Chapter: The Assistant Commissioner walked along a short and narrow street like a
wet, muddy trench, then crossing a very broad thoroughfare entered a
public edifice, and sought speech with a young private secretary (unpaid)
of a great personage.

This fair, smooth-faced young man, whose symmetrically arranged hair gave
him the air of a large and neat schoolboy, met the Assistant
Commissioner's request with a doubtful look, and spoke with bated breath.

"Would he see you?  I don't know about that.  He has walked over from the
House an hour ago to talk with the permanent Under-Secretary, and now
he's ready to walk back again.  He might have sent for him; but he does
it for the sake of a little exercise, I suppose.  It's all the exercise
he can find time for while this session lasts.  I don't complain; I
rather enjoy these little strolls.  He leans on my arm, and doesn't open
his lips.  But, I say, he's very tired, and--well--not in the sweetest of
tempers just now."

"It's in connection with that Greenwich affair."

"Oh!  I say!  He's very bitter against you people.  But I will go and
see, if you insist."

"Do.  That's a good fellow," said the Assistant Commissioner.

The unpaid secretary admired this pluck.  Composing for himself an
innocent face, he opened a door, and went in with the assurance of a nice
and privileged child.  And presently he reappeared, with a nod to the
Assistant Commissioner, who passing through the same door left open for
him, found himself with the great personage in a large room.

Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which, broadened at the
base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped in the fringe of thin
greyish whisker, the great personage seemed an expanding man.
Unfortunate from a tailoring point of view, the cross-folds in the middle
of a buttoned black coat added to the impression, as if the fastenings of
the garment were tried to the utmost.  From the head, set upward on a
thick neck, the eyes, with puffy lower lids, stared with a haughty droop
on each side of a hooked aggressive nose, nobly salient in the vast pale
circumference of the face.  A shiny silk hat and a pair of worn gloves
lying ready on the end of a long table looked expanded too, enormous.

He stood on the hearthrug in big, roomy boots, and uttered no word of
greeting.

"I would like to know if this is the beginning of another dynamite
campaign," he asked at once in a deep, very smooth voice.  "Don't go into
details.  I have no time for that."

The Assistant Commissioner's figure before this big and rustic Presence
had the frail slenderness of a reed addressing an oak.  And indeed the
unbroken record of that man's descent surpassed in the number of
centuries the age of the oldest oak in the country.

"No.  As far as one can be positive about anything I can assure you that
it is not."

"Yes.  But your idea of assurances over there," said the great man, with
a contemptuous wave of his hand towards a window giving on the broad
thoroughfare, "seems to consist mainly in making the Secretary of State
look a fool.  I have been told positively in this very room less than a
month ago that nothing of the sort was even possible."

The Assistant Commissioner glanced in the direction of the window calmly.

"You will allow me to remark, Sir Ethelred, that so far I have had no
opportunity to give you assurances of any kind."

The haughty droop of the eyes was focussed now upon the Assistant
Commissioner.

"True," confessed the deep, smooth voice.  "I sent for Heat.  You are
still rather a novice in your new berth.  And how are you getting on over
there?"

"I believe I am learning something every day."

"Of course, of course.  I hope you will get on."

"Thank you, Sir Ethelred.  I've learned something to-day, and even within
the last hour or so.  There is much in this affair of a kind that does
not meet the eye in a usual anarchist outrage, even if one looked into it
as deep as can be.  That's why I am here."

The great man put his arms akimbo, the backs of his big hands resting on
his hips.

"Very well.  Go on.  Only no details, pray.  Spare me the details."

"You shall not be troubled with them, Sir Ethelred," the Assistant
Commissioner began, with a calm and untroubled assurance.  While he was
speaking the hands on the face of the clock behind the great man's
back--a heavy, glistening affair of massive scrolls in the same dark
marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly, evanescent tick--had moved
through the space of seven minutes.  He spoke with a studious fidelity to
a parenthetical manner, into which every little fact--that is, every
detail--fitted with delightful ease.  Not a murmur nor even a movement
hinted at interruption.  The great Personage might have been the statue
of one of his own princely ancestors stripped of a crusader's war
harness, and put into an ill-fitting frock coat.  The Assistant
Commissioner felt as though he were at liberty to talk for an hour.  But
he kept his head, and at the end of the time mentioned above he broke off
with a sudden conclusion, which, reproducing the opening statement,
pleasantly surprised Sir Ethelred by its apparent swiftness and force.

