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nature.'
    'Where did she go, Mr Gaskell?'
    'I told her the best car park for her would be Elephant and Castle.' He went to the map on the wall to show me where the Elephant and Castle was. Gaskell was a big man and he'd retired at fifty. I wondered why he hadn't found a pub to manage. He would have been wonderful behind a bar counter. The previous week, when I'd been asking him about the train service to Portsmouth, he'd confided to me – amid a barrage of other information – that that's what he would have liked to be doing.
    'Never mind the car park, Mr Gaskell. I need to know where she's meeting me.'
    ' Sandy 's,' he said at last. 'You knew it well, she said.' He watched me carefully. Ever since our office address had been so widely published, thanks to the public-spirited endeavours of 'investigative journalists', there had been strict instructions that staff must not frequent any local bars, pubs or clubs because of the regular presence of eavesdroppers of various kinds, amateur and professional.
    'I wish you'd write these things down,' I said. 'I've never heard of it. Do you know where she means? Is it a café, or what?'
    'Not a café I've heard of,' said Gaskell, frowning and sucking his teeth. 'Nowhere near here with a name like that.' And then, as he remembered, his face lit up. 'Big Henry's! That's what she said: Big Henry's.'
    'Big Henty's,' I said, correcting him. ' Tower Bridge Road. Yes, I know it.'
    Yes, I knew it and my heart sank. I knew exactly the kind of 'informant' who was likely to be waiting for me in Big Henty's: an ear-bender with open palm outstretched. And I had planned an evening at home alone with a coal fire, the carcass of Sunday's duck, a bottle of wine and a book. I looked at the door and I looked at Gaskell. And I wondered if the sensible thing wouldn't be to forget about Lucinda, and whoever she was fronting for, and drive straight home and ignore the whole thing. The chances were that I'd never hear from the mysterious Lucinda again. This town was filled with people who knew me a long time ago and suddenly remembered me when they needed a few pounds from the public purse in exchange for some ancient and unreliable intelligence material.
    'If you'd like me to come along, Mr Samson…' said Gaskell suddenly, and allowed his offer to hang in the air.
    So Gaskell thought there was some strong-arm business in the offing. Well he was a game fellow. Surely he was too old for that sort of thing: and certainly I was.
    'That's very kind of you, Mr Gaskell,' I said, 'but the prospect is boredom rather than any rough stuff.'
    'Whatever you say,' said Gaskell, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.
    It was the margin of disbelief that made me feel I had to follow it up. I didn't want it to look as if I was nervous. Dammit! why wasn't I brave enough not to care what the Gaskells of this world thought about me?
     
    Tower Bridge Road is a major south London thoroughfare that leads to the river, or rather to the curious neo-Gothic bridge which, for many foreigners, symbolizes the capital. This is Southwark. From here Chaucer's pilgrims set out for Canterbury; and a couple of centuries later Shakespeare's Globe theatre was built upon the marshes. For Victorian London this shopping street, with a dozen brightly lit pubs, barrel organs and late-night street markets, was the centre of one of the capital's most vigorous neighbourhoods. Here filthy slums, smoke-darkened factories and crowded sweat-shops stood side by side with neat leafy squares where scrawny clerks and pot-bellied shopkeepers asserted their social superiority.
    Now it is dark and squalid and silent. Well-intentioned bureaucrats nowadays sent shop assistants home early, street traders were banished, almost empty pubs sold highly taxed watery lager and the factories were derelict: a textbook example of urban blight, with yuppies nibbling the leafy bits.
    Back in the days before women's lib, designer jeans and deep-dish pizza, Big