It’s a Battlefield by Graham Greene

night, Mrs Simpson.’ But her fury and her fidelity held him with his hand on the door; he could not turn his back before allowing her her ‘say’. She was old and withered, angry and unreasonable, but he recognized a quality he shared; it might be described loosely as love, as obstinacy, as loneliness, or even as desperation. The more one was alone, the more one clung to one’s job, the only thing it was certainly right to do, the only human value valid for every change of government, and for every change of heart. ‘It’s them murderers,’ Mrs Simpson said with hatred. ‘I’d like to see ’em all strung up and finished with. That Drover.’ She quivered in the steam under the weight of the years, and death lent her hatred and contempt its own blindness and incongruity. ‘Good food wasted.’
    At the Yard he found that his directions had already been carried out. They were careful never to give him reason for legitimate complaints; they sprang to his orders as they would never have sprung to the orders of a man they liked. Then there would have been a certain give and take, an occasional pardonable slackness, but with him they were careful that the only grounds of complaint should be theirs for his intrusion. The stations had already been informed of his instructions regarding Drover. They had even kept the tobacconist at the Yard in case the Assistant Commissioner wished to see him, and a careful report on the developments in the Paddington murder lay already on his desk. He tried in vain to break through their politeness and disapproval. ‘I’m not troubling to read this, Crosse. It’s your job. I’m your, your – er – subordinate tonight. I merely want to – want to learn.’ Superintendent Crosse’s face was as blank as a whitewashed wall.
    They packed into a single car. The great lit globe of the Coliseum balanced above the restaurants and the cafés and the public-houses in St Martin’s Lane. Round and round Trafalgar Square the buses went like circus horses. The high squeal of the Wolseley’s hooter pierced through a traffic block; cars ground their brakes, a policeman raised his hand, and they were shaken out into Charing Cross Road temporarily bare of traffic. The whores flowed down one pavement and up another; flat dago faces printed on song sheets filled the window of a music shop and a salesman inside played with passionate melancholy: ‘My Baby Don’t Care’. A row of men peered into peepshows, and ‘A Night in Paris’ and ‘What the Butler Saw’ and ‘For Women Only’ rattled and whined and jolted and stuck. Somebody was firing a rifle in a fun booth for cigarette packets and china vases.
    â€˜Have you brought a gun, sir?’ Crosse asked.
    â€˜I don’t possess one,’ the Assistant Commissioner said.
    A gust of wind and rain brushed the windows in St Giles’s Circus and lifted the posters of a man selling papers by Lyons Corner House, so that for a moment, while a bus delayed them, the Assistant Commissioner caught a résumé of the evening’s news, poster after poster flapping up: ‘Home to Lossiemouth’, ‘3.30 Results’, ‘Insured?’ ‘Appeal Fails’, ‘Midday Runners’; then falling again, like time burying the old news deep.
    â€˜You ought to have brought a gun, sir.’
    The car dived left by Goodge Street Station, and then right, up Charlotte Street.
    â€˜I’ve never felt the need of one yet.’
    The Superintendent swallowed. He wanted to say something disparaging, something which would put the East and its jungles in a proper place in the hierarchy of danger. ‘He’s got a gun, sir.’
    â€˜He’ll be afraid to use it,’ the Assistant Commissioner said. He had walked for twenty miles through the jungle with a walking-stick and he wasn’t going to carry a revolver within two