The pack-ice psychology that held Dennis immobile creaked and splintered as its grip upon him tightened. That was it, then. That was how his life was going to end, in a short stroll beside the Thames upon a freezing cold October night with nobody about. There’d be some soothing and placatory chatter, then a muffled noise of some variety, a splash, when he would be appointed a full partner in the company of Dolden, Green, Dorland, Lockart & Knuckleyard. And nobody would ever know, he realised. He’d kept Clive all to himself, in a compartment of his life away from all other acquaintances like Ada, Grace or Tolerable John: he hadn’t mentioned Clive to any of these people, hadn’t wanted to share Clive with them. Nor would Clive have mentioned him to anybody, it went almost without saying. His brief life and brutal death would both forever be unsolved, and here he was, on the front doorstep of his own mortality, and there was no defence; was no reprieve. Inside him, everything was caught in an accelerating spin, the vertigo of any clump of suds in its decaying orbit of a plughole. Distantly, he heard his own voice saying, ‘Yeah. Yeah, that sounds great. I’d better just pop to the gents’ before we go. It’s that meal I had earlier, playing up. Shan’t be a minute.’

  He was somehow upright and making his way unsteadily towards the front of the café and its toilet facilities, a high-pitched ringing in his ears. Despite his desperate attempts to catch their gaze with eyes that shouted ‘help me’, neither the defeated-looking pensioner behind the counter nor the Three Wise Monkey customers would look up from their own dilemmas or acknowledge Dennis’s. Was he so close to dying that the living could no longer see him? He was barely conscious of his actions, as if part of Dennis had already given up on his basic responsibility to keep himself alive, shuffling in the coffee shop’s low-wattage twilight, a sleepwalker to the guillotine. He supposed that his pretended urgent visit to the lavatory was intended to buy him a minute or two’s precious time, before accompanying his homicidal friend to the Embankment and their last appointment. Shambling in a stupor of the abattoir, he didn’t see what else there was to do except proceed to the inevitable outcome and have all this terror over with. Off on his left now he could see the entrance to the ladies’ and the gents’, discreetly signposted, while a few feet in front of him, there was …

  In an adrenalated scream of bone and fear and muscle, Dennis flung himself towards the cafeteria’s front door before he realised he was doing it, yanking the heavy portal open with the frigid air outside smacking into his face and lungs. Behind him he heard Clive say, ‘Dennis? Just where do you think you’re going?’, and his crisp enunciation wasn’t jocular, it wasn’t playful. It was cold, surprised and angry. Hurling himself out into the icy blackness, he glanced back and saw that the apprentice brief was standing, snatching a fawn raincoat from his chairback, with Clive’s grey, unblinking eyes locked on to Dennis, staring, full of awful promise. Eerie as a waxwork tableau, no one else in Franklin’s had looked up, or given any indication he and Clive were even there. The weighted café door swung shut behind him, but by then Dennis was pelting down the sparsely lighted road and praying to his dead mum he could disappear into the empty, echoing shadows under Holborn Viaduct before Clive reached the street and spotted him. That didn’t happen.

  Rhythmic and untiring footfalls slapped the bomb-cracked slabs behind him as he ran on into the truncated tunnel’s denser darkness, where his friend and ending called to him again. Unnervingly, the tone was once more ribbing and good-natured, with its bark of a frustrated predator entirely absent, as though never there at all.

  ‘Look here, young Knuckleyard, this is all very entertaining and mysterious, but can I ask what it’s in aid of ? Do you salt-of-the-earth scallywags end all of your social engagements with a hundred-metre dash? Or are you hoping the fresh air will help you with your rickets?’

  Ludicrously, Dennis found that he was starting to compose a bantering rejoinder, and so pounded on beneath the viaduct, spurred by his own alarming vulnerability, erupting out into the glimmer of Farringdon Street on its far side. A car purred past but didn’t slow, and although he could make out one or two other pedestrians through the miasma, in his thudding heart he knew that nobody was going to offer him assistance. Amery was smartly dressed while Dennis was a grubby scruff, and any intervention would be based on the assumption that Dennis had run off with Clive’s wallet or said something unforgiveable about Clive’s wife. If anybody deigned to notice the pursuit, they’d more than likely rugby-tackle him as an absconding miscreant. No saviours. No Samaritans.

