Spot was now shaking his head furiously, trying to retain some vestige of control on circumstances that were suddenly and inexplicably slipping between his nicotine-stained fingers.

  ‘No! No, no, no! A fackin’ knife? You think I’m fackin’ simple, do yer?’

  Bark-deep furrows creased the indoor mountain’s forehead as he studied the unnerved and spluttering gangster.

  ‘My opinion on your intellectual prowess is beside the point. What I think is that you are frit, believing that I mean to harm you with this implement when, as I have already told you, it is but for purposes of demonstration. And besides, the presence of a dirk makes not a whit of difference to your safety, when I could as well destroy you with my hands, or feet, or any other part of me. I am a hard man, Mr Spot, in ways you will not previously have encountered. Now, if Mistress Shilling will provide the object I have asked for, then we may sooner continue with our discourse.’

  While the rest of her had stayed as motionless as marble, Grace’s gaze had shifted back and forth between the villain and the vendor, trying to judge which way the winds of her predicament were blowing. With Spot incandescent but reduced to pop-eyed silence by the fruit-seller’s unanswerable logic, it appeared she was decided. Face an apprehensive white mask as though all the blood had rushed to her extraordinary hair, she rose from the settee and went without a word into her tiny kitchen, coming back almost immediately with the requested knife, which she handed to Blincoe before once again resuming her position on the couch.

  The instrument looked frighteningly sharp, with its steel blade perhaps eight inches long. As Blincoe gripped its handle with both hands, holding it upright like a ceremonial sword, the atmosphere in the cramped sitting room was charged with an uncomfortable electricity. Dennis and Grace were cringing, although neither was entirely certain why, and Solly Kankus’s complexion had become as pale as whey. No one said anything.

  It was so sudden. With one quick and forceful motion of his burly arms, the vegetable salesman drove the vicious length of steel three inches deep in his own brow between the barely interested eyes, with a horrific, splintering thud. Everyone shrieked except Grace, who had clapped both hands over her mouth, and whose wide eyes seemed just about to relocate on to her blanching cheeks. Exhaling what was possibly a groan of mild discomfort, Blincoe took his hands away to leave the weapon jutting from his head as though he were a cutlery-draw unicorn.

  Dennis let himself slump against the closed door, breathing heavily and slowly. The choleric rage had drained out of Jack Spot to be replaced by bilious greyness, and the shaken Mr Kankus said, ‘I feel a bit sick, to be ’onest,’ and sat back down on the kitchen chair he’d risen from when they arrived. Gog, with the murderous antenna sticking from his face, gave the ashen and speechless crime king an appraising look, content that he had made his point, which was just then embedded where Gog’s forebrain should have been. The market-stall leviathan’s small eyes contracted even further and he nodded, satisfied, initiating a faint quivering in the protruding kitchen knife.

  ‘I issue, sir, not from the egg but from the acorn, and am thus insensible to injury. If you or your lieutenant should possess a fowling piece or barker, I must tell you that it would be no more use than this cake cutter that is giving me crossed eyes at present. In my back I have a musket ball, and in my thigh some lead shot and what I think may be a flint arrowhead, with none of it occasioning the least discomfort. I have had assailants think to burn me down, but being densely made, I am inordinately slow to catch, and so could strike my death blow while they were still fiddling with their tinderboxes. And, should it occur to you to publicly unmask my hidden nature, I shall ask to whom you might announce this revelation, and just what it is that you’d reveal. That there’s a stall in Berwick Street run by a chap made head to toe from wood? Perhaps this is a titbit you might share with those policemen sympathetic to your cause, or, otherwise, amongst your loyal fellows in the criminal fraternity, who surely would not see such ramblings as a sign of instability or weakness.’

  Spot stood voiceless and as still as ditchwater throughout all this, with all the fight gone out of him, flipping for options through the cooked books of his agile mind and realising he hadn’t any. Gog continued, confident that he and the crime overlord had reached a point of mutual understanding.

  ‘Now then, if I have convinced you of my verifieds, we may at last procession to the kernel of our present business, being your request for conference with a dignitary from the other town, that you hope might alleviate your plights. Do I have the right comprehension of it?’

