Dennis spun round to find an older and world-wearier version of the portrait’s subject standing at his shoulder, as though stepped from thin air with the aid of elemental spirits. Although shabbier and with the colour firebombed from his hair, this version wore a grin of satisfaction and, without the tache, was not demanding anyone consider their resemblance to the architect of World War II. Embarrassed to be caught transfixed in worship by the work’s creator, Dennis dimpled sheepishly and spread his hands in admiration, shaking his short back and sides with wonderment.

  ‘All this, it’s just bloody amazing. I don’t know how you can do the work you do, when you’re … you know. When you’re …’ Dennis trailed away to mumbles, but Spare laughed.

  ‘Come on, boy. Spit it out. “When you’re stuck down an ’ole no bigger than a coal scuttle and can’t sit down for cats”, is that what you were gunna say? ’ow do I unpack all o’ this out of a tiny little box like that? It’s a good question, Dennis, and yer needn’t look as if you’ve farted by just askin’ it. The answer is, that’s where the magic comes in. William Blake, at Fountain Court, ’e lived in little digs off boiled bacon, an’ from that ’e bodged up an ’ole universe. O’ course, we can’t take all the plaudits. Both Bill Blake an’ my good self, we weren’t entirely unacquainted with those areas o’ London what ’ave caused you so much grief o’ late. The Great When’s ’ad its part to play in both our oeuvres, I dare say. Credit where credit’s due, ay?’

  It was then that Dennis thought to ask a question that he should have asked a fortnight earlier.

  ‘Mr Spare, what … the Great When. What is it?’

  The artist regarded Dennis with a sympathy that bordered the paternal.

  ‘Well, for a kick-off, it’s Austin. Or Awstin, should you prefer. Or even Zos, for when I’ve got me magic ’at on. But the Great When … for my money, son, it’s the imaginary o’ London. It’s the place what people think of when they ’ear that name, a London all made up o’ bits an’ pieces what they’ve ’eard or what they can remember, that bears no resemblance to whatever shit’ole’s goin’ on outside these doors. It’s the eternal London, if you like, and as such it’s a truer place than this is, ’ere one minute and bombed flat the next. It’s the imaginary, like I said, so it’s what the material city’s founded on, and in that sense it’s realer than what we are. It’s an ’idden attic o’ mankind’s imagination, what’s only accessible to them ’oo’s stairs go up that ’igh. Sometimes I think of it as like a metaphor what’s put on weight an’ substance, or a matter-phor, as yer might say. It’s been built up across the centuries from dreams o’ London, which are often more endurin’ than a place put up wi’ bricks an’ mortar. All the same, mate, it’s not Butlin’s. It’s not somewhere you can visit for a laugh.’

  Dennis agreed with this assessment, and especially the last part.

  ‘You’re dead right there. I don’t ever want to see the place again. I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t know how you’ve managed for so long, or got to know those parts so well. How do you even find your way about, with everything continually changing into something else?’

  Spare fingered his pugnacious chin and pondered.

  ‘Well, it’s like with everythin’, it all gets more familiar if you’ve travelled there a time or two, although I ’ave to say it’s easier once yer’ve ’ad a gander at an Oxtercross.’ Interpreting Dennis’s interested nod as obvious camouflage for blank incomprehension, Wynne Road’s warlock ventured him an explanation. ‘What the Oxtercross is, it’s a map o’ the Great When, an’ the street names in its index are all alphabetical. For some unearthly reason, it’s arranged accordin’ to the ’ebrew alphabet, so rather than it bein’ A to Z like normal, it’s aleph to tau, or ox to cross, therefore the name. O’ course, you only see ’em in the other place. If one turned up ’ere in Short London, it’d be a cock-up bigger than your ’ampole book, you mark my words. Fuckin’ disaster, that’d be.’

  Having apparently concluded his deliberations on the subject, Austin looked once more at Dennis, this time wearing an expression of concern.

  ‘Dennis, what you were sayin’ about ’ow you never wanted to ’ave anythin’ to do wi’ the Great When again, it’s only fair as I should tell yer it’s not up to you. Yes, I’ll allow that givin’ it a wide berth is yer wisest policy, but you should bear in mind that the Great When is finished with us when it’s finished with us, not before. Again, it’s very like the artistic imagination: you may think you’re lucky, stumblin’ upon a vision, but it’s better that you understand right from the get-go, it’s the vision that’s the one what’ll be givin’ all the orders. It’s the vision what’s in charge.’

