Half past four. He realized it wasn’t that he’d woken early, because he hadn’t woken up. He would have had to sleep to wake up, and what he’d managed for the last four and a half hours wasn’t sleep.

He reached out of the bed and switched off the alarm before it had a chance to disturb the rest of the house, then pulled his bare arm back into the warmth.

He sighed, rolled onto his back, sighed again, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then threw back the blankets. He got out of the bed and pulled on the old dressing gown that he had left on top of the bedclothes as moral support. He wrapped it around him and shuddered with the cold, then coughed a sticky wet bark full of whiskey and cigarettes.

He walked to the window, lit a cigarette from the pack in his dressing gown, and took his first drag.

His breath felt heavy. When he ran his tongue around his mouth, his teeth and his tongue felt thick and sticky. He coughed again, this time dipping his head, trying to catch some stubborn smokers’ phlegm but failing.

Nobody was moving in the street outside. His little Austin sat under the lamp, looking like it was about to be swept away by the water rushing down the gutter. Rossett wondered if he’d pushed the driver’s-side window all the way up or if he’d have a wet arse on his drive to work again.

He dragged on the cigarette. The reflection of the flaring orange end in the glass looked like a distant explosion, though it was only inches away. His tired eyes tried to focus, and he blinked away some sleep and heard a rattly wet cough through the thin wall. It was coming from the room next door, and Rossett decided he needed to get going before the boardinghouse came alive and a queue formed for the toilet on the landing.

It wasn’t easy being a police sergeant attached to the SS in London in 1946, and Rossett didn’t want to make it any harder than it already was.

He dressed and silently smoked another cigarette, sitting on the wooden stool by the window, looking at the shadows cast on the floor by the streetlamp. Eventually, he rose with a sigh and went downstairs to the small kitchen at the back of the house. Mrs. Ward, his landlady, was already up, and a fat, sweating teapot sat waiting on the cast-iron stove behind her, gray steam whispering from its spout. She nodded as he entered, silently poured him a cup, and set it on the table.

“I’ve only got toast and dripping,” she said as Rossett reached for the teaspoon, then added, “There’s no sugar or milk either, so don’t bother asking.”

He placed the teaspoon on the table next to the cup and wrapped his hand around the brew, more for the warmth than anything else. He wouldn’t drink it, he never did; morning tea didn’t agree with midnight Scotch.

“I don’t see what the point is of having a police sergeant live in your house if he can’t get you things,” she said as she sat down across the table from him. “I barely have coke for the stove, let alone food to cook in it.”

“The point is that he pays you rent; it’s not his job to steal food for you as well,” Rossett said flatly, blinking through the smoke of yet another cigarette.

“Trust me to get the only law-abiding copper in London.”

Rossett half smiled at her and she smiled back, eyes coming alive beautifully amid the laughter lines.

One New Year’s Eve, three sherries the wrong side of sober, she had told him she would wait “all my life for my Ronnie.”

Ronnie hadn’t come back from Dunkirk.

That was the night Rossett realized he was jealous of a dead man.

They’d danced at midnight, in each other’s arms for one song on the parlor radio, eyes closed, hearts open for five minutes.

He didn’t drink the tea. He stood, and she fetched his heavy raincoat from the hook on the back of the door. It was still damp from the night before, and he shivered as she smoothed it across his shoulders and then pulled it across his chest.

He tossed what was left of his cigarettes onto the table. “Fry those for now,” he said as he walked out the door. “I’ll see you tonight.”

He sat in the car and looked at the folders lying on the front seat.

The job.

The damn job, waiting next to him, eager to get going, already sitting in the car.

Rossett wondered about the gray faces in his dream. He couldn’t remember when they had first started to appear.

He looked at the files again, sighed, and then started the car.

The window on the Austin had stayed up for once, so his drive across the city wasn’t as grim as usual. Few private cars were left on the roads in the near absence of fuel, so the journey only took him twenty minutes through a black-and-white London that was still half asleep and confused in fog.

As he approached the marked house, he saw three army trucks and a black Rover police car parked on the corner. He checked his watch: five thirty-five, everything on schedule.

He parked behind the third truck, nodding to the eyes that watched him pull up. A couple nodded in return, but most stayed huddled in their heavy coats and capes, arms folded like surly schoolboys outside a headmaster’s office, heads sagging from lack of sleep.

He got out of the car, walked past the trucks, and banged on the misted-up window of the Rover. The door opened almost immediately, and Rossett leaned down to speak to the occupants.

His boss, Brewer, and a uniformed inspector he didn’t know nodded in the half-light of the yellow bulb in the back of the car. A uniformed sergeant Rossett vaguely recalled from a previous operation climbed out the front of the car and smoothed his tunic, nodding at Rossett.

“We okay to go, sir?” Rossett addressed Brewer directly.

“Whatever you think best, Sergeant,” replied Brewer, who was pretending, quite badly, to read some papers on a clipboard in an effort to stay out of the operation.

“I’ll check that the men are ready to roll,” said Rossett. Although Brewer didn’t respond—he seldom did—he was supposed to monitor Rossett’s work as a courtesy to the Met. In truth he only turned up under protest and seldom even spoke to the Germans.

“If you don’t mind, Sergeant, I’ll stay out of your work as much as I can.