‘Cough cough cough cough. Dennis, if at any point soon you’re about to tell me how you got into the cough cough other place, or what you saw there, then for cough cough cough cough fuck’s sake don’t. I only want the outline. You can cough cough cough spare me the fucking details.’

  This was fine with Dennis as it meant that Grace could be one of the fucking details that he spared her. He told Ada about Monolulu pointing him in Austin Spare’s direction, and about Jack Spot’s unwise demand to meet with someone from the other London, but he didn’t breathe a word about Gog Blincoe, heads in glass jars, or where he’d been sleeping for the last four nights. And once Ada was satisfied that Hampole’s book was gone and with it the attentions of Jack Spot, she didn’t press him further. They sat talking in a kitchen that was sunlit but still ugly, and their chat moved smoothly from the shaky ground of mystery to matters more immediate. Ada told him that if he’d serve in the shop when it reopened in the afternoon, then she’d put bedding back on his unwanted mattress and pop to the high street and obtain a piece of haddock for their supper. Other than the still-upsetting fact that he no longer had a bed, Dennis agreed that this all sounded very reasonable. He chatted to her about Spare and Ironfoot Jack, the latter of whom she had heard, and she belatedly remembered that someone had called in at the shop for Dennis while he’d been away.

  ‘It was that cough cough nice cough cough cough John McAllister. This was the Wednesday, and he seemed quite worried that you might be cough cough cough cough dead. Well, cough cough cough we both were, obviously, but he wouldn’t cough cough cough fucking shut up about it. He said he’d be out the cough cough cough cough office until next week, but if you got back in cough cough touch, he said that you could meet him in the Cheshire cough cough Cheese, next Monday night. Cough cough cough cough.’

  All of his friends had been concerned about him, then, both Clive and Tolerable John, and he allowed himself to think that Ada, in her own way, had been worried, too. Although, of course, she’d sold his bed, which, possibly, was Ada’s idiosyncratic means of dealing with bereavement, but inside he knew it wasn’t and that Ada was a brutal, heartless travesty of an old woman, plain and simple. Finishing between them the half pack of finger biscuits, they concluded their conciliatory tea break, and she told him to go and unlock the shop while she set out to dress the corpse of his expired mattress and to do her bit of shopping. She also instructed him to watch out for that woman with the funny eye, who Ada would swear blind was pinching racy murder paperbacks.

  Unlike the days that Dennis had experienced recently, Saturday passed much as predicted: when they’d opened up the shop again, Ada had coughed away to Dennis’s lately unfurnished room and at least made it look like somewhere one might quarantine a dying animal. She’d put on a fur coat that had less hair than Ada had herself over her dressing-gown, and gone to fetch the haddock. Dennis watched the shop with its handful of customers, and, sure enough, at roughly half past three, a woman came in who had the brisk manner of a district nurse and one eye that was rolling uncontrollably in its ill-fitting socket. When he noticed her pick something from the shelves of the Detective section and stepped from behind the till to take a closer look, she put the book down hastily and fled the premises with her afflicted eye rotating like a compass needle at magnetic north. Just out of interest, he inspected the American crime paperback that she’d been coveting. Its cover had a painted brunette, naked save a near-transparent negligee, sprawled on an unmade bed with a trilby-clad shadow angling between her arguably pre-mortem legs, and bore the title The Tomato Had a Toe Tag. On reflection, the persistent accuracy of his landlady’s bleak worldview was what made it so enormously dispiriting.

  After they’d LOSED, Ada prepared the haddock with peas, boiled potatoes and a knob of butter, and when they’d had that, they both sat in the kitchen listening to the wireless. Ada coughed and cunted her way through the sports results, checking her Littlewoods pools coupon to see if she’d won a fortune, verbally abusing entire football teams when it invariably turned out she hadn’t. Then, at twenty-five past six, she seemed to have her evil spirits raised by forty minutes of Those Were the Days, where Harry Davidson and his radio orchestra performed tunes from when Ada had still been alive. Following that, they had a quarter-hour of ‘Quintin cough cough cough cough fucking Hogg’ with dull impressions of his week in Parliament, and then, at eight o’clock, came Music Hall and the tired patter of its host, Ted Ray. At last, when Ada had begun to croak along with an old Marie Lloyd routine, Dennis could take no more and went off to his cheerless, bedless bedroom.

