Pensively, Dennis sipped his stout and, wearing a moustache of foam, asked Gawsworth why the story was called ‘N’, fearing the answer might be something glaringly apparent to a more attentive reader than himself. But the biographer could only spread his hands and widen his already wide eyes, pushing out his bottom lip into a pout of glum bewilderment.

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest. I asked him the same thing myself, when he made his submission. I’d suggested that perhaps it stood for North, because it’s all about North London, but he only looked at me and smiled – rather annoyingly, I thought. Wouldn’t confirm it or deny it. All I could get out of him was one of his conundrums. He patted me on the knee, and said, “Here we commence the missing second half of London’s alphabet.” Make what you will of that.

  ‘One of the finest writers that this country’s ever seen, but heaven knows, the man could be a trial. Tricky Welsh mind, you see, forever coming up with things that will deliberately mislead his audience. “N” is a marvellous example – first, he softens up the reader with unlikely facts, such as the difficulty there is in locating the precise part of Stoke Newington where Edgar Allan Poe was schooled, for instance. Then, once he’s established an air of authentic reportage, he introduces elements that he’s invented but which sound just as convincing, like the book that he describes and quotes bits from, A London Walk. Devilishly clever, don’t you reckon, as a literary device?’

  Dennis became aware that from the table’s far side, Austin Spare was shooting him a warning glance while seemingly engrossed in what the Grants were on about, reminding him that there were things not open to discussion here. Thus chastened, Dennis feigned surprise, proceeding cautiously.

  ‘Huh. Well, I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I thought it must be a real book that I hadn’t heard of. So, you’re saying Machen made it up?’

  Gawsworth smiled, smug with his insider knowledge and oblivious to Dennis’s. Even the cardboard toucans seemed amused while drowning under their pale-ale meniscus.

  ‘Absolutely. Made the book up, made the author up – the Reverend Hampole, was it? – made it all up for an earlier novel, The Green Round, and then referred to it again in “N”. Each of the works concerns a grander London than the one which we perceive, so I suppose having the same imaginary book in both tales makes a sort of cockeyed sense. Where did you come across the story, incidentally? I hope it wasn’t an abridged appearance in some tatty magazine.’

  Across the room, the darts match was called off by mutual consent before somebody lost an eye. The ambient smother of brown-blue tobacco smoke was heavier now, as was the adjectival swearing: ruddies had pupated into bloodies as the night wore on, before eventually hatching in their adult form as fuckings. Dennis reached one hand into the carrier bag beside his pub stool, pulling out the copy of The Cosy Room, and also Spare’s horse-racing oracle that he’d snatched up by accident, still in its tipster’s envelope. Gawsworth was overjoyed, as though one met with a beloved child after a lengthy separation. At Dennis’s invitation, he took the collection in his hands, turning it this way and then that, admiring the wallpaper understatement of the green-and-white wraps, lifting it to his roseate nose and breathing in its stale bouquet.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blowed! And isn’t it a magnificent creature, although I say so myself ? You know, I’ve not seen one of these in years. That’s made my day, that has. I don’t suppose you’d like it signed, at all? I mean, I know that I was merely the compiler, not the author, but, still, if you wanted, I’d be only too pleased to affix my scribble to it.’

  While the volume technically belonged to Ada, Dennis didn’t see how the compiler’s signature could harm its saleability. He grinned and nodded his plucked-chicken head, assuring Machen’s Boswell that the scribble would be a tremendous honour. Beaming like a child, although a drunken one, Gawsworth produced a lovingly mistreated fountain pen from his breast pocket and proceeded to inscribe The Cosy Room, in bright blue ink and a clear hand that barely trembled. This activity attracted the attention of the table’s other half, and Spare’s jocular comment was near shouted to be made out over the nearby piano, then meandering from ‘Hush, Here Comes a Buzz Bomb’ on to ‘I Live in Trafalgar Square’, without a noticeable change of key.

  ‘Stone me, I didn’t know we’d got the autograph hounds in tonight. ’ere, Dennis, wossat other thing, in the white envelope? Looks like it’s one o’ Monolulu’s tips what ’e ’ands out.’

