrium that poked up through the building as if seeking light and air, up some stairs and around a balcony that looked down into the well, and up and around again and up, was the office of the Assistant Under-Secretary to the Assistant Secretary (not to be confused with the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Permanent Assistant Secretary, both career civil servants) who was in a sense responsible, although in fact not really responsible, for the apparatus that investigated the Metropolitan Police - not in a criminal sense, but a business one: its stated goal was efficiency. The Assistant Under-Secretary was a man named Hector Hench-Rose.
‘Denton!’ he shouted. ‘Ha-ha!’ Hench-Rose had ginger hair and a ginger moustache and was, at forty, already seriously into belly after years of pouring himself into the uniform of one of the higher-numbered regiments. He was affable, courageous and useless as an administrator, and so had been given the equivalent of the rank of superintendent and put one step down from the top of the division with no more experience of police work than if he had spent his life running a home for foundlings.
‘Hector.’ Denton liked Hector Hench-Rose in a qualified way; they were opposites without ever being enemies. Hench-Rose was energetic, cheerful and happy; Denton was listless, dour and doubtful that happiness existed. He liked to warm himself at Hector’s fire now and then.
‘Place stinks,’ Hector said now. He was leading Denton to a chair in an office so dark it could have been used to store coal. One window gave on to an air shaft; the only other light came from a gas lamp above the desk. The rain, nonetheless, managed to reach that only window and trickle down it with sooty smears. ‘Something in the chimney. Birds, I think. Place full of smoke half the time, then we get a puff of wind and this unspeakable smell.’
‘I had raccoons in a chimney once,’ Denton said.
‘Raccoons! Those are the buggers with eye-rings, aren’t they. Look like burglars in an operetta. What’d they do?’
‘They stank.’
This amused Hector mightily. He offered a cigar, tea, an early drink; Denton refused them all. Hector made social small talk, mentioned the opera by way of getting to Emma, as if he knew about her and Denton. His tone was a little odd, perhaps more inquisitive than usual; Hench-Rose was an enthusiastic gossip but usually discreet. Did he know already that Emma had thrown him over?
‘Emma all right?’ Yes, he knew.
‘Fine, of course.’
‘Didn’t see you with her at the opera.’
‘And never will.’
Hench-Rose showed his teeth in a tight smile, seemed about to say something, thought better of it and turned to the question of weekend parties. ‘You shoot?’ he said.
‘Nobody recently.’
‘Oh - ha! Ha-ha! Meant birds, man. Grouse, partridge, like that.’ He talked about shooting driven birds, which Denton found about as interesting as the opera - shooters stood at assigned posts and waited while a small army of beaters drove everything that could run or fly past them to be slaughtered. ‘Make some fantastic scores,’ Hector said. ‘Certain royal party knocks down hundreds in an afternoon.’
‘And then eats them all that night.’
‘Hmm? Oh, ha-ha. No, actually, the birds go off to the markets. Very important part of the process, selling the kill.’