He had a square face and had dealt with a receding hairline by shaving his hair down to a brown fuzz. Too many transport café breakfasts and standing his round at the pub had put a tire around his waist. He was a large man, and driving big trucks and hauling heavy gear had given him broad shoulders and heavily muscled arms. I took a step backward and the door opened. A white blur marched up the hallway until it filled the view through the window from side to side. Somebody yelled, “It’s your boyfriend!” which earned a shush and a sotto voce reprimand from someone else. Through the reproduction stained-glass window in the front door I could just make out blurry figures running back and forth at the far end of the hall. There was an immediate chorus of female yelling from inside. I paused and checked the garden there were gnomes loitering near the ornamental birdbath.

The front door was flanked on one side by a hanging basket full of blue flowers and on the other by the house number inscribed on a ceramic plate in the shape of a sailing yacht. It had been raining in London but after Colchester I’d driven into clear blue skies and the sun lit up the rows of well-kept Victorian terraces that ran down to the sea.Ĭhez May was easy to spot, a 1970s brick-built fake Edwardian cottage that had been carriage-lamped and pebble-dashed within an inch of its life. At the end of the road lay Brightlingsea–lining the coast, so Leslie had always told me, like a collection of rubbish stranded at the high-water mark. Having spent many a Saturday night as a probationary PC wrestling squaddie in Leicester Square, I made sure I stayed on the main road and bypassed the city altogether.īeyond Colchester I turned south and, with the help of the GPS on my phone, got myself onto the B1029 heading down the wedged-shaped bit of dry ground jammed between the River Colne and Flag Creek. The classically educated chinless wonders who run the British army obviously took this admonition to heart because Colchester is now the home of their toughest soldiers-the parachute regiment. He’s surprisingly sympathetic to the revolting Brits and scathing about the unpreparedness of the Roman generals who thought more of what was agreeable than expedient. I knew all this because I’d been reading the Annals of Tacitus as part of my Latin training. If you drive northeast up the A12 you eventually come to Colchester, Britain’s first Roman capital and the first city to be burned down by that redheaded chavette from Norfolk known as Boudicca. I T’S A sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind. T HANKS to everyone from the last book plus the staff of the Metropolitan Archive and Sarah for sneaking me into the Groucho.

Moon over soho by ben aaronovitch