Swann sipped his coffee, adding several of Mr Tate’s newly invented sugar cubes, of which he’d grown very fond, and looked hard at Parker.

” We can’t afford to bugger this one up, Parker.”

Parker wished his superior wouldn’t use such language.

“No need to worry, sir, everything is in place.”

” Good. And I don’t want Evans in plain clothes when he goes over the road. Tell him he’s to put himself across as a bent copper and that he wants some of the action, whatever that might be, or he’ll close them down.”

” Right you are, sir. I shall go and brief him now.”

” And get back to me as soon as Deveroux shows himself.”

“Sir.”

With that Parker closed the window, picked up Swann’s dirty cup and saucer and made to leave.

” You’ll make a lovely father, John.”

” Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

Swann, just for a minute, thought he saw the hint of a smile around Parker’s mouth as the young man left the office.

But Swann regretted his little joke about fatherhood as the past came flooding back, as it usually did after a cup of Parker’s strong coffee, too much sugar, and far too much Turkish tobacco.

Twenty-eight years earlier Herbert Merriman Swann, as a twenty-six year old captain of Dragoons, was sitting atop his horse on the morning of September 13th 1854 watching a dispirited and cholera-infested British expeditionary force come ashore at Kalamata Bay – some two hundred feet
below him – in a blaze of bearskins and red tunics and realised that, although undoubtedly brave, the army of which he was still a proud member, which would still win the military challenge ahead (the Russian Army was little more than a uniformed rabble in Swann’s opinion) was, nonetheless, extremely poorly equipped in arms, medical care, clothing and food. It made him angry to realise that most of the men he saw disembarking below would probably die of disease rather than wounds
received in battle.

But Swann, in that first year in the Crimea, still retained a certain admiration for the commander of the expeditionary force, Lord Raglan, a man who’d served bravely under Wellington (losing an arm at the battle of Waterloo) and a commander that tried desperately to keep his forces on the move in the Crimea by always trying to outflank the Russians by the reluctant use of Swann’s reconnaissance platoon that could, with the use of semaphore, fast riding, and the connivance of an ever growing band of journalists (who made excellent spies), and a couple of photographers, with their wagon loads of equipment, ensure Raglan had as much up-to-date information as possible.