Despite a sun-soaked day, the night encouraged frills of fog from out of the river, bundles of grey gauze rolling uphill to hang blurring coronas on the streetlamps, themselves sparser in accordance with remoteness from the city’s centre, so that the increasing distances between them seemed the suffocating voids that separated stars. Climbing through half-demolished streets into the dark, Dennis found himself thinking of the countless eggs of iron and fire that had fallen in the last ten years, some of them not yet hatched. Curled metal embryos, they slept beneath the amniotic rubble, saving up their birth wails for an unsuspecting future. This was the whole problem with the past, that it was never really over, when the dreadful bricks of yesterday were what tomorrow would be built from.

  Wading in half-hearted revellers and thickening mist, Dennis ascended Bishopsgate towards his inconceivable appointment. Passing Spitalfields and the by-now-familiar mouth of Folgate Street, where Grace lived, he resisted the temptation to just wander down and check whether her light was on, just see if she was home, because what was the point of that? That was just soft. He’d see her later, hopefully, when the encounter up at Arnold Circus was resolved and he went back to her place and her posture-altering settee. He’d have to see what happened after that, regarding him and Grace, although the same thing could be said about his job, or his address, or any other aspect of his wispy, insubstantial life. Like all the war-struck world, he’d have to see what happened. Shattered fragments couldn’t be expected to have aims or plans.

  On native turf in Shoreditch, where the vaporous miasma bordered on opaque, Dennis relied upon the instincts ingrained by his scabby urban childhood in those lanes, a kind of pavement radar steering him into Old Nichol Street, up Camlet Street, and so to Arnold Circus where, it being still some minutes to eleven, he turned out to be the only person there. The fog was for some reason thinner in the circle’s empty centre, perhaps ventilated by the seven streets that happened to converge there, with their intervening buildings become wedges of a monstrous and intimidating brickwork pie. Other than Dennis, there were only two old cars and what looked like a builder’s truck, all evidently parked there overnight, so as a circus it was something of a disappointment.

  Loitering in the murk and wanting for a better entertainment, he unpacked his memories of the place, the things he’d done there and the things he’d heard about it. He recalled a memorable fight in Arnold Circus when he’d been ten or eleven, probably a punch-up started over his pugnacious surname or the fact he didn’t have a father any more. He hadn’t won, of course, but, as he saw things, had been only narrowly defeated, making it the high point of his pugilist career. As for the circle’s wider history, this was a narrative of ugly rumour and lamentable established fact, a penny-dreadful shocker writ in virid seams of moss between the district’s stones. Back in the nineteenth century, this vacant ring had been a vortex of Victorian crime, an open plughole that half of the city’s stolen goods were circling. A proper rookery, it had lent Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago its appropriately pungent backcloth, and had been the lair of the Old Nichol mob, whose murderous procurers had ripped more Whitechapel women than their better-known contemporary who, according to Gog Blincoe, had been an absconded Pope of Blades. He thought of Grace with an unhappy wince he didn’t really have a right to, wishing that she hadn’t been forced into such a bruising trade, or that she had a less-traditionally lethal place than the East End in which to ply it.

  He constructed a compelling fantasy wherein, despite having no visible means of support himself, he rescued Grace from her at-least-rent-paying job, a fiction which ignored the fact that so far, Grace had rescued him. He’d just reached an important plot point, where the sudden and horrific death of Coffin Ada had revealed him as the unexpected beneficiary of her surprisingly large fortune, when a sound out of the clouded dark shredded the half-built daydream into flakes of tinsel. It was a harsh, grating noise, repeated at brief intervals, and drawing closer. As his heartbeat stepped on the accelerator pedal, Dennis wheeled round in a startled pirouette, attempting to identify which of the seven radiating lanes the din was coming from. Off down one fogbound passageway – he’d lost his bearings, but he thought it was Navarre Street – the unnerving racket was not only louder, echoing in the occluded row, but had a visible accompaniment of showering sparks, hot specks of burning orange on the churning greyness, an infernal mechanism clanking nearer in the smog.

