Dennis bobbed his shorn head gravely in agreement. Not having McAllister’s professional involvement in such matters, he had always tended to assume that murders hadn’t happened if he hadn’t heard of them, forgetting that celebrities like Heath and Haigh were just the tip of a red iceberg. There must be a dozen or more slayings like the one that John had just recounted every year, that never even registered as mysteries before they were swept out with the statistics. He supposed that in a way, the stories everybody was familiar with, from Heath and Haigh to Jack the Ripper and the Ratcliffe Highway murderer, were stories written largely by the papers of the day, assembled from whatever facts were known with a large helping of imaginative surmise. The bigger murder narrative, bigger because it was comprised from all the countless cases that were little and ignored, was hiding in plain sight while everybody gawped at John Haigh and his acid baths. It was as if— Halfway through an entirely unconnected thought, Dennis remembered where he’d first seen the name Dolden.

  It had been in Clive Amery’s notebook, when he’d left it briefly unattended at Bond’s Coffee House last Monday – Gordon Bennett, had that only been a week ago? – and Dennis had contrived to have a gander at it: Dolden, Green, Dorland & Lockart. A firm of solicitors, as he’d assumed, and very probably that’s what it was. There must be, after all, a lot of men called Dolden, and he couldn’t work out why his stomach had dropped when he’d recognised the name. It must, he reasoned, be the hideous fantasia of his last seven days that had conditioned him to look for hidden jeopardy in the most trivial coincidence; the jittery legacy of Birmingham. It was like demobbed soldiers jumping when some schoolkid burst a crisp bag. He needed to calm down and accept that he’d been through a lot and, like the soldiers, wasn’t finding it as easy settling back into a normal life as he’d expected. All the same, it was a funnyosity to not have come across a name in eighteen years of life, and then to hear it twice in the same week. He sipped his pint and tried to listen to what John was saying.

  They talked for another hour or two until the landlord called time, at which point they put their coats on and expressed the hope that they might meet up at Spare’s exhibition on the coming Friday. Only when they were about to leave did Dennis, feeling privately ashamed of being such a nervous nelly, give in to his apprehensions and ask Tolerable John if he could have a nose around and dig up anything about the three names Green, Dorland and Lockart. ‘It’s just that I saw the name you mentioned, Dolden, on a list with those three others, in the notepad of someone I know. I’m thinking that it’s probably a legal firm, but anything that comes up, I’d be grateful.’ John said that he’d see what he could do, needlessly adding that he wasn’t optimistic. They shook hands outside the alley entrance of the Cheshire Cheese, then headed off down Fleet Street in their opposite directions.

  As he laboured up past Spitalfields to Shoreditch, Dennis thought of Grace and how he only had three days to wait until he saw her, and then three days later he’d be seeing Clive. Much as he felt encouraged by these future treats, he was aware that the six days skipped through so lightly in his sunny forecast would be spent at Lowell’s Books & Magazines with Coffin Ada Benson. In the still-obtaining drizzle he slogged back home to Gibraltar Walk and his slab of a mattress, wondering about those half a dozen nights, and how he’d ever manage to survive them.

  Nonetheless, in what seemed like no time at all, he found himself arriving in Farringdon Road to make his long-delayed appointment with Clive Amery. Dennis couldn’t for the life of him think when he’d last been up that way, but when he turned into the street, at dusk, he felt a rush of warm familiarity as he remembered the location, scarcely able to believe that he’d forgotten it. Farringdon Road, he now recalled, was the place built to look almost exactly like the Strand, maybe to make the area less unfamiliar to visitors such as himself. He drifted down the twilight avenue with a cosy nostalgia for the countless times he must have been there previously, perhaps during his childhood.

  The café halfway along, where his friend had arranged for them to meet, was placed so as to reproduce the same position Bond’s held on the Strand, which was most probably the reason Clive had chosen it. The name above the door was Compton’s, which he didn’t think was the name Clive had given him, but since it was so obviously the right place, he didn’t see that this would matter.

