Visibility Read Free Page B

death?”
    “Drowning. Probably forcible.”
    “Probably?”
    “The pathologist’s running tests as we speak.”
    “Is there anything you
do
know?”
    “He was a homosexual.”
    “Your ideal case, then.”
    Herbert chose to ignore this last remark. “There’s not much more I’ll be able to do tonight, so I’ll come in tomorrow morning after breakfast and take it up from there.”
    “And put in for overtime, no doubt.”
    The last time the topic of overtime had come up, Herbert remembered, Tulloch had contended that the whole system was skewed. The men who needed the money for their families were the ones who couldn’t afford the time to make that money, he said; in contrast, the ones who had the time to spare had nothing to spend the money on.
    Herbert had suggested that he do the time and Tulloch take the money. Tulloch had thought that a splendid idea.
    “Well,” Tulloch continued, before Herbert could answer, “everyone else here’s too busy to waste time on a poof in the drink, so you’re more than welcome to it. You’d know their haunts better than us, that’s for sure. What about the scene?”
    “I’ve sealed it off, of course. I’ll have a proper search done in the morning, when there’s enough light.”
    “Gordon Bennett,” Tulloch said. “We
have
taught you something after all.”
    And he hung up.
    South Kensington tube station was more or less at the bottom of Exhibition Road, so Herbert managed to find it by the simple expedient of walking straight, dodgingthe hardened drinkers who had headed for the private clubs after lunch—membership on the spot for five shillings—and remained there as afternoon slid to evening, nursing their cut-price whiskeys and bemoaning their luck. South Kensington and Earls Court were full of such places, never-never lands of clipped mustaches, army-style overcoats, and old school ties.
    Seven years on from the war, they were still weary, still clinging to their Micawberish feeling that something would turn up. War veterans were prematurely and preternaturally aged, their careers ripped apart by the conflict; many of them had stepped aside so as not to get trampled underfoot by younger men desperate to fill their shoes.
    Herbert found a Piccadilly Line train heading east almost at once. The tube system was still free from fog;
strange days indeed
, he thought,
when those malodorous and claustrophobic tunnels were cleaner and brighter than the real world above.
    He sat in a near-empty carriage, flicking through the notes Rathbone had given him. There was little of surprise and even less of encouragement within them.
    That the blond man had been drowned against his will was now almost beyond doubt. Threads of wool, presumably from his killer’s clothes, had been found under three fingernails on the right hand and two on the left. His right hand had also been clutching silt and weeds, presumably fixed in a cadaveric spasm.
    Rathbone could have written most of what followed in Greek for all the sense it made to Herbert, but, whatever he said, Herbert was happy to take his word for it.
    Bilateral hemorrhages on the shoulders and chest followed lines of muscle bundles and were thereforeconsistent with violent tearing, itself indicative of a struggle. Such symptoms could be confused with putrefaction, but extravascular erythrocytes provided histo-logical proof of a true hemorrhage. Moreover, petechial hemorrhaging inside the eyelid and on the eyeball itself were indicators of excessive premortem adrenaline, as were the abnormally high histamine and serotonin levels. Such indicators were all consistent with murder.
    It was Herbert’s patch all right.
    Since homosexuals were proscribed by law, it followed that they had an underworld. As Tulloch had insinuated, Herbert knew full well where the gates to this particular Hades were; the queer pubs, in the first instance, such as the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, the Golden Lion on Dean Street, and the Duke of York