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THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE rather too busy for Aaron to worry about the graphologist’s impossible fraud. He had to appear in court for the prosecution of George ‘Dapper’ Melkin for unlawful killing.

Dapper, a violent brute with a penchant for flashy waistcoats, was of the Brummagem Boys, a Birmingham outfit that had an ongoing dispute with the local Sabini gang. A Sabini man, one James ‘Nippy’ Nicholls, had died following a recent fracas; Aaron had two eye witnesses and a bloodstained gentleman’s walking stick, hollowed out and the end filled with lead, to put Dapper on the spot.

He was pleased about that. It had been a good collar, and more, he had a deep dislike of the gangs. The racecourse terrorists, as the newspapers called them, had originally confined themselves to extorting bookmakers, cheating racegoers, and fighting one another over who got to do those things in which area, but their size and reach had grown markedly since the war. The Sabini gang alone could call on some three hundred men in Clerkenwell, Finsbury and King’s Cross. Since the same area only had a policing strength of around six hundred, that was too damned many gangsters jockeying for power, offering ‘protection’ to shopkeepers and bookmakers, sticking their fingers into nightclubs and gambling dens and other such pies. Aaron had read of the problems in Chicago and New York, with their areas where the law’s writ didn’t run, and he did not want to see it happen in London.

He did not, therefore, mourn Nippy Nicholls’ death, but he did relish the opportunity to send Dapper down as he deserved.

It mostly went well, except that Dapper’s barrister made a spirited and deeply insulting attempt to suggest that the King’s Cross police in Aaron’s person favoured their local gang over the interlopers from Birmingham. Aaron kept his temper despite the provocation, the judge slapped it down hard, and Dapper got twenty years.

It was a good result. Less good were the newspaper stories the next day. Not much else was on, and Aaron found his picture in several of the papers, along with a lot more of his life story than he wanted.

“ Firebrand Fowler’s Son Abandons Unions, Takes On Gangs ,” Detective Constable Challice read aloud in the mess. “That’s a bit tortured. Sabini Gang ‘Protected In High Places’ with quotation marks so it’s not libel. That’s not very nice, but the article isn’t too bad overall. Oh my goodness, listen to this. ‘The latest heartthrob isn’t a film star: he’s a policeman. Darkly handsome DS Fowler’s Italian good looks—’”

“You have to be joking,” Aaron said.

“No, honestly, it’s in the Pictorial . They’ve done a sketch. You look like Valentino. Well, you don’t,” she added with a critical glance, “but the sketch does.”

DC Helen Challice was the second woman to join the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department, the only one based at King’s Cross. It was generally felt that women should not work on crimes of violence and murder, so she was usually set to cases more suitable for the gentler sex. Aaron could imagine Challice had an advantage when it came to interviewing a three-year-old whose father had given her gonorrhea, or a thirteen-year-old who’d been raped by four men in a row and was now pregnant, but he had no idea in what way those cases were supposed to be easier on the investigating officer. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or so, but after six months in the job, she already looked older.

He’d come across her sobbing in an office one night, and been sufficiently reminded of his own sister that he’d first attempted comforting words, and then just brought her tea that was basically hot sugar syrup until she stopped crying. Once a few days had passed and she’d realised both that he hadn’t made her wobble into station gossip, and that he didn’t intend to make advances off the back of that unexpected intimacy, they’d settled into as close to a friendship as Aaron had at work.

She was a self-possessed young woman, with the brisk confidence of a Head Girl or a hockey captain, and she was looking at Aaron with an air of concern. “Are you not pleased? I’d have thought being compared to Valentino would be quite the boost.”

“I’d rather not be in the papers at all. They will drag things up that don’t matter, and I’d rather just do my job.”

“Valentino, though? I wouldn’t mind it if the papers said I looked like Clara Bow.”

“I bet you would if they said it when they should be talking about a good collar,” Aaron pointed out. “And it’s rather insinuating, isn’t it? The lawyer accuses me of being in the Sabinis’ pocket and then the papers say I look Italian...”

“Do you think that’s it?” Challice gave the Pictorial a quick scrutiny. “There’s nothing in here about the Sabinis at all, though, it’s just their New Faces section.”

“Oh. Well, that’s not so bad.” Aaron was perhaps a little over-sensitive on the subject of his family; skin tended to be thin where it had been previously rubbed raw.

