Blincoe’s shrug was like that of an oak in strong wind.

  ‘Be that as it may, our earliest priority must be the woman who is being held a prisoner. Despite what the City Heads have said, we have no guarantee that Mr Spot shall not betray his bargain, and so do away with Mr Knuckleyard and the young woman, once he has the thing he wanted. My proposal is that I might walk with our young colleague here to Spitalfields where he has his appointment later, there to have a word with Mr Spot myself. It may be that I can convince him to observe the correct protocols, and in this way spare these two innocents further misfortune.’

  With a grunt of effort, Jack Neave rose from the settee and limped across the lino to retrieve an ashtray from the table near the thickly curtained window, keeping up the conversation as he went. Watching him walk, morbidly fascinated by his barrelling gait, Dennis observed that the man’s pumping elbows, probably employed to keep his balance, looked instead like the twin pistons powering his compact engine as he hauled his gammy leg back to the couch and resumed his position.

  ‘Good idea. I don’t imagine that a puffed-up little ’ard case like Jack Spot will want to muck about once you’ve explained things to ’im. As for all the Arnold Circus folderol tomorrer night, leave that wi’ me. While you’re off down in Spitalfields, I can get most o’ that set up from this place without goin’ too far out me way.’

  Still putting himself back together from the mental rubble he’d been left in, Dennis started to pick up on bits and pieces of the back-and-forth that he did not yet fully understand.

  ‘S-So where’s this place, then? I’m guessing that we’re in Stoke Newington, but, but the window that you covered up, that opens on the other London, doesn’t it? How is that possible? I mean, this room looks like it’s been here a long time. Why haven’t people found it?’

  Monolulu and the junior partner of M. Blincoe & Son deadpanned at each other before turning to regard their stockier associate, as if agreeing Neave should be the one to furnish Dennis with an answer. The old bohemian stubbed out his cigarette and sighed.

  ‘It’s where I’m livin’ at the moment, in my ongoin’ attempts to solve the Problem of Existence. It’s a little ’ideaway ’ere in Stoke Newington I ’eard about a year or two ago. The bloke what owned it couldn’t let it out for love nor money, on account of everybody sayin’ it was ’aunted – now, the view out through the window ’ere ain’t like that all the time, but then you’d only ’ave to see it once for it to make a supernatural impression, wouldn’t yer? So, anyway, I snapped it up for next to nothin’. As for why nobody’s found it, well, they ’ave, only they didn’t know what they were lookin’ at, most of ’em. Only one who did, as far as I can see, was Arthur Machen. This, unless I’m very much mistaken, is the ’ouse ’e wrote about in “N”.’

  Dennis’s mouth was hanging open like a storm drain. With the realisation that the place where he was sitting was the one he’d read of in The Cosy Room at Grace’s flat, the full enormity of what he was involved in hit him like a train. Even the bibulous protagonists of Machen’s tale never laid eyes on this location, but saw it described in Thomas Hampole’s mythical A London Walk, the non-existent tome which, for the past week, had been ruining Dennis’s life. It was as if the world he’d thought to be a solid was instead a layered thing, made up of slippery fables all competing to be real, books within books. He’d fallen through the fragile paper page into a different narrative, where circumstance was without limitation, as were the unfathomable jeopardies. He’d clumsily tripped out of fact and on to the precarious sliding floor of fiction, where nothing was safe. Unable to make any progress with this daunting thought, he opted to deploy another question.

  ‘And, if I can ask, who’s Harry Lud, this chap that Jack Spot’s meeting up with?’

  Monolulu snorted in derision.

  ‘Oh, hardly a chap, I can assure you! He is altogether of a different cut!’

  Sitting beside the tipster on a chair that looked too flimsy to support his weight, Gog Blincoe shook his great totem-pole head. Long and lugubrious, his flat face seemed incapable of animation.

  ‘Mr Lud is reckoned one of the Arcana, which are, so to speak, the foremost signifiers of the Higher Town, and so must be approached with caution. In the case of Mr Lud, who is no less than the quintessence of all crime, that caution must be doubled. I doubt any good shall come to Mr Spot from this audition, but that is not our concern, so long as no harm comes to anything this side of the divide. Now, lest my ears deceive me, I have just heard the Stoke Newington church clock striking for three. We had best be about our business in delivering this young woman from her captors.’

