Gideon's Fog [antikvár]

Gideon^s Fog Commander Gideon of the Yard couldn't remember a fog like it. Not since he was a lad, anyway. Nowadays clean air policies had more or less done away with them— but this was like old times—thick, impenetrable yellow and suffocatingly sulphurous. He sat in his car and looked across the Common and remembered how he used to earn a copper or two, helping the lost home with a candle in a jam jar to light their way —and suddenly he saw a gleam of light. Likely young lads were still turning an honest penny perhaps—then alarm rose in him What had he seen ? What mischief did the fog conceal ? And elsewhere that night other misdeeds were being committed—some in the name of a league of militants, bent on clearing promiscuity and shameless abandon out of London's parks Gideon is involved in a web more impenetrable than the murky, fetid air of GIDEOJ^'S FOG The Park To George Gideon, Commander of the Criminal Investigation Department of London's Metropolitan Police, the parks of London were the city's lungs. Take them away, and the eight million or more men, women and children who lived in the heart and environs of the sprawling metropolis would slowly suffocate. At one time, when the myriad of houses in the central boroughs and inner suburbs burned coal, suffocation had threatened in another way. Then, the word "pollution' had been littie known. But as the small coal brought from the deep mines of South Wales, and even from Scotiand, had smouldered and burned, so its choking fumes had risen up the narrow chimneys to fill the air with particles of soot and corroding acids. Not all the smoke had come from tiny houses and small grates; much had come from the larger, more prosperous houses in the hezuit of the city; in Mayfair and Knights-bridge, Kensington and Victoria. In their huge fireplaces coal had blazed up chimneys once swept—and not so very long ago—by tiny boys driven up into the hot soot-lined tunnels. Their sweeping brushes had dispersed fumes, which, invisible and unsuspected in fine weather, descended like a blight on the windless days when moisture