‘That was one of the things I thought I saw, a length of gauze floating a few feet off the ground, shining like headlights. I was, you know, I was somewhere near the churchyard when it happened, so I thought it might be what you’d seen as well. It’s stuff I’m not supposed to mention. I can only tell you that its name is “Her Train”, but I don’t know what that means. And it likes poetry, apparently, although I can’t see how when it’s a curtain. That’s the lot. That’s all I know about it.’

  Grace leaned back on the settee to stare at the blank white ceiling while she thought this over. When eventually she tipped her burning copper head once more in Dennis’s direction, she was wearing what appeared to be at least the run-up to a smile.

  ‘I like the sound of that – “Her Train”. So, that would be connected with Saint Bride, like it’s a bridal train or something, yeah? That’s poetry, in my book. Too poetic for someone called Knuckleyard to have invented, anyway. You’re not having me on, I don’t think. You seem fairly harmless, and that’s the best hard-luck story that I’ve heard in donkey’s years. What are you going to do, though, about all this mess you’re in, this business that you can’t tell anyone about? Is there somebody who could help you, where you live?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘She said I shouldn’t go back while all this is going on. I live at Coffin Ada’s.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘I know. And as for what I’m going to do, I haven’t got the foggiest. That book’s the main thing. I’m supposed to take it back to somewhere in this other place, but now I’ve seen a bit of it, I don’t know how that’s possible. I’ve had some, well, some funny customers who’ve offered me advice, but nothing that I can make head nor tail of. I had that black chap, the tipster, Monolulu. He came up to me in Berwick Street, like he knew what was going on, and gave me something that turned out to be … here, you can see it if you like. I don’t think it’s forbidden.’

  Dennis rummaged in his carrier bag, once more avoiding contact with the cloth-covered catastrophe that was the Hampole volume, and retrieved the envelope that held the racing forecast cards. His hostess took it from him, but did not immediately look at it, keeping her eyes on him instead. The frown was back, and what had looked like the beginnings of a smile quickly evaporated.

  ‘Hang on. You’re telling me that the most famous black bloke in the country gave you this, out of the blue, and that he somehow knows about this trouble that you’re in? I’ve got to say, you’re not making it any easier believing all this, are you? I mean, seriously, Prince Monolulu?’

  He shrugged helplessly, and spread his hands.

  ‘It’s just what happened. I was … I was in a different life when I woke up this morning, then it all fell in on top of me. I’ve had a really funny day.’ It was the best he could come up with.

  Grace regarded him for a few moments, undecided, then turned to the item resting in her lap. She took the small manila envelope out of the larger white one and pouted incredulously at the words SURREALIST RACING FORECAST CARDS before removing and examining the cards themselves. She flipped one over, then another, and the distrust trickled gradually from her face as if suspicion were a liquid. While she studied the array of images, squinting and leaning close to trace their smouldering contours, Grace’s features lapsed into a childlike wonderment that caused Dennis to once more ask himself how old he thought she was. Older than him, judging by her voice, her bearing and her manner, but not too much older. Perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two? Eventually, she tore her gaze free from the pasteboard oracles and looked back up at him.

  ‘I’ve not seen anybody draw like this before. The way he does a line, it’s like he’s winding wool, like he’s gone off into a trance and taken everybody with him. What’s his name?’

  She sounded as if she knew something about art, and Dennis felt pleased with himself that, on this one occasion, he could make out he knew something, too.

  ‘It’s this chap Spare, who lives across in Brixton. My mate John, he made me think I should perhaps go over there and see if he can help me. Someone … someone else I met suggested the same thing. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, but John told me – Austin, that’s the artist’s first name, Austin Spare – that people say he’s a magician.’

  Brushing flames of hair out of her eyes, a gesture that he could have watched all day, Grace took a last look at the cards before replacing them in their two envelopes and handing them to Dennis, who returned them to his carrier-cum-albatross. She lit another cigarette and then responded.