  With similar protests from his joints and the boards under the linoleum, the tradesman stood, compelling the three other men to stand too, if they wanted to remain in earshot. Blincoe was still dressed as though for market, in a lengthy apron of rough hessian, his shirtsleeves rolled back and exposing his enormous lower arms, with thick blond springs of hair erupted from their backs as though fresh from the lathe. The right arm sported what appeared to be a pale and old tattoo, a simple heart containing the word ‘Mum’ that, through an accident of the long-faded ink, looked almost chiselled or engraved. Jack Neave, with something motherly in his attentiveness, bustled and clanked about the murky room as he made ready to show Dennis and the giant fruiterer out to the street.

  ‘Come on with me, you two. And if ’is ’ighness ’ere can wait till I get back, I’ll treat ’im to a tot o’ rum while ’e pours out ’is troubles.’

  Monolulu sniffed.

  ‘It will take more than alcohol to ward off the dark sorcery that I am promised … which is not, of course, to say that I refuse your offer. My best wishes to you, Dennis Knuckleyard. I hope that you and Mr Blincoe are most valorous in the rescue of this poor, unlucky girl. White man for pluck!’

  Leaving the turf predictor with his ostrich feathers sagging and unkempt in the low-wattage half-light, Ironfoot Jack led Gog and Dennis through a dreamlike labyrinth of unlit landings, stairs and passageways until they reached the stout front door, which Jack unbolted.

  ‘Good luck with that spotty little berk. You be at Arnold Circus by eleven, Friday night, so me and Gog can put yer straight before the eminences turn up for their chinwag. I don’t know if we can count on Monolulu bein’ there. ’e’s in a funny mood, after your brush with Charmin’ fuckin’ Peter. Very quiet, for one thing, did yer notice? Or at least, not deafenin’. It’s a bad sign. Anyway, you get on down to Spitalfields before it rains. See yer tomorrer.’

  The door, final as a coffin lid but with brass letterbox and knocker, closed on Neave’s comradely grin and they found themselves in the backstreets of Stoke Newington, a lengthy hike in front of them and black clouds massed like an armada overhead. Squinting towards the iron sky, Gog rubbed his hands together as if trying to start a fire, then tipped his finely wrinkled features down to favour Dennis with a sober, businesslike expression. ‘Right then. Let us two be off.’

  They’d walked most of the Kingsland Road’s long drop in silence before the first heavy spots fell, Blincoe seemingly comfortable with keeping mum if there was nothing useful to be said. Gripping the raincoat’s collar tight around his scrawny neck, Dennis glanced up in envy at the taller man who seemed oblivious to the sudden cloudburst, spattering droplets sluiced from his impassive face down seams and creases that functioned as guttering. Around the point where Kingsland Road turned with a retail flourish into Shoreditch High Street, their eventual destination nearing, Dennis felt compelled to make sure that his taciturn accomplice was prepared for confrontation.

  ‘Will you be alright with this? I mean, Spot and his heavies have got weapons. Razors, knives. Guns, probably. It’s just, I don’t want you walking in there without …’

  Although the al fresco salesman’s lined visage seemed too immobile to permit a smile, the log-slide rumble emanating from his chest was very like a chuckle.

  ‘It does seem to me that all of us – saving for those limbless through injury – are bearing arms, and I believe my own to be sufficient. But what of yourself ? Are you better recovered from your meeting with the London Cat than our friend Monolulu?’

  They were not far from the junction with Commercial Street, walking against the rain, and Dennis shrugged his sodden shoulders in reply.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so, although I’m not sure how much of this I’m really taking in. I feel a bit numb, to be honest. What about Prince Monolulu, though? It sounded as if he was swearing off the other London, for fear of that, well, you know. The cat thing.’

  Gravely, Blincoe shook his head, showering Dennis with the run-off.

