These were myriad. Trestle tables fluttered horror comics of outlandish hue, and non-specific fish displayed resentful profiles against white slabs, as though posed for police photos. Tumbril cabbage crates brimmed with the heads of slain vegetable royalty.

  Towards the bottom of the crowded gradient, pausing to adjust his grip on the ungovernable box, he spotted somebody he knew – if not to talk to, then at least by reputation. Maurice Calendar, who stood beside a fruit and veg stand, chatting to its owner, was widely considered the most fashionable man in London, although nobody would think that looking at him here. Around his middle twenties, black hair neatly Brylcreemed, Calendar had on the same ubiquitous fawn raincoat worn by all the city’s decently paid younger blokes, the same starched shirt and neutral tie, the same smoke-coloured trilby. There were those who said he’d been the first to dress like that, long before anybody else had, but it didn’t look to Dennis as if there’d been many major innovations since. It wasn’t just the run-of-the-mill clothing, either. Calendar seemed somehow puffier and more swollen, slower in his movements than the last time Dennis had run into him. Appearing short of breath, the flagging trendsetter leaned heavy on a corner post of M. Blincoe & Son Fresh Fruit and Vegetables, regaling the stall’s hulking monolith of a proprietor. This latter’s face was like the flat side of a split log, having a nose so broken it was barely three-dimensional, whorls that with imagination might almost resemble eyes, and enough wrinkles to suggest a grain.

  Having regained control of his oblong obstruction, Dennis soldiered on through Soho, heading back towards the Charing Cross Road and then possibly a bite to eat and cup of tea somewhere along the Strand. That would be nice. He might see his mate Clive. Retracing his steps over Broadwick Street triggered a random landmine-burst of history and disconnected semi-facts. Wasn’t it somewhere along here that a Victorian doctor stopped a cholera epidemic in its tracks, just by having the handle taken off a sewage-tainted water pump? Morosely, Dennis speculated that there was most likely a bad-news pump somewhere, letting all the shit in, and that England’s miseries might be alleviated by somebody qualified in medicine, with a sufficiently large spanner.

  Dennis didn’t have an avalanche of friends, and ‘not an avalanche’ meant less than three. He’d lost touch with the other kids from school around the time he’d gone to live at Coffin Ada’s, which was understandable. He bore no grudges for the way his classmates had abandoned him, and would have steered clear of himself in their position. All the same, lacking romantic interest other than the girl in Picture Show, that only left him with Clive Amery and Tolerable John McAllister. Ironically, he’d met both these enduring pals through the same situation that had lost him all his others, which was his proximity to Ada Benson. Tolerable John was a reporter for the Daily Express, who would sometimes drop by Lowell’s Books & Magazines to draw on Ada’s talent for uncommon gossip, and if Dennis got the chance, he’d look in on John later when he headed back to Shoreditch. Clive, contrastingly, had been a punter fortunate enough to call at the establishment while its repellent manager was out spoiling a church-hall beetle drive and Dennis was alone at the cash register. The dazzlingly funny trainee lawyer had been looking for William Le Queux’s Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks, and he and Dennis had immediately hit it off. It was Clive Amery that Dennis hoped he might bump into as he manhandled his clunking soap container down the Strand.

  He clutched and cursed his way along the ancient boulevard that still recalled a Roman occupation and had barely registered the buzz bombs, flinching every few steps as he reached the next shop window and was shocked anew by his reflection. Dennis was a thing made out of string with lumpy knots to represent his knees and elbows, bending slightly backwards under the encumbering box as though some sort of hunch-front. The short back and sides that left a bristling chestnut lawn atop his shaved suede skull made him look like a wilted thistle. He conceded it was little wonder, given his appearance, that at eighteen years of age he was still technically a virgin. Yes, he’d been tossed off by Susan Garrett when he was fourteen, but that was true of most people.