  ‘A magician. Well, I dare say I’ve heard stranger things, although they’re mostly things I’ve heard from you this evening. He’s a smashing artist, though, there’s no gainsaying it. Alright. You’ll probably turn out to be a bloody nuisance, but at least you’re interesting. If you’ve nowhere else to go, you can stop here until you’ve sorted yourself out. I shouldn’t mind it, either, if you took your mate’s advice and went to see this Spare chap down in Brixton. Even if he wasn’t any help to you, I’d like to find out more about him. You do that tomorrow and I’ll look upon it as your contribution to the rent.’

  Accepting her conditions without hesitation, Dennis babbled his relief and gratitude, while she reminded him about the sharpened key. They both relaxed a little after that, with Grace putting a match to a malodorous paraffin stove, much alleviating the October chill. She asked if he’d had anything to eat, then took him through into her tiny kitchen where she made them both a cheese and onion omelette with some bread and butter, chatting tersely as she served it up in two enamel dishes. Wolfing it down ravenously, mouth too full to talk, he learned that she’d been an evacuee, one of the kids packed off to somewhere outside London during the hostilities. There were still thousands of them, four years after the war finished, that had not been reunited with their homes and families. Sometimes this would be because their old homes were no longer standing, or because their parents had been either killed or were too hard up to accept their children back.

  Grace was in the first category. Placed with a couple up in rural Derbyshire and suffering the unwanted attentions of the husband, she’d absconded back to a gutted metropolis during the war’s concluding weeks, only to find that Mum and Dad and house had all been taken from her by a buzz bomb. For a time, she’d slept rough – public lavatories, blitzed churches, an abandoned car – surviving on what she could pinch from shops or washing lines. Dennis supposed she would have been sixteen or seventeen when this was going on. Inevitably, Grace had learned from observation what the best employment option was for girls without resources and, reluctantly, had cut her life to suit the cloth. By her account, she’d done alright: she’d managed to get by without a ponce or a protector, which was hardly easy but was how a lot of women on the game preferred to handle things. Not a majority, by any means, but a fair few. She’d stopped at fleabag lodging houses until there was cash put by to rent her Spitalfields accommodation, and now here she was. She thought that one day she might like to be an actress, or a dancer. Having by this point devoured his omelette, Dennis interjected that he one day hoped to be a secret agent, and Grace told him to grow up.

  Before she went to bed, she fetched him a plaid blanket so he could sleep doubled up on her settee, instructing Dennis to augment it with his raincoat if he got too cold after she turned the paraffin stove off. She had a duplicate front door key for the next day in case he got back from Brixton before she was home, and told him there was a communal bathroom on the upstairs landing, but that, rather than alert her neighbours, he’d be better pissing in the kitchen sink. Leaving a shaded table lamp to see by, she informed him, quite unnecessarily in his opinion, that she slept with her upsetting keyring underneath her pillow, and, with that, she wished him a good night.

  He was too full of unfamiliar voltage to consider sleeping straight away, and couldn’t close his eyes without commencing footage of a rush down avenues impossible, dragged in the wake of an expanding Maurice Calendar. Wishing he had something to read that at the very least might bore him into an unconscious state, he suddenly recalled the Machen book that Ada had suggested he peruse, The Cosy Room, currently nestling in his carrier bag beside A London Walk. Thinking that he could do with a stout pair of tongs, he gingerly removed the Rich & Cowan first edition from its brown paper container and flicked to the story that his landlady had recommended, the ambiguously titled ‘N’.

  At first, he struggled with what he perceived as stuffiness in the tale’s presentation, although by the time he’d read a page or two, the burnish of its language and its atmospherics had seduced him. It appeared to be about a group of genial if quarrelsome old friends, who’d met to reminisce upon the vanished London of their youth over a glass or two of steaming punch. By turn avuncular and argumentative, they bickered over the supposed existence of a paradisiacal area in Stoke Newington called Canon’s Park, a rumoured place without the least shred of supporting evidence.

