It’s a Battlefield by Graham Greene Page A

miles of Scotland Yard. He did not believe that the man who had killed Mrs Janet Crowle and later cut up the body and stowed it in a trunk in the left luggage department at Paddington was a braver man than the murderer who had set fire to his own hut and died in the flames to escape capture. If one could go out against men like that with a walking stick, one did not need a weapon in London.
    The car came out for a moment into the Euston Road, sent its shrill warning past the furniture dealers’ and wireless shops and one-night hotels to the constable on point duty, then swerved across the lit garish road into the darkness again. A man stepped out from a tobacconist’s and waved to them, and the car slid to the kerb and stopped. Behind them Euston Road flickered and grumbled, but in the street no one spoke, no one moved except the man who fumbled at the door of the car. Crosse helped him from inside and leaning across asked softly: ‘Well?’
    â€˜He’s going out,’ the man said. ‘He’s asked the landlady for hot water and a clean towel. She told him she’d have to boil a kettle and slipped downstairs and told Jenks.’
    â€˜We’d better get him in the house,’ Crosse said. ‘Which is it?’
    â€˜You’ll see Jenks in the doorway fifty yards down on the left-hand side.’
    â€˜Which is the room?’
    â€˜Top floor. Back room. There’s a fire escape up the back outside the window. He hasn’t drawn the curtains, the landlady says. He never draws ’em before supper. He’s a man of habits.’
    â€˜Does he face the window?’
    â€˜His arm-chair faces the door.’
    â€˜Has he had the hot water?’
    â€˜Jenks’ll signal when she takes it up,’ and while he spoke a tiny flame shone in the street and went out. ‘There,’ the man said. ‘She’s taking up the water now.’
    â€˜Come on,’ Crosse said, ‘out of the car. Two men stand in the doorway where Jenks is, one round to the back door, one up the fire escape. I’ll go up the stairs with Jenks. How do you reach the fire escape?’
    â€˜A passage on the right of the front door,’ the man said, ‘takes you to the back yard. You can’t help seeing the fire escape.’
    â€˜I’ll go up the fire escape,’ the Assistant Commissioner said.
    â€˜You’d better stay in the street,’ Crosse said. ‘But I haven’t got the time to argue now. Come on quietly.’ They crossed the road and followed him down the pavement, a line of heavy men in soft hats walking cumbrously on tiptoe; only the Assistant Commissioner at the tail of the procession walked with natural lightness, all the useless flesh burned away by fever. A taxi went soberly by towards Euston and a young man in horn-rimmed glasses leant out of the window and stared at them with his mouth open. ‘Hi!’ he said in a tipsy voice, ‘Hi!’; they walked on self-consciously like a row of ducks, while the taxi receded and the young man still leant from the window and called: ‘Hi!’ drunk and puzzled and amused; as the taxi turned into Euston Road he hammered on the glass and called to the driver to look: ‘Lot of funny men,’ they heard him shout. Lights behind upper windows shrouded in lace curtains never touched the dark channel in which they walked. They were buried twenty feet deep in a night world of their own; above their heads the lights behind closed panes, at their backs a gleam and murmur, the faint evocation of a world in uproar till the midnight closing hour. Somebody whispered from a doorway: ‘He’s washing now.’
    Crosse halted them and whispered back: ‘How long have we got?’
    â€˜He always washes well when he goes out of an evening, the landlady says. Down to the waist. She says he’s always been a one for cleanliness.’
    The Assistant Commissioner smiled, treading softly