  The rest was pleasantries – Dennis repeating his appreciation of Spare’s art, and Spare saying he hoped Dennis would keep in touch – conducted in the baleful glare of Self-re-Hitler. In the end, the artist spotted Steffi Grant gesticulating at him from the room’s far side and, grunting his apologies, went off to see what was the matter. Catalogue in hand, Dennis continued his progression down the slow conveyor belt of murmuring faces that might hopefully deliver him to Grace.

  When finally he found her, she was by herself, Driberg and Ironfoot having wandered off, and she was weeping. This shocked Dennis to his core. From the first moment that they’d met, Grace had been perfectly composed, despite the life-or-death ordeals that she’d been made to sit through, and he couldn’t begin to imagine what bereavement or what tragedy had taken place in the last twenty minutes to undo her so. Immediately anxious and at a much higher pitch than he’d expected, he asked what was wrong, but she was plainly still far too upset to speak. Instead, she shook her head and gestured with the hand that wasn’t crushing a white hanky to her wet eyes, mutely indicating the exhibit they were standing by, which, in his sudden panic of concern, he hadn’t registered.

  In landscape ratio and perhaps eighteen inches wide, smaller than many of the other images, it was an equine portrait that was rendered once more in pastel and charcoal. Signed and dated in the upper right – AOS ’48 – this was apparently a recent work, and following a hurried consultation of his catalogue, Dennis discovered that its full title was Horses to the Slaughter: Railway Horse.

  In browns and greys against a ground of charcoal smudge, the horse’s head was almost a right profile, elderly and at what was presumably an auction block, waiting to find out who its meat and glue were being sold to. Muzzle roped and bandaged shut, preventing any fuss, the animal’s untended mane fell lank across its brow to frame a sole visible eye. This was a cobalt planet of despair, its gaze directed flatly at the artist, at the viewer; an expression without fear and speaking only of exhaustion, of a final resignation that was awful to behold. Beside him, Grace had at last tamed her tear ducts and was once more capable of conversation.

  ‘Sorry. It’s the eye that got me. He puts such a lot into his portraits’ eyes, your mate. That poor horse, how it’s looking out at us. It’s like it’s saying, “Yeah, I know that it’s all up for me, but don’t forget, you’re part of the same queue.” It made me come over a bit unnecessary, that’s all.’

  He could see why. The creature’s bleak acceptance of its fate said all the things to him that it had said to Grace, but also seemed to resonate with his own lingering dread concerning the picked carcass of his days-old dream; the same centreless feelings of approaching doom, of horses to the slaughter. It was with considerable relief that Dennis allowed a recovered Grace to lead him from the Railway Horse’s mortal scrutiny and into the remainder of the exhibition.

  She seemed thrilled when he eventually remembered to present her with the catalogue, and also greatly cheered up by the opportunity to have a go at Dennis over his reaction to Tom Driberg. ‘Honestly, you should have seen your face, pink as a baby’s bum. At least you know now what I feel like. It’s a burden, Dennis, being irresistible.’ Laughing and chatting, they continued with their circuit of the lounge, eventually arriving back at Theurgy with its detached muse and her stack of gaseous faces. Both agreed they’d had a smashing afternoon, but that it might be time to get back to North London, with perhaps some fish and chips for tea on the way home. Deciding that she’d better use the ladies’ toilets at the Temple Bar before embarking on a reasonably lengthy return journey, Grace left Dennis just inside the pub’s front door to wait on her return, and was therefore not there to witness Tolerable John McAllister’s belated entrance.

  Dennis greeted the puffed-out journalist warmly, but explained that he himself was just about to leave, at which McAllister nodded morosely and said, ‘Yeah. I knew that that would happen. I’ve had a right day of it at work, and couldn’t get away till now. But still, I’m glad I caught you. I dug up some information on those names you asked me to look out for.’

  It took Dennis a few seconds to remember his embarrassingly jittery request to John upon the Monday night just gone, about what he’d seen written in Clive Amery’s notebook. He was just about to laugh it off as nerves and tell McAllister that he shouldn’t have bothered when the glum reporter pulled out his own notebook and looked up at Dennis quizzically.

