A virtual monopoly. The only reliable figures he had were for the decade 1783–93. In that period Liverpool had delivered a total of 303,737 slaves to the West Indies, which of course didn’t include those who had died on the way, say three in ten. Getting on for half a million. Then there were the deaths inflicted in the process of capture, the deaths through tribal conflict incited by the traders, the lingering deaths caused by misery, imported diseases, the destruction of the economic bases of life. Beyond calculation. The familiar sensation of bafflement and wonder came to him, the suffocating sense of the enormity of it. This was just Liverpool, just ten years.

  Among all those who had practised it, the seamen, the skippers, the merchants, he had not so far found a single questioning voice. Protest there had been, but not among those in receipt of the profits. The trade was sanctioned by law; for the men in the ships and the counting houses that had been enough. Even men of conscience … The words of the Reverend John Newton, ordained after many years a slaver, came to him now with a peculiar chill: In all the years I was engaged in the slave trade I never once questioned its lawfulness.

  He couldn’t have been talking about legality – he knew perfectly well it was legal. No, he meant permissible, justifiable, he was using the word in its contemporary meaning – one of the great achievements of that appalling age to frame a word that could so nicely blend the notions of the legal and the permissible. Lawful. Perhaps that blending itself due to the moral contortions of the slave trade. We live with it still, he thought. It was Eichmann’s defence …

  He tried to dwell on the known and familiar objects around him, find solace, healing virtue, as he had done in frightened childhood, by tracing lines and patterns, the folds of a curtain, the threadbare roses on the chintz of his chair; but their talismanic power failed him now, they gave nothing back, not even the chess set, not even the treasured bowl … We would do it again, he whispered in the silence of the room. I know we would do it again. This had been no mere aberration, it had gone on too long. Worst of all, impossible to resist, attacking him now with the usual horror, was the knowledge that it had never really stopped …

  With an instinct of self-protection, he took pencil and paper, began to make some calculations. By that year then, by the close of the century, Liverpool had engrossed more than ninety per cent of the English trade, which must mean close on half of total European black cargoes, say three-sevenths. The average price of a plantation slave at the time was around fifty pounds. That meant that the gross income of the Liverpool merchants in an average year would be somewhere around one and a half million pounds.

  He closed his eyes, rested his head against the back of the armchair, trying to get some notion of the meaning of this sum. Doctor Johnson told Boswell that a man could manage to exist on six pounds a year and live comfortably on thirty. Swift’s Stella lived almost luxuriously on an income of a hundred pounds a year: the price of two slaves in prime condition.

  These statistics could only be blunted with the help of a large whisky. Then, fighting off a sick reluctance, he ate a poached egg on toast and two soft, forgotten apples.

  Afterwards he set off for the public library in William Brown Street. Horror merely fed his obsession. He wanted to look up some details concerning the slave ship Zong, subject of a celebrated appeal case in 1782. He found the book he wanted, Black Cargoes by Mannix and Cowley, but there was not much there about the legal process, merely an outline of the main events, with most of which he was already familiar.

  The Zong, sailing out of Liverpool with Luke Colling-wood as master, had left Sao Thomè on September 6,1781, with 440 slaves and a crew of 17. The Middle Passage had been difficult – they were delayed by bad weather, mortality among the negroes was very high. On November 29, with land in the West Indies already sighted, the captain called his officers together. There were only 200 gallons of fresh water left in the tanks, not enough to last out the voyage. If the remaining slaves died of thirst or illness the loss would fall on the owners of the vessel, but if they were thrown into the sea they could be regarded as legal jettison, covered by insurance. Following this conference, 132 slaves were thrown overboard in three batches. Back in England the owners claimed £30 insurance money for each of the jettisoned slaves. The underwriters refused to pay. The owners duly appealed. The appeal was heard at the Court of Exchequer, presided over by Lord Mansfield. After admitting that the law was with the owners, Lord Mansfield said, “A higher law applies to this very shocking case”, and he found for the underwriters – the first case in which an English court ruled that a cargo of slaves could not be treated simply as merchandise.