  The firm Clive worked for had their offices down at the Strand’s eastern extremity, near the Royal Courts of Justice, so that the young legal eagle often spent his lunch break at Bond’s Coffee House, roughly halfway along. It was to this that Dennis veered his barely manageable load, turning around to shunt the front door open with his arse and backing in as if arriving for a papal audience. Although its management appeared uncertain of the new arrival and his hefty inconvenience, the place itself embraced him with aroma, steam and more warmth than he’d felt in weeks. A halting series of apologies led Dennis to the cafeteria’s rear, where he was instantly relieved to see Clive lounging at an otherwise unoccupied table for four, jotting down memos on a notepad between careful sips of black and steaming coffee.

  Seemingly oblivious to admiring glances from a clutch of office girls across the aisle, Clive swept the fine blond hair out of his eyes, tapped thoughtfully upon his lower front teeth with a pencil, and was everything that Dennis wasn’t. Clive was funny by intention rather than anatomy; talked comfortably with everyone; could charm a breeze block. And while Dennis was a problematic shape that clothing happened to, Clive wore his glad rags beautifully – only an ordinary chalk-stripe navy number, but it hung like silk, and close up you could see the cut, the quality. Well-polished shoes. Smart wristwatch. Horse-head cufflinks. Grunting with exertion, Dennis dumped himself on the chair facing the apprentice barrister, and his debilitating box on the one next to it. Amery glanced up with annoyance, which immediately transubstantiated into unalloyed delight.

  ‘Stone me, it’s Knuckleyard. What’s up, chum? Did you finally take a blunt bread knife to that horrible old woman who you work for? And that’s why you’re looking for a brilliant lawyer, who can get you off with a life sentence rather than the rope.’ He nodded at the box. ‘Is that her head?’

  It was a lovely thought that started Dennis laughing down his nose. ‘Got it in one. So, anyway, this brilliant lawyer that I’m looking for – d’you know one?’

  Clive smiled at him fondly. ‘Why, you cheeky bugger. Just for that, I’m going to let them hang you. Draw and quarter you, if they’ve a mind to. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Dennis was part-way through informing Clive that, yes, he’d love a cup of tea and possibly a piece of cake if one was going spare, when an offended-looking man with sleeves rolled up and managerial manner stormed the coffee house’s length to pull in at their table, snorting like a train.

  ‘These seats are for my customers, son, not your rubbish. Come on, get it off that chair and then be on your way.’

  As a first step to his surely immemorable reply, Dennis had let his mouth sag open idiotically, when Clive leaned forward and held up a manicured forefinger in the restauranteur’s direction.

  ‘Perhaps if I could just stop you there.’

  Surprised, the man switched his unfriendly gaze to Dennis’s much more presentable companion, who returned it calmly as he flipped a business card from his breast pocket with a practised gesture, holding it aloft for the irate proprietor to read.

  ‘Clive Amery, Jessop & Wilks. I’d hoped that meeting with my client here at your establishment might spare him any more undue publicity, but it seems not. This man is Sir Dennis Compton-Knuckleyard, the fifth Lord Oxydol. You have heard of the Oxydol soap dynasty, I take it?’

  Looking on amazed, Dennis wished that his own voice was as middle class as Clive’s, and had the ring of someone used to being listened to. Given the right enunciation, you could get away with anything. The manager, if that was what he was, now seemed uncertain and increasingly alarmed. Responding to the lawyer’s question, he bobbed his perspiring head in affirmation, mumbling something that to Dennis’s ear sounded very much like the word mumble. Clive went on.

  ‘I don’t know if you follow any of the quality newspapers, but if so, his lordship’s plight can hardly have escaped your notice. I’ll be blunt. It’s squatters – rough types who’ve been in the army, and who think that just because their houses have all been blown up, they can live anywhere they want, whether it be in disused army barracks, or the mansions of our most revered detergent tycoons. Strictly between us, a mob of them have commandeered my client’s stately home. As you can see, they’ve taken all his decent clothes and left him with the hairstyle of a convict. That, and those few heirlooms he could haul in this dilapidated box, marked with the emblem of a once proud family. For pity’s sake, I ask that you might reconsider your previous assessment of his character, and unless you yourself happen to be the fourth Lord Oxydol, that you do not refer to him as “son”.’