  This turned out to be as physically and psychologically uncomfortable as he’d anticipated. With no bed supporting it, his mattress was a pancake rectangle – no springs save those that had been built into the absent bed frame – that raised him no further than two inches from the spider-haunted floor. Whereas he’d previously sat on his bed’s edge, the room lacking a chair, other than standing up, the only posture now available to him was lying down, which meant he couldn’t reach his bedside table any more, and that his main view of the place he slept was now that of an insect. It was miserable. Fully dressed and glaring at the crack map of the ceiling from a skirting-board perspective, Dennis fumed, flat on his back, and tried to work out how the thrills and terrors of the previous week could have boiled down to this cold cup of sick. He lay like that an hour or two, until he’d heard Ada’s tubercular typhoon rage up the stairs and into bed, and then he removed everything except his once white vest and pants, turned off his bedside lamp and slid himself like luncheon meat between the stale bread sheets. Peacefully nodding off, as an eighteen-year-old, was usually not accomplished without physical exertion, and for several minutes he attempted to imagine Grace with lower standards, but this made him feel like a psychic intruder or a séance-medium peeping Tom. Eventually, he thought about the maybe dead brunette he’d seen on The Tomato Had a Toe Tag, who was painted and who therefore had no rights, and soon thereafter Dennis managed the Big Sleep.

  Sunday was worse, what with the shop not being open and Saturday’s sun revealed as a demoralising propaganda exercise arranged by the resurgent rain. All that was pleasurable about his life was paused until a future time which, from that Sunday’s vantage, appeared geological in its remoteness: he’d still got four days of limbo before he saw Grace again and took her to Spare’s show on Friday, while his postponed rendezvous with Clive was yet another three days after that. He read his tattered hoard of Picture Show and Radio Fun from front to back, and even took to counting Ada’s coughs, but gave up in despair at the first thousand. Mostly, he consoled himself by looking forward to tomorrow night’s meet-up with Tolerable John, if he could only get through until Monday without strangling Ada as she slept, then hanging himself with her carefully unpicked and braided hair. As Clive was always pointing out, this was the era of the murderous lunatic. No one would blame him.

  Mercifully, it didn’t come to that. Surprisingly, they boasted an unusually steady flow of customers for a wet Monday, leaving Dennis very little time for doleful reverie. The workday’s only memorable event came in a lull during the afternoon, when Dennis plucked his courage up and recklessly asked Ada if there really was a dead man buried underneath the flowerbed in her backyard. She looked at him in silence for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, Dennis, there is. And there’s cough cough cough cough cough cough always room for more.’ They didn’t speak a further word to one another before he struck out that evening for a fleeting taste of liberty.

  Much as he ached to see Grace, Dennis was relieved to find the puddle of weak lamplight at the top end of Bride Lane deserted. Possibly she’d gone home early or, given the weather, not come out today at all, but either way it spared him the discomfort of encountering her during working hours. How would he talk to her, and should he even let on that he’d seen her? Grateful that he could leave these decisions for another day, he soldiered on through Fleet Street’s dark and drizzle, dodging barging cars and weaving journalists, towards the alley mouth providing access to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.

  Inside the windowless retreat, where dawn and sunset were at best a rumour, the same endless sixteenth-century day was going on. With the inevitable hanging skeins of smoke affording their traditional low visibility, it was too easy to imagine that the lumbering and occluded forms one passed between the backyard toilets and the bar were those of Samuel Johnson, W. B. Yeats or shuffling Carmelites from the old monastery raised here in the twelve hundreds. The two indistinct shapes playing dominoes at their secluded corner table might be an embittered grudge match between Gerald Kersh and P. G. Wodehouse. The unfathomable monologue from the vicinity of the end barstool was perhaps Alfred, Lord Tennyson checking his lines for scansion. Well, why not?

  He somehow managed to find John McAllister’s accustomed seat without recourse to a lighthouse or foghorn, and on sighting Dennis, the professionally joyless pressman’s face broke open in a radiant beam of what was only mild unhappiness.