"The kind of thing which meets us under the surface of this affair,
otherwise without gravity, is unusual--in this precise form at least--and
requires special treatment."

The tone of Sir Ethelred was deepened, full of conviction.

"I should think so--involving the Ambassador of a foreign power!"

"Oh!  The Ambassador!" protested the other, erect and slender, allowing
himself a mere half smile.  "It would be stupid of me to advance anything
of the kind.  And it is absolutely unnecessary, because if I am right in
my surmises, whether ambassador or hall porter it's a mere detail."

Sir Ethelred opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which the hooked
nose seemed anxious to peer; there came from it a subdued rolling sound,
as from a distant organ with the scornful indignation stop.

"No!  These people are too impossible.  What do they mean by importing
their methods of Crim-Tartary here?  A Turk would have more decency."

"You forget, Sir Ethelred, that strictly speaking we know nothing
positively--as yet."

"No!  But how would you define it?  Shortly?"

"Barefaced audacity amounting to childishness of a peculiar sort."

"We can't put up with the innocence of nasty little children," said the
great and expanded personage, expanding a little more, as it were.  The
haughty drooping glance struck crushingly the carpet at the Assistant
Commissioner's feet.  "They'll have to get a hard rap on the knuckles
over this affair.  We must be in a position to--What is your general
idea, stated shortly?  No need to go into details."

"No, Sir Ethelred.  In principle, I should lay it down that the existence
of secret agents should not be tolerated, as tending to augment the
positive dangers of the evil against which they are used.  That the spy
will fabricate his information is a mere commonplace.  But in the sphere
of political and revolutionary action, relying partly on violence, the
professional spy has every facility to fabricate the very facts
themselves, and will spread the double evil of emulation in one
direction, and of panic, hasty legislation, unreflecting hate, on the
other.  However, this is an imperfect world--"

The deep-voiced Presence on the hearthrug, motionless, with big elbows
stuck out, said hastily:

"Be lucid, please."

"Yes, Sir Ethelred--An imperfect world.  Therefore directly the character
of this affair suggested itself to me, I thought it should be dealt with
with special secrecy, and ventured to come over here."

"That's right," approved the great Personage, glancing down complacently
over his double chin.  "I am glad there's somebody over at your shop who
thinks that the Secretary of State may be trusted now and then."

The Assistant Commissioner had an amused smile.

"I was really thinking that it might be better at this stage for Heat to
be replaced by--"

"What!  Heat?  An ass--eh?" exclaimed the great man, with distinct
animosity.

"Not at all.  Pray, Sir Ethelred, don't put that unjust interpretation on
my remarks."

"Then what?  Too clever by half?"

"Neither--at least not as a rule.  All the grounds of my surmises I have
from him.  The only thing I've discovered by myself is that he has been
making use of that man privately.  Who could blame him?  He's an old
police hand.  He told me virtually that he must have tools to work with.
It occurred to me that this tool should be surrendered to the Special
Crimes division as a whole, instead of remaining the private property of
Chief Inspector Heat.  I extend my conception of our departmental duties
to the suppression of the secret agent.  But Chief Inspector Heat is an
old departmental hand.  He would accuse me of perverting its morality and
attacking its efficiency.  He would define it bitterly as protection
extended to the criminal class of revolutionists.  It would mean just
that to him."

"Yes.  But what do you mean?"