  He was just about to push the glass door open and go in when his attention was seized by activities across the street, on Farringdon Road’s other side. It was two men, one of them drunk or in a state of some sort, and the other evidently trying to help him. It was difficult to make them out at first, what with the failing light, but after a few moments’ squinting, Dennis realised with surprise that it was Solly Kankus and Jack Spot, both standing on the road’s far side and peering back at Dennis with identical expressions of insufferable dread. Kankus seemed to be weeping, possibly in terror, and at the same time was shaking his whole body with convulsions that appeared exaggerated and theatrical, as if the sobbing mobster were miming an earthquake during his turn at charades. Beside his henchman, Jack Spot was apparently attempting to help Kankus get himself under control, all the while shooting frightened looks across Farringdon Road at Dennis, as though Spot was desperate to get as far away from him as possible, but was delayed by Kankus and his overstated trembling. Having no wish to exacerbate the recent problems between him and the two gangsters, Dennis thought it prudent to enter the cafeteria and thus remove himself as the direct source of their agitation.

  The interior of Compton’s was, as he’d expected, laid out very much the same as Bond’s, with its long counter just inside the door. The stout proprietor was hurrying already from behind the till to welcome his illustrious customer, the way he always did, and for a moment Dennis thought that it was the same chap who managed Bond’s, but quickly spotted that it was in fact the very similar-looking Flabby Harrison, who bustled up to him in beaming welcome.

  ‘Why, Sir Dennis Nayland-Smith, how good of you to visit us. Everything’s on the house, of course. I’ll bring it over to your Lordship’s table in a minute.’

  Dennis found himself surprisingly relieved and pleased to meet with the pot-bellied book dealer again. He knew that Harrison had, for some reason, closed his bookshop in Charing Cross Road, and Dennis thought there’d been some sort of setback at the dealer’s home address in Berwick Street, although he couldn’t recollect the details. Either way, it was good to see Harrison back on his feet again, and Dennis was cheered up to see that Flabby had retrieved his dust-encrusted model aeroplanes from Berwick Street and had them dangling from the ceiling up behind the counter.

  Awkwardly – there were, for some reason, large cardboard boxes full of books crowding the café’s floor – he made his way towards the rear of the establishment, where he found Clive reading an evening paper, while the clutch of secretaries grouped at an adjacent table giggled and looked on admiringly. Absorbed in his newspaper, Clive did not appear to notice Dennis’s arrival, and, not wanting to disturb him, Dennis sat down in the vacant chair across the table while he waited for Clive to look up and spot him. Idly, he perused the headline on the broadsheet that Clive held up in front of his face, which read ‘Night-Life of Soho’, probably a scandalous exposé. As he sat there, he became aware that one of the young girls at the next table seemed to be intently staring at him, before understanding with a guilty start that it was Grace. The disappointment with which she regarded him was plain, and Dennis realised suddenly that if this was the night that he was meeting Clive, then he’d completely missed the Spare show that he’d promised to take Grace to. He was trying to think how he could possibly apologise when she leaned over to him, whispering in a flat monotone.

  ‘He didn’t know you were at mine, but should have known you weren’t at Ada’s.’

  Was she talking about Clive? And where was Flabby with his tea and cake? Starting to feel uneasy, he looked back at the young lawyer opposite, who was still engrossed in his reading. Was his pal deliberately ignoring him? Looking around, it struck him for the first time that the unoccupied tables at this back end of the café all had dirty burlap sacks piled up on top of them. He wasn’t certain he was in the right place any more. Returning his attention to the figure sitting with him at the table, face concealed behind the open newspaper, he was no longer even sure that it was Clive. What he had taken for a smart black suit turned out upon inspection to be folds of membrane, beaded here and there by milky perspiration. Where Clive’s hands were visible as they held the obscuring newsprint up before him, they weren’t hands at all but things that ended in unfolded knives instead of fingertips, and there were three of them. As he began to stand up from the table in alarm, Dennis said, ‘Clive?’ in an unsteady voice, and by way of response heard only click-click-click-click-click …

  And woke to Monday night on his unleavened mattress, not entirely knowing what had scared him so.

