sity of greasy slime and damp
plaster interspersed with lamps, and enveloped, oppressed, penetrated,
choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night, which is
composed of soot and drops of water.

Brett Street was not very far away. It branched off, narrow, from the
side of an open triangular space surrounded by dark and mysterious
houses, temples of petty commerce emptied of traders for the night. Only
a fruiterer's stall at the corner made a violent blaze of light and
colour. Beyond all was black, and the few people passing in that
direction vanished at one stride beyond the glowing heaps of oranges and
lemons. No footsteps echoed. They would never be heard of again. The
adventurous head of the Special Crimes Department watched these
disappearances from a distance with an interested eye. He felt
light-hearted, as though he had been ambushed all alone in a jungle many
thousands of miles away from departmental desks and official inkstands.
This joyousness and dispersion of thought before a task of some
importance seems to prove that this world of ours is not such a very
serious affair after all. For the Assistant Commissioner was not
constitutionally inclined to levity.

The policeman on the beat projected his sombre and moving form against
the luminous glory of oranges and lemons, and entered Brett Street
without haste. The Assistant Commissioner, as though he were a member of
the criminal classes, lingered out of sight, awaiting his return. But
this constable seemed to be lost for ever to the force. He never
returned: must have gone out at the other end of Brett Street.

The Assistant Commissioner, reaching this conclusion, entered the street
in his turn, and came upon a large van arrested in front of the dimly lit
window-panes of a carter's eating-house. The man was refreshing himself
inside, and the horses, their big heads lowered to the ground, fed out of
nose-bags steadily. Farther on, on the opposite side of the street,
another suspect patch of dim light issued from Mr Verloc's shop front,
hung with papers, heaving with vague piles of cardboard boxes and the
shapes of books. The Assistant Commissioner stood observing it across
the roadway. There could be no mistake. By the side of the front
window, encumbered by the shadows of nondescript things, the door,
standing ajar, let escape on the pavement a narrow, clear streak of
gas-light within.

Behind the Assistant Commissioner the