"I mean to say, first, that there's but poor comfort in being able to
declare that any given act of violence--damaging property or destroying
life--is not the work of anarchism at all, but of something else
altogether--some species of authorised scoundrelism.  This, I fancy, is
much more frequent than we suppose.  Next, it's obvious that the
existence of these people in the pay of foreign governments destroys in a
measure the efficiency of our supervision.  A spy of that sort can afford
to be more reckless than the most reckless of conspirators.  His
occupation is free from all restraint.  He's without as much faith as is
necessary for complete negation, and without that much law as is implied
in lawlessness.  Thirdly, the existence of these spies amongst the
revolutionary groups, which we are reproached for harbouring here, does
away with all certitude.  You have received a reassuring statement from
Chief Inspector Heat some time ago.  It was by no means groundless--and
yet this episode happens.  I call it an episode, because this affair, I
make bold to say, is episodic; it is no part of any general scheme,
however wild.  The very peculiarities which surprise and perplex Chief
Inspector Heat establish its character in my eyes.  I am keeping clear of
details, Sir Ethelred."

The Personage on the hearthrug had been listening with profound
attention.

"Just so.  Be as concise as you can."

The Assistant Commissioner intimated by an earnest deferential gesture
that he was anxious to be concise.

"There is a peculiar stupidity and feebleness in the conduct of this
affair which gives me excellent hopes of getting behind it and finding
there something else than an individual freak of fanaticism.  For it is a
planned thing, undoubtedly.  The actual perpetrator seems to have been
led by the hand to the spot, and then abandoned hurriedly to his own
devices.  The inference is that he was imported from abroad for the
purpose of committing this outrage.  At the same time one is forced to
the conclusion that he did not know enough English to ask his way, unless
one were to accept the fantastic theory that he was a deaf mute.  I
wonder now--But this is idle.  He has destroyed himself by an accident,
obviously.  Not an extraordinary accident.  But an extraordinary little
fact remains: the address on his clothing discovered by the merest
accident, too.  It is an incredible little fact, so incredible that the
explanation which will account for it is bound to touch the bottom of
this affair.  Instead of instructing Heat to go on with this case, my
intention is to seek this explanation personally--by myself, I
mean--where it may be picked up.  That is in a certain shop in Brett
Street, and on the lips of a certain secret agent once upon a time the
confidential and trusted spy of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim,
Ambassador of a Great Power to the Court of St James."

The Assistant Commissioner paused, then added: "Those fellows are a
perfect pest."  In order to raise his drooping glance to the speaker's
face, the Personage on the hearthrug had gradually tilted his head
farther back, which gave him an aspect of extraordinary haughtiness.

"Why not leave it to Heat?"

"Because he is an old departmental hand.  They have their own morality.
My line of inquiry would appear to him an awful perversion of duty.  For
him the plain duty is to fasten the guilt upon as many prominent
anarchists as he can on some slight indications he had picked up in the
course of his investigation on the spot; whereas I, he would say, am bent
upon vindicating their innocence.  I am trying to be as lucid as I can in
presenting this obscure matter to you without details."

"He would, would he?" muttered the proud head of Sir Ethelred from its
lofty elevation.

"I am afraid so--with an indignation and disgust of which you or I can
have no idea.  He's an excellent servant.  We must not put an undue
strain on his loyalty.  That's always a mistake.  Besides, I want a free
hand--a freer hand than it would be perhaps advisable to give Chief
Inspector Heat.  I haven't the slightest wish to spare this man Verloc.
He will, I imagine, be extremely startled to find his connection with
this affair, whatever it may be, brought home to him so quickly.
Frightening him will not be very difficult.  But our true objective lies
behind him somewhere.  I want your authority to give him such assurances
of personal safety as I may think proper."

"Certainly," said the Personage on the hearthrug.  "Find out as much as
you can; find it out in your own way."

"I must set about it without loss of time, this very evening," said the
Assistant Commissioner.

Sir Ethelred shifted one hand under his coat tails, and tilting back his
head, looked at him steadily.

"We'll have a late sitting to-night," he said.  "Come to the House with
your discoveries if we are not gone home.  I'll warn Toodles to look out
for you.  He'll take you into my room."

The numerous family and the wide connections of the youthful-looking
Private Secretary cherished for him the hope of an austere and exalted
destiny.  Meantime the social sphere he adorned in his hours of idleness
chose to pet him under the above nickname.  And Sir Ethelred, hearing it
on the lips of his wife and girls every day (mostly at breakfast-time),
had conferred upon it the dignity of unsmiling adoption.