  Dennis admitted that it was, and sheepishly confessed that it contained Spare’s own Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards. Amid considerable mirth, the artist requisitioned Gawsworth’s pen and volubly insisted that he too should sign his work for their young visitor. ‘’oo shall I make it out to? Should I just put Dennis Knacker’s-yard, or what?’ Struck by an impulse that was either altruistic or self-serving, Dennis asked if the manila packet with the cards in could be dedicated to Grace Shilling. ‘She’s the woman that I’m staying with at present, and she thought your art was smashing.’ Underneath the printed title on the inner envelope, Spare carefully penned, ‘For Grace Shilling, with regards, from tuppenny-’apenny Austin Osman Spare’. Everyone laughed, Dennis replaced the two signed items in his carrier and, having apparently exhausted a restricted repertoire, the waxen pianist once more commenced the ‘Harry Lime Theme’.

  Finishing his stout, confirming his next-day appointment at Wynne Road and shaking everybody’s hand, Dennis picked up his bag and exited the Elephant and Castle before etiquette demanded that he get a round in and stand everyone a drink. Being the conscientious type, this didn’t make him feel particularly good, but, then, since he was relatively broke, it didn’t press upon his conscience any further than the second or third lamppost.

  The overcast hour it took to reach Spitalfields – across Tower Bridge, as an immense weight of black water crashed invisible below – had not one star, the sky emptied of promise rim to rim. He walked up through the Minories to Aldgate while the city nursed its wounds and made sounds in its sleep around him, muttered distant brawls or coughed backfiring cars. Cutting along Whitechapel High Street to the arse-end of Commercial Street, the east wind blew a chandelier chain of police-car bells from somewhere by the river at his back, and he allowed himself to think that he was making progress with his lunatic dilemma. He was going to get through this in one piece, and with luck that piece would be the right way out. With Spare’s assistance, by this time tomorrow night he’d have returned the nondescript and terrifying book to where it came from, as his former landlady had stipulated, and might be a few steps closer to regaining something like a normal life. All of his problems had boiled up like silverfish out of A London Walk, and he felt certain that they’d melt away once he was rid of it. His feet beginning to complain, he passed the closed café where he’d scoffed down his breakfast, and resolved to be more positive about his situation.

  Being pulled by Maurice Calendar through the impossibility of the different London, he supposed, had been exciting, although not so much as it was frightening. Meeting with Austin Spare and his associates seemed full of mystery and enchantment, but the sheerest upside to Dennis’s present circumstances was Grace Shilling, by a mile. He was inordinately chuffed with himself in instructing Spare to sign the racing forecast cards for her. It wasn’t that he thought the gift would make her fall into his embrace or her bed: if it just stopped her from reminding him about her sharpened key so frequently, then he’d be more than happy. All he really wanted was to get back to her flat and see how that face looked if it was pleased with him.

  He passed the Spitalfields church, squatting in the night with dunce-cap steeple and a stony porthole for its mouth, a giant clown screaming only silence over the surrounding yards, over the history-stained Ten Bells, bulging with light and voices on Fournier Street’s far side. A little further on, he crossed the road and turned left into Folgate Street, rehearsing as he went his presentation of Spare’s autograph to Grace. Should it be nonchalant, or did it need a build-up? For the first time in his barely started life, he was returning home to someone female who was not his mum or Coffin Ada, and he found that he was looking forward to it with only the slightest twinge of apprehension.

  When he reached what he was sure was the right number, he retrieved the borrowed house key from his pocket and let himself in as quietly as he could, attempting to avoid those floorboards in the downstairs hall that Grace had pointed out as noisy troublemakers. He could tell from the thin crease of light beneath her room’s door that she was at home, but thought it best to knock politely before entering. After a longer pause than he’d expected, Grace said to come in, in a flat tone suggesting she was unenthusiastic about their reunion, but then she didn’t know about the racing forecast cards.

  He was two steps inside before he worked out that things had gone badly wrong. Grace sat bolt upright on the rickety settee, completely still and white with dread. They weren’t alone. There was a fellow who resembled a more threatening Glenn Miller standing by the unlit stove, and, Dennis realised belatedly, another bloke behind him, just inside the door. A third perched on the sofa beside Grace, an oversized man with a crafty smile, a prominent mole on one cheek, and eyes that looked as if they found amusement in appalling things.

  ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in,’ said Jack Spot.