  He hurtled on into the London dark and heard Amery’s steady and relentless pace behind him, but how far behind he couldn’t tell. His own feet punched the pavement mercilessly, the repeated impacts jarring through his lanky frame, and though he knew with terrifying certainty what he was running from, he had no clue where he was running to. He raced across Stonecutter Street, and only then became aware that if he didn’t change direction soon they’d be at the Victoria Embankment, where Clive wanted them to be. Dennis’s ineffectual escape bid had only allowed his murder to occur slightly ahead of schedule. His breath burning in his throat, he swung around the next turn on the right, where he was momentarily surprised to find himself in after-hours Fleet Street.

  His first thought was to take sanctuary in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, but that was too far down the road and his pursuer would be rocketing around the corner any second now, would see where he was going. Before Dennis knew what he was doing, he’d crossed Fleet Street at a frenzied sprint and darted, hopefully unseen, into the dark mouth of Bride Lane. Expecting with each step to feel Clive’s hand fall on his neck, not daring to look back and check for fear of losing crucial instants, Dennis was committed to this new trajectory and only saw his error when it was too late: the other end of Bride Lane led on to New Bridge Street, only slightly further down the road he’d just turned off from, slightly nearer the Victoria Embankment and its wide, indifferent waters. Was this, then, his fate, certain and inescapable, where every effort to get out could only lead him deeper in, towards his river-bottom terminus? His headlong pace was slowing, perhaps fatally, his feet no longer sure of their direction or their destination. If he carried on towards the Thames, then Clive would kill him. If he went back, Clive would kill him. If he stopped, if he put up a fight, if he did anything at all, he knew his life was done. Caught helpless in the maelstrom of what were most probably his final thoughts, he’d not consciously recognised this as the exact spot where Grace had scraped him from the Bride Lane pavement, but his nearside arm was reaching out already of its own volition. His numb fingers hooked on something, possibly the stone edge of a window, and reality collapsed. A whole fifteen-foot section of brick wall swung out into the feeble lamplight, an impossible door now ajar, and without thinking, Dennis flung his body through before it could swing shut again, so that

  he is immediately somewhere else, amid skyscraper blossoms that have tender green stems bigger than the trunks of elms, and fragrance so thick he can cut it with a knife … behind, the doorway inconceivable is closed once more, leaving a blacker black between the redwood irises, an interruption of decanted starlight … he’s back in the fit or seizure of the Great When, at what Maurice Calendar had called the Fisbo opening in Furious Alsatia … still horrifically afraid and with his limbs still full of flight, he tells himself that even if Amery had chased into Bride Lane after him, it wouldn’t have been quick enough to notice the miraculous two-storey entrance opening and shutting … even so, he backs away from the concealed gate’s distilled darkness, stumbling backwards up a slope of knee-deep grass to higher ground, his eyes fixed on the blank void of the portal, just in case …

  drinking the too rich air despite it hastening his pulse, he cautiously makes his reverse ascent through towering stalks, and petals shed like wedding dresses cast off in regret … although this place could never in a million years become familiar, he starts to remember where he is, as if partly retrieving an elusive dream … off to his left, viewed through the enlarged flora, is the edifice of sensuously contoured coloured glass, Westminster Abbey-sized, that he recalls from his previous visit to this cyclopean garden, a voluptuous immensity of tints and glints that might, he fuzzily conjectures, be a counterpart of St Bride’s Church … on its far side, seen through the bulbed translucence, Dennis briefly glimpses a long skein of floating smoke that he suspects to be the gossamer unfolding of Her Train … the billowing Arcanum keeps its distance, hanging back, perhaps because Dennis’s fear is at this point more aromatic than his poetry … he’s in the process of succumbing to the mental drift and mesmerism of the hidden city’s atmosphere, its trilling sound effects, and when Clive steps out from the abyss bracketed by flowers only a little further down the gradient, Dennis’s heart performs a sickening lurch, tripped up by the skipped beat …