The Assistant Commissioner was surprised and gratified extremely.

"I shall certainly bring my discoveries to the House on the chance of you
having the time to--"

"I won't have the time," interrupted the great Personage.  "But I will
see you.  I haven't the time now--And you are going yourself?"

"Yes, Sir Ethelred.  I think it the best way."

The Personage had tilted his head so far back that, in order to keep the
Assistant Commissioner under his observation, he had to nearly close his
eyes.

"H'm.  Ha!  And how do you propose--Will you assume a disguise?"

"Hardly a disguise!  I'll change my clothes, of course."

"Of course," repeated the great man, with a sort of absent-minded
loftiness.  He turned his big head slowly, and over his shoulder gave a
haughty oblique stare to the ponderous marble timepiece with the sly,
feeble tick.  The gilt hands had taken the opportunity to steal through
no less than five and twenty minutes behind his back.

The Assistant Commissioner, who could not see them, grew a little nervous
in the interval.  But the great man presented to him a calm and
undismayed face.

"Very well," he said, and paused, as if in deliberate contempt of the
official clock.  "But what first put you in motion in this direction?"

"I have been always of opinion," began the Assistant Commissioner.

"Ah.  Yes!  Opinion.  That's of course.  But the immediate motive?"

"What shall I say, Sir Ethelred?  A new man's antagonism to old methods.
A desire to know something at first hand.  Some impatience.  It's my old
work, but the harness is different.  It has been chafing me a little in
one or two tender places."

"I hope you'll get on over there," said the great man kindly, extending
his hand, soft to the touch, but broad and powerful like the hand of a
glorified farmer.  The Assistant Commissioner shook it, and withdrew.

In the outer room Toodles, who had been waiting perched on the edge of a
table, advanced to meet him, subduing his natural buoyancy.

"Well?  Satisfactory?" he asked, with airy importance.

"Perfectly.  You've earned my undying gratitude," answered the Assistant
Commissioner, whose long face looked wooden in contrast with the peculiar
character of the other's gravity, which seemed perpetually ready to break
into ripples and chuckles.

"That's all right.  But seriously, you can't imagine how irritated he is
by the attacks on his Bill for the Nationalisation of Fisheries.  They
call it the beginning of social revolution.  Of course, it is a
revolutionary measure.  But these fellows have no decency.  The personal
attacks--"

"I read the papers," remarked the Assistant Commissioner.

"Odious?  Eh?  And you have no notion what a mass of work he has got to
get through every day.  He does it all himself.  Seems unable to trust
anyone with these Fisheries."

"And yet he's given a whole half hour to the consideration of my very
small sprat," interjected the Assistant Commissioner.

"Small!  Is it?  I'm glad to hear that.  But it's a pity you didn't keep
away, then.  This fight takes it out of him frightfully.  The man's
getting exhausted.  I feel it by the way he leans on my arm as we walk
over.  And, I say, is he safe in the streets?  Mullins has been marching
his men up here this afternoon.  There's a constable stuck by every
lamp-post, and every second person we meet between this and Palace Yard
is an obvious 'tec.'  It will get on his nerves presently.  I say, these
foreign scoundrels aren't likely to throw something at him--are they?  It
would be a national calamity.  The country can't spare him."

"Not to mention yourself.  He leans on your arm," suggested the Assistant
Commissioner soberly.  "You would both go."

"It would be an easy way for a young man to go down into history?  Not so
many British Ministers have been assassinated as to make it a minor
incident.  But seriously now--"

"I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do
something for it.  Seriously, there's no danger whatever for both of you
but from overwork."

The sympathetic Toodles welcomed this opening for a chuckle.

"The Fisheries won't kill me.  I am used to late hours," he declared,
with ingenuous levity.  But, feeling an instant compunction, he began to
assume an air of statesman-like moodiness, as one draws on a glove.  "His
massive intellect will stand any amount of work.  It's his nerves that I
am afraid of.  The reactionary gang, with that abusive brute Cheeseman at
their head, insult him every night."

"If he will insist on beginning a revolution!" murmured the Assistant
Commissioner.

