The police doctor would soon discover that she had not been raped, but Faber did not think that mattered. He had taken a criminology course at Heidelberg, and he knew that many sexual assaults were not consummated. Besides, he could not have carried the deception that far, not even for the Fatherland. He was not in the SS. Some of them would queue up to rape the corpse…. He put the thought out of his mind.

He washed his hands again and got dressed. It was almost midnight. He would wait an hour before leaving, it would be safer later.

He sat down to think about how he had gone wrong.

There was no question that he had made a mistake. If his cover were perfect, he would be totally secure. If he were totally secure no one could discover his secret. Mrs. Garden had discovered his secret—or rather, she would have if she had lived a few seconds longer—therefore he had not been totally secure, therefore his cover was not perfect, therefore he had made a mistake.

He should have put a bolt on the door. Better to be thought chronically shy than to have landladies with duplicate keys sneaking in in their nightclothes.

That was the surface error. The deep flaw was that he was too eligible to be a bachelor. He thought this with irritation, not conceit. He knew that he was a pleasant, attractive man and that there was no apparent reason why he should be single. He turned his mind to thinking up a cover that would explain this without inviting advances from the Mrs. Gardens of this world.

He ought to be able to find inspiration in his real personality. Why was he single? He stirred uneasily—he did not like mirrors. The answer was simple. He was single because of his profession. If there were deeper reasons, he did not want to know them.

He would have to spend tonight in the open. High-gate Wood would do. In the morning he would take his suitcases to a railway station checkroom, then tomorrow evening he would go to his room in Blackheath.

He would shift to his second identity. He had little fear of being caught by the police. The commercial traveler who occupied the room at Blackheath on weekends looked rather different from the railway clerk who had killed his landlady. The Blackheath persona was expansive, vulgar and flashy. He wore loud ties, bought rounds of drinks, and combed his hair differently. The police would circulate a description of a shabby little pervert who would not say boo to a goose until he was inflamed with lust, and no one would look twice at the handsome salesman in the striped suit who was obviously the type that was more or less permanently inflamed with lust and did not have to kill women to get them to show him their breasts.

He would have to set up another identity—he always kept at least two. He needed a new job, fresh papers—passport, identity card, ration book, birth certificate. It was all so risky. Damn Mrs. Garden. Why couldn’t she have drunk herself asleep as usual?

It was one o’clock. Faber took a last look around the room. He was not concerned about leaving clues—his fingerprints were obviously all over the house, and there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind about who was the murderer. Nor did he feel any sentiment about leaving the place that had been his home for two years; he had never thought of it as home. He had never thought of anywhere as home.

He would always think of this as the place where he had learned to put a bolt on a door.

He turned out the light, picked up his cases, and went down the stairs and out of the door into the night.

2

HENRY II WAS A REMARKABLE KING. IN AN AGE WHEN the term “flying visit” had not yet been coined, he flitted between England and France with such rapidity that he was credited with magical powers; a rumor that, understandably, he did nothing to suppress. In 1173—either the June or the September, depending upon which secondary source one favors—he arrived in England and left for France again so quickly that no contemporary writer ever found out about it. Later historians discovered the record of his expenditure in the Pipe Rolls. At the time his kingdom was under attack by his sons at its northern and southern extremes—the Scottish border and the South of France. But what, precisely, was the purpose of his visit? Whom did he see? Why was it secret, when the myth of his magical speed was worth an army? What did he accomplish?

This was the problem that taxed Percival Godliman in the summer of 1940, when Hitler’s armies swept across the French cornfields like a scythe and the British poured out of the Dunkirk bottleneck in bloody disarray.

Professor Godliman knew more about the Middle Ages than any man alive. His book on the Black Death had upended every convention of medievalism; it had also been a best-seller and published as a Penguin Book. With that behind him he had turned to a slightly earlier and even more intractable period.

At 12:30 on a splendid June day in London, a secretary found Godliman hunched over an illuminated manuscript, laboriously translating its medieval Latin, making notes in his own even less legible handwriting. The secretary, who was planning to eat her lunch in the garden of Gordon Square, did not like the manuscript room because it smelled dead. You needed so many keys to get in there, it might as well have been a tomb.

Godliman stood at a lectern, perched on one leg like a bird, his face lit bleakly by a spotlight above—he might have been the ghost of the monk who wrote the book, standing a cold vigil over his precious chronicle. The girl cleared her throat and waited for him to notice her. She saw a short man in his fifties, with round shoulders and weak eyesight, wearing a tweed suit. She knew he could be perfectly sensible once you dragged him out of the Middle Ages. She coughed again and said, “Professor Godliman?”

He looked up, and when he saw her he smiled, and then he did not look like a ghost, more like someone’s dotty father. “Hello!” he said, in an astonished tone, as if he had just met his next-door neighbor in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

“You asked me to remind you that you have lunch at the Savoy with Colonel Terry.”

“Oh, yes.” He took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and peered at it. “If I’m going to walk it, I’d better leave now.”

She nodded. “I brought your gas mask.”

“You are thoughtful!” He smiled again, and she decided he looked quite nice. He took the mask from her and said, “Do I need my coat?”

“You didn’t wear one this morning. It’s quite warm. Shall I lock up after you?”

“Thank you, thank you.” He jammed his notebook into his jacket pocket and went out.

The secretary looked around, shivered, and followed him.

COLONEL ANDREW TERRY was a red-faced Scot, pauper-thin from a lifetime of heavy smoking, with sparse dark-blond hair thickly brilliantined. Godliman found him at a corner table in the Savoy Grill, wearing civilian clothes. There were three cigarette stubs in the ashtray. He stood up to shake hands.

Godliman said, “Morning, Uncle Andrew.” Terry was his mother’s baby brother.

“How are you, Percy?”

“I’m writing a book about the Plantagenets.” Godliman sat down.

“Are your manuscripts still in London? I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

Terry lit another cigarette. “Move them to the country in case of bombing.”

“Should I?”

“Half the National Gallery has been shoved into a bloody big hole in the ground somewhere up in Wales. Young Kenneth Clark is quicker off the mark than you. Might be sensible to take yourself off out of it too, while you’re about it. I don’t suppose you’ve many students left.”

“That’s true.” Godliman took a menu from a waiter and said, “I don’t want a drink.”