  amongst the monster hollyhocks, lit by a night sky with too many constellations, the new breed of post-war murderer that Dennis has let into London’s under-mind appears relaxed and in a playful mood, no longer running and no longer needing to … tilting his head back, smiling up with satisfaction at the star jam overhead, Amery’s stylish figure looks immaculate against the flaring vision of its backdrop; looks alarmingly at home … when he returns his sparkling gaze to Dennis, his expression is one of disorienting fondness, his delivery amused, detached … ‘So, this makes two doors that you’ve shown me now – and from what I gather, I’m quite good at opening the things. It must be something in my carefree personality. I take it, after your peculiar antics at the café, that you’ve realised the mistake you made regarding Arnold Circus. But, I mean, look at it, Dennis! This place is just marvellous! I’ve been exploring little bits of it all week. You surely can’t have meant to keep this Shangri-La all to yourself ? To be quite honest, I’m a little disappointed in you, Knuckleyard. I ask you, where’s the harm in sharing such a fabulous discovery with your best mate?’

  unhurriedly, Clive strolls towards him through the stellar dapple, elegant in his fawn coat and looking like the hero … every step that Amery takes forward is reflected by a pace from Dennis in retreat, as he backs up the incline with his sweaty palms held out before him, trembling and placatory … his voice, when he can find it, is the plaint of a kicked puppy … ‘Clive, you kill people. I know you do’ … the other man now pauses in his casual advance, flicking his fringe back from a brow knitted in puzzlement, and, in the end, he laughs … ‘Dennis, you can’t be serious. Wherever did you come by a preposterous idea like that? Is this some lurid fancy you’ve imagined while sat on a bombsite with your roughneck friends, imbibing gas and milk?’ … continuing his rear-view climb throughout this humorous interrogation, Dennis is now almost at the summit of the gently rising ground where it abuts the Great When’s Fleet Street, or its Upper Scandals as described by long-gone Maurice Calendar … his hushed reply to Amery sounds, in his own ears, tremulous and frightened … ‘Kenneth Dolden. Violet Green. Edith Dorland. Eileen Lockart’ …

  the attorney’s wry and cordial features melt into the face of someone Dennis doesn’t know, the grey gaze narrowing, the finely modelled lips without a vestige of amusement … shaking his blond head as though regretful, Clive resumes his patient and sedate approach, while Dennis sticks with his attempted backwards disengagement … nonchalant, his hands deep in his raincoat pockets, the young lawyer’s tone is level and straightforward, with its chummy camouflage unnecessary now … ‘Hm. It appears that I’ve misjudged the depth of your stupidity. I’m not sure how you found me out, but, then, that doesn’t really matter, does it, when you must have also realised that you’re next? Dreadfully sorry and all that, but I can’t let you keep me from all this. The way it crawls and changes, the magnificent grotesquery – Dennis, it’s what my dreams are like. This is what I was born for’ …

  they’re both at the slope’s top end, facing each other in their awkward progress through the giant horticulture … with a heavy sigh, Amery takes his hands out of his pockets, holding in his right what looks to be an Arab knife with a sharp, curving blade that glitters in the stellar downpour … ‘This is my Moroccan kris, the letter opener that I picked up in Portobello. So, what do you say, young Knuckleyard? Shall we peruse your contents?’ … with a choked cry, Dennis is delivered from his stasis, at last turns away from his tormentor, bolting for a madman’s fantasy of Fleet Street … through his shock and panic, he hears Clive’s expensive, hand-tooled footfall close behind him and, as they burst out on to the Upper Scandals, hears Amery’s cry of pleased surprise … ‘Good God! This pavement is all gold! There’s more gold here than there is in the world!’ … not daring to look round, Dennis runs on in helpless dread, and only when confronted by the startling obstacle at Fetter Lane is he compelled to cease; is everything compelled to cease …

  four-storey buildings made of folded newspaper curtail their rustling, and the street’s handful of baroque pedestrians seem halted in mid-stride … Dennis himself is poised impossibly on one foot, all his weight thrown forward, and behind he hears Clive make a similar dead stop, with the world’s motion suddenly suspended, its kinetic force held in abeyance … at the centre of the burnished thoroughfare, facing both prey and predator, there is a thing of morbid and arresting beauty … by its tingling aura, Dennis at once knows it for a representative of the Arcana, though it’s one he hasn’t seen before, a new variety of the Great When’s disquieting fauna …

