They sat chuntering until the clock in Christchurch’s oppressive steeple chimed for ten, and then Grace left Dennis to his monastic couch while she went off to bed. Before she did, she thanked him for the racing forecast cards that he’d had Austin Spare make out to her, and asked if she could borrow Machen’s book, The Cosy Room, to read before she went to sleep. She’d had a browse of it during the many lapses in her conversation with Sonny the Yank or Solly Kankus, and had thought that ‘N’ looked interesting. Since the story only quoted from Hampole’s imaginary volume and was not the inconveniently solid tome itself, Dennis could see no harm in this and told her to enjoy it. With a voice as clear and musical as a struck wine glass, she bade him goodnight and went off to her room, leaving the echo of her cheapskate scent behind her, a faint compensation.

  Folded up to fit on the settee, Dennis slept only fretfully. His mind was filled with Inferred Saracens and pot-pourri, with talking cats and wooden men, and had no room for dreams. He half woke from his half sleep the next morning in an unexpectedly good humour, to the smell of cooking breakfast and the at first unfamiliar sensation of not feeling doomed. Grace was both up and dressed, and had already been out to the shops for sausages and a wrapped block of cooking fat, hence the tongue-torturing aroma from the kitchen. He felt guilty that she hadn’t gone to work already, realising that he must be a financial inconvenience, and at the same time selfishly content to have her there when he awakened, and then guilty again about being selfishly content. None of this spoiled his sausages and egg, nor his enjoyment of Grace’s vermilion waterfall across the kitchen table. With what passed for dash in Spitalfields, he cut his sausage into rounds and speared them on his fork to mash into the ruptured golden eyeball of his egg, as happy as he could remember being.

  Overnight the rain had packed it in, although the pavements were still wet and glittering like sticklebacks in a rare outburst of October sun when Dennis reached the Strand. Bond’s Coffee House was relatively underpopulated for the time of day, and only when the idling proprietor had seen him coming and had hurried to open the door did he remember that here, in this few square yards of London, he was a soap-flake aristocrat. Reminded of his station, Dennis improvised a glance that mingled shame at his impoverished circumstances with what he thought might be upper-class contempt. It seemed to do the trick, and the attentive manager nodded and smiled with gratitude to be in the receipt of such refined abuse. When asked for cake and tea, with Grace’s tenner flourished as a guarantee of payment, the man lifted both palms in refusal. ‘No, no need for that, your Lordship. On the house. Your legal friend is at his usual table, up the back. I’ll bring it over.’ Putting Grace’s ten-pound note away with what he hoped was a disdainful lip curl, Dennis essayed his ungainly way through a blue wall of cigarette smoke to the café’s rear, where Clive was waiting for him.

  ‘Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. It’s Lord Snooty, and practically on the stroke of one! How did you manage that? I’ve always thought of you as too hard-up to own a wristwatch. Does whatever hovel you’re existing in at present have an hourglass or a water clock, for instance?’

  Dennis sniggered and sat down at the two-person table, opposite the grinning lawyer.

  ‘No. It’s just that being closer to the state of animals, we tell the time by shadows, rabbit droppings and that sort of thing. How are you, anyway? What gripping legal business am I dragging you away from now?’

  Clive flicked his fine blond fringe out of his eyes and executed a theatrically glum expression. He was dressed up in a different suit from the chalk-stripe affair he’d worn on Monday, this one plain black, but it hung upon his lean form just as stylishly, as though the skin that he’d been born into had got side vents and buttons.

  ‘Dennis, you have no idea what torments we civilised people go through. It’s been nothing else but family arguments about inheritances, and retired major generals who want to sue King George for spying on them using secret rays. To be quite honest, I’d give my right arm for even a good acrimonious divorce, but, no, it seems that all these ghastly idiots are perfectly contented with each other. Why don’t interesting types ever get into legal trouble?’

  Dennis shrugged.

  ‘So, not the rush of crackpot killers that you were expecting, then?’

  Performing an offended scowl, Clive shook his head.