  Halfway through this, Dennis was forced to clap a hand across his mouth and turn his face away, hoping the gesture could be taken for a pang of reawakened grief. Similarly, perhaps his shaking shoulders might pass as a bout of stifled weeping. By this point the putative coffee house owner was apologising unreservedly. He even tried to bow to Dennis, although the resultant ducking of his torso and accompanying sideways movement of his arms made the whole thing look like a constipated curtsey. Squirming with remorse, the man asked Clive if there was anything that he could do, and was told in reply that with a cup of tea, a wedge of fruitcake and another coffee for himself, the whole unfortunate affair would be forgotten. Mopping his damp jowls, the chastened cafeteria boss trundled away, returning presently with the requested fare and more apologies. Benevolently, Clive waved these aside, pressing a florin on the poor chap – ‘for your trouble’ – and assuring him that in his modest way he was assisting in the battle against communism.

  When they were once more alone except for the admiring giggles of the nearby secretaries, the two settled to a lively and digressive chat, Dennis’s half delivered in a spray of masticated fruitcake. He told Clive about the Machen books, making the other young man grin with his somewhat embroidered sketch of Flabby Harrison and the bookseller’s dusty air-armada. ‘No, I’m serious. It was the whole Battle of Britain, mummified and hanging from his ceiling.’ Amery, in turn, discoursed amusingly upon some recent cases at his place of work, which led on naturally to an appraisal of the striking post-war surge in London’s criminal activities.

  ‘Most of the plain, straightforward theft, that’s soldiers who’ve come home accustomed to the military attitude regarding property, where if you’re short some piece of kit, you swipe it from the fellow five bunks down. It’s just the way that life works in the army. Sanctioned larceny is part of the supply chain, but apparently, if you apply that principle on civvy street, you’re looking at a year or two inside. Who could have known? Armed robbery, now that’s a different kettle of catastrophes. With that, it’s largely mouthy little berks who’ve not seen combat save for at the pictures, and who’ve got an arsenal available at every junk shop. So, they do a jeweller in broad daylight with no getaway car, shoot a bystander and end up swinging for it. No, all this, it’s something anyone could have seen coming half a mile away. The only new thing since the war, to my mind, it’s these crackpot killers.’

  He sipped at his black and steaming beverage, then went on.

  ‘You know. The nutcases. The ones who kill people because they’re wearing brown shoes, or because it’s Tuesday. There was Neville Heath, who murdered those two girls while living under half a dozen aliases, including “Rupert Brooke”. Or look at Haigh, two or three months back. Nine, they reckon he did. More than Jack the Ripper. Drank their blood out of a mug, dissolved the lot in drums of acid and laughed fit to burst when he was sentenced. Mark my words, young Knuckleyard, we’re going to be seeing a lot more charmers like that in future, raving mad and killing for the fun of it. You’d almost think that there were people who took being bombed for five years rather poorly.’

  At this juncture, Clive excused himself to visit the toilet facilities out in the coffee house’s rear yard, winking at the office women as he passed their table and reducing them to whispering jelly. Dennis whiled away his time by dabbing up stray cake crumbs with a moistened forefinger, and tried to read the pencil jottings in Clive’s open notepad upside down. Up at the page’s top was what appeared to be another legal practice – Dolden, Green, Dorland & Lockart – and then under that what he imagined were reminders for appointments, scheduled conversations and the like: ‘Talk Harwell Wednesday, Collins case’; ‘Vaughn’s statement eight years old – no libel action at the time?’; ‘Malcolm and Paul, drinks Friday’ and a host of suchlike stultifying memoranda. Dennis was surprisingly uplifted to find out that even someone like his mate was capable of being really, really dull. Of course, no sooner had said mate returned and sat back down, than he said something funny that dispelled Dennis’s fleeting brush with self-esteem.

  ‘Of course, the man that I blame for this awful violence is Dick Barton, special agent.’

  Dennis spluttered over the last tepid mouthful of his tea. There’d been a lot of talk in newspapers that credited the bloody mess, from Heath to Haigh and all points in between, to the titular tough guy of the fast-paced wireless serial. Clive sighed reproachfully at Dennis’s amusement.

  ‘You may laugh. I only know that when I hear the theme music, it makes me want to kill somebody, usually myself. I’m sure that I can’t be the only one.’