  ‘That is as may be, though to avoid the Great When shall avail him naught. Much like myself and my currently inconvenienced fellow Mr Calendar, the London Cat – that I refuse to call by any other name – is one of those that look enough like something from this realm to pass for normal, and may so go back and forth between the two domains. For Mr Monolulu not to venture on the Higher Town means little, when it may as readily come visit him.’

  Attempting not to think about his own exchange with Charming Peter, Dennis wiped the water from his dripping eyebrows with one hand and steered the conversation on another tack.

  ‘Yeah. Austin, Mr Spare, he said that you and Maurice Calendar came from the other place originally. I’m surprised you can be bothered with this world at all, considering it’s pissing down like this half of the time. Back at the flat up in Stoke Newington, you were the one who kept insisting that the first thing was to get Miss Shilling out of harm’s way, when you’ve never met her. I’m dead grateful that you did, but can’t help wondering what makes you so concerned. I mean, I wouldn’t want to handle this without you, but I can’t see why you’re making it your problem.’

  Blincoe swivelled his eyes sideways under barely used lids and regarded Dennis pensively for a few moments, before turning his arresting countenance back to the deluge and responding.

  ‘Am I right in thinking Mr Spare showed you the Popes of Clink Street?’

  Dennis nodded warily, unsure where this was headed.

  ‘Might it likewise be the case that he informed you of the terrible calamity that took place in the late Victoria’s reign, when one of those baleful contraptions managed to discharge itself from its confinement, so that emissaries of the Great When were required for its recapture?’

  They were then crossing the busy road, eliciting vexed horn blasts from a massive green Pickford’s removal van that roared out of Great Eastern Street, which the stallholder did not suffer to acknowledge. Dennis once more answered Blincoe’s quiz in the affirmative.

  ‘He said the other place had sent a couple of its heavyweights to this world, so that they could catch the thing and take it back to where it came from.’

  Blincoe grunted as the put-out Pickford’s wagon growled off down Commercial Street.

  ‘Aye, that were me and Mother made responsible for that grim undertaking. Popes of Blades are not without resource, and it had been evading notice by configuring itself as something broken or discarded, heaped up in the corner of a premises without remark. At last we came upon it in a yard off Heneage Street, and I allowed my mum to beat the creature to submission because being herself feminine, she had the greater hatred for it. We returned it, somewhat crippled, to its prison hole where it was swiftly killed and disassembled by its cousins. Many said that we had done a noble thing in its retrieval, although we ourselves thought otherwise.

  ‘Here is my point: whatever we’d achieved, we’d not achieved it quick enough. More than a three-month it had taken us to find that wretched mechanism, and in that time, some five women, young ones by my reckoning, were cut to bits by the sour fruit of our ineptitude. This will explain my zeal that no more bystanders should come to mischief as a result of my unwieldy sluggishness.’

  Dennis was still absorbing the foregoing anecdote, unsure if it was about what he thought it was about, and came close to colliding with the cabbage peddler when his huge companion stopped abruptly in their weighty tracks. Through windswept sheets of drizzle, Blincoe took in his surroundings before venting a despondent sigh.

  ‘Now that I think of it, I have not been about these parts since that November night, some sixty years since. I see now that, though I never meant to, I have been avoiding it, along with all the memories that are its residents. I still recall my mother calling that malign device a little bugger when she stamped its thorax in, and I remember also the thick clicking sounds that it made in reply, much like the chain of a malicious bicycle might do. This is a sorry place, I think.’

  It was only when Dennis followed the titanic merchant’s nearly wistful gaze that he too, with a chime of cardiac panic, realised where they were. The metal black and white sign bolted high up on the wall of the row opposite, its letters accented with rust or pigeon shit, said ‘Folgate Street’. They had arrived, and Dennis was surprised to feel his knees go weak. Blincoe, appearing not to notice, pointed to the nondescript terrace of shops across the pittering road from where they stood.

  ‘It was up there it had got in, we reckoned, through what used to be the Liberty of Norton Folgate. All the Liberties are gateways. Why, just past that barber’s is a panel that bears an advertisement for liver pills, but, in a low light and a hurry, might be taken for a door. You know how such things work by now, I trust, which is to say that they work best by happenstance.’