  Blinking a staccato Morse of disbelief, Spot stared hard at the floor and didn’t seem to want to look at his interrogator’s poleaxed cranium.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, look, can you take that chopper out yer nut before we start with this? It’s givin’ me the screamin’ abdabs.’

  Blincoe shook his head from side to side, which only served to make the startling protrusion wobble disconcertingly.

  ‘No. I believe that we shall leave it where it is, that it may better focus your attentions on the seriousness of our discussion. Furthermore, it will help to prepare you for the rendezvous you have demanded with a presence that, I promise, is more sobering than I. He is called Harry Lud, and it is the red-handed soul of crime itself that you make your appointment with. To this end, I have been instructed to relay the finer details of that gathering. It is to be in Arnold Circus at the confluence of seven streets, upon the first stroke of tomorrow’s midnight. Should you harbour any apprehensions, then you may come armed, although as I have shown you, there is precious little use in it. If it should further reassure you, then you can as well bring this man here’ – he briefly pointed the unsettling knife’s handle at the seated Solly Kankus – ‘as a bit of company. He’s seen enough this afternoon, and seeing more does not present a greater risk to our security, when neither of you can say anything of this, even to those you love the best, lest it should see you dragged away to bedlam.’

  Trembling so badly that his chair was rattling, Kankus looked appalled to be invited to the next night’s gathering, and very likely knew the things that he’d already witnessed would be in his foulest dreams for the remainder of his life. He had the eyes of one condemned. Jack Spot, meanwhile, had listened to the vegetable man’s address with fidgety unease, a misbehaving schoolboy called to reckoning before an unexpectedly stern teacher. He scratched his boiled-bacon neck and shuffled his expensive shoes, all the while darting glances at Gog’s stainless steel appendage before once more staring fixedly at Grace’s carpet. Blincoe quietly surveyed the nervous men, considering.

  ‘One other thing, and then our chat shall be concluded. It has not escaped my notice that you have subjected my friends, Mr Knuckleyard and Mistress Shilling, to considerable duress. From this point on, there’ll be no more of that, or I cannot describe to you the consequences. They are both of them in the protection of the other town, and must be left alone. If that is clear, then you and your associate may take your leave of us until tomorrow midnight, after you have made fair recompense with Mistress Shilling for her loss of earnings in the two days that she was kept prisoner. She is a woman of exceptionally fine appearance, and by my own estimate might have expected that her takings should be not far short of five-and-thirty pounds. Let us agree to call it forty.’

  There occurred an interval of silent incredulity before Spot came to see that bargaining positions, with a thing of solid timber that had just deliberately impaled its face, were neither here nor there. With gritted teeth, the gangland boss produced a wallet, counting out four tenners that he passed indignantly to Grace, who took them with a sweet and grateful little smile that only served to worsen Spot’s already thunderous disposition. Then, with Kankus green and ill, with Jack Spot glaring impotently at practically everything except Gog Blincoe and his stuck-fast tableware, the two men made their muttering exit, leaving Grace and Dennis to an awkward lapse in conversation and, apparently, an ambulatory tree. In the ensuing hush, it was a moment before Grace came to the rescue.

  ‘Well, that was a right how-d’you-do. Would anybody like a cup of tea?’

  Dennis, belatedly removing his damp coat, accepted gratefully, but Blincoe shook his blade-augmented head.

  ‘Why, thank you kindly for your offer, but I must decline. I’ll take my nourishment when I’m home after work tonight, where I can put my feet down. With that said, there is one service you might do me, which is to assist in the removal of this blessed nuisance from my otherwise distinguished countenance. I will concede, I stuck it in with too much force, that I might make a more severe impression on the pair of dips or dragsmen that have lately quit our company. It is perhaps a good inch further in than I’d intended, and will likely be a bugger to pull loose. Perhaps if I should set myself upon this chair so you can reach, it will be easier for you to find firm purchase.’

