The last mile of my beat was always Kidbrook Lane.

Sergeant saved it for the newer men and for nights when the weather had turned,

and that Wednesday morning the weather had turned.

PC Donald Gunn.

A cold April rain had come down sometime after midnight,

and by the time I was walking out past the

market gardens, the lane was one long rut of mud and standing water, and my cape was heavy with

it, and my boots were making the sucking sound boots make when they don't want to leave the ground.

I carried a bull's-eye lantern in my left hand, and a truncheon on my belt, and a whistle on a lanyard that I had never yet had caused to blow.

The whistle was new that year.

Before the whistle, we had wooden rattles, and before the rattles you just shouted.

I had been a constable in the Greenwich Division near on five years by then, and the loudest thing I had

ever done on Kidbrook Lane was cough. There was a little brook ran along the hedge. The Kidbrook,

they called it. You could hear it even when you could not see it. You could hear the cabbages,

too, if you know what I mean. The leaves taking the rain.

On a country lane at four in the morning you listen for things,

because the eyes are only good for as far as the lantern reaches.

And the lantern that morning reached about as far as a man's arm.

I thought at first it was a dog. There was a shape at the edge of the lane

in the ditch where the water was running and it was moving. I had found dogs before in that

ditch. Farmers up the Eltham Road used to put down the ones that got old and sometimes the body

would not stay where it had been put. I stepped

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