  ‘Nary a one, dear boy! The acid-bath blood-drinkers have all let me down appallingly. I mean, there must be dozens of them out there, and it’s not as if they’re difficult to catch: they always knock off the same type of victims, in the same way, or, like Haigh, they use the same way to dispose of the remains. They might as well just autograph a bottom corner of the murder scene. You’d think there’d be at least one nutcase with his head sufficiently screwed on to vary up the act a bit. If you ask me, their problem isn’t that they’re mad, it’s that they’re so bloody repetitive. Why don’t they … Oh. Hang on. I think this is your manservant approaching.’

  From the far end of the cafeteria, the patently intimidated manager of the establishment was picking his way carefully between the smoke drifts and the scattering of other customers, holding a tray with Dennis’s requested tea and cake on up before him, head tipped back as if he were a footman or an equerry. With a mischievous look and admirable smoothness of delivery, Clive switched from his vexed monologue on the shortcomings of contemporary homicidal lunatics to a concerned and lawyerly interrogation of his put-upon aristocratic client.

  ‘Hold on, your Lordship, let me get this right. You mean to say that those low-born intruders, after barring you from your extensive Oxydol estates, have daubed communist slogans on the ha-ha and have clipped the topiary into a copse of rampant phalluses? It’s little wonder that you vomited your kedgeree. Hanging’s too good for these marauders, and if I had my way, they’d be staked on anthills, right across the length and breadth of Hampstead Heath. In fact … Ah. Yes, put it by his Lordship if you’d be so kind, there’s a good fellow.’

  This last was addressed to the speechless proprietor who’d by then reached their table, bearing Dennis’s gratis refreshments, and heard every word of the foregoing upper-crust indignities. The fifth Lord Oxydol fought to maintain a corpse-like impassivity while picturing regurgitated boiled egg, rice and haddock steaming on the sculpted penile privet, trying not to laugh until their disconcerted waiter was back at his counter and thus safely out of earshot. Throughout all this, Clive impaled his supposed client with a look of near-angelic sympathy, only the blue eyes sparkling with amusement as the trainee barrister piled detail on ludicrous detail in his unrelenting efforts to make Dennis laugh against his will. ‘And, just to recap, you say that they flambéed all the peacocks, before urinating in a writing desk once used by Mary Tudor, although not in that way?’ When at last the startled eavesdropper was at the far end of the coffee house and the pair were no longer overheard, Dennis allowed himself to giggle dangerously around a mouth crammed full of fruitcake, while Clive settled back into his chair and sipped at his black coffee with a smile of satisfaction bordering on the sadistic.

  ‘So, young Knucklehead, what’s all this mystifying nonsense you were telling me over the telephone the other day? You made dark references to being stalked by desperados, and to some formerly unexplored region of the metropolis. I take it you weren’t simply drunk?’

  Taking a moment to swallow his cake and wash it down with too hot tea, the temporarily mute Dennis wagged a lifted palm from side to side in flat denial before he eventually answered.

  ‘No. I’d had a pint or two the first time that I went there, but the next time I’d not touched a drop. It wasn’t drink or the DTs, it was just unbelievable. The way it started, that day I saw you in here, I’d just unknowingly been lumbered with this bloody nightmare of a book. Some people who were in the know told me that it had come from, well, this different area of London, and that if I didn’t want to come a cropper, I should get it back there sharpish. This was right around the time I found out there were shady types wanted the book as well, gangsters who reckoned it would get them into this, this different neighbourhood. It turned out it was Jack Spot. Anyway, the next night …’

  Clive set his half-finished cup of stimulation carefully upon its saucer, and leaned forward.

  ‘Did you say Jack Spot? What, the Jack Spot? Dennis, are you having me on?’

  ‘I wish I was. That Tuesday after I’d seen you, I had a couple of his men clock me when I was out at night, and both came running after me. It was like in a film, pelting along the alleys and the backstreets with a couple of arm-breakers right behind. Just when I thought that they were going to collar me and carve me up, I had this, well, I had this sort of accident, and next thing that I knew, I’d landed in the other place, the other bit of London. I was only there about ten minutes before I found my way out again, but that was ten minutes too much. It nearly bloody killed me. And since then, it’s just got worse instead of better. The night after I called you, I had Jack Spot himself catch up with me. He threatened to kill me and, well, this other person, somebody I know, if I didn’t set up a deal for him the next time that I visited this, this location.’

