He was just passing the blitzed shell of St Luke’s, a clot of deeper shadow on the other side of Old Street, its peculiar Egyptian steeple bayonetting the sky, when a thought struck him. It was no more than the tiniest of loose ends, dangling from his carefully embroidered memories, but like a schoolboy with an unpicked scab, he found himself compelled to pull the end of it: hadn’t he told Clive, from the telephone box by the church in Spitalfields, that he would not be living with his landlady until his ‘other district’ difficulties were resolved? He felt sure that he had, and then reluctantly recalled the cryptic words that Grace had uttered in his dream, something about ‘He didn’t know you were at mine, but should have known you weren’t at Ada.’ But, of course, that made no sense. Why would Clive trek to Shoreditch if he’d known that Dennis wouldn’t be there? It wasn’t as if the bombed-out area had got anything else to offer a sophisticated trainee lawyer. And they’d met on Bethnal Green Road, just as you’d expect if Clive had visited the bookshop before heading back along Gibraltar Walk, although, now that he thought about it, Clive had seemed surprised to see him.

  He crossed the City Road, puffing his trail of baby ghosts, and, just past Bunhill Row where William Blake was sleeping, came upon the northern reaches of the wasteland that had once been Cripplegate. Out there in the night acres, down towards the stubs of Chiswell Street, a blaze was raging that he soon identified as a kids’ bonfire, prematurely set alight before November 5th by rival children, as an act of sabotage. It spat and crackled, faintly echoing the greater conflagration of nine years before and, being Chiswell Street, put him in mind of Eileen Lockart, five years old and strangled, out there in the admixture of brick and willowherb. This wasn’t something that he wanted to consider, and so he redoubled his attempts to reconstruct that Shoreditch corner and his unexpected run-in with Clive Amery. What had Clive said to him, exactly?

  From what he remembered, it had mostly been about Clive’s urge to make sure that he was OK after the trouble Dennis was anticipating when they’d previously met, his then forthcoming tryst with ‘Jack Spot and his quaking henchman’, as Clive had succinctly phrased it. This, predictably, sparked a repeat of Solly Kankus and his overstated shuddering in Dennis’s still-unexploded dream, with on its heels a sudden notion that transformed his spine into a knobbly icicle: while he was pretty sure he’d told Clive that he wouldn’t be at Ada’s for some time, he was completely certain that he hadn’t mentioned anything about Spot having an associate, much less a quaking one. He couldn’t have said anything about it when he’d met with Clive at Bond’s that Friday afternoon, for the compelling reason that it hadn’t happened yet. In fact, the only way that anyone could know of Mr Kankus and his fit of trembling, that night in Arnold Circus, would be if they’d …

  At his back, across the weeds and rubble, a great pile of broken furniture and branches – carefully constructed and maliciously ignited – was still roaring, an unwitting funeral pyre for Eileen Lockart. Crossing Goswell Road, his pace slowed to a trudge, as if his bone marrow had been replaced by lead, when almost all his pennies dropped at once in a hard copper rain: the only way for anyone to know how Jack Spot’s colleague had behaved that night was for them to have been there.

  But Clive hadn’t been there; hadn’t even known the meeting would be taking place in Arnold Circus. Although Dennis was becoming rapidly aware that he’d told his friend about matters he should not have done, he knew that he’d avoided naming the location of Spot’s audience with Harry Lud. All that he’d said was, it was somewhere up near Ada’s bookshop where a lot of different streets converged … which, Dennis realised haltingly, for anyone with access to a map of London and a pair of eyes, was practically as good as giving them the full postal address. He plodded onward automatically into the Old Street murk, simply because that was the way his feet were heading, and insisted to himself that even if Clive had deduced that Arnold Circus was the place in question, that did not alter the plain fact that Clive hadn’t been there. There’d been only Spot and Kankus, Dennis and Jack Neave, and of course Gog Blincoe and Harry Lud. Other than that, beyond two parked cars and a builder’s truck, the place had been entirely empty. But, having commenced to tug on the loose thread, he found he couldn’t stop until his memory embroidery was an unravelled intestinal mess.