"The time has come, and he is the only man great enough for the work,"
protested the revolutionary Toodles, flaring up under the calm,
speculative gaze of the Assistant Commissioner.  Somewhere in a corridor
a distant bell tinkled urgently, and with devoted vigilance the young man
pricked up his ears at the sound.  "He's ready to go now," he exclaimed
in a whisper, snatched up his hat, and vanished from the room.

The Assistant Commissioner went out by another door in a less elastic
manner.  Again he crossed the wide thoroughfare, walked along a narrow
street, and re-entered hastily his own departmental buildings.  He kept
up this accelerated pace to the door of his private room.  Before he had
closed it fairly his eyes sought his desk.  He stood still for a moment,
then walked up, looked all round on the floor, sat down in his chair,
rang a bell, and waited.

"Chief Inspector Heat gone yet?"

"Yes, sir.  Went away half-an-hour ago."

He nodded.  "That will do."  And sitting still, with his hat pushed off
his forehead, he thought that it was just like Heat's confounded cheek to
carry off quietly the only piece of material evidence.  But he thought
this without animosity.  Old and valued servants will take liberties.
The piece of overcoat with the address sewn on was certainly not a thing
to leave about.  Dismissing from his mind this manifestation of Chief
Inspector Heat's mistrust, he wrote and despatched a note to his wife,
charging her to make his apologies to Michaelis' great lady, with whom
they were engaged to dine that evening.

The short jacket and the low, round hat he assumed in a sort of curtained
alcove containing a washstand, a row of wooden pegs and a shelf, brought
out wonderfully the length of his grave, brown face.  He stepped back
into the full light of the room, looking like the vision of a cool,
reflective Don Quixote, with the sunken eyes of a dark enthusiast and a
very deliberate manner.  He left the scene of his daily labours quickly
like an unobtrusive shadow.  His descent into the street was like the
descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off.  A
murky, gloomy dampness enveloped him.  The walls of the houses were wet,
the mud of the roadway glistened with an effect of phosphorescence, and
when he emerged into the Strand out of a narrow street by the side of
Charing Cross Station the genius of the locality assimilated him.  He
might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can be seen
of an evening about there flitting round the dark corners.

He came to a stand on the very edge of the pavement, and waited.  His
exercised eyes had made out in the confused movements of lights and
shadows thronging the roadway the crawling approach of a hansom.  He gave
no sign; but when the low step gliding along the curbstone came to his
feet he dodged in skilfully in front of the big turning wheel, and spoke
up through the little trap door almost before the man gazing supinely
ahead from his perch was aware of having been boarded by a fare.

It was not a long drive.  It ended by signal abruptly, nowhere in
particular, between two lamp-posts before a large drapery
establishment--a long range of shops already lapped up in sheets of
corrugated iron for the night.  Tendering a coin through the trap door
the fare slipped out and away, leaving an effect of uncanny, eccentric
ghastliness upon the driver's mind.  But the size of the coin was
satisfactory to his touch, and his education not being literary, he
remained untroubled by the fear of finding it presently turned to a dead
leaf in his pocket.  Raised above the world of fares by the nature of his
calling, he contemplated their actions with a limited interest.  The
sharp pulling of his horse right round expressed his philosophy.

Meantime the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to a
waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner--one of those
traps for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a perspective of
mirrors and white napery; without air, but with an atmosphere of their
own--an atmosphere of fraudulent cookery mocking an abject mankind in the
most pressing of its miserable necessities.  In this immoral atmosphere
the Assistant Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise, seemed to
lose some more of his identity.  He had a sense of loneliness, of evil
freedom.  It was rather pleasant.  When, after paying for his short meal,
he stood up and waited for his change, he saw himself in the sheet of
glass, and was struck by his foreign appearance.  He contemplated his own
image with a melancholy and inquisitive gaze, then by sudden inspiration
raised the collar of his jacket.  This arrangement appeared to him
commendable, and he completed it by giving an upward twist to the ends of
his black moustache.  He was satisfied by the subtle modification of his
personal aspect caused by these small changes.  "That'll do very well,"
he thought.  "I'll get a little wet, a little splashed--"

He became aware of the waiter at his elbow and of a small pile of silver
coins on the edge of the table before him.  The waiter kept one eye on
it, while his other eye followed the long back of a tall, not very young
girl, who passed up to a distant table looking perfectly sightless and
altogether unapproachable.  She seemed to be a habitual customer.

