Charlie said, 'Give the boys a chance, Mr Mather. They don't mean any harm. This is one of the best-run clubs—' Mather pulled open the door of the cupboard. Four women fell into the room. They were like toys turned from the same mould with their bright brittle hair. Mather laughed. He said, 'The joke's on me. That's a thing I never expected in one of your clubs, Charlie. Good night all.' The girls got up and dusted themselves. None of the men spoke.
'Really, Mr Mather,' Charlie said, blushing all the way upstairs. 'I do wish this hadn't happened in my club. I don't know what you'll think. But the boys didn't mean any harm. Only you know how it is. They don't like to leave their sisters alone.'
'What's that?' Saunders said at the top of the stairs.
'So I said they could bring their sisters and the dear girls sit around...'
'What's that?' Saunders said. 'G-g-g-girls?'
'Don't forget, Charlie,' Mather said. 'Fellow with a harelip. You'd better let me know if he turns up here. You don't want your club closed.'
'Is there a reward?'
'There'd be a reward for you all right.'
They got back into the car. 'Pick up Frost,' Mather said.
'Then Joe's.' He took his notebook out and crossed off another name. 'And after Joe's six more—'
'We shan't be f-f-finished till three,' Saunders said.
'Routine. He's out of town by now. But sooner or later he'll cash another note.'
'Finger-prints?'
'Plenty. There was enough on his soap-dish to stock an album. Must be a clean sort of fellow. Oh, he doesn't stand a chance. It's just a question of time.'
The lights of Tottenham Court Road flashed across their faces. The windows of the big shops were still lit up. 'That's a nice bedroom suite,' Mather said.
'It's a lot of f-fuss, isn't it,' Saunders said. 'About a few notes, I mean. When there may be a w-w-w-w...'
Mather said, 'If those fellows over there had our efficiency there mightn't be a war. We'd have caught the murderer by now. Then all the world could see whether the Serbs... Oh,' he said softly, as Heal's went by, a glow of soft colour, a gleam of steel, allowing himself about the furthest limits of his fancy, 'I'd like to be tackling a job like that. A murderer with all the world watching.'
'Just a few n-notes,' Saunders complained.
'No, you are wrong,' Mather said, 'it's the routine which counts. Five-pound notes today. It may be something better next time. But it's the routine which matters. That's how I see it,' he said, letting his anchored mind stretch the cable as far as it could go as they drove round St Giles's Circus and on towards Seven Dials, stopping every hole the thief might take one by one. 'It doesn't matter to me if there is a war. When it's over I'll still want to be going on with this job. It's the organization I like. I always want to be on the side that organizes. On the other you get your geniuses, of course, but you get all your shabby tricksters, you get all the cruelty and the selfishness and the pride.'
You got it all, except the pride, in Joe's where they looked up from their bare tables and let him run the place through, the extra aces back in the sleeve, the watered spirit out of sight, facing him each with his individual mark of cruelty and egotism. Even pride was perhaps there in a corner, bent over a sheet of paper, playing an endless game of double noughts and crosses against himself because there was no one else in that club he deigned to play with.
Mather again crossed off a name and drove south-west towards Kennington. All over London there were other cars doing the same: he was part of an organization. He did not want to be a leader, he did not even wish to give himself up to some God-sent fanatic of a leader, he liked to feel that he was one of thousands more or less equal working for a concrete end—not equality of opportunity, not government by the people or by the richest or by the best, but simply to do away with crime which meant uncertainty. He liked to be certain, to feel that one day quite inevitably he would marry Anne Crowder.
The loudspeaker in the car said: 'Police cars proceed back to the King's Cross area for intensified search. Raven driven to Euston Station about seven p. m. May not have left by train.' Mather leant across to the driver, 'Right about and back to Euston.' They were by Vauxhall. Another police car came past them through the Vauxhall tunnel. Mather raised his hand. They followed it back over the river. The flood-lit clock on the Shell-Mex building showed half-past one. The light was on in the clock tower at Westminster: Parliament was having an all-night sitting as the opposition fought their losing fight against mobilization.
It was six o'clock in the morning when they drove back towards the Embankment. Saunders was asleep. He said, 'That's fine.' He was dreaming that he had no impediment in his speech; he had an independent income; he was drinking champagne with a girl; everything was fine. Mather totted things up on his notebook; he said to Saunders, 'He got on a train for sure. I'd bet you—' Then he saw that Saunders was asleep and slipped a rug across his knees and began to consider again. They turned in at the gates of New Scotland Yard.
Mather saw a light in the chief inspector's room and went up.
'Anything to report?' Cusack asked.
'Nothing. He must have caught a train, sir.'
'We've got a little to go on at this end. Raven followed somebody to Euston. We are trying to find the driver of the first car. And another thing, he went to a doctor called Yogel to try and get his lip altered. Offered some more of those notes. Still handy too with that automatic. We've got him taped. As a kid he was sent to an industrial school. He's been smart enough to keep out of our way since. I can't think why he's broken out like this. A smart fellow like that. He's blazing a trail.'
'Has he much money besides the notes?'
'We don't think so. Got an idea, Mather?'
Colour was coming into the sky above the city. Cusack switched off his table-lamp and left the room grey. 'I think I'll go to bed.'
'I suppose,' Mather said, 'that all the booking offices have the numbers of those notes?'
'Every one.'
'It looks to me,' Mather said, 'that if you had nothing but phoney notes and wanted to catch an express—'
'How do we know it was an express?'
'Yes, I don't know why I said that, sir. Or perhaps—if it was a slow train with plenty of stops near London, surely someone would have reported by this time—'
'You may be right.'
'Well, if I wanted to catch an express, I'd wait till the last minute and pay on the train. I don't suppose the ticket collectors carry the numbers.'
'I think you're right. Are you tired, Mather?'
'No.'
'Well, I am. Would you stay here and ring up Euston and King's Cross and St Pancras, all of them? Make a list of all the outgoing expresses after seven. Ask them to telephone up the line to all stations to check up on any man travelling without a ticket who paid on the train. We'll soon find out where he stepped off. Good night, Mather.'
'Good morning, sir.' He liked to be accurate.
3
There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. The air in the streets was clear. You have only to imagine that it was night. The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich nearest the pits an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows. The stationer's window in the High Street was full of Prayer Books and Bibles: a printed card remained among them, a relic of Armistice Day, like the old drab wreath of Haig poppies by the War Memoriaclass="underline" 'Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget.' Along the line a signal lamp winked green in the dark day and the lit carriages drew slowly in past the cemetery, the glue factory, over the wide tidy cement-lined river. A bell began to ring from the Roman Catholic cathedral. A whistle blew.