information from somewhere. He no more saw my father than I did.’
‘You weren’t looking in the right direction.’
It wasn’t worth arguing about. Helen now seemed inclined to give the medium the benefit of the doubt even while Tom’s own doubts had hardened. But the news story about the drowning of Ernest Smight wasn’t the only thing to unsettle Helen. She told Tom how Hetty had been at the shops that afternoon and had discovered that someone had been asking questions about them.
‘About us?’
‘You know Hetty always goes to Covins for the vegetables? Well, it appears that someone was in the shop earlier today asking about the neighbourhood, saying how it was coming up in the world and so on, and how he’d heard that lawyers and such people were moving out to Kentish Town. He wanted to know whether it would be a good place to start a business or open a shop.’
‘Sounds innocent enough,’ said Tom.
‘Wait a moment. According to Hetty, Mr Covins said that if the fellow asking the questions was a would-be shopkeeper then he was a Chinaman. Mr Covins was a Chinaman, that is.’
‘I still don’t see what it’s got to with us.’
‘He mentioned Abercrombie Road by name, he talked about lawyers and notaries coming