“Really, I think it’s fine,” Challice assured him. “It does say you’re related to man-about-town Paul Napier-Fox, whose recent engagement—”

“I don’t want to know,” Aaron said from the bottom of his heart. “Please stop.”

“Oh, all right. It seems a bit of a waste, though. Half of CID is desperate to get their pictures in the paper and here you are with stories coming out of your ears and you don’t want them. Really, we should make the most of it. Put you on posters. DS Fowler, the Face of the Department.”

There was a snort from the door. It was Detective Inspector Davis, wearing his usual expression of aggressive disgust. “You and your lady friend admiring your press cuttings, Fowler?”

“Oh, that was just me, Inspector,” Challice said with the bright, friendly smile she usually adopted with Davis. “Was there something, sir?”

He didn’t trouble to reply to her. “DDI wants a word, Fowler. Now will do.”

Divisional Detective Inspector Colthorne was a tall, imposing man in his forties, distinguished if not handsome, with a shrewd air that suggested a stockbroker before he got complacent. He’d been promoted from Detective Inspector in C Division (Soho) a few years ago, and was now the senior officer of G Division (Finsbury, Islington, King’s Cross, and Clerkenwell). He had an authoritative rule but an easy manner with it, and was generally considered a good chief, a laugh when he wanted to be, though possessed of a wicked temper if you were fool enough to cross him.

Aaron didn’t quite share the general admiration. He’d been a constable under Mr. Colthorne in Soho before they both moved to King’s Cross, and never managed to get on with the man. That, he had to admit, was down to envy. He wasn’t easy or genial himself, didn’t have the knack of charm or banter, and probably could never have been popular anyway since he came with far too much baggage attached. Gossip about his father and his extended family always went before him, and he was wearily accustomed to the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of proving himself. Yes, my father was Terry Fowler, the union man. Yes, my mother’s family is upper-class as it comes. But I’m still a copper.

“Well, Fowler,” Colthorne said. “Congratulations. Excellent result yesterday. Good to get Melkin off the streets.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“A disgrace about that brief’s insinuations, though. This tactic of abusing an honest policeman and impugning his character ought to be severely punished by the Bench.”

The DDI had been the object of a similar accusation during the war years, Aaron vaguely recalled; clearly the experience had left scars. Aaron was grateful for the sympathy now. “Thank you, sir,” he repeated. “It was rather unpleasant. Of course the defence has to do what he can for his client, but to be accused of corruption or collusion with criminals—it strikes at the heart of why we do the job.”

“And, I’m sorry to say, that sort of slander follows a man around for a long time. Mud sticks.”

“I hope not, sir. What they said of me was entirely baseless.” The DDI’s brows drew together, and Aaron had a sudden, horrible feeling that he might have sounded as though he was implying something about other accused officers. “It’s often the way, if they’ve nothing else to fall back on,” he added hastily. “Grasp at straws to discredit the prosecution.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it grasping at straws,” Davis said. “You’re Italian: naturally the brief would see the Sabini connection.”

“I’m British, sir,” Aaron said evenly. “And my only connection to the Sabini gang is having arrested some of them.”

“Of course it is,” Colthorne said jovially. “There’s no point fretting about this sort of thing, Fowler; it’s just part of the game, and we all have to take our knocks, you as much as anyone else. And aside from that, you did well enough out of the papers. Flattering stuff in the Pictorial . One for the scrapbook, eh?”

“Sir,” Aaron said, exquisitely uncomfortable.

“And worth following up, perhaps,” Colthorne went on thoughtfully. “The Press like a face, a personality. If they’ve latched on to you as the Valentino of King’s Cross nick, we could use that. Why should C Division get all the column inches? A monthly article, perhaps—”

“No,” Aaron said, the word coming without thought. “That is, I should prefer not to have anything to do with the Press, sir.”

Colthorne cocked a brow. “Come now. You must have given half a dozen interviews yesterday.”

“I gave the usual briefing after the verdict, sir,” Aaron said stiffly. “Nothing else.” He was doing this wrong, he knew. Colthorne’s tone was jovial; he was probably only joshing, and Aaron should be taking it as banter, but he couldn’t. “I really wouldn’t want to be in the papers,” he repeated doggedly.

Colthorne leaned back in his chair, assessing him with a look. “I’d have thought you were used to it. Firebrand Fowler and Bright Young People—”

“That’s nothing to do with me, sir.”

“Your family is nothing to do with you?”

Aaron was damned if he was going into that. “Not at work. I can’t help what the papers say; I’m just trying to do my job.”

