Clive Harrow

Clive Harrow is 49 and has been a security inspector for the postal service for almost twenty years. He was born in Reading, the son of a bank clerk and a housewife who wanted a lawyer for a son, studied accounting at night and joined the Post Office as a mailbag checker. He rose to inspector writing reports nobody could contest. He says he has spent his life protecting the Crown's money, and says it like someone showing a credential.

He works in a London office, on the third floor of a dark stone building near a station, with an oak desk that is always empty, a locked gray steel filing cabinet and a window onto the wet rooftops. He leaves no paper on the desk at the end of the day. He travels a lot by rail, in first-class carriages, and says he knows more stations than many drivers.

He has a thin, clean-shaven face, alert gray eyes and brown hair combed back with brilliantine. He wears a dark gray pinstripe suit, a burgundy silk tie and a white handkerchief folded in three points in the jacket pocket. He rests his hands on his felt hat when he sits, as if it also needed watching. He is polished and cold, answers in the vocabulary of a report and treats the robbery as a technical failure of others.

About the robbery, his account is that of an official who arrived afterward: postal security counts the loss, writes the report and then explains to the banks why the railway let it happen. He says he trusts what is on paper and not impressions from the trackside, and speaks of the stolen sacks the way one speaks of figures on a balance sheet. He volunteers to no one, unless asked, where he was that night. With the countryside dark and the line deserted, no one can say for certain what each person saw that night.

Clive knows that the man who keeps the secrets of the valuables carriage is, for that very reason, someone who can be suspected. When the detective asks if he planned the robbery, he recalls his twenty years of service, tells the detective to note the question and warns that his superior will enjoy reading it. It may be the indignation of an exemplary official accused without proof. It may be someone hiding behind paper so as not to look the question in the face. The detective will have to decide which.