  It was a yarn told in five parts, and Dennis only reached the third of these before his skin began to crawl. A short way down its opening page there was the following: ‘ … he chanced to light on a shabby brown book on his untidy shelves … It was called A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis. The author was the Reverend Thomas Hampole, and the book was dated 1853.’ Shooting a nervous glance towards his string-handled receptacle, Dennis read further. The remainder of that third instalment was a lengthy passage quoted from the Reverend Hampole’s tome, in which the amiable clergyman put forward an unorthodox philosophy. Hampole maintained that a more absolute reality endured behind the flimsy scenery of the material world, made out of nothing save ‘Heavenly Chaos’, with the reverend providing a supporting anecdote that seemingly referred to the Stoke Newington location recently debated by the story’s bibulous and tetchy colleagues.

  Grace’s lamplit living room acquired a pall of gathering unease, and shadows that he wasn’t used to. Now regretting his poor choice of bedtime literature, he persevered through the remaining sections of the narrative to its finale. Though increasingly unnerved, Dennis discovered he could still appreciate the cautious and oblique way in which Machen edged around his startling subject matter – his conception of the human realm as a mere safety curtain, a dilapidated rag, threadbare in places, that was pulled across a more substantial world. ‘N’’s penultimate episode had one of the punch-quaffing comrades spend an evening in a tavern known as the King of Jamaica, where the working men he drank with offered further confirmation of the liminal Stoke Newington address. This led to a concluding chapter where the querulous companions were once more assembled, with one of the comrades, Arnold, now convinced by his experience that the elusive Eden of Stoke Newington existed, while his fellows seemed unshaken in their scepticism. And then Dennis reached the story’s closing lines, where Arnold succinctly summed up his comprehension of events: ‘I believe that there is a perichoresis, an interpenetration. It is possible, indeed, that we three are now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter streams … And with what companions?’

  Dennis closed The Cosy Room and dropped it back into the carrier without looking, not wanting to even see the Hampole book by this point. He took off his jacket, tiptoeing into the claustrophobic kitchen where he urinated quietly into the sink, then ran the tap for a few seconds until he felt less uncivilised. Arranging blanket, coat and jacket on the truncated settee, he took his shoes off and then slipped beneath the makeshift bedding, folding his long body into an uncomfortable Z-posture on the too short couch. The word ‘perichoresis’ from the tale’s conclusion was embedded in his skittering thoughts where it resounded disconcertingly, partly because he didn’t know its meaning, partly because he was sure that Maurice Calendar had used it. As exhaustion wrapped its heavy arms around him, Dennis reached out to click off the table lamp and told himself he hadn’t understood the Machen story, while remaining fearful that he had. Eventually, he slept.

  The unexpected sun slapped him awake into a room he didn’t know and an immediate spill of non-specific dread. Prising apart sleep-lacquered lids, he noticed first a single filament of red-gold hair shed on the nearer arm of the settee, prompting a memory of Grace – Grace Shilling, had she said? – and where he was. His gaze next lighted on the carrier bag, which explained and identified the dread.

  Uncramping himself, he sat up, deducing from the timbre of the silence that he was the only person in the ground-floor flat and possibly in the whole house. He’d evidently slept for longer than he meant to, and his wary rescuer had no doubt already gone out to get on with her day. She must have dressed and breakfasted while making a considerable effort not to wake the drooling stranger on her couch, which Dennis found both touching and embarrassing. When he was relatively confident that none of Grace’s neighbours were at home, he crept upstairs and found the bathroom that she’d mentioned, treating himself to a brisk cold-water wash and brush-up before darting furtively back to the rooms below. Lacking her presence, these seemed without use or meaning, like deserted stage sets when the characters and dialogue were somewhere else. Putting his jacket, shoes and coat on, Dennis tidied up as best he could, which is to say he left his blanket neatly folded at one end of the settee, and once more ran the tap in Grace’s kitchen sink, just to be sure. Hefting his carrier bag and pocketing the house key he’d been trusted with, he walked out into Folgate Street and Wednesday.