On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the observation
that the patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of fraudulent
cookery all their national and private characteristics.  And this was
strange, since the Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British
institution.  But these people were as denationalised as the dishes set
before them with every circumstance of unstamped respectability.  Neither
was their personality stamped in any way, professionally, socially or
racially.  They seemed created for the Italian restaurant, unless the
Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them.  But that last
hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them anywhere
outside those special establishments.  One never met these enigmatical
persons elsewhere.  It was impossible to form a precise idea what
occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night.
And he himself had become unplaced.  It would have been impossible for
anybody to guess his occupation.  As to going to bed, there was a doubt
even in his own mind.  Not indeed in regard to his domicile itself, but
very much so in respect of the time when he would be able to return
there.  A pleasurable feeling of independence possessed him when he heard
the glass doors swing to behind his back with a sort of imperfect baffled
thud.  He advanced at once into an immensity 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 van and horses, merged into one
mass, seemed something alive--a square-backed black monster blocking half
the street, with sudden iron-shod stampings, fierce jingles, and heavy,
blowing sighs.  The harshly festive, ill-omened glare of a large and
prosperous public-house faced the other end of Brett Street across a wide
road.  This barrier of blazing lights, opposing the shadows gathered
about the humble abode of Mr Verloc's domestic happiness, seemed to drive
the obscurity of the street back upon itself, make it more sullen,
brooding, and sinister.

 The Assistant Commissioner walks along a "short and narrow street like a wet, middy trench" and eventually enters a public building, where he meets a young, fresh-faced male secretary. This secretary, who has the vibe of "a large and neat schoolboy" , looks at the Assistant Commissioner doubtfully and says that his boss probably won't be able to meet with him. When the A.C. says that he's come to talk about the bomb in Greenwich, the secretary finally agrees to go check with his boss. The AC gets admitted to the private chambers of a member of English parliament named Sir Ethelred, whom the narrator describes as "Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which, broadened at the base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped in the fringe of greyish whisker" . The man from parliament wonders out loud if the recent attack is the beginning of a new wave of anarchist terrorism. The A.C. assures him that this isn't the case. The man shoots back that he was given a guarantee by Inspector Heat "less than a month ago" that no attacks could take place . The A.C. then tells Sir Ethelred about Verloc's involvement as a secret agent from the foreign embassy. Sir Ethelred agrees that this situation will require special treatment. Ethelred is red with anger over the foreign powers that mess with England in these backdoor ways. The A.C. says that they really need to seek out and get rid of secret agents, since these agents are more harmful than helpful to society. The A.C. then adds that instead of using Heat, he wants to get to the bottom of the case personally. He plans to visit Verloc and scare him into admitting something about what's going on. Ethelred gives the A.C. his blessing to figure out the case his own way. Parliament is working late this night, and Ethelred says that if the A.C. finds out anything, he should come straight back and tell him. The A.C. returns to the police station and finds out that Heat has gone home for the day, taking with him the most important piece of evidence in the Greenwich case. You'd never get away with that sort of thing in an episode of CSI, though. The A.C. sends off a note to his wife, saying that he won't be able to meet with her and Michaelis' great lady that night. He goes out into the wet London night and grabs a horse-drawn taxi. Then he rides it to an Italian restaurant and eats for a moment. Conrad takes a moment to talk smack about how unauthentic the Italian food in London is. After this section, the Assistant Commissioner walks to Brett Street in search of Verloc's shop. During this time, the narrator keeps getting drearier and creepier in his descriptions of London. The A.C. passes by another horse-drawn carriage, which seems to "merg into one mass, seem something alive--a square-backed black monster blocking off half the street" . The street takes on an appearance that's "sullen, brooding, and sinister" . This description shows the mounting tension of the plot's rising action, and it's a very characteristic tone for Conrad, who often writes about dark, wet, and dreary places.

