Visibility by Boris Starling Read Free Book Online Page B

assignment, please ring Detective Superintendent Tyce at New Scotland Yard…”
    “Young man, I will ring the commissioner himself. Now, if you’re going to look for my son’s killer, you won’t find him in here; so you may go.”
    The station attendant at High Street Kensington said the next train was five minutes away. Herbert sat on a platform bench and read the conference pamphlet Rosalind had given him.
    The speeches and panel discussions were as esoteric to a layman’s eyes as he would have expected; science really was a different language, he thought. He flicked through the pages, reading little and understanding less, until he reached the list of delegates at the back.
    Each delegate was listed, along with his institutionand country. There had been about a hundred people there, representing a healthy selection of nations. British apart, there were Americans, French, Swiss, Canadians, Swedes, and Portuguese.
    Speakers were marked with an asterisk; there had been six sessions, four of them individual lectures, the other two panel discussions. The topics looked suitably obtuse; manna for the scientist, Herbert thought, but anesthetic for the layman.
    He was halfway down the list, skipping through the list of British delegates, when his gaze, attention, and heartbeat skidded to a halt pretty much simultaneously.
    De Vere Green, Richard. University of Cambridge.
    Herbert knew Richard de Vere Green, and he knew, too, that he was not affiliated with the University of Cambridge, at least not officially. De Vere Green’s institution was altogether closer to home. He had been Herbert’s boss at Five.
    Elkington and Highgate could wait; Herbert took the underground back to Green Park. Someone had left a copy of the
Express
, and Herbert flitted idly through the classifieds and the promotional contests—
Win a car! First prize a Humber Super Snipe, worth £1,627. Second prize an MG Midget, £825
—before turning to the gossip column, spiritual home of those whom he envied and despised in equal measure.
    Lord Beaverbrook had declared that the gossip column was the most important part of the paper, and had therefore decreed a list of those never to be mentioned favorably. No one knew for sure who was included, but prime suspects included Charlie Chaplin (suspected communist), Noel Coward (queer), and Paul Robeson(a bit of both, not to mention the color of his skin).
    The
Express
was a dreadful paper, which was one of the main reasons Herbert liked it, and its interest lasted precisely the length of an average tube journey, which was recommendation enough for any journal. Today, however, he read the
Express
primarily to avoid thinking about de Vere Green, an exercise which proved predictably futile.
    At Five, Herbert had been a Watcher. No, he had been
the
Watcher; the best surveillance operative in the entire service. Being a Watcher was like playing the drums; almost anyone could do it, but very few people could do it well.
    In the opinion of all those qualified to make such a judgment, Herbert had been outstanding. His eyesight and hearing were both very good, he was a quick thinker and capable of reacting well to the unexpected, and he was endlessly patient, a master of the gentle art that was doing damn all convincingly.
    And he was the nearest thing to an invisible man. He was neither dwarf nor giant, not revoltingly ugly nor sickeningly handsome, midway between beer barrel and string bean. In short, he was the kind of person one would pass in the street without noticing.
    Many people were just different enough from the norm—whatever that was—for a stranger to notice them, even for a couple of seconds.
    Not Herbert. He was entirely nondescript, exceptional only at being unexceptional.
    It was not hard to imagine what
that
could do to a man’s psyche.
    But back to de Vere Green—and back, too, to Donald Maclean.
    May 1951, eighteen months ago. Five had been tailing Maclean for months, looking for fresh evidence