  It was Jack Neave. Hunched like a terrifyingly large crow in long, black coat and battered homburg, the backstreet entrepreneur limped from the swirling damp, his iron shoe scraping fireworks from the cobbles. His cravat was white tonight, bunched in the same elaborate silver ring, and his know-it-all smile was friendly, albeit dabbed with melancholy at the corners.

  ‘Sorry, boy, I didn’t mean to make yer jump. But if a little bloke who’s got a dodgy leg turns you into a bag o’ nerves, wait till you see what we’ve got comin’ later. You’ll be in a right state.’

  Somewhere in the roiling shroud, a distant place of worship chimed eleven. Ironfoot chatted amiably as he circumnavigated their hazy arena, checking its security for the forthcoming interchange, casting an eye over the stationary cars before inspecting the open-backed builder’s truck which, unsurprisingly, had nothing of more value than a heap of empty sacks left in it overnight. The pair elected to stand sheltering by the parked vehicle, where Dennis shivered and Neave lit a cigarette.

  ‘I ’ad a word with our friend Mr Blincoe earlier. E’s off in the Great When now, sortin’ out the other end o’ the arrangement, but ’e said as ’e’d be ’ere by midnight. It should all go off alright.’

  Tightening his raincoat collar, Dennis raised an issue that had been perturbing him.

  ‘What if somebody wanders by? I know it’s foggy and it’s late, but it’s a Friday night …’

  Exhaling a long plume of smoke to further decrease visibility, Jack shook his head.

  ‘They won’t. With the Arcana, everybody looks the other way. Y’see, with normal people, they can’t let themselves see things like that. Admittedly, you’ll get yer artists, poets, nutters sometimes, but not normal people. If there’s somebody tonight who’s thinkin’ about walkin’ ’ome through Arnold Circus, there’ll be somethin’ that comes up, some little incidental thing, and they’ll decide to go another route. Nah, passers-by, least of our worries, that is. You’ll find out.’

  At around ten to twelve, the same tan Morris that Sonny the Yank had driven Dennis out to Brixton in nosed hesitantly from the fog bank blocking Club Row, grumbled to a halt a few yards from the builder’s lorry and killed its anaemic headlights. After a mistrustful pause, the forward doors clunked open and Jack Spot climbed out, followed by Solly Kankus from the driver’s side. While Spot seemed jumpy and on edge, Kankus looked genuinely ill, the man’s whole body cringing inwards in its effort not to be there. His unsettled boss, meanwhile, was glaring warily at Ironfoot.

  ‘’oo the fack are you? An’ where’s blockhead, the other chap? ’e said ’e’d be ’ere.’

  Neave shrugged his thick lower lip in unconcern.

  ‘I’m Ironfoot Jack, and I’m king of the Needies. Mr Blincoe is escortin’ Mr Lud from the superior London, and they’ll both be with us very shortly. Until then, my best advice is that we should compose ourselves, so as there won’t be any untoward behaviour when crime’s embodiment arrives.’

  Spot scowled a simmering acceptance and then stood beside the motor, muttering beneath his breath to the unravelling Solly Kankus. No one else said anything, and Jack Neave’s cigarette, sizzling brighter with each inhalation, was their only lighthouse in the curdled night. Then something happened: there was an elusive shift of atmosphere, and one by one, the four men noticed that the mist pooled in the circus was withdrawing, creeping back to crowd into the several street mouths, leaving the central enclosure dark, but clear as crystal. Dennis took a step back, Spot was made as still as marble halfway through an uncompleted gesture, Solly Kankus started to recite what was perhaps the Lord’s Prayer in a quavering whisper, and the very windows, doors and drains of the encirclement gaped open-mouthed into a gathering mystery.

  Jack Neave took a last quick pull on his fag, then ground it out beneath an iron boot heel.

  ‘’ere we go.’

