For a moment I thought I saw a face; then it was gone.

Chandler, standing beside me, hadn't spoken a word for ten minutes. No one had.

The smell of the river came on the night air, bland and rotten. We went on watching, and I glimpsed a black wet fin disturbing the surface not far from the bank. Bubbles popped in the soft light of the lamps, tracing a regular pattern.

The face came again and I kept my eyes on it, but it must have been a patch of rubbish or something, surfacing on the slow current; it vanished again. From across the river Big Ben started chiming the prelude to the hour. The air was sultry after the heat of the long summer day.

On our left the small boat was moving downstream, the two men in it paying out the lines to the net. Someone on the bank swivelled the end floodlight, and we saw an oily black ripple as one of the divers neared the surface and rolled over, going down again. The eleventh chime of the clock faded to silence.

More people were walking down from the bridge, where they'd left their cars. The police had a barrier halfway along Riverside Walk, to keep them back. The inspector in charge of the operation was standing somewhere on the other side of Chandler, not speaking, leaving it to his team to get on with the job: they obviously knew what they were doing. -

I'd never met Chandler before; he was one of the new people, a pale thin man who kept his distance, afraid of questions until he felt sure of his ground. I'd only asked him a couple of things and he'd stared at me for a long time, as if I were a bloody fool; it was just that he didn't know the answers. None of them knew for certain who it was in the river here.

Tilson had said it was Sinclair, when I'd talked to him on the bridge earlier tonight.

The submersible lamps were swinging again, below water; the divers moved like shadows across the diffused light, nearer the surface now. The men in the boat had started calling to the land crew along the bank.