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napkin.
    “Perhaps that’s enough of politics for now, eh, Diana, at least until the port arrives. And so, Vivian, what’s new in your world?”
    “Oh my dears. It’s so tiresome. Last spring I made up a little party with the Oliviers and some other friends to go to Vienna and we were going to repeat the experience again this spring but,” he sighed, “another casualty of war I suppose. And anyway, Larry and Vivien are stuck in Hollywood. It’s all just so ghastly!”

CHAPTER 3
    Tuesday January 30th
    Merlin finished the bun and pulled his chair a little closer to Tony’s electric fire. The paper had a story about volunteers joining up to help the Finns. This irritated him, prohibited as he was from contributing directly to the war effort by the A.C.’s injunctions. His irritation was compounded by his failure to make any meaningful progress with the Barnes case. Bridges had put in a lot of tedious spadework in identifying the flag of the boat seen by Colonel Trenchard and then tracking the boat down to a waterman’s boatyard in the Pool of London. It turned out that the boat owners had been employing casual labour on the boat that day, having unluckily lost their full-time crew of three all in one go to the call-up in the first week of January. They had names for that day’s replacement crew, who had been carrying a small load of agricultural equipment up the Thames to Maidenhead, but no addresses. The boatmen had been paid cash-in-hand at the end of the day’s work and had not been seen since.
    All this effort by Bridges proved to be wasted when, five days after the discovery of the body, they finally received Dr Sisson’s report. The doctor estimated that the body had been in the water for at least three days. The boat line of enquiry had been dropped and Bridges muttered something rude about to which orifice the good doctor’s snuff might be applied in future.
    The report did confirm, as expected, that they were dealing with a murder case. The gruesome absence of an eye had nothing to do with the girl’s death but was down to a scavenging fish. Death had been caused by a blow to the head and, in Sisson’s view, had certainly occurred before the body’s immersion in the water, as the lungs were empty. So the next question to resolve was the identity of the victim.
    They ploughed unsuccessfully through all vaguely applicable missing persons reports. Looking for missing persons in London had become a nightmare since the war started. The evacuation had relocated thousands of women and children to the countryside. Some had settled down in their new homes but many had quickly given up on the delights of rural life and returned to the city. These movements back and forth inevitably complicated police enquiries considerably.
    They looked into a few likely prospects, only to find that the girls reported missing had escaped their families to live with boyfriends in or out of London or, in one case, to work in a brothel.
    Things were not going well on other fronts either. Johnson was still struggling to make a breakthrough on the hit and run he was investigating. Little progress was being made with the dockers investigation. The preparation for the IRA trial was tedious and time-consuming and Merlin just couldn’t bring himself to get moving on the fingerprint report. Meanwhile, crime was a moving target, and new cases were coming in all the time to their undermanned and overworked office.
    Merlin left a couple of coins on the counter and headed out into the cold. The river in front of the Yard was now almost completely solid. He remembered reading somewhere about winter fairs held on the frozen Thames in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. He’d like to see that but somehow doubted that Londoners would be in the mood for such jollity this winter.
    Back at the Yard, Bridges caught up with him as he reached the top of the stairs. “We’ve had a break – I think we’ve found the Barnes girl, sir.”
    Merlin