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of the gents’. I ordered a pint of lager and sat drinking it slowly. The trick about being invisible in a place like that is to be half well-known and never to look at anyone – then they never trouble to look at you, taking you for a drunk, a has-been, no matter what, or newly fired and on the dole, starting on the skids etcetera. I sat in my corner and lit a horrible cigarette called a Westminster, hoping that perhaps the straw taste would really help me stop smoking this time. It didn’t; I smoked it right to the end. I tried my pint again, lit a second Westminster, and opened the file Bowman had thrown me. It was a thin file. It was a funny business; it seemed to me there had been no proper procedure in it at the local end. I didn’t understand so far why the police down there couldn’t or hadn’t tackled it, nor where their Chief Constable came into it – all on his own to us, independently, as it seemed to me, of his own officers. It was all the more curious because no one had been reported dead, just missing – and then not by the person you would have thought most interested, i.e. the husband.
    Page one of the file had the name on it – William Mardy. Profession: general practitioner. However, there was a note against this – struck off, see file that refers.
    Then there was his address, Thornhill Court, Thornhill, Wilts.
    Sickening errors, democratically arrived at of course, lay either side of the road as I drove west out of London. Blocks of semi-abandoned streets made dead ends of effort where people who had tried to start something – anything – had been crushed by the dull, triumphant logic of the state. I crossed the demarcation lines of two ethnic groups at Swallowtail Lane; the Regal cinema loomed up in my lights, its façade blackened by fire. I passed a series of streets thatstood for political convictions. No one crossed them on foot now at night; yet they were streets that we had easily patrolled, one, two of us, as young coppers on the beat in the old days. But now there was no asserting yourself here as police unless there were fifty of you. The blindness to understanding was equally lit by the few lights that swayed in the icy darkness, and by the rows of windows, some half lit, in small streets that now no longer led anywhere but to danger. The windows all had the same mail-order leer that made a flat, to its family, whatever its colour, seem falsely safe, and each was whitened by the eyeball of a Japanese lampshade. Now, on the main road, a first-floor sash yawned, broken, open and unlit next to a traffic light that was at red. I stopped, waiting for this light to change, watching the rain sweep off the eaves in the north wind thick as a widow’s tears; an Indian woman hurried down a sidestreet with a coat over her head against recognition and the rain. A block further on lay a heap of smashed cars frosted over on a stretch of waste ground; next to them, black with grime, its forecourt wet with dirty snow, stood a shut-down petrol station.
    In further sad, narrow streets, beyond my car lights, half hidden by groups of old bangers with their front wheels up on the pavement, lay ruined three-storey houses that the council neither had the money to restore, nor corruption interest in pulling down. These were all dark – the power, the water cut off in them, life itself cut off there at this wrong end of winter. Yet life still did cling on in them, I knew. Uncivilized, mad life; these rank buildings that had housed self-respecting families once were now occupied by squatters of any kind – the desperate last fugitives of a beaten, abandoned army, their dignity, rights and occupations gone (or never known), their hope gone, tomorrow gone. I passed Arcade Street where there had been a machine-gun attack a fortnight ago on the wrong house (they were terrorists who had wanted the house next door) – wife and nine-month-old child killed as they watched TV in the sitting-room, terrific. But the