  Both his gaze and elbows on the table, Clive tapped pensively against his lower lip with steepled index fingers. He was still wearing the horse-head cufflinks that he’d worn on Monday, a realistically presented chestnut mare in brown enamel, glinting in the coffee house’s low light. After a few moments he looked up at Dennis, his eyes serious and questioning.

  ‘So, just to clarify, this other part of London, it’s concealed in some peculiar way that makes it difficult to reach or even find, is that the gist of it? It’s somewhere so exclusive that Jack Spot’s prepared to kill you to make contact, yet you stumble into it by accident, and then, ten minutes later, you find your way out again. Which seems to indicate that this near-inaccessible region or district of the city is, perhaps, ten minutes’ walk from streets and landmarks that were more familiar. How does that work? You’ll forgive me, but it doesn’t sound as if you’re talking about just another neighbourhood of London, does it? Without wishing to appear indelicate, isn’t it more the case that what you’re telling me about is, in some utterly confounding manner, an entirely separate world?’

  Thinking about it, Dennis realised belatedly that the foggy account of his adventures he had given Grace was never going to hold up under Clive’s forensic scrutiny. The jeweller’s-lens analysis of every word in an account was what his best mate did to make a living. Feeling slightly queasy at the idea that he might have let Clive figure out too much for his own safety, he nevertheless admitted to himself that being subject to his friend’s impressed attention was extremely gratifying. Torn between the urge to act responsibly and the desire to show off, Dennis continued his attempt to walk a tightrope line between the two.

  ‘Um. Yeah, well, I suppose you could put it like that. Look, Clive, it’s not that I don’t want to fill you in on all this stuff. I really do. It’s just that even knowing about this place can get people killed, or worse. It is a part of London in a way, but it’s another London, standing here where this one is, but so that nobody can see it. I’ve not got the foggiest idea how it can do that, but I know it’s really dangerous, double-Dick-Barton dangerous. That’s why I’m not supposed to talk about it.’

  Clive laughed, banishing the earnest moment.

  ‘Funny that, you mentioning Dick Barton. I was just now thinking that you should have your own theme tune, what with all this drama. No, I’m finding what you’re telling me enthralling, but I can assure you, anything you say is in the strictest confidence and won’t go any further. I’ll treat it as if it were all under lawyer-client privilege, how’s that? And furthermore, I promise that I shan’t press you for details, if you’ll only throw me a few more of these intriguing crumbs. For instance, how did this blood-curdling business with Jack Spot end up? What with you having brought his tantalising name up in the first instance, it’s only fair that you must at least tell me that.’

  He had a point. Dennis had dropped Spot’s name in order to make his unlikely tale appear fraught with importance, and, having done that, couldn’t just leave Clive hanging.

  ‘To be honest, all the rigmarole with Jack Spot hasn’t ended up as anything, at least not yet. The thing he wanted me to set up was a meeting with one of, you know, the people from this other London. That’s meant to be taking place tonight, at midnight, up near Coffin Ada’s bookshop at a place where all these different streets converge. You wouldn’t know it. I don’t really want to be there, tell the truth, but in a way I’m looking forward to it, because then the whole thing will be finished. I can go back to a normal life, I’m hoping, where I never have to think about what’s happened this last week ever again.’

  Clive smiled and raised his coffee cup to clink against Dennis’s teacup in a civilised, non-alcoholic toast. ‘Well, here’s to Knuckleyard recovering his screamingly dull proletarian drudgery as soon as possible. And, my dear fellow, please try not to do this sort of thing too often. We can’t have you suddenly becoming hugely interesting without throwing reasonable society into hysteria. For one thing, if you brutish underlings were regularly fascinating, why would anybody need to visit the theatre or read novels? The entire of Britain’s glorious literary tradition would collapse, and we should have no Shakespeare, Wilde or Buchan. Mind you, on the other hand, we wouldn’t have George Orwell’s miserable predictions, either, which might cheer things up a bit.’

