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be over. Do you want a pipe? We’ve still got some tobacco, but it’s a bit ropy.’ Bryant waved a wallet of foul-smelling shag past him and dropped it into the chaos of the desk.
    ‘I don’t, thanks,’ said May, removing his coat and looking for somewhere clean to put it. ‘There’s a very good code station already running, but they’re stocking it with the best of the Oxford grads. I’ll just have to wait my turn.’
    ‘You probably want to know what this is all about,’ said Bryant, pushing a chair at him. ‘Sorry no one could tell you much, but the MoI and the Home Office are very big on public morale at the moment.’
    ‘I’ve noticed,’ said May. ‘The block on information is a bit stiff. Part of Hyde Park near Marble Arch was roped off at the weekend. They reckon an underground shelter was blown to bits, heads and arms and legs everywhere. The only way they could tell the girls from the men was by their hair. But I didn’t see anything about it in the papers.’
    ‘No, you wouldn’t. I can understand that, but some of the other directives are driving us barmy.’ Bryant sucked noisily at his pipe. ‘This business with lifts having to be kept at the bottom of shafts during raids, except in tube stations, where they have to be kept at the top. I suppose it’s sensible, but all transgressions have to be reported, and it makes so much paperwork. Not that you’ll have had any paperwork on us.’
    ‘No, they wouldn’t even tell me what PCU stood for.’
    ‘Peculiar Crimes Unit, isn’t it frightful? I think their perception of the word “peculiar” and mine differ somewhat. I’ve got some bumph here you can read through.’ He rooted around among his papers, sending several overstuffed folders to the floor, but failed to locate anything specific.
    Thinking about his first impression of Arthur Bryant some years later, May was reminded of a young Alec Guinness, bright-eyed and restless, distracted and a little awkward, filled to exhaustion with ideas. May was less excitable, and his habit of keeping a rein on the more excessive reaches of his imagination pegged him to others as the reserved, serious one. After their deaths, it was said by their biographer that ‘Bryant said what he meant and May meant what he said’. May was the diplomat, Bryant the iconoclast, a decent combination as it turned out.
    ‘They meant “peculiar” in the sense of “particular”, but the damage is done, and the name is attracting some very odd cases. We had a report last month of a man sucking blood out of a Wren in Leicester Square. It’s hopeless. The Heavy Rescue Squads are busy trying to locate people who’ve been buried alive under tons of rubble, most of the central London constabulary remaining at home have left to join the ARP, the ATS and the AFS, and we’re expected to go chasing around after Bela Lugosi. Morale again, you see. They don’t want people to think there’s a bogeyman roaming around in the blackouts, otherwise they won’t head to the shelters. Panic in the streets; it’s an image that scares the hell out of them. You’d think we were more of a propaganda unit than a proper detective squad.’
    ‘How many of us are there?’ asked May, moving a stack of handwritten music scores from a chair and seating himself.
    ‘Half a dozen, including you. Superintendent Davenport’s the most senior DI, spends all of his time haunting the HO and the Met, or playing billiards with Sergeant Carfax, who’s married to his ghastly sister. She comes creeping around here on the scrounge for salvage donations, got a face like a witch doctor’s rattle. No, we don’t see too much of Davenport, luckily. Then there’s Dr Runcorn, rather ancient and not much cop but the only forensics wallah they could spare us. We have a young pathologist called Oswald Finch, tragically born without a sense of humour, we use him for the serious stuff. DS Forthright is also a part-time member of the WVS. Then there’s us