Too stirred up. Her hotel creaked and groaned hideously anyway. In the predawn quiet the unfamiliar background London noise—continuous motor engines, horses, trains, trams and hawkers, and the hum of millions of humans—was reduced, and all the hotel’s sounds came to the fore. The footsteps above, the creaking bed next door one way, the snoring that rumbled in from next door the other way, or from above. There were also the pipes that roared alarmingly every now and again—the waste pipes that is, that ran vertically down the corner of her room. But all these external sounds were themselves only the background to the thoughts swirling in her mind. Jonathan Priest, whom she knew to be Dan’s friend because Dan wrote to her saying that he was, was suggesting that Dan was murdered by a superior officer just after the war ended. And she’d sworn that she wouldn’t go running to anyone to ask if any of this was true. Well, she hadn’t quite promised exactly that, had she? She’d promised to not say that Jonathan had told her.