  ‘That mate of yours, whose book you saw this list in, am I right in thinking he’s a copper?’

  Thrown off balance by the unexpected question, Dennis’s reply was guarded.

  ‘Um, yeah. Yeah, he’s with the law. Why? What was … ?’

  John was flicking through the worn and compact jotter, filled with what at first resembled Spare’s invented hieroglyphics, but which Dennis soon identified as Pitman shorthand. At length, John located the precise pages of scribble he’d been looking for, then read them out to Dennis in a tone that was too weary to be even mournful. ‘Violet Green, believed to be a prostitute, was shot dead on the landing of her Rupert Street address in Soho – this was 1947 – with what the police thought might be an American service revolver. Edith Dorland, 1948, still a young woman, thirty-one years old, she had her head bashed in and turned up on a bombsite at Mint Street, in Southwark.’

  Prior to delivering his findings on the third and final name that Dennis had enquired about, McAllister raised his eyes from the indecipherable scratchings, shook his head defeatedly and sighed.

  ‘The names are all in order chronologically, as it turns out. The last one, Eileen Lockart, I think she was strangled, later on in 1948. Her body was discovered by chance on another bombsite, this one up at Chiswell Street in the remains of Cripplegate. Eileen Lockart was five years old.’

  Numbed by the information, Dennis couldn’t think of anything to say. John closed the wire-bound pad and slipped it back into his pocket, brow still furrowed by the thought of the dead child.

  ‘They’re unsolved London murders from the last three years, the lot of ’em, with Kenneth Dolden as the earliest, in 1946. There’s nothing else connecting them, as far as I can see. I should imagine your mate had them written down as part of ongoing investigations.’

  Yes, of course. Of course that was the answer. Though Clive wasn’t a policeman, he was with the law, as Dennis had evasively put it to John. He’d obviously jotted the names down in reference to forthcoming cases, or some other complicated legal process Dennis wouldn’t understand. When Tolerable John had said that his imagined legal partners were in fact a list of unexplained dead bodies, Dennis had felt, unaccountably, a sense of vertigo, as if suddenly finding himself at the brink of an abysmal drop with no clue how he’d got there. Now, however, with his brief Dick Barton fancies so convincingly dispelled, almost before they’d formed, he told himself he couldn’t even properly remember what they’d been, although that wasn’t strictly true: his fears had been connected in some manner with the scalpel-fingered presence, clicking from behind the newspaper with its ‘Night-Life of Soho’ headline, there in his unpleasantly persistent dream. And though the names were clearly nothing he should worry himself with, the dream remained, an odd-shaped stain on memory’s unswept floor.

  Hugely relieved, although not sure what of, Dennis thanked John for all the trouble that he’d gone to, promising the melancholy journalist a pint the next time they were in the Cheshire Cheese, perhaps next Friday after work, the evening before Guy Fawkes Night? John solemnly noted this down in his Rosetta Stone of a reporter’s notebook, and then smiled to see Tom Driberg blowing kisses at him from the lounge bar’s open door. ‘So Driberg’s here, then? Red, queer and in Parliament. I don’t know how he gets away with it. He was a mate of old Aleister Crowley as well, once upon a time.’ Dennis was unsurprised. Who wasn’t? He and John rushed through a farewell handshake, and McAllister went off in search of his flamboyant colleague. A few minutes later, Grace returned from her safari to the ladies’, blaming her long absence on the toilet’s solitary, permanently engaged cubicle. When Dennis offered no response to this, she frowned up at him, questioningly.

  ‘Here, are you alright? You’re looking a bit shaken up by something.’

  Was he? He supposed it must be some residual reaction to the news from Tolerable John, even though that misunderstanding had been sensibly resolved. Annoyingly, her use of the phrase ‘shaken up’ had conjured an irrelevant vignette from Dennis’s increasingly stale nightmare, with the gangster Solly Kankus trembling exaggeratedly on the far side of the Farringdon Road, his fleshy body rippling like a windswept flag. Dennis assumed that this bizarre and inexplicable internal image wasn’t helping with the seen-a-ghost look that Grace had referred to, and so told her that his stricken countenance was a result of thinking about Railway Horse. Her lime eyes melted and she pinched her lips into a sympathetic pout. Believing Dennis to be a more sensitive and feeling individual than she’d previously suspected, she let him link arms with her for most of the long journey home, even inviting him into her Folgate Street flat for an hour, so he could eat his fish and chips from a clean plate instead of last week’s Daily Mirror.