  Even after all the starfish-spider popes, loquacious cats and severed heads in pot-pourri, what followed was an episode that Dennis didn’t feel was truly real while it was happening, and even less so later when he’d had a chance to think about it. He and Grace spent the next quarter of an hour attempting to prise Grace’s kitchen knife from Blincoe’s forehead, trying out experimental grips and holds while the arboreal goliath gripped his seat’s edge and endeavoured to stay still. Eventually they managed it with Dennis crouched behind the chair and pulling, arms encircling the giant’s chest as far as they were able, while Grace braced one foot against Gog’s belly and, grasping the hilt in both hands, threw all her weight backwards. When the blade came free, she stumbled like a film reel in reverse and, fortunately, fell back on to her complaining sofa, gasping with surprise and effort. Dennis narrowly avoided landing on his arse and dragging both the chair and Blincoe down on top of him, which would have almost certainly entailed a trip to hospital. Sprawled panting on the couch while she recovered, Grace looked dazedly from the unharmed utensil that she held in one hand to the piggy-bank-sized slot between the corkscrew curls of Blincoe’s eyebrows, where a bead of amber sap or resin was accumulating. While no doubt relieved it wasn’t blood, she sounded worried.

  ‘You want something on that. It’ll get infected.’

  Blincoe lifted an exploratory finger to his wound before examining the sticky residue left on the digit’s tip. He offered Grace a reassuring smile, barely perceptible amid his rigid features.

  ‘Thanking you for your concern, but this mere pinprick does not risk infection, since my biological affairs are not the same as your’n. That said, a dressing, if you have one, would be handy. Otherwise, my juice shall trickle down my face and likely in my eyes, where, should it harden, it might be a year or more afore I got it off.’

  As it turned out, Grace kept a small first-aid tin in her bedroom. Wiping up as much of the clear, oozing gum as she could manage using a warm flannel, she applied a pad of lint to the deep gash, secured by a white gauze bandage that wrapped twice around the fruit-and-veg provider’s huge skull and was fastened with a safety pin. Checking himself in a hand mirror of pink celluloid that Grace provided, the admiring behemoth seemed not dissatisfied with his new look.

  ‘Aye, that will do the job. I shall pretend to have received the blow by walking smack into a shop’s low awning, which, although a lie, is not the blackest. Some of the establishments in Berwick Street have canopies too near the pavement to allow safe passage for a person of my stature.’

  Shortly after that, Gog made his genial farewells, assuring Dennis that he’d be there for the meeting up in Arnold Circus the next evening. Showing him to the front door, the two flesh-and-blood youngsters watched him walk off, whistling, through a still-falling rain he seemed almost to welcome. Grace and Dennis looked at one another silently – what could you say about all that? – and then walked back along the hallway to the stuffy flat, to make that postponed cup of tea, and talk, and find out what was left of them.

  Soon they were seated hesitantly on the sofa, with an extra person’s space between them that was careful not to imply any intimacy. It transpired that one of Grace’s captors, Solly Kankus, had brought cigarettes and biscuits when he’d turned up for his shift of guard duty and taken over from a similarly cordial Sonny the Yank. Both Grace and Dennis dunked their plain digestives in their teacups, each intent on not permitting too long an immersion, anxious to avoid an oversaturated morsel falling with a faecal plop into their laps. At last, after he’d wolfed down half the packet, Dennis wiped his lips on an unseemly jacket sleeve and tried a conversational opener.

  ‘They treated you alright today, then? When Sonny the Yank was driving me across the river to see Spare this morning, I got the impression that both him and Solly had a bit of a soft spot for you. They didn’t seem so keen on me, though.’

  Grace laughed and sprayed crumbs across the coffee table.

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s because they still think you’re my ponce. When I was in the motor with them while you had your private natter with their boss, I told them all about what happened to me as a young evacuee, forced on the game by circumstance and prey to … well, to vicious brutes like you, as I explained it to them.’ She was laughing harder now, and half of a digestive ended in the seashell ashtray. ‘I told them you like to whip me with great, rancid lengths of seaweed – it was just the first thing that came in my head – and when they fell for that, I told them that you like to do it when you’re nude except for a sou’wester and a pair of wellingtons. I think that, funnily enough, they ended up with more respect for you, although they thought that you were a disgusting pervert. Oh, come on. It is quite funny. You should see your face.’

  Luckily, Dennis couldn’t. Even if he could, he’d not have understood why anyone should find his scolded-puppy look of hurt betrayal comical, although in fact, to an objective eye, it was. ‘Why did you tell them that? I don’t just mean the bit about the seaweed. Why did you make out I thrashed you in the first place?’ It took Grace a minute or two to stop giggling, and then a little longer to stop coughing when some sodden crumbs went down the wrong way. Finally, she raised her watering eyes and gazed at Dennis earnestly.