  Dangerous precedent, Benson thought. The owners must have been very alarmed. Puzzled too, probably: what kind of higher law could this be, that said a cargo was not a cargo? That damned crank Mansfield, he imagined them saying, standing together on the Custom House steps, he ought to stick to his own business. Does he think he is a bishop? Now, of course, they were saying more or less the same thing about the bishops …

  On the way out he found himself passing the door to the Reading Room. Without any particular sense of decision he entered, went up to the counter and asked for back copies of the Observer Colour Supplement. He had not thought to look at the date on Thompson’s magazine. All he could remember was the face on the cover, the manic showman’s pop eyes and waxed moustache.

  “Perhaps it was about a Dali retrospective,’’ he said to the not much interested assistant. He was embarrassed at being so vague. “Fairly recent,” he said. But when he eventually found the issue he wanted he saw that it was nearly three months old. Either Thompson had fished it out of some bin not often emptied or he had been carting it around with him for weeks.

  In that case, he thought, sitting alone at the long table with the magazine before him, in the latter case he must have brought it with him, perhaps from Leeds where he left his hamster or Huddersfield where he deposited his budgies.

  He began leafing through the advertisements. Could Thompson’s interest have been aroused by the offer of a bathrobe in white or navy blue, mailed within two weeks of receipt of your cheque, a Vauxhall Cavalier, a holiday with the Club Méditerrané, membership of the Wine Club? It seemed unlikely. There were some Dali paintings reproduced in the middle section – the skin of a hand neatly draped over a rail, pyramids on a beautifully shadowed desert, telephones, floating eyeballs, all immaculate, distinct to the point of hallucination. Accompanying the pictures was a piece about the artist’s career and his protracted dying. Perhaps it was simply this then, he thought without conviction – for reasons best known to himself Killer Thompson had become interested in Dali, in this world of illusory images alien to the true experience of sight, a clarity falser than shadow.

  On almost the last page there was an article entitled ‘A Room of Your Own’, one of a series in which wealthy or famous people, or people in the news for some reason, were pictured in their home surroundings. It was a double-page feature, with a photograph on one side of a woman in a white gown and gold bracelets, with a face vaguely familiar, standing smiling in a room full of opulent clutter. He read the name under the picture: Sylvia West. He thought he remembered her now: she had played English-rose-type heroines in some swashbuckling English films of the fifties. He was about to turn over the page when he noticed a small picture on the opposite side, a heavy-set, grey-haired man in a tweed suit standing on a terrace against a background of grey stone. The print underneath said: Merchant Banker Hugo Slater on the terrace of Brampton Manor, his Cheshire home.

  Slater was not such a rare name of course, but Hugo Slater – that cut the field down a bit. This man on the terrace looked about the right height and the general cast of his features were not dissimilar, though the face was heavier now and the form thicker-set. His Cheshire home. What had Thompson said? Over the water. I thought he meant the river Jordan.

  He looked at the picture of the woman again. She had kept her stage name. It was not a dress she was wearing, he noticed now, but white silk pyjamas, loose-fitting and fullsleeved. She looked strangely like one of the features of the room rather than its occupant, a life-sized, smiling simulacrum standing amidst mirrors, clocks and china dogs. Stray phrases caught his attention. In the arcane language of the antique world … Sylvia West also collects Derby ware … I come here and listen to Verdi…

  He began to read with more attention, hoping to find some confirmation that this Slater was the one he had known. Like the rest of the house, the room shows style and discrimination. The handsome eighteenth-century bureau is in walnut. In the arcane language of the antique world the bureau bookcase has a broken pediment. ‘Positively riddled with secret drawers, darling,’ Sylvia says with the same radiant smile that used to look down at us from the screen in the days when heroines were virginal and heroes were brave and strong and offered marriage. She laughs. ‘They are so secret that I don’t know where half of them are myself.’

  The side chairs are walnut too. Sylvia likes walnut because it ages so beautifully and has such superb colours in it. On the middle shelf, alongside a set of Roman oil lamps in terracotta, there is an antique Syrian glass scent bottle her husband, financier Hugo Slater, brought back from a business trip. A devoted collector himself, he generally picks up a little something for her too on his travels. Sylvia also collects Derby ware. ‘I love things, objects,’ she says. ‘I love clutter, I guess, so long as it is elegant clutter. It is my great dream to restore the concept of the boudoir. Such a pity it has gone out of fashion, don’t you think? A room where a woman can have her pretty things about her and be alone and private and yet still receive her intimates or her lover or whatever. ’ She glances as she speaks at the huge divan with its design of peacock plumes and peacocks.