  He once more ground his roughly textured palms together, absent-mindedly, and peered through the persisting shower at the wet front doors of Folgate Street.

  ‘It is my understanding that the woman we have come here to assist has her address upon this very lane. Since I can see no profit in delaying matters, shall we be about our business?’

  Though delaying matters had always been Dennis’s preferred approach, he found he had no argument to counter Gog’s more direct attitude. Reluctantly, and with his stomach knotting into animal balloons, he led his vast confederate across the rain-lashed street to Grace’s doorstep.

  He still had his borrowed key, and so the two of them went in the front and down the squeaking hall to what he hoped was the right flat, where he knocked timidly and heard a man’s voice tell him to come in. Swallowing nervously, he turned the worn Bakelite handle.

  His reception looked like a publicity still from a horror film, with everybody motionless, and the assembled cast – Jack Spot, Solly the Turk and Grace herself – staring wide-eyed at Dennis as he made his fumbling entrance. Or rather, as he rapidly accepted, staring at what was behind him.

  Spot and Solly Kankus jumped immediately to their feet, both of them startled and the former clearly angry, eyes like an affronted scrapyard dog.

  ‘’oo the fack’s this? I never said you could bring anybody with yer! If you’ve fackin’ …’

  Pointedly closing the door behind him, the imposing vendor of fresh produce stepped around the stammering Dennis and held up a worryingly big placating hand.

  ‘I am Gog Blincoe, and I come here as a spokesman of the different city, to discuss the terms of our engagement with you. Meaning you no disrespect, there are first things which I must ascertain before we may commence our haggle.’

  Without offering the incredulous Spot even a glance, plainly indifferent to the criminal’s response, Gog lumbered past him and the equally astounded Kankus to where Grace had been sitting throughout all this, perched mutely on the edge of her collapsible settee. Crouching upon his mammoth haunches, the experienced market man gazed searchingly into the motionless girl’s apprehensive eyes. With their two heads in such proximity, the great disparity in scale between them was so marked that they might have belonged to different species. Dennis noticed that Grace trembled almost imperceptibly as Blincoe spoke to her, his voice the patient rumble of a cart on cobbles.

  ‘Mistress Shilling, I am glad to find you in fair health, and have but one interrogation for you: have you, in the time of your captivity, been handled roughly or else harmed in any way? If it is so, then tell me, and I shall kill both these scoundrels on the instant, sparing all of us further involvement with this irksome difficulty.’

  Spot and Kankus stared at the squatting colossus with respective speechless outrage and mounting alarm, then exchanged a bewildered glance with one another before looking back to the apparently untroubled Blincoe. Grace, for her part, had not dared to take her eyes from those of the solicitous and gentlemanly Soho ogre for a second. When she answered him, it was in tones much younger than the twenty-something years that Dennis had supposed for her, as though the presence of this fairy-story monster had reduced the tough streetwalker to an awestruck child.

  ‘No. Don’t do that. Nobody’s been hurt so far, and I’d like it if it carried on like that.’

  Jack Spot was bordering upon the apoplectic, his mole quivering.

  ‘You’ll fackin’ what? Kill us, is that what you just fackin’ said? Do you know who I am?’

  Taking his time, the ponderous leviathan rose from his crouch, straightening to what must, in Dennis’s estimation, have been getting on for seven feet, taller than the not-insubstantial Spot or Dennis by a hand or two, and with the gravity of both men put together. Blincoe turned and scrutinised the gangster with unblinking eyes that held not the least measure of concern.

  ‘Yes, I believe I do. You are one Jacob Comer, known more generally as Jack Spot because of that unsightly blemish you have on your cheek. You have accrued your fortune largely by intimidating turf accountants, and it may be you suppose all others to be similarly cowed. If that is so, there is a danger that you have misunderstood our situation here. I shall repeat to you, I am not from the city that you know. My origins are in the other place, and it is not my well-being that’s under threat in these negotiations. It may be you are in need of a display, to settle your uncertainties. That being so, then Mistress Shilling will perhaps obtain for me a kitchen knife, if such a thing is to be had.’