  It came to him, for instance, that if Clive in some way had been there at Arnold Circus, it would at a stroke explain his earlier questions about bumping into Clive that afternoon in Shoreditch, although hardly reassuringly. This new scenario would mean that his friend wasn’t coming back from having been to call on Dennis up at Coffin Ada’s, having somehow not recalled that Dennis wouldn’t be there. In the new hypothesis, Clive had been up at Arnold Circus all night long, both during the exchange between Jack Spot and Harry Lud, and afterwards, when everybody else had gone. But if that was the case, what was he doing there all night? And anyway, completely undermining this whole ludicrous conjecture was Dennis’s certain knowledge that Clive hadn’t been there in the first place. Then, dragging his heels across St John Street, he thought once more of the builder’s wagon with its stacks of not-worth-stealing burlap sacking in the back, as in the cafeteria in his dream, and as the penny rain became a bruising torrent, Dennis finally had no choice but to understand.

  Oh God. Oh God, Clive had been underneath the sackcloth, must have hidden there at some point earlier that Friday afternoon while Dennis had been idly frittering away the moments until midnight. He would have heard everything and no doubt seen it all, Kankus and Spot’s arrival, Blincoe dragging back the previously timber curtain and the entrance of crime’s essence, Harry Lud. Dennis stopped in his tracks at the worn kerb of Britton Street and let the awful truth sink in.

  If his distressing theory was correct, Clive would have witnessed Blincoe opening an aperture between the different Londons. Did that mean he’d then know how to open one himself ? Dennis felt sick. Was that where Clive had been that Friday night, exuberantly exploring the Great When? Starting to shiver now, he thought back to their Bethnal Green Road meeting and recalled that Clive had been ever so slightly rumpled and dishevelled, as though he’d just spent a night out on the town. It was a shame, in retrospect, that Dennis hadn’t thought to ask which town. He slumped against the nearest brick wall, and the full enormity of what he’d done washed over him, a pulverising tide.

  He’d blabbed. He’d done the thing that everyone had told him not to do, because he’d so much wanted to impress his older friend, and now the trouble he was in was terrible. This was worse, even, than his first encounter with the Hampole book, because then he’d had the assistance of Jack Neave and Monolulu, Maurice Calendar, Gog Blincoe, Austin Spare … he couldn’t turn to them for help with his current dilemma, because none of them must ever know that he’d betrayed the concealed city. What, he wondered with heart thudding, was he going to do? What if the City Heads, or even the horrific Charming Peter, learned what he’d allowed to happen? Him and Clive would end up in the same condition as his landlady’s book-dealer friend, eyes on the inside, staring at the backs of their own heads. And couldn’t this put Grace in danger, too, just from the little that she’d seen? He leaned against the blacked-out brickwork, gasping, and he wanted desperately to turn around and hurry back to Shoreditch, wanted all of this to go away, but knew it wouldn’t. God, what was he going to do?

  His only option, it occurred to him, was to meet up with Clive as planned and force his errant friend to see that this wasn’t some supernatural lark, and if they didn’t both leave it alone, then it would get them killed, or worse. He didn’t know if he could out-argue a lawyer, only that he had to. Straightening up and drawing a deep, quavering breath, he carried on to Old Street’s end and then turned left into Farringdon Road. Despite his new resolve, there was still something bothering him.

  Dolden, Green, Dorland & Lockart. Not solicitors, apparently, but unsolved murders that his chum had jotted in a notebook, no doubt as upcoming legal cases he was looking at. Descending the benighted road faster than he’d intended, borne now on an avalanche of pennies, Dennis suddenly perceived the flaw in his own reassuring explanation. Who was there to prosecute, who to defend, if these four murders were unsolved? And if Clive’s listing of those names was therefore not professional, what was it? His unsettled mind was racing now, in an attempt to keep up with his feet. Was he suggesting that Clive might have killed those people? All of them? That he’d shot Violet Green and strangled Eileen Lockart? No. That was ridiculous, when Tolerable John had said that these were random slayings that had nothing to connect them up. Unless, of course, they had. He thought of Clive berating homicidal maniacs for their predictability, and of the lawyer’s many monologues debating the post-war compulsive murderer. Down at the bottom of the almost empty road, on its far side, he could see an illuminated signboard that said ‘Franklin’s’. He was almost there.