  Benson looked up from this with relief. It was written in the kind of arch and knowing style he found repulsive. There was nothing more about Hugo Slater in any case, only some further stuff about how Sylvia liked to go to her boudoir, close her curtains, listen to Verdi and forget the world for a while. Well, we know what you mean, Sylvia.

  He emerged on to William Brown Street to find that the edges of the cloud had lifted. Sunshine was striking across the city with a visionary radiance under this dark canopy, gilding the neo-classical porticoes of the Walker Art Gallery, bringing splendour to the dishevelled starlings on the curving gutter of the Rotonda and the stiff foliation of the Corinthian capitals below. He crossed the street, passed through the long shadow of the Iron Duke on his ninety-foot pedestal, traversed the cobbled forecourt of St George’s Hall, glancing with customary amazement at the long colonnaded sweep of its façade. Worthy of ancient Athens, as Queen Victoria once remarked. The broad terrace at the back of it was deserted and he stood for some time here looking down the gardens towards Pier Head. The twin towers of the Liver Building, surmounted by their fabulous birds, looked pale, ethereal almost, in the luminous air above the river. Beyond them the sky had a faint reddish tinge, like the stain of some distant, stealthy conflagration. The civic dignitaries on the descending terraces were all looking that way too, Liverpool’s famous men, the bronze skirts of their frockcoats melting in this sudden sunshine. Slater on his terrace too, member of the landed gentry …

  It must be the same man, his mind insisted: Slater of Anzio, Slater of the Beachhead Buddies. There was the name, the picture in the article; most compelling of all was the fact that Thompson had kept it all this time. He tried to recall the conversation of the night before but it had been so disjointed, Thompson had wandered so much, it was difficult now to get any sense of the sequence of things. A hundred quid, he wouldn’t feel it … I got to get the animals together … silly bugger, he could of gone to Naples … you a friend of his? Did he think Slater had sent me? Or was I somehow just a sign, a portent for Thompson, part of his struggle to make the world intelligible, preserve the contempt which seemed all now that kept him alive? Silly bugger, I always remember that silly bugger…

  He began to walk back towards Lime Street, then turned off at random, not much noticing where he was going. Among blank streets, a no-man’s-land between thoroughfares, a drunk held out a hand to him. The man’s face was covered with contusions of some kind, dark, mulberry-coloured bruises. He had a surprisingly hard grip – Benson had to use force to get his hand away. Immediately afterwards he passed a little girl with her mother and the little girl smiled at him, a gap-toothed, confiding smile. Though hardly noticing his surroundings, he registered these incidents with an extraordinary vividness as he did the changing sky, in which clouds were breaking and thinning to show broad rifts of blue.

  Weariness brought him finally to a pause. He found himself in Aigburth, near the entrance to Otterspool Park. He went through the park gates and sat down on the first bench he came to. Before him, on the other side of the path, there was a chestnut tree in full flower, the great cones of blossom standing erect among the thick leaves. From somewhere in the depths of the foliage a warbler was singing, the same repeated cadence, sweet, deliberate, somehow intensely secret. There were not many people about. On another bench further along an elderly, unkempt woman was sorting through the contents of a canvas bag. After a few minutes a young man in a tracksuit came running past. Of course it was a weekday. Today must be Friday, he thought. Tomorrow was the 22nd of May, day of Rathbone’s show, anniversary of the break-out. Alma’s birthday too—he would be seeing her. Thompson had put it out of his mind.

