Declare

redundancy. And there was a directive an hour ago that the Metropolitan police were not to be involved in your apprehension, though Covent Garden is properly in their jurisdiction, not in ours. Yours is a damned peculiar case, young man.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Hale in a humble tone, in fact cautiously grateful that the man had not mentioned resisting arrest.
    For a few minutes then Hale perched on a chair in front of the officer’s desk and answered questions, but they were all to do with the schools he had attended and his membership in the Communist Party. Twice Hale had ventured to say that he had only gone to tonight’s meeting in King Street to meet a girl from one of the Oxford women’s colleges and that he hadn’t known anything about the missing Air Ministry document, but his interrogators had each time just nodded and repeated a question about the Party meetings at Oxford, or his stint in Haslemere College in Surrey, or about the technical magazines he had subscribed to.
    Eventually the questioning was done, and he was told that since he was apparently to be handed over to officers of the Special Branch soon, he would simply be shackled to a chair here in the station in the meantime and not driven over to the holding cells in Ludgate Hill. The officers even offered him a cup of tea, but he refused, fearing that his hands would shake too badly to hold a cup.
    And so for several hours Hale dozed in a stout chair against the curved ceiling-wall, jolting awake whenever the wind outside knocked the wooden shutters against the window frame over his head or when involuntary twitches rattled the chains that connected his ankles to the chair legs; much later two men were brought in and booked for looting, having grabbed some bottles of brandy and a couple of bicycles from a boarded-up shop in Eastcheap, and Hale watched with morbid interest as they were curtly interrogated and then sent away under stern guard to the Ludgate Hill cells.
    Hale almost envied them. He was fairly sure that his imminent transfer of custody must have been arranged by the James Theodora person he had spoken to on the telephone last year, but he had no idea at all what the man’s response to this detainment would be. Why the apparently deliberate confusions in the details of his arrest? Chained to a chair in a police station, charged with subversion during wartime—so far from his bed in Magdalen College, so very many cold dark miles and years from the old box bed in Chipping Campden!—Hale wasn’t able to quite dismiss the possibility that Theodora would simply have him taken away somewhere, under the fog of contradictory paper-work, and killed.
    If there was any solace to be derived from the Communist philosophy in the face of death, Hale had not studied Marx deeply enough to find it; but at the same time the feverish Our Fathers and Hail Marys that droned in his head and even twitched his lips from time to time seemed to lack some crucial carrier wave, so that they propagated no farther than the inside of his skull.
    He awoke from a deeper sleep when his chair was shoved aside by two men who unlatched the shutters and folded them back with a businesslike clatter; and he was squinting against the bright daylight as they unshackled his ankles and brusquely hoisted him to his feet.
    “Time to go, Ivan,” one of the men told him. “The Special Branch lads are here for you.”
    Oddly both disoriented and calmed by the glare of the summer morning visible beyond the pulled-back blackout curtains, Hale absently thanked his captors and shuffled across the unworn wooden floor and out into the sunlight. At first he didn’t see anyone waiting for him.
    St. Paul’s Cathedral stood in solitary grandeur out there on the bombed plain, silhouetted by the rising sun like a god’s baroque ship arrived too late in a ruined land; the impression was strengthened by the sea smell from the high-tide river that lay somewhere close beyond the broken skyline of Upper Thames Street to the south. Seen in daylight, the humped and pocked ground was a field of purple-blooming wildflowers, and Hale walked a few steps along a path of mismatched masonry fragments trodden flush with the black dirt, blinking downward through stinging, watering eyes at his dress shoes and the cuffs of his recently pressed trousers— wondering for the first time if his Oxford evening clothes would have been quite right for a City meeting of the International Workers’