  Not having absorbed much of Shakespeare, Wilde or Buchan, Dennis fastened with relief upon a book and author that he’d genuinely read. Their small talk drifted to the ills besetting modern entertainment, and thus comfortably away from topics with which Dennis had begun to feel slightly uneasy. They agreed that 1984 was probably a fair reflection of contemporary anxieties, with everybody’s minds still full of pogroms, concentration camps and atom bombs. In Clive’s opinion, with the national imagination pulverised by near six years of showering incendiaries, Orwell’s disturbing novel was unlikely to be the last slice of alienation to impress itself on public sensibilities. As an early example of a similar phenomenon, Dennis brought up the radio comedian Tommy Handley, who had passed away that January last. In It’s That Man Again, Handley had conjured his outlandish deep-sea divers, German spies and charladies to spout their catchphrases without regard for plot, sense or the laws of physics; the irrational hilarity of a blitzed world where nothing was connected and where anything could happen without cause or explanation. After two hours and another cuppa each, they came to the conclusion that all the surrealism of the 1930s had a lot to answer for, and so had Hitler.

  When at last Clive couldn’t risk extending his long lunch break any further, he and Dennis exited the coffee house past the solicitous proprietor who, no doubt still considering the virile shrubbery and Marxist vandalism to the ha-ha, offered Dennis a pained look of outraged sympathy. Outside, in the persisting sunshine, the pair shook hands and clapped shoulders as they made their jocular farewells. As Clive was just about to set out for the courts and legal enterprises of the Strand’s far end, he glanced back at his scruffy colleague with a look of genuine affection and regard.

  ‘Good luck with all this business later, Knuckleyard. And well done. That has to be the most rewarding hour or two I’ve ever spent. You’re a remarkable young ruffian, you know.’

  Still basking in the compliment, Dennis stood watching fondly as his friend and idol walked away into the jostling Friday herd. Despite whatever shattering incongruities he might be witness to in Arnold Circus later, Dennis was inordinately pleased with both himself and how his day was going so far. He’d accomplished all the near-impossible things he’d been tasked with – the return of Hampole’s volume to its place of origin, and his unlikely success in the rescue of Grace Shilling from Jack Spot – as if he was a competent adult and not the freakishly tall child that, privately, he knew himself to be. And then, of course, there were his improved fortunes with regard to Grace herself. Alright, he couldn’t really claim she was his girlfriend, and in fact she’d made it clear that she would blind him if he touched her, but for two nights running Dennis had been sleeping barely fifteen feet away from an attractive woman, and that had to count for something. Finally, the cherry on the top of all these causes for smug self-congratulation, there had been the look on Clive’s face, an intensity of fascinated focus that he hadn’t seen before, and that he thought might herald a forthcoming mutual respect between the two of them. Long after Clive had dwindled to a black dot in the varicoloured throng, Dennis stood marvelling at his own new-found capability, and then remembered that he’d left himself with some eight hours to kill before his midnight meeting, cursing himself as a hopeless amateur.

  In the event, he passed his empty shift with a surprising number of pointless activities. A couple of the hours were spent thinking of calling in on Tolerable John, or Grace – or even, for a nihilistic thirty seconds, Coffin Ada – then deciding not to. An unspecified amount of time was squandered walking aimlessly through London’s intestinal maze, attempting to take in the notion that each street and building coexisted with a lurid, otherworldly counterpart, but failing. A considerable period went by in three or four identically dilapidated tea shops, or conceivably the same one visited repeatedly by accident, stirring too much sugar into weak infusions while mentally planning the autobiography that he would surely one day write: his birth in 1931; his father Brian called away to war when Dennis was just eight, shot down and killed when he was ten; his mother Irene gone with her angina four years later; then the purgatory of Lowell’s Books & Magazines; and finally the things he couldn’t ever speak of without being put away, and, therefore, the immediate abandonment of his projected memoir. He perused at length a day-old copy of the Daily Mirror someone else had left behind, tutting in pity at 4,000 dead from floods in Guatemala, not much bothered about the conclusion of Japanese war-crime trials in the US, nodding in grave appreciation at the David Low cartoon and skipping Jane, its personality-free heroine uninteresting now she kept her clothes on with post-war propriety. He counted all the buildings in Long Acre and Great Queen Street, dined from a convenient Covent Garden pie-and-mash stand and considered learning French. The seconds, in their tens of thousands, gnawed him past the bone of boredom, and at something after ten o’clock, for all his many apprehensions, he commenced a long, cold walk to Shoreditch almost gratefully.