With the protection withdrawn and the admiral shot dead, questions would be asked in the press and in Parliament – to say nothing of every public bar in the land. ‘And where were our policemen in this?’ was likely to be the most politely phrased enquiry. Resignations would be expected. Sandilands was quite right to have fallen on his sword – Lily feared that his position was, indeed, untenable. Until she turned up a note he had carefully kept. The note authorized – indeed, demanded – the instant suppression of the police guard on the gentlemen concerned, who had no wish for it to continue. It was judged an expensive manoeuvre and an unnecessary one. The note was signed by the Home Secretary himself.

Lily put it conspicuously at the front of the file.

The investigating CID officer at the scene of the assassination of Dedham, a Superintendent Hopkirk, had been there in minutes and seemed to have done a thorough job in the short time that had elapsed. She noted and admired the neat handwriting, the succinct phrasing. The officer must have been miffed to find a deeply involved, guilt-ridden and angry commander on site and breathing down his neck, she guessed. With the map of London she always carried with her and the pencilled sketch on squared paper provided by the inspector, she was able to pull together the outline of the atrocity. And Lily was left, after absorbing all the dimensions, bullet counts, and initial witness interviews, with a feeling of sorrow for the dead man. And for his wife, who had reacted to the outrage with incredible courage, throwing herself into a firefight with the retreating gunmen. A formidable pair, the Dedhams.

Everyone in the land knew of Lord Dedham. Naval man turned politician, speechmaker extraordinaire, rather in the simple style of Mr Churchill, he told the truth as he perceived it with a clarity that appealed to everyone.

When it came to political speeches the admiral used the tactics of the bare-knuckle fighter: get the first blow in and make it a cruncher. His views on the unrest which had preceded and accompanied the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty had been delivered with the gloves off very recently in Dublin. He’d accused the prime minister himself, Lloyd George, of working with the king’s enemies and had gone so far as to condemn him for having ‘shaken the bloody hands of murderers’. Dedham was a clear enemy of Sinn Fein and denouncer of the bombs and bullets that organization used instead of words.

The admiral had been sure of many things, but after his years of service in the Navy he was most certain that ‘if we bale out and leave Ireland, Britain is faced across the sea with an enemy that blocks its trade routes. And that is to say – the end of the British Empire. Shall all the gallant sacrifices made fighting the German foe to the east count for nothing, set at nought by a treacherous stab in the back from our neighbour to the west?’

Sandilands had inserted a news cutting reporting this speech, delivered to an enthusiastic audience on 24 May – Empire Day. The occasion had been a memorial supper to mariners lost at sea and Lord Dedham had further stoked the fires of patriotism by finishing with a quotation from Rudyard Kipling:

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

‘Ouch!’ Lily muttered as she leafed through the details. ‘Bet there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.’

They were dealing with a national hero but also a victim who had enemies running into the hundreds if not thousands. Enemies with powerful, armed and ruthless forces behind them to do their bidding. ‘A crazed and driven foe’ might have been Kipling’s verdict.

It had been Dedham’s first day back in London when he’d been ambushed. A crucial moment of imbalance, well judged by the assassins, Lily thought. And yet something had gone disastrously wrong for them. The gunmen, both Irish by birth, it was surmised, had been caught almost immediately after the killing. They’d been arrested and interrogated initially in the Gerard Street police station only two streets away from the admiral’s doorstep.

Rustling her way through the sheets Lily began to pull together a story of remarkable courage. The cabby whose taxi the killers had commandeered had driven off in the direction of Paddington station but had almost immediately taken a turn off the main road into Gerard Street. There he’d swerved at the last minute and driven his vehicle at speed in through the gates of the police station, hooting his horn. The duty sergeant at the gates had instantly slammed them shut, trapping the taxi and its occupants in the courtyard. A squad of coppers just coming off duty in the West End had surged out and arrested everyone.

Their bag consisted of four persons: two gunmen, both injured. At the moment of arrest, one had a slash across the left cheek and a .22 bullet embedded in the muscle of his back, the other had a broken wrist.

A young lady passenger, hysterical but otherwise unhurt. She’d given her name and a Mayfair address and, after interview, had been released from custody, insisting on a police escort back to Park Lane. Lily had a clear impression from Superintendent Hopkirk’s dry phrasing that they’d been only too glad to lay on a squad car and driver to take her home. Anything to get her out of their hair.

Lastly, the taxi driver. Discovered slumped over his wheel unconscious and at first thought to be dead. Revealed by his licence to be a Mr Percy Jenner, ex-London Rifle Brigade, he’d been hit over the head with a blunt instrument, probably the butt of a gun. He’d been conveyed to St George’s hospital where his condition had been stabilized. A constable with a notebook was at his bedside.

The bodies of the admiral and the beat bobby who died trying to stop the taxi had been taken to the morgue and post mortems were under way. The work was top priority and in the hands of Dr Bernard Spilsbury himself. Report awaited.

Lily looked up from her task, stretched her back and considered. It seemed straightforward enough: successful assassination, bungled getaway, capture of culprits. But there were details that left her with an unease, a need to know more – and more precisely. She began to write a list of questions in her notebook. She was finishing her reading of the file with the last of the exhibits – a cutting from the previous week’s Times newspaper quoting the whole of Admiral Dedham’s rip-roaring speech in Dublin, a clear incitement to murder – when she remembered there was one important thing she had to do before Sandilands returned.

Lily looked at the clock. He’d been gone for almost two hours. Where were his rooms? How long did it take for a shave? He’d said ten minutes. Allowing for brisk walking time there and back to somewhere close by … Albany? … she’d probably left it too late, she judged. She listened. All on the third floor was silent. She crept to the heavy door and opened it an inch. She was reasonably certain that she would now have early warning of anyone approaching down the corridor, or the door of Miss Jameson’s office opening. Lily returned to the desk.

She sat for a few moments staring at the telephone and wondering if she dared. With the hurdle of her decision to resign successfully jumped, what had she to lose? She found the courage to lift the earpiece.

The operator at the switchboard answered in her precise but strangulated tone. They were all graduates, these telephonist girls, and renowned for the way they could torture the English language. Lily had applied for such a post with a laundry in Clapham advertised in the newspaper over a year ago but had given up at the first hurdle when she discovered that of the other eight hundred applicants for the position, many had a degree from a university and most had a cultured, upper-class voice.