  7

  Self as Hitler

  He was still thinking about his not-quite-nightmare on and off over the next few Shoreditch days. The bad dream tangled itself in amongst the furniture of Dennis’s routine existence, wrapped around his spells of serving in the shop or helping Ada do the laundry, a strung bunting of unexplained details, of suggestive dialogue, of something being wrong, that threaded glinting through the dull detritus of an uneventful week. He was still being haunted by it intermittently come Thursday night, when Dennis took the bath he saw as a contractual obligation of his not-quite-date with Grace the following day.

  Ada had taken the zinc tub down from its bent nail on the kitchen wall, lit the copper boiler for him and creaked off to her room, because ‘nobody wants to cough cough cough cough see you naked, Dennis’. As he partly filled the bath with boiling water from the copper and judiciously reduced its temperature with a few saucepans full of cold, he bitterly reflected that his landlady’s dismissive words were probably a fair assessment of the broader public sentiment. He stripped to his malnourished waist and kneeled beside the steaming vat to wash his hair. With Ada’s second-best jug, he scooped up enough hot water to first drench his head, then, after rubbing up a lather with the dwindling bar of Lifebuoy soap, doused it a couple of times more to rinse away the suds. Inevitably some went in his eyes, and so he dried them with a scratchy towel before removing shoes, socks, trousers, underpants, and stepping gingerly into the by-now-only-lukewarm tub. Pale as a lily, he sat down as best he could, his freshly shaved chin almost resting on his knees, and thought about his dream while wiping himself with a semi-rigid flannel.

  The most puzzling thing about it was that he was puzzling over it some three nights after the event. It was a dream, and if its nonsense seemed unusually burdened with significance, that was a dream as well. Like most such night frights, it was clearly a collage of otherwise prosaic elements selected from the week just gone, assembled randomly by his subconscious into an unsettling new context. Dreams, almost by definition, felt like they were bursting at the seams with meaning, when in fact they had none. All the same, this one was nagging and insistent, its strange details surfacing at inappropriate moments such as talking to a customer, brushing his teeth with table salt or sitting in a tepid bath while watching islands of dead skin and soap scum gathering on its grey surface. Why had he dreamed Solly Kankus virtually shimmying, and where had all that burlap sacking come from? What had Grace meant by her indecipherable aside? Knowing that it would yield no answers, knowing there weren’t any answers there to yield, he still persisted with his useless fretting until he was textured like a prune and on the draughty outskirts of pneumonia.

  At last he prised himself out of the miniature gunmetal tub and dried as best he could with the abrasive towel, already damp from where he’d used it on his hair. Donning his mac as an impromptu dressing-gown, he carefully conveyed the half-filled tub of dirty water out into a freezing cold backyard, depositing it over Ada’s problematic flowerbed where there at least was nothing left to kill. One of the few advantages of having no surviving neighbours was that he could stroll nude save his raincoat in the middle of the night without obtaining an unsavoury reputation, so he took advantage of the outdoor lavatory before he hurried back into the house with his teeth chattering. He hung the bathtub back on its bent nail, grabbed his discarded clothing and raced upstairs to his bedroom before Ada could emerge from hers to tell him that nobody wanted to see Dennis naked with a cough cough mac on, either. Having turned the light out, writhing on his mattress and reflecting he’d do better with a fakir’s mat, he tried to strew his path to sleep with petal thoughts of seeing Grace tomorrow, but kept finding himself there in Compton’s café, worrying about what was behind the newspaper.