  The pair expanded on this notion, entertainingly, for a good fifteen minutes: ‘So, then, what you’re saying is that John Haigh only had to hear that dum-diddlum-diddlum-diddlum, and he’d think, “Right, it’s time to order in another drum of hydrochloric.”’ This subsided into a more general interchange where Clive, remarking on the vast amount of post his job entailed, impressed his younger friend by citing a Moroccan letter opener he called a kris that he’d bought in a Portobello junk shop. His seemingly effortless exotic style would surely have made anybody envious. In the end, with Clive considering a third coffee and with Dennis sort of eager to get back and crow to Ada over his remarkable success, the two shook hands and parted ways.

  Manoeuvring out of his seat, Dennis once more took up a load like Sisyphus’s boulder but with corners, and then made his clumsy and protracted exit from Bond’s Coffee House. This took him past the hypothetical proprietor at the front counter, who seemed both uncertain as to whether he should bow, and how to do it if he did. On this occasion, he opted for the back-and-forth sway of a startled metronome, curtailing his obeisance only to rush from behind the till and hold the glass door open for his burdened customer. Allowing the intimidated serf what he thought was a passable aristocratic nod, the fifth Lord Oxydol and his heraldic cardboard box continued up the Strand towards the inky latitudes of Fleet Street.

  Stumbling his lumber down a highway that was famously all gutter, Dennis noted that Fleet Street’s mystique of flashbulbs and last-minute drama wasn’t to be seen from pavement level, and supposed that this was simply how it went. Mythology was only visible from far away. The place that people conjured when they thought about the city and its landmarks was nowhere in evidence; a phosphorous idea of London that had either been demolished in the war, or else was hiding.

  As he’d hoped he might do, he bumped into Tolerable John McAllister. This was outside the alley mouth that granted access to the Cheshire Cheese, from which the fatalistic newshound was emerging just as Dennis and his obstacle went by, although their interaction was unfortunately brief.

  ‘John. How’s things?’

  ‘Ah, well, you know – tolerable. Listen, Dennis, I can’t chat, mate. All us lot are off to Westminster, to see what Attlee’s got to say with China gone red as a beetroot. Probably “Oh dear”. Why don’t you look us up tomorrow, when I should be here all day? Cheers, Dennis. Love to Ada.’

  Glumly, Dennis watched the journalist barrel away into a background clamour of lugubrious pedestrians and petulant Ford Populars, sleek and black like tadpole taxis. Peering at the dwindling figure over the top flaps of his increasingly unwieldy carton, he began to worry that he might resemble Kilroy, scribbled on a bog door underneath the legend ‘Wot? No prospects?’ Suddenly self-conscious, he turned and resumed his overladen journey to the east. Down at the street’s far end, the blanched dome of St Paul’s swelled up above the gap-toothed skyline, a crash-landed moon.

  He got almost as far as Ludgate Circus without incident, but when he passed Bride Lane, his luck, such as it was, deserted him. The steep street wound away and to his right, with near the top a lamppost just across from St Bride’s churchyard, against which was propped a woman who was lovelier than any met in magazines, and also in full colour. She stopped Dennis in his tracks halfway across the road, where he stood thunderstruck and struggling to accept that she was real.

  It was the hair that first seized the attention, roughly, by the eyeballs. Guy Fawkes Night come early, it spilled down in bonfire waves to set the tatty collar of her short black coat alight, conflagrant orange, startling against the stony palette of the overcast printworkers’ passage. Somewhere around five foot six and beautifully rounded, a lit cigarette in one hand, she faced slightly off from Dennis as she lounged so that he only caught her quarter profile, strong, and serious of intent. High heels and stockings. He could see one clip-on earring in the same electrifying green as her visible eye, and was belatedly assessing her most likely occupation when, alerted by his halting footsteps, she looked round and flattened him with her incurious green gaze.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Her face was exquisite – possibly a little younger than he’d first assumed – betraying not the slightest trace of interest in her uninvited audience. As she turned, he noticed with surprise that in the hand without a smouldering cigarette she held an open book. She was a reader, then; perhaps a student. His unworthy preconceptions suddenly in disarray, Dennis was lost for all but fatuous words.