  ‘It was self-preservation, pure and simple. If it turned out that this “different part of London” business was just something that somebody said the last time you were in the loony bin, I thought that I might earn some sympathy by painting you as a Marquis de Sade dressed up like Captain Ahab.’

  Dennis didn’t know who either of those was. Grace carried on regardless.

  ‘Listen, I’m not laughing at you, Dennis. What I’m laughing at is all of this, because it’s either frightening or ridiculous, and I know which one I prefer. Besides, I see that you’ve been on the level with me. You proved that when you walked through the door this afternoon, with half of Birnam Wood behind you. I’ve seen some things in my time, but bloody Nora, Dennis, what’s all this you’ve gotten yourself into? I know that you’ve tried to keep it private, and from meeting Mr Blincoe – who’s a very nice man, incidentally, for saying that he’s not one – I can see why you might do that. You were trying to keep it all away from me, and that was lovely of you. Really lovely.

  ‘But if this stuff you’ve been telling me is true, how have you coped? I mean, just look at you: you’ve all the substance of a beanbag, but today you’ve been off on an outing with a black magician to what sounds like Wonderland, where you’ve apparently been able to sort out our bother with Jack Spot – Jack Spot, for God’s sake – and then turned up back here with Pinocchio’s big brother for a bodyguard. Although I’m not sure that it suits you, you’ve been quite heroic. I’m not going to let you shag me. I’m just saying that I’m moderately impressed.’

  Respectively crushed and elated by her last two statements, he felt unsure what to say, scratching his bristly nape to buy time until the words came to him.

  ‘Yeah, well, you were the one sat here all day with thugs who’d said that they were probably going to kill you. You’re a marvel. I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d not took me in.’

  Seemingly out of nowhere, Grace proposed that she should make them both pilchards on toast for tea, then hurried off into the kitchen before he could see her quiet smirk of self-satisfaction.

  Later on, after they’d eaten, they sat there on the last-legs settee and listened to the tiny fists of rain beating against the window, the subdued catcall and clatter of a Thursday night in Spitalfields, audial entertainment in the absence of a wireless. Having met Gog Blincoe and concluded that the less she knew about this other place the better, Grace’s only question was what happened next.

  ‘I’ve got no problem letting you kip here another night or two, until this is all finished, but where does it go from here? What’s going to happen in this Arnold Circus place tomorrow night, and are you going to be alright? Who’s Harry Lud?’

  Dennis was circumspect in his reply.

  ‘From what I can make out, there’s, well, let’s say there’s people in the other place, and they’re, like, templates, essences or something, for the things in this place. What’s the word?’

  Grace lit a cigarette and raised her eyebrows questioningly. ‘Archetypes?’

  ‘I’ve not heard of them, but yeah, probably. They’re called Arcana in the other place. Tomorrow, there’s a mate of mine I said I’d see at lunchtime, but then after that I might go straight to Arnold Circus for this set-to with Jack Spot and Harry Lud. He’s one of the Arcana, and he’s, like, the archetype of crime, if that’s the word I’m looking for. That’s why Spot wants to speak to him, to see if he can sort out all Spot’s gangster problems. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but Gog Blincoe and another fellow, Ironfoot Jack, have said they’re going to be there. I should think I’ll be alright.’

  He washed up while she made them both another cup of tea, and, following that, Grace produced a careworn pack of cards, inviting Dennis to join her in a few hands of whist, playing for matchsticks. After barely two hours, Grace possessed enough to build a reproduction of Westminster Abbey, leaving Dennis without even one to pick an errant flake of pilchard from his teeth. During that time, however, they’d agreed that he should stay at Grace’s flat after whatever happened up in Arnold Circus the next night, and she had generously offered him one of the ten-pound notes that Blincoe had extorted from Jack Spot. ‘No, go on, take it. I’d have not got half of forty quid for Wednesday and today. When the warm weather drops away, so does the trade. I’m serious, you have it. That way, if I should tell anybody else you’re living off my earnings, you’ll know there’s a bit of substance to it.’