  He got to Folgate Street a little after one o’clock on Friday afternoon. On hearing of the Spare show at the Temple Bar, Ada had generously given him the rest of the day off, or, as she’d phrased it, told him that he could fuck off and join the cough cough Foreign Legion for all she cared. With his heart and hormones leaping like a spring lamb, Dennis knocked on Grace’s front door and then shuffled restlessly while he waited for her to emerge. The day was something of an anti-hero, weather-wise, neither completely good nor absolutely villainous. The pipework of the sky was lagged with white fleece to prevent it bursting in a cold snap, but at intervals there was a prettier season visible through gaps in the celestial insulation. He was in the process of convincing himself that he should have rapped in a more masculine and forceful manner when the door swung open and she came out smiling, with her hair tied back and a sea-green coat that he hadn’t seen before. In the five days that she’d been absent from his life, she had mysteriously become more beautiful, more mesmerising, and a few years older. Smartly dressed and with her scarlet ponytail caught up in a black ribbon, Dennis wondered if she might even be twenty-four or twenty-five, and worried that this yawning age gap might prove insurmountable. Still grinning, she stepped out into a burst of sudden sunshine, leaned in close to sniff and say, ‘You’ll do,’ before taking his startled arm and marching him away to Walworth.

  They decided that they’d go by bus to Elephant and Castle and then walk from there. They sat together for the ride across the river, Grace claiming the window seat, and chatted with surprisingly good humour about the inadequacy of their bombsite lives. He managed an exaggerated take-off of his landlady that made Grace laugh, and told her he’d be moving out as soon as he found some way to support himself, floundering when she asked him what that way might be. Only a fortnight back he’d told her that he thought he’d make a first-rate secret agent, and although he wasn’t nearly as grown up as Grace, he had at least in those two weeks matured enough to wince at what a schoolboy dolt he must have sounded; must have been. Almost before he knew what he was saying, he had blurted out a passionate desire to be a writer, that he hadn’t previously believed that he possessed. This seemed to impress Grace much more than had his earlier career choice, and so there and then Dennis resolved to have a literary life rather than the romantic death in the Vienna sewers he’d been planning. In response, she told him of her own fierce drive to one day be a dancer, an ambition that she clearly hadn’t made up just five minutes back, like Dennis had.

  ‘I’ve got a decent body, and it strikes me as a better move to show it off than lend it out. I’ve never taken proper classes, but I think I’ve got a feel for dancing, a lot more than for the work I’m doing now.’ She gazed through the bus window at the rushing Thames. ‘One day, young Dennis, I shall be London’s sensation. I’ll be much too big by then to talk to you, of course, but if you’re lucky you might get work writing some of my reviews, ay?’ She smiled sweetly and he wished, not for the first time, that he knew when she was joking.

  They got off at Elephant and Castle, where they were relieved to find the Temple Bar was not far down the Walworth Road, a nice three-storey building in good nick that had exposed black beams against white plaster, in a style that Dennis thought was known as ‘Brewer’s Tudor’. Entering, immediately swallowed by the public house’s atmosphere, it struck him that the London pubs he knew were very much like dogs, each with their own smell, their own friendly growl, their own sharp bark when things had gone too far and their own toilet habits. Once inside, the Temple Bar turned out to be both warm and spacious, with occasional long rays of sunlight through the tall front windows even lending it an airy quality. The lounge, with Spare’s work hanging everywhere about its walls, seemed to be going through a crisis of identity, unsure if it was a South London pub that had both educated and refined itself, or an art gallery that had unfortunately turned to drink. A sizeable crowd near to filled the room, but it was difficult to say if they were art enthusiasts or lunchtime alcoholics.

  Peering between the intellectuals and inebriates – assuming there was any difference – Dennis spotted Spare’s shabby but striking figure on the room’s far side, in conversation with Jack Neave. It was the first time Dennis had seen the two men together, but they talked to one another like old friends, or possibly survivors of the same disaster. Ironfoot Jack appeared to have dolled himself up for the occasion, at least relatively speaking, in that his cravat this week was yellow silk with no conspicuous stains. Spare, on the other hand, had not altered a single mucky fingernail since Dennis had last seen him, still in the same scruffy layers and patched-together shoes that seemed to be his only clothing; the apparel that he lived and worked and conjured rain and slept in. Gently seizing Grace’s arm, perhaps the first time that he’d dared deliberately touch her, Dennis guided her between the jostling art drunks and across the lounge to show off his illustrious new acquaintances to her, and, naturally, vice versa. Having an attractive woman by one’s side was, after all, surely a universal language of esteem, at least for men, even when hobnobbing with sorcerers and lopsided bohemians.