  He got up and began to walk further into the park, between the steep banks that rose on either side, thick with shrubbery, shot through with sunlight as the sky continued to clear. Nettles and bluebells grew among the azaleas and the ash trees were in first feather; great clumps of rhododendron flowered dark red among the dense green of their leaves. This is a kind of gully too, he thought, remembering that distant spring, the last few days before the attack. It was only when not fighting that you could have any idea of what you might be fighting for and that, as he remembered it now, was the recovery of a certain kind of sensation that had been lost. We had all, he thought, brought ourselves or been brought to the belief that the expense was somehow necessary. What we were purchasing, the nature of the transaction, we didn’t really know, but we thought we knew it sometimes in the spring of that year, in the valleys back behind the lines, the soft air blowing up from the south, new wheat, flowering fruit trees, somebody singing somewhere. Song of home – all our hope in it, however trite the words. Not like the slave songs; they knew they would never see their homes again. The songs they sang on those occasions were songs of sorrow and sadness, simple ditties of their own wretched estate … Cruel too, that spring weather, any blade of grass could remind you of the men who had not stayed alive to see it. And relief and guilt at being alive yourself. If Walters could have lain in the open like some of them, a death among others, scattered like husks, then it might have seemed, it might have come to seem, that his death was fruitful somehow. From husks to seeds, merely a change of metaphor. But not that death, alone there in the gully, soaked in the creosote they had to throw over him. Irrational, of course … If he did stay back, could it have been for me, could it have been for my sake?

  At the end of the path there was a paved area with a boarded-up pavilion in the middle; beyond this a short field rose steeply. Benson climbed, reached the crest of the slope, saw the river below him, a wide, pale glitter with the plumed chimneys of Birkenhead to the north and the line of the Welsh hills in the far distance. Over the water was Cheshire. He didn’t mean the Jordan, he meant this. Hugo Slater, merchant banker. On the terrace of his Cheshire home. A devoted collector himself … A devoted collector and producer of entertainments, certainly, in those days of the Beachhead. That enthusiasm, that dedication, could it all have been simply a desire to get out of the fighting, save his skin? Impossible to believe: he could not have feigned so well.

  He began to walk across the level ground towards the water. The grass had been cut here recently; long swathes of it lay across the field; withered now, but the sun brought out again the sweetish smell of its perishing. He went down steps to the paved promenade, crossed to the rail and stood there, looking first across the bright, idle expanse of water, then below him to where in the shadow of the wall the river reverted to its true nature, mud-coloured and sullen, lapping slowly against the stone steps.

  Slater did everything, he thought, watching the skirmishing of gulls over a paler patch of water spreading from the bank, effluent of some kind, sewage probably. He gave all the time he had, all the time he wasn’t at the front, auditioning, rehearsing. Not only that. He inspired people, no other word for it. The show was Slater’s creation. Any talent, he would find it, even if they didn’t come forward. He found that cross-eyed man who had been in an operatic society – he sang bits from Gilbert and Sullivan, still does for all I know. He found the Cockney comedian who was killed on the same night as Crocker. He found Walters and me. He knew what he wanted – he wouldn’t take just anybody. The man who did the impression of Al Jolson, he wouldn’t take him. Little man, throwing himself about, mouth open wide, Swanee, how I love yah. I’m afraid it’s just not good enough. Al Jolson was the only thing he could do. He said he’d done it in pubs before the war. Disappeared one night, wandered off, no one ever saw him again. Then there was the one who did the German officer. How Slater found him I don’t know. He was brilliant but it was all Slater’s idea, turning the German propaganda into a comic sketch like that. And he found the man to do it, he was an officer in the London Irish. The joke was to use stuff from their leaflets and the radio broadcasts they put out. He would come on in the uniform of a German officer, strutting around, monocle. ‘Hello, boys.’ A sort of comic-Teuton accent, very slow and laborious. ‘Have you heard about Private Fox? He went out on pat-rol and stepped on a shoe-mine. Nasty things, shoe-mines …’ Just then someone would let off a detonating cap like the sound in a toy gun but louder and that would be a shoe-mine and he would have his foot blown off. He would hobble off stage and come back on a crutch, still talking in that same ingratiating way. ‘Have you heard about Private Jones? He got in the way of a piece of shrap-nel. Nasty stuff, shrapnel. He was only half a man after that, get what I mean, boys?’ Another loud bang and he clutches at his balls. In the end, after various kinds of damage, he is still moving around the stage on his crutch, one arm in a sling, bandage round his head but he’s still got the monocle in. Still the same slow delivery. ‘Remember the hell of Dun-kirk? Think of the terrible hours when the German broom swept your fellow soldiers off the Con-ti-nent. How many brave Tommies kicked the buck-et. Take my advice, boys – get out while you are all in one piece.’