  They talked, between mouthfuls, of the exhibition and the people that they’d met, and Grace described the personal impression Spare had made on her. ‘There’s sex not far beneath the surface in some of his pictures, but, from talking to him, I think that he might be shy.’ After their meal was finished and washed down with a hot cup of tea, Grace thanked him for the catalogue and said she’d had a lovely day which, he concluded, meant that it was time for him to leave. On her front doorstep, she said he should call in on her sometime, and they made a tentative engagement for the Sunday evening after next. She stood on tiptoe to bestow a goodnight peck upon his startled cheek, and Dennis floated all the way back to Gibraltar Walk without once thinking of himself as Hitler, or of Tolerable John’s grim list of unsolved homicides, or of his dream.

  Over the following weekend, of course, without the scintillant distractions of a wonderment-crammed pub or Grace’s company, he thought of very little else.

  It wasn’t simply that he had a cloud above him while he served an uneventful Saturday behind the till at Ada’s shop, or idled in his bedless room throughout a rainy Sunday. It felt nothing like a cloud. It felt more like a train – black, loud and steaming – rumbling closer in his belly and his heart, although he didn’t know from which direction, or what he could do to get off of the track. His bubbling and fizzing mind was an alchemic glass retort where unknown substances appeared to be reacting badly with each other: somewhere in the random slop of information that he took into his close-cropped head without examination, contradictory facts were screaming at each other, urgent and irreconcilable, but Dennis couldn’t for the life of him tell where the increasingly panicked disagreement issued from.

  Hardest to understand was why he should be in this fretful mood when everything was going relatively well. He’d somehow managed to get through the terrifying other London ordeal only mildly scarred, and all that was successfully behind him now. He thought that Grace was perhaps starting to warm up to him, and then on Monday night he had the long-delayed appointment with Clive Amery that he’d been looking forward to all week, although admittedly less so since Dennis’s nocturnal horror film of seven nights before. That was what most annoyed him, that a blatantly nonsensical assemblage of mental rubbish like a dream should shadow this rare period of enjoyment, hanging over his forthcoming rendezvous with his best mate. During the day on Monday, working in the shop, there were even occasions when, ridiculously, he considered telephoning Clive at work to call the meeting off, then realised with a stab of shame how stupid he was being. He had wanted nothing more than Amery’s friendship and approval all this time, and here he was preparing to reject it, all because he’d had a stupid dream. It was the sort of thing a twelve-year-old might do, and Dennis was a man now; could be called upon to do his National Service if the country ever found out he existed or, worse, where he happened to be living. He resolved to grow up and put all this nebulous and morbid nonsense from his thoughts, but when he set out from the shop that night at seven for the Farringdon Road, Dennis learned that his thoughts had decided otherwise.

  It was the last night of the month, pressing against the sharp edge of November, and was much colder and blacker than he’d been expecting. Making his way out of Shoreditch, leaving vaporous parcels of his breath behind him in a bread-crumb trail, he noted that the streets tonight were mostly empty, with few cars and fewer still pedestrians. Most probably this was as a result of the low temperature, but, then again, it was All Hallows’ Eve, the night when all the witches, ghouls and devils were supposed to be about, and when sensibly superstitious people didn’t venture out of doors. At least, that’s what his mum had told him, and he was beginning to think that he should have listened to her. Without the diversions of the shop, he found himself with no recourse except to dwell upon the things that he’d been trying not to dwell upon, and without Ada’s coughing as a kind of background music, the dark lanes and empty byways seemed unnaturally silent. He could hear his every worry.

  As he started up the drawn-out yawn of Old Street, Dennis tried to take his anxious self in hand, commencing a stern lecture on how there was absolutely nothing real that he should be concerned about. All he was doing, after all, was keeping an appointment made over a week ago with Clive, when Dennis had fortuitously bumped into his friend there on the corner of the Bethnal Green Road. Clive had been looking for him up at Coffin Ada’s, to make sure he was alright, and Dennis had been walking home from Grace’s after the preceding night’s decisive interlude at Arnold Circus. He remembered how appreciative of Clive’s concern he’d been, to think that the urbane young lawyer would walk all the way to Lowell’s Books & Magazines, simply to check on his well-being. It was—