  4

  Of Popes and Pot-Pourri

  By the seashell ashtray on the coffee table was a straight-edge razor, open in a V at ten to two, anticipating trouble come quarter to three.

  If they’d had time to talk things over, Grace and Dennis would have probably agreed that they were equally to blame for their shared nightmare. Dennis, for his part, hadn’t informed Grace that the murderous criminal seeking the Hampole book was Jack Spot, nor that Spot already had Dennis’s name. Conversely, Grace hadn’t made clear to Dennis that when she’d said his tough-sounding moniker was ‘useful’, she’d meant as pretended pimp that she could use to menace rowdy or non-paying customers: ‘You do know that I’m one of Dennis Knuckleyard’s girls, don’t you?’ She’d employed the strategy already twice that day, which evidently had been once too many.

  They sat side by side on a couch as precarious as their situation, eyes fixed dead ahead, not looking at each other. Both were terrified and struggling to keep it from their faces, gazing levelly above the folded blade and ashtray at the figure sitting just across the table from them, on a chair retrieved from Grace’s kitchen. Two impassive thugs stood silent, one to either hand – Glenn Miller on the left, an olive-skinned chap on the right – a pair of brackets that contained the seated man’s coiled-spring malevolence as an aside.

  The widely publicised king of the underworld, in nicely tailored umber suit and blue silk tie, was peering down into the carrier bag that Dennis had just handed to him. Under a retreating hairline, Spot’s brow creased with inauspicious puzzlement. Dapper and dangerous, like a grenade sporting a pocket handkerchief, at last the tall, well-fed man lifted his enquiring gaze to the young couple who sat facing him over the razor-laden table. When he spoke, the barely restrained East End snarl was that of an enraged dog struggling with elocution lessons.

  ‘Where’s my fackin’ book, then?’

  The balloon of fear inflating inside Dennis for the previous five minutes was now bigger than Dennis himself, containing him and Grace within its paralysing stillness, in its swell of apprehension that awaited an inevitable, catastrophic pop. Desperate attempts to strategise had proven useless, all his thoughts a blizzard, and nonsensically distracted by the leftmost goon’s remarkable resemblance to a disappeared bandleader. In the crushing knowledge that he could find himself dead or earless at a moment’s notice, Dennis could only rely on instincts that he knew to be notoriously unreliable. These were all at that moment strenuously advising him, whatever else he did, not to attempt a cover story. His one half a chance, as far as he could see from inside his anxiety-inflatable, was to be as straightforward and as truthful as his circumstance allowed. He cleared his throat, still uncut.

  ‘Mr Comer …’ Unbelievably, Dennis’s memory had retrieved Spot’s proper name from one of the newspaper articles about the man, and done so just when it was needed. ‘Mr Comer, I am much too scared to tell you any lies. I wish to God that you’d found Harrison the night before I saw him, and not the night after, because then it would be you was lumbered with the bastard thing, not me. That book … it isn’t what you think it is.’

  This wasn’t going well. Spot’s stare, formerly merely quizzical, was now refrigerated. He spoke through a worryingly frozen smile, while that left-hand enforcer looked more like Glenn Miller by the instant.

  ‘Oh, yeah? And what do I think it is?’

  Dennis discovered he was blinking frantically, aware that his next words might leave his cheeks in shreds. Beside him on the listing sofa, Grace was breathing slowly, through her nose.

  ‘If I’m right, you think it’s a passport to a … well, another part of London, one that most people don’t know is there. And yeah, having the book means that there’s bound to be some dealings with, you know, the other place, but it’s not like a passport. It’s … I don’t know. It’s more like a warrant or a summons. It’s more like a sentence.’

  Seeming now more interested, the racketeer narrowed his calculating eyes.

  ‘’ow’s that, then?’

  Playing on a wireless in Dennis’s head was Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, although he really wasn’t. Ears full of imaginary clarinets, he pressed on with his summary for the defence and/or last words.

  ‘It’s a long stretch of obligation where there’s no rewards; there’s only penalties. I was told that if you don’t get objects like A London Walk back where they came from, you could end up … have you ever heard of somebody called Teddy Wilson, from out Lewisham way? Got found in a state I can’t even imagine, all for trying to throw away a book just like the one you’re after.’