  ‘I don’t believe it! Dennis! I was just this second thinking that I’d very likely not see you again. How did you ever sort out all that bother you were in up to your neck? Hang on – let me get you a pint to celebrate, then you can tell me all about it, within reason. I shan’t be a minute.’

  Dennis was by now becoming used to the unsettling phenomenon of close acquaintances expecting him to have been murdered, and at least John hadn’t screamed or taken Dennis for an actual ghost, like Coffin Ada had. Now that he thought about it, that was possibly because John hadn’t ordered Dennis to his almost certain death and, being thus less weighted down with guilt than Ada, hadn’t seen him as a vengeful and accusing Banquo come to shake his gory locks at anyone. Dennis was vaguely annoyed that nobody he knew had rated his survival chances higher when, after the things he’d done, he knew he wasn’t the inept and fragile hatchling everyone assumed, naïve and wet behind the ears. He thought about this for a moment, then ran an exploratory finger up behind one ear to check, dismayed to have it indeed come back glistening and moist. He’d walked here in the rain, of course, but didn’t know if that was a sufficiently extenuating circumstance. It was then that John came back from the bar with a fresh, foaming pint of beer for each of them. Setting the glasses down, McAllister reclaimed his seat and leaned across the table, wearing a peculiar expression that Dennis eventually recognised as warm enthusiasm on a visage that had never been designed to handle it.

  ‘Come on, then, tell me all about it. Though when I say all, I mean don’t tell me about anything unnatural. If you have to talk about, you know, the other place, then call it Birmingham.’

  To Dennis’s astonishment, he found this ploy made it much easier to relate a narrative that he himself did not completely understand: ‘So, anyway, I had these gangsters chasing me through Soho, and the next thing that I knew, I was in Birmingham.’ ‘Then Austin Spare, he took me halfway across Birmingham to meet the City Heads. Of Birmingham.’ ‘When I got back, Jack Spot had to do everything we said, because I’d brought home somebody from Birmingham.’ ‘And so, after that night in Arnold Circus, it’s all finished, and I hope I never have to go to bloody Birmingham again.’

  As the long tale at last reached its conclusion, John sat back in the well-padded chair and shook his morose head in marvelment. ‘So it’s all true, then. I suppose I’ve always had a feeling in my stomach telling me it was, but if you’ve been there, then I can’t deny it, can I? Birmingham is real.’ One of John’s fellow journalists was just then wading through the dream sequence of smoke around their table, and he gave McAllister a startled frown, as if this fact was news to him, too. Ever since the V-bombs, life in London had just been one unbelievable surprise after another.

  When no more could usefully be said regarding Birmingham, the two men’s conversation drifted readily to less unearthly territory. Dennis thought to mention Spare’s forthcoming show in Walworth Road, and John said that he’d be there if he got the chance. ‘I could even try putting it on my expenses as an article for the Express. “Bombed Black Magician Puts Perplexing Paintings in Pub”, or something like that.’ Dennis fetched them another pint, then asked McAllister how the reporter’s own last seven days had gone. John’s answer was a drawn-out sigh expressed in words.

  ‘Well, I suppose you could say it’s been tolerable, though only just. From what I’m hearing, the man on the Clapham omnibus is starting to object to being robbed and murdered on a nightly basis. Since the war, the crime’s been shooting up all over, for all sorts of reasons, and one of the editors at the Express thought we might get a feature out of it. That’s what I’ve been assigned to, although frankly, I’m not optimistic.’

  Dennis laughed involuntarily into his beer foam but disguised it as a fit of choking, and made a recovery by lifting both his eyebrows in surprise and saying, ‘Really?’ Seemingly oblivious to mockery, McAllister’s hands, face and shoulders synchronised into a gloomy shrug.

  ‘The problem is that everybody’s looking for a simple reason why all this is happening – it’s the Labour government, it’s the bent coppers, it’s the foreigners – when, far as I can see, the war put paid to simple reasons and we shan’t be seeing ’em again. It’s complicated reasons these days, in the world that we’ve got now. Everything’s tangled up with every other thing, and it’s all got a million different causes, not just one. And all these complications keep on multiplying until soon the average person won’t be able to keep up, or to make proper sense of anything. England’s a different place now, Dennis. Everywhere’s a different place, and crediting the rise in burglaries to Clement Attlee or Dick Barton isn’t going to make it otherwise.’