  Clive couldn’t be a murderous lunatic. That couldn’t have been what the clicking thing behind the newsprint in his dream, that he suspected was a Pope of Blades, was telling him. Because if that was true, then … then he’d done something much worse than to betray a confidence. If Clive killed people for the fun of it, then in his efforts to impress somebody posh and cultured, Dennis had set loose a monster in the city’s secret and immortal soul. He’d unleashed unimaginable suffering upon both Londons, gifting them a killer that might move from place to place in the material world without detection; that might threaten the superior realm itself. Dennis alone had done this. Self-re-Hitler.

  He was now outside the café, nothing like his dream, and found that he was pushing open its front door and entering, despite his every fibre telling him to run away. Why had Clive chosen somewhere so far from their usual haunts, and at so late an hour, for their meeting? Why, if Dennis’s increasingly hysterical surmises were correct, would Clive want to meet up with him at all, once he had served his purpose by revealing the forbidden landscape? Was it because he was the one person who might possibly connect Clive Amery to the Great When? Manoeuvring through the unfamiliar premises, uneasily considering the implications of this final question, he jumped when he spotted Clive at one of the establishment’s rear tables, smiling, his eyes twinkling.

  ‘Lord Oxydol! I was just starting to suspect you’d stood me up.’

  And Dennis’s bad dream began.

  8

  A Startling New Calendar

  There was a glint, a visual whinny, every time Clive’s horse-head cufflinks caught the light. In Franklin’s late-night café, the trapped air hung thick and still above the cup-ringed tables, most of them unoccupied, and in the hush, each stifled cough or rattled saucer was a nerve-testing percussion. Everything seemed smeared – the sounds, the atmosphere, Dennis’s face inverted in the hollow of a teaspoon, his glazed feelings – glistening as though through a thin grease of apprehension. The establishment wasn’t at all like Bond’s and had no poor, dead Flabby Harrison behind its counter, yet felt less real than his dream had done. There were three other customers, two men and an impassive older woman, seated separately at their different wooden islands of preoccupation and apparently invisible to one another, silent funeral deities. Dennis was nailed there, held in place by the moment’s impossibility and wondering how his best friend was going to kill him.

  In a trance of fright he overstirred his weak tea, mesmerised by the slow, looping scrape of steel on chinaware, a tinkling soundtrack to his circling thoughts as he sat fixed by the oncoming headlights of extinction. Why wasn’t he doing anything? Was he just going to wait for it to happen? His own end was just across the table from him, chatting amiably, and Dennis couldn’t marshal a response to literally save his life. His panicked, fluttering attention lighted upon detail after detail as if in a miserable attempt to gobble up these last few crumbs of sight and sentience: stray grains like chiselled ice floes at the base of the salt cellar’s crystal lighthouse; dead fly belly-up behind the sugar bowl; residual carbon bruises, black stars furiously ground into a currently unused tin ashtray. His well-spoken executioner’s least incidental gesture startled the equestrian cuff-fastenings into a glittering steeplechase, while Dennis sat there and did nothing save recall the bleak acknowledgement in Railway Horse’s one visible eye, that knowing shared glance on the way to slaughter. No more than two feet away and yet as though from an immeasurable distance, Clive was saying something entertaining about Scotland that, to Dennis’s ear, sounded now like the smooth, reassuring patter of somebody flogging sudden death on the black market like a pair of nylons.

  ‘ … heard about their latest Highland fling, with the petition that they launched on Saturday? The sixth Duke of Montrose, quite possibly an Edinburgh cousin of your Lordship, was the first to sign this ransom note insisting that the Jocks should have home rule, as if we can just saw the country off at Newcastle. Wherever will it end? Next thing you know, we’ll get the Welsh demanding independence, or the Cornish. It won’t let up until Putney’s a republic. I say, are you trying to tunnel through the bottom of that teacup?’

