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tied their boats up and are doing their patrols on shore. The smash-and-grab men will be harvesting fast, sir, mark my words.” He could hardly have sounded more thrilled.
    For his part, Herbert could have done without Elkington’s particular brand of schadenfreude this morning. “Where’s the diver?” he asked.
    “Right here, sir.” Elkington pointed to a young woman alongside him. Herbert could have sworn he saw a flourish in the gesture; and then he was no longer thinking of Elkington at all, as his entire attention was focused, almost against his will, on the woman.
    It was not that she was beautiful—although she was certainly that—more that she seemed so exotic, so incongruous, in this freezing fog-bound city. Her skin was olive beneath hair black as night; Herbert saw almond eyes, a nose the elegant side of aquiline, lips like lightly plumped pillows. She was short and slender, but something in her carriage suggested a wiry strength. She could have been a biblical queen, brought early to her throne. She looked to be in her early twenties.
    “Detective Inspector Smith, meet Hannah Mortimer,” Elkington said.
    Hannah put out her hand for Herbert to shake, and missed his fingers by three inches. Her eyes were staring without focus at a point over his left shoulder.
    “It help me if you say something,” she said.
    The foreign undercoat to her accent—Eastern European, he thought—could not entirely disguise the hint of insolence in the statement. Elkington stiffened in proxy embarrassment; Herbert stifled an absurd desire to laugh.
    “How do you do, Miss Mortimer?” he said.
    Her sightless eyes swiveled slightly towards his face, as though she were a radio astronomer picking up return signals.
    “I know what you think,” she said.
    “What?” Herbert asked.
    “You wonder how blind person can be diver.” He said nothing; it was exactly what he
had
been thinking. “My answer is very easy,” she continued. “River and lake beds are filthy dirty; most of the time, you can’t see a thing. You want to find things, you must feel for them. So your sense of touch must be accustomed. There are many blind divers, in actuality.”
    She invariably emphasized the first syllables of words, Herbert noticed, irrespective of their proper pronunciation—
acc
ustomed,
act
uality,
wonder.
    “I’m sure there are,” Herbert said mildly. “OK. I want you to look for”—he caught himself, and stumbled over the next words—“I mean …”
    “You can use words like ‘look’ and ‘see.’ I know what they mean. For me, is no bother to hear them.”
    Herbert was glad that she could not see the rouge ofembarrassment on his cheeks; the flush was too deep to pass off as reaction to the cold.
    “So, you want me to find—what?” Hannah asked.
    “Anything that might tell me who the man was, or why he was killed.”
    Sheathed in a bulky wartime diving suit with heavy boots and a metal helmet, Hannah stepped into the Long Water as easily as a seal would and vanished from sight.
    Herbert turned back towards the statue.
    Peter Pan stood atop a bronze tree stump which swarmed with fairies, squirrels, mice, and rabbits. His right hand was raised, as though hailing a cab; in his left he clutched a set of pan pipes.
    Herbert remembered the layout from the previous night. The statue was bounded from behind by an array of flowerbeds and shrubbery, and from in front by the Long Water.
    The water was cordoned off by a railing, presumably for the safety of the children who congregated at the statue. Either side of the railing were sections of hedges and small trees. The body had been found beyond these, where the path gave directly onto the water, presumably for launching small boats in the summer.
    Random sounds floated past Herbert, distorted and lacerated by the fog. He heard voices, engines, footsteps, though he could tell neither from which direction they came, nor indeed whether they existed outside of his imagination.