  6

  Behold Him, Gemmed with Larcenies

  And, like an opening rose or an explosion, it came rushing in. Diametrically opposite the builder’s truck, across the suddenly pin-sharp expanse of Arnold Circus, double gates – with flaking emerald paintwork and their worn planks chewed at either end like pencils – were padlocked and chained against the Shoreditch midnight. As seen from the circle’s far side, there appeared to be a fault or interruption over on the picture’s right, between the stout green gatepost and the brick wall it was set into, a widening chink of colour rippling in the clarified-glass darkness. At the edges of this wavering flaw, both wall and gate seemed to be acting like a gas or liquid, shimmering and bending, momentarily deformed by something reaching through the shifting absence from beyond. The four men looking on at last identified this as a large and mobile human hand, fumbling in the shining gap to hook thick fingers on the sturdy post, which bunched between the digits without splintering or breaking, hard wood seemingly become as soft as velvet. In a swish like that of wind but with more echo and more sibilance, the pair of solid gates rucked into fabric curtains and were pulled aside, boards become billowing folds upon which padlock, chain and hinge were only painted. The strong hand that had accomplished this reveal turned out to be that of Gog Blincoe, head still bandaged, who stood silhouetted with a motley of hues behind him, then walked out into the eerily illuminated circus and stood to one side, impassive eyes fixed on the radiant aperture as though he were a compere silently awaiting the main act.

  Jack Spot backed up against his motor, while Kankus sank moaning to his knees, his legs made into corrugated cardboard. Dennis, only a few nights before, would have been in the same condition but, now formed of sterner stuff, he merely trembled and made a concerted effort not to close his eyes. Beside him, Ironfoot leaned in confidentially and spoke in a stage whisper, to be heard above the mounting soundtrack that seemed to accompany the escalating dance of coloured light.

  ‘Don’t shut yer peepers. This is it, the thing it’s all about. It’s what they call perichoresis. It’s an interpenetration, an’ it’s ’ow the Great When works, but you don’t see it very often.’

  The drab pudding of the cement round’s reality hung heavy from its every crack and crevice, and was in the hardness of its paving, its toe-stubbing kerbs. The blunt, inarguable factuality of the ringed buildings was apparent from the circus’s residual smell of stone and smoke, of people and their enterprises, evidencing the continuous and ordinary surround of being, but … the cobbles are now staining with aurora, and from out a tunnel into brilliance an ungraspable form coalesces as it lumbers closer, each slow earthquake step rumbling its imminence … about it is an auditory halo of policemen’s whistles, gunshots, ambulance bells, victims pleading, frantic knocking-shop piano, breaking windows, weighty parcels falling into rivers, screeching tyres, a multitude of missing men and women bawling their surprise, or fear, or anger, and… Solly the Turk had curled into a foetal ball, down at the feet of a still-paralysed Jack Spot. It was as if the empty intersection was scene to a shattering collision of enormous bodies, to a catastrophic pile-up that could not be seen or heard, and only registered deep in the stomach or the screaming nervous system. Nor was this sense of emergency and crushing impact over in an instant, but went on and on, the moment of intolerable disaster like a held note, stretched out and interminable.