  stopping time, arresting the momentum of the moments with its presence, at the base of Fetter Lane there stands a spectacle … a mighty steed made all from bone, and, sat side-saddle on its spine, a female form that isn’t quite a woman, more a stylised swirl of luminescent pen strokes that implies the feminine … with its component pieces polished to a white which borders on fluorescent, the articulated skeleton of a tremendous shire horse blocks the golden road and its chronology alike … the fleshless hooves are massive and the fetlocks stout as silver birches … the long skull seems broken at its muzzle, now the cartilage and velvet hide have gone, and in the emptied sockets is a watchful dark … exposed ribs like a giant’s xylophone gleam as if carved from moonlight, and it shakes a great head bare of everything except its bridle, whinnies with a hollow echo, both the graveyard mare and its outlined suggestion of a rider being seemingly exempt from the extended instant’s immobility …

  on her sepulchral mount she is an animated pencil drawing, loosely crayoned in swipes of light … the flickering arms are raised, and in one hand she holds aloft an iron key, while in the other is a jet-black handkerchief … the dancing lines that sketch her face give the illusion that her scribbled eyes are fixed on Dennis, filled with intimations of significance he doesn’t fully understand … it comes to him that this might be the archetype Jack Neave has talked about, called Slenderhorse, but whether that be jockey, nag, or if the two comprise a single entity, he cannot say … the key she holds, he somehow knows within his vitals, will unlock the mysteries of death, presumably his own … the purpose of the handkerchief, however, is opaque to him until she drops it …

  parachute silk cut from night, its tumbling descent is languid, rivetingly graceful … like a woven liquid or an opening bloom it falls, the thin black square slipping and crumpling into new and transient configurations as it swoops, breeze-borne, on its leisurely tailspin towards millionaire macadam … his gaze frozen on its stately plummet, he considers how much horse racing has played its part in this disastrous undertaking … Monolulu, Spot’s illegal bookie empire, Spare’s Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards, Clive’s cufflinks … with a cold flash of belated insight, Dennis comprehends that he is looking at the signal to commence a fatal derby … flittering and flimsy, the black hanky cartwheels and cavorts from shape to fluid shape in its gavotte with gravity, hovering, floating, flirting with the glistering ground until at last it touches terra firma, spreading its obsidian skirts out like the farewell curtsey of a ballerina, and time is resuscitated, and they’re off …

  absurdist strollers at the street’s far end complete paused paces and continue with their dazzling perambulations … broadsheet buildings recommence their whispering flutter … Dennis is flung forward from his freeze into a smooth resumption of his previous stampeding gait, without the fall or falter that he’s been anticipating, and not far behind, hears Amery do the same … the two men, game and poacher, make their dash along the Upper Scandals, kicking up the Eldorado dust as they shoot past the cemetery equestrian to either side … although it isn’t the greased lightning that he felt when he was being dragged by Maurice Calendar, Dennis discovers that he can run faster in this London than the other, perhaps due to a decrease in friction, gravity or air resistance … he accelerates between the fish-wrap architecture, its façades of headline smearing by him in the corners of his vision, Edward abdicated, Mafeking relieved … the lead this buys him is short-lived as, at his rear, his adversary quickly picks up the same trick, with nearing shoe slaps ringing in the operatic resonance and, up above, the spatter of a billion lights …

  once more without a clue where he is running to, he only knows that Clive is going to catch him, gut him like a mackerel on these gilded boulevards … he can’t see any other way that this is going to end … Amery’s tougher, cleverer, has passed the week just gone in unrestricted exploration of the Great When, may already know as much or more than Dennis does, has all of the advantages, is holding all the cards … although Clive hadn’t known the centre of the higher city to be paved proverbially with gold, perhaps because it was outside Clive’s radius of reconnaissance – but as he jets from a perfected Fleet Street into an apotheosis of the Strand, Dennis can’t see how this fact is of any use to him in his mortal predicament … probably corresponding to Short London’s law courts, Amery’s home ground, he passes on the right a soaring stone colossus, blindfolded but brandishing a sword and balance … justice symbolised and yet, from Dennis’s perspective, hardly evident …