  Spitalfields hunched scarred brick shoulders, unimpressed by the surprise deluge of sunlight, and corralled the district’s ingrained blackness into narrow, overshadowed lanes where dark could loiter until nightfall. Dennis winced and squinted his way down Commercial Street, past the uproarious market and the church with tongues of soot licking its corpse-white flanks, to find himself a cheerfully dishevelled café that appeared too recent to have fried an egg for Jack the Ripper. Here he gloried in a robust sausage sandwich – slabs of fresh bread, soft and baked to flaking umber at the edges, soaking up the hot grease of the bangers – washed down with a cup of tea he knocked back scalding hot, for the astringency. Asking the undernourished waitress for a second cup that he could linger over, he gazed worriedly into its cloudy depths and tried to think about his situation, quickly realising that both the thinking and the situation were impossible. He had a mob of gangsters after him, and he was either stumbling into something supernatural or he was going mad. He was about to go south of the river, all the way to Brixton, seeking a magician who’d been recommended by a famously eccentric racing tipster. Everything about his life and circumstances was, it seemed to him, unbearably precarious.

  When he was halfway through the beverage, Dennis was struck by something that he recognised, despite the rarity of the phenomenon, to be a sensible idea: if he was heading into danger, he should have someone with a degree of influence who understood about his problems and could maybe intervene if things went haywire. Tolerable John had said already that he didn’t want to be involved, but there was Clive, Clive Amery, in many ways Dennis’s hero, brimming with capability, connected to the legal system, and thus perfect as a second or a safety net. No sooner had the name occurred to him than a bright shaft of hope broke through his cloudbank of anxieties, bringing a sense of reassurance, albeit tentatively, that he’d not allowed himself to feel in days. He finished his tea hurriedly, and knew somehow that this decision would make an enormous difference to the way that his predicament played out. Buoyed by a sudden optimism, he paid up and exited the café after asking for a pocket-dragging weight of copper pennies with his change.

  He rattled back along Commercial Street to the fire-blackened church, and squeezed into a phone box that stood to one side of its intimidating portico. Inside, the oblong stack of stale air had a modern, plastic smell that was betrayed by undertones of toilet, and the huge directory was slumped and dog-eared like a decomposing tree stump. Turning the thin pages, Dennis searched his recollection for the law firm where Clive worked, looking for Dolden, Green, Dorland & Lockart before he remembered this had been another company; one that he’d simply noticed in Clive’s notepad. Finally, his intermittently astute unconscious mind supplied the name Jessop & Wilks, whose number he found easily after his long and pointless Dolden dead end. Dialling, he experienced an obscure satisfaction in the rapid clicking as the dial rotated back to zero after every digit.

  When somebody picked up the receiver at the other end, a beeping was commenced that carried on until sufficient sweaty pennies had been crammed into the dented slot. A woman’s voice announced the company name in an enquiring tone, and Dennis asked her if Sir Dennis Compton-Knuckleyard could have a word with Mr Amery. When Clive answered the phone on his extension line some moments later, he already sounded cheerfully amused by this uncalled-for interruption to his working day.

  ‘Lord Oxydol! Well, what an unexpected pleasure to receive a call from you. Do say that it’s about my knighthood.’

  Dennis laughed. He wasn’t used to telephones, and always marvelled at the closeness they permitted with somebody who was miles away; more so than with someone in the same room, where there was not that sense of intimations whispered, crackling, into his ear.

  ‘Yeah, well, I asked my mate, the Duke of Persil, but he said it wouldn’t wash. Look, Clive, I’m sorry about calling you at work. It’s just, I’ve got myself mixed up in something that’s a bit peculiar, and I wanted you to know about it in case anything should happen. So that you could, you know, keep an eye out for me. I’m not living up at Ada’s any more, so I’m more or less on my own, now.’

  ‘My dear boy, you know I always like to keep an eye out for you working-class types. That’s why I’ve still got my watch and cufflinks. What exactly are you on about?’

  Out through the smeared panes of the phone box, Dennis watched a red-faced tramp with chimney-brush hair weaving through the weeds and bird-soiled slabs of the adjacent churchyard, trying to escape the unaccustomed dazzle. He told Clive what he was on about, though not exactly.