  Dennis realised that his nose was bleeding, trickling warm and viscous. In the curly crown of his plucked-looking head, there was the high-pitched whisper of a wireless dial that wandered back and forth between two alternating frequencies, a squealing fluctuation as opposed eternities came into violent contact with each other. Flattened between crashing cities, Dennis clung tight to the tailboard of the builder’s truck in his endeavour to stay upright. Cautiously, he raised his squinting gaze back to the blazing interruption on the circle’s far side, where … congealing from the colours, a shape previously uncatalogued collects itself, and in his mounting fanfare of undone lives, he is almost here, the general of ruin … incompatible with human vision, the emerging mass is edited by Dennis’s perceptual limitations to a bulbous rectangle, bulging in space and time, some nine feet high and twelve feet wide, and yet with mannerisms and a measured gait as the illicit’s absolute approaches entity, and unmistakeably he’s Harry Lud, none other and no less … around him, as his mantle, a gold glow with no apparent source … his perfume is Bay Rum and Brylcreem, tarts and dogs, cigars and marzipan … the heavy coat he wears is furred with rustling layers of banknotes, blackmail letters, compromising snapshots, ransom messages, appalled newspaper headlines, flash-blanched mugshots, warrants and forged documents … crowbars for cufflinks, and his tiepin is the head of a decapitated rat … he’s Harry Lud; he’s all of infamy … the brow is easily a yard from ear to ear yet still seems disproportionately small, topped by a broad-brimmed hat whose ostentatious band is pornographic film … white hair like sisal hanging to his shoulders and a jaw that pokes out challengingly from amid his several chins … four long scars that converge between the straggling eyebrows slice the face into a radiating sundial of antique hostility, a Union Jack of settled grudge and grief … with dainty lips fastidious and great indifferent eyes the eerie grey of X-ray plates, a monarch of corruption lifts one plump hand in a signal of expectant invitation, and … heaving a sigh of resignation, Ironfoot Jack propelled himself in scrapes and showering sparks across the dumbstruck circus as he formally commenced negotiations.

  ‘Most feared and beloved ’arry Lud, beside whose majesty earth’s potentates are fuckin’ little toerags, gratefully we welcome you to our unworthy manor. May your rackets all be lucky, and may snouts avoid your mention. We’ve got someone ’ere who seeks your blindin’ counsel.’

  Almost filling the arched entranceway behind the drawn-aside theatre curtain that had been a pair of gates, and with the shine of the Great When spilling its painted rays behind him, the disquieting statement that was Harry Lud wrinkled a sharp hummingbird nose as he considered this entreaty. Tilting his hat’s cartwheel brim down, villainy’s unpardonable saint gazed in deliberation at the ground, where … caught on shoes like getaway cars that have radiator toecaps is a dragging train of smuggled bottle and explosion-blackened strongbox, bodies bound and naked, torture garages, guns in their hundreds braceleted as though unlucky charms, a winding torrent of dire consequence extending back into the maddening glare from which the street-wide figure is projecting … and at length, the abstract principle of felony tips back his Cinemascope head to speak, his voice the rattling undertow of a dredged riverbed … ‘Then let the cunt be brought to me, that I may render the once-over unto him’ … about Lud’s feet, the trailing stream of vice and victim shudders, moaning in the noir cacophony that is iniquity’s continuous accompaniment, at which … an evidently strained Jack Neave glanced back with hollow eyes across his shoulder at the gangsters, cowering by their motor.

  ‘I can’t keep this up for long, so be warned. Mr Comer, this is what you asked for. My advice is, if yer can, walk over ’ere yerself and say yer piece to Mr Lud, or I’ll ’ave Mr Blincoe drag yer.’

  Jack Spot’s gaze, fixed on Lud’s mountainous physique, was full of naught but horror at the gold impossibility of everything. He sagged against his car, tinted by foreign colours washing from the aperture directly opposite, and made a whining sound, high in his nose. His mental processes writ bold on his contorting face, he visibly considered simply staying where he was and then glanced over at Gog Blincoe, looming in the mist-choked mouth of Calvert Avenue with those gigantic arms folded across his sackcloth smock. Blincoe returned the glance and shook the great boll of his head, as if to say that sitting all this out was not an option. With what looked to be the final resignation of the scaffold, Spot stepped awkwardly over the crumpled, sobbing mound of Solly Kankus and began his tottering advance towards a furnace mouth where stood the gilded figurehead of wrong.

  Eventually, drawing level with Jack Neave and only feet off from the widescreen spectacle of Harry Lud himself, Spot fidgeted, and wrung his hands, and couldn’t find his voice. And when he did it wasn’t his but that of someone’s mum, high-pitched and wheedling.