  Spot, at this point, shared a concerned frown with his stout, olive-skinned accomplice before turning back to Dennis.

  ‘Mr Kankus ’ere, some time back, ’e informed me of a chap ’e’d ’eard about, south of the river, what ’ad turned up in a, shall we say, unusual condition. That this Wilson, was it, who was all the wrong … ?’

  ‘The wrong way out? Yeah, that was him.’ He felt Grace stiffen on the couch beside him, and could hardly blame her. Like Jack Spot, the inside-out book dealer was another detail of his story that he’d not seen fit to share. It hadn’t seemed the proper time, although he had to grudgingly admit that right now was a great deal worse. Spot thrust his lower lip out thoughtfully as he considered Dennis’s foregoing argument. He drummed the digits of one hand against the table’s worn veneer, a small intaglio ring on his little finger adding a metallic tick to the percussion. After a few moments, the celebrity crook ceased this tense accompaniment and exhaled heavily, as though he’d come to an unsatisfactory conclusion. With an air of deep regret, he picked the razor up and opened it, regarding Grace and Dennis with eyes that were oddly fatherly and deeply disappointed.

  ‘Well, all what you’ve said is very useful, and I shall be takin’ it into account, believe me. Just the same, I can’t ’elp noticing that you’ve avoided the main thrust of my enquiry, which, if I recall, was, “Where’s my fackin’ book?”’

  Dennis was now as stiff as Grace, the pair of them become the wooden couple in a painted weather-house, blanched as if lit by lightning. When Spot had produced the mother-of-pearl-handled item earlier, both had observed the tailor-made, tubular, inside jacket pocket he’d retrieved it from, this carefully kept evil: evidently something of a speciality. Bolt upright with the electricity of panic, Dennis tried to think of something non-disfiguring to say, all the time wondering if when Spot cut his face in half, the taller of the two enforcers would shout, ‘Pennsylvania, six-five-thousand!’ Mouth almost too dry to speak, let alone blither, he had no choice but to stick with honesty as his best policy.

  ‘In Brixton. There’s this chap there I was told could help me get the book back to this, well, this other district. He said that he’d take me there tomorrow morning, and that I should leave it overnight with him for my own safety.’

  Jack Spot rubbed an idle forefinger beside his nose, and glanced up, smiling, at the brace of heavies before looking back at Dennis with the brief smile now evaporated.

  ‘From what I can see, it looks like ’e was wrong about that last bit, weren’t ’e? Now, why don’t you cheer us up by tellin’ me this facker’s name and where he lives?’

  Because, well, then there’d be no reason not to murder him and Grace, the way these men had murdered Flabby Harrison? Because it would bring havoc down upon a gifted individual that Dennis rather liked? Because it would be cowardly? All of these answers bubbled on the teenager’s chewed lips, and all of them were less than adequate. Waiting for inspiration, he stalled unconvincingly.

  ‘You don’t want him. He’s just an old bloke in a basement with a load of cats, painting his pictures, mumbling about magic. He’s a bit touched, to be honest. I should leave him out of it. Oh, God, no, don’t …’

  These last syllables were occasioned by the mob boss leaning forward and bringing the repurposed shaving accessory towards Dennis’s eyes, which were tight shut for several seconds before he eventually realised that his executioner had paused. He opened them to Spot’s face only inches from his own, features contorted by a struggle between rage and trepidation, the titular blemish on his left cheek quivering like a volcanic island in a sea of deepening pink.

  ‘’old on. ’old on a fackin’ minute. You say Brixton, and you say as ’e paints pictures. It’s not wossername, that black magician in the papers, is it? Spare. It better not be fackin’ Spare, or …’

  Dennis nodded mutely, braced for the forthcoming slash, but Spot slammed down the razor with an anguished growl and said, ‘Aow, fack! Fack my old rags! Fack! Fack!’, and more in this same tenor, for what seemed like an unbearably long while. The brute lieutenants looked as startled and disturbed by their commanding officer’s tirade as his intended victims, everyone stock-still and staring as a sharply dressed Mills bomb of angry malice trembled, at the threshold of explosion, in a Spitalfields flat too small to contain it. In the end, Glenn Miller intervened with a profound East End inflection that greatly reduced the otherwise remarkable resemblance.