  Made aware that he was still stirring compulsively, Dennis apologetically withdrew the spoon and placed it in his saucer. He was uneasily conscious that he wasn’t holding up his end of the pair’s customary back-and-forth; not chuckling at the one-sided jokes about the class distinctions that there were between them. Feeling like a condemned man, not wanting Clive to spot that there was anything the matter, he attempted a relaxed smile but could manage no more than a rictus.

  ‘Haha. And, yeah, I mean, who’d be, you know, presiding at a Scottish parliament? They’d have, they’d have to have the, I don’t know, the Loch Ness monster, or, or, or Macbeth. Somebody frightening and Scottish, Burke and Hare, someone like that. Haha.’

  Which, even as the words were spilling from his mouth, he knew was frantic nonsense and nothing at all like repartee. Nevertheless, Clive gave him an amused look that was only faintly questioning. ‘Yes, I suppose they would. Perhaps in a black kilt that had a human head as a replacement sporran, playing bagpipes made from somebody’s wee mother, something of that nature? You know, Knuckleyard, I’ve missed these chats of ours across the course of this last dreary week. You really are a tonic after all the chaps at work, who, I’m afraid, can be as dull as ditchwater. Perfectly decent fellows, I suppose, but, for all that, there’s no one there who’s anywhere near my own age, who I can talk to as a friend and equal. Nobody with your primitive allure.’

  Down at the nearly silent cafeteria’s front end, one of the other customers scraped back his chair, perhaps to make a visit to the lavatories. The older woman looked at the cartoon strip in her Evening Standard with a face free from expression. Dennis automatically said ‘Ha’ as a response to the remark and brandished once again his rictus grin, but inside he was crumbling. To hear Clive speak of them as equals, once his fondest dream, was like a hard punch in the stomach now he knew it for a tactic. Clive was going to kill him because Dennis was the only living individual who might associate the trainee barrister and trainee murderer with the Great When, and all this flattery was part of an insidious routine, a lethal courtship. Knowing this did nothing to reduce the amber bead of paralysing dread he was held fast in, like a prehistoric bluebottle. He found he was incapable of doing anything or saying anything that might prolong his brief and, thus far, largely wretched life, opting instead to babble more non sequiturs in lieu of conversation.

  ‘We, we’ll probably be more alluring when we’ve, you know, when we’ve come down from the trees and, and, and combed out all the nits and, I don’t know, the bits of bark, or …’

  Clive’s fond smile, maintained throughout, now had an undertone of puzzlement.

  ‘Dennis, I have to ask, is everything alright? It’s just, you don’t seem quite your usual self. You’ve not been having any more of your spine-tingling adventures, have you?’

  Glancing as it was, this reference to Dennis’s excursions in the other London sounded in him a profound peal of alarm, so that he recoiled from the question into mumbling improvisation.

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry. I, earlier on, I had something to eat that’s given me a bit, you know, a bit of bellyache. It’s nothing serious. You go on with what you were saying.’

  From somewhere adjacent to the café entrance came the creak of a door swinging shut, and then another scrape of chair legs on linoleum, announcing the stray customer’s return. Clive held Dennis’s darting gaze for a few seconds, still wearing the same amused and interested smile, before he lounged back elegantly in his chalk-stripe suit, his orange tie, his racecourse cufflinks, and resumed his lulling monologue on the importance of their friendship. Motionless behind its sugar bowl, the fly held all its legs up as if frozen in the act of trying uselessly to push away demise.

  ‘Well, I suppose what I was getting at is that, for all our differences in rank, we’ve got a lot in common, you and I. Both young chaps, keen to find our footing in the world, both with our parents gone, both with the same bomb-happy sense of humour – we should spend more time together, don’t you think, and get to know each other? Tell you what, after we’ve finished here, why don’t we toddle down and take a walk on the Embankment? You can tell me all your boyhood tales of life with Bill and Nancy and the Artful Dodger, and I’ll top you with hilarious accounts of setting fire to servants.’