  The mention of radio’s special agent put Dennis in mind of Clive, who’d jokingly blamed Barton for what Clive saw as the post-war rise in homicidal madmen. He decided to ask Tolerable John for his opinions on the subject, which seemed pertinent to their discussion.

  ‘I was hearing someone say the other day about these nutcase killers we’ve had since the war, like Haigh and Neville Heath and that. This person reckoned we’d be seeing more of ’em in years to come, due to the psychological condition everybody’s in from being bombed.’

  John nodded in unfortunate agreement.

  ‘Yeah, that sounds about right. Being bombed, and all the complications of life nowadays, like I was saying. You can see how someone might go a bit strange. O’ course, we had our maniacs long before the war. Been part of human nature, I suppose, since Jack the Ripper’s time, at least.’

  Though privately unsure that human nature had got anything to do with Jack the Ripper, Dennis merely nodded and let John continue.

  ‘Like, before him, in the late seventeen hundreds, you’d got Renwick Williams, who they called the Monster. He was a mad slasher. And then, not long after that, you’d got your Ratcliffe Highway murderer, who slaughtered a young draper and his missus, alongside their boy apprentice and three-month-old baby, with a mallet and a ripping chisel. He got buried at a crossroads on the Highway with a wooden stake banged through his heart, like Dracula. His name was Williams, too. John Williams. What is it with all these blokes called Williams? Are the family all murderers?’

  Dennis didn’t think that he could get away with saying he’d been talking to John Williams’s severed head only the other day, even if he maintained that this had taken place in Birmingham. Instead, he opted for a humorous deflection.

  ‘What about Vaughan Williams, who did Lark Ascending?’

  John looked up at him and, it goes without saying, didn’t crack a smile.

  ‘A poisoner, from what I’ve heard.’

  Caught out by the deadpan delivery, Dennis guffawed while John just twitched the corners of his mouth and said, ‘Hmuh,’ which was his equivalent. Completely undeterred by this derailment to his dogged, journalistic train of thought, McAllister continued with his thesis.

  ‘No, but what you heard about there being more mad killers since the war, with more to come, I think that’s definitely on the cards. In my job, they’re the kind of cases that I tend to notice, ones where there’s no purpose and no motive for the murder, where they don’t make sense by any rational standards. I’m not talking about any of the big names, Haigh or Heath, the ones who make the front page of the paper. What I notice are the little stories, buried on page eight and never mentioned after that because there’s nothing known, there’s nothing anyone can say. Like, I don’t know if you’d remember, but the Kenneth Dolden murder back in 1946 was one that I could never figure out.’

  Dennis frowned, searching through his memory but to no immediate avail.

  ‘The name rings a vague bell. Perhaps I read it in the papers at the time, although I couldn’t tell you now what it was all about. Refresh my memory.’

  Before he did that, the reporter volunteered to first refresh Dennis’s glass, and so there was a brief hiatus before John returned with beer and picked his story up without missing a beat.

  ‘Right. Kenneth Dolden. He was this young feller, twenty-three or thereabouts, ex-service and on his demob leave from the RAF. He’s in a car with his fiancée, parked up for a snog there at the edge of Epping Forest down in Waltham Holy Cross. Suddenly, out of nowhere, this chap with a muffler covering his face pulls open the car door, shoots Dolden four times to make sure he’s killed him, then he scarpers and is never seen again. No clues, none of the other courting couples in the clearing could remember seeing anyone, and no apparent motive other than the killing of a total stranger. Hasn’t been solved in three years, and probably it never will be. That’s most likely why it’s stayed with me, the pointlessness of it and that there won’t be a solution. There’ll be no murderer’s name made famous in the headlines, but there’s been no end of nasty little stories like that since the war, so what you heard is right. The mental cases spring up where the bombs fell, like a dangerous variety o’ London rocket.’