“Glad to hear it,” Colthorne said, evidently deciding the conversation wasn’t worth pursuing. “A good collar, and a good result. Davis tells me you’ve a few days’ leave booked? Well deserved. Enjoy yourself.”

***

A ARON ALWAYS TOOK HIS days off because they were his right and you used your rights at work, but he didn’t have much to do with them. He generally went to stay with his sister in Sheffield, or had her little family descend on his flat in Lisson Grove, but he’d heard just the day before that his niece had come down with scarlet fever. He therefore occupied the first morning by purchasing a variety of books, toys, chocolates, and whisky in Debenhams for the benefit of the whole family and getting it all shipped up. Then he went to the dentist, then to the cinema, and with all his avenues of entertainment now exhausted, he turned his thoughts to Joel Wildsmith.

He’d been too busy to consider the graphologist for a while, but now he was at leisure, the problem nagged at his mind. He simply couldn’t see how Wildsmith could have found out as much as he had.

He bought a book on graphology. It assured him he could come to a full understanding of a person’s character simply by considering the differences in writing styles:

Some of pressure (strong, weak, irregular, decreasing in the downward direction, sudden dot-like pressure), differences in the degree of legibility, regularity, connection, size, width, fullness, extension upwards and downwards, differences of the writing angle (slant to the right, upward angle, slant to the left), of the speed between the movements, differences between good and bad spacing, between angles and curves, between a rising and sinking tendency of the letter basis...

“Makes perfect sense,” he muttered to himself, and flipped randomly to a later page, which informed him that writing the date rarely expressed the writer’s libido as thoroughly as other numerals could.

Sod this. He put the book on the table, although he felt like throwing it across the room, and headed off to Pentonville. He didn’t make an appointment. If he had to hang around for a while, he would: it was worth it to retain the element of surprise.

In the event, the char said Mr. Wildsmith was home, and let him in. He knocked at the door. A handsome man answered.

Aaron stared. Wildsmith, sans ghastly moustache, stared back at him.

It made all the difference. Without the foliage he had a lovely mouth, with a perfectly curved upper lip and a full lower one. He had a good nose, come to that, and his strikingly light eyes under the thick reddish brows were an intriguing, even dominating feature when the moustache wasn’t demanding all the attention.

“You shaved,” Aaron said, like a fool.

“Of course I shaved. Would you wear that thing longer than you had to?”

“Had to?”

“I lost a bet,” Wildsmith said, sounding as though he had explained himself as often as he was going to. “Hello again, Mr. Thurloe, and by that of course I mean Detective Sergeant Fowler. I saw you in the papers. Aren’t you glam.”

“May I come in?”

“Have you a warrant?”

“This isn’t an official visit. I’m calling as a private citizen.”

“You did that last time. I’m not a great admirer of policemen who pretend to be private citizens. It tends to end badly for the people they lie to.”

Wildsmith leaned against the doorway as he said that, and crossed his arms in a belligerent manner. A split hook protruded from his left sleeve. He had a pencil clamped between the two halves of the hook.

“Are you busy?” Aaron said. “Shall I make an appointment?”

“No, you should go away.”

“This is a private call. A pound an hour, wasn’t it?”

“Are you going to leave or do I have to call a constable? Not that a mere constable would dare enforce the actual law against a detective sergeant,” Wildsmith added sourly. “But he’ll have to find some fumbling excuse not to carry out his duty by removing an importunate nuisance, and at least that will be funny.”

“I don’t think I’m being importunate, although you’re certainly being obdurate,” Aaron said. “For the third time, I’m not calling in an official capacity. I’d like to consult you on a graphological matter, and I’m happy to pay for your time.”

Wildsmith looked at him. The fingers of his right hand drummed rapidly on his other sleeve. “Tell you what. You can come in if you tell me something.”

“What?”

“The pieces of writing you gave me. Whose hands were they?”

“None of your affair,” Aaron said, instinctively defensive.

“Fine,” Wildsmith said, stepped back, and closed the door.

Or tried to. Aaron had been a police officer too long to have doors shut on him, and his foot was firmly in the way. “Hold on there.”

“No. If you’re acting as a police officer, I’ll see your warrant. If you aren’t, you come into my home on my conditions, which are, I want to know who wrote those papers.”

Aaron weighed it up rapidly. He wanted answers, and he had nothing else to do, and Wildsmith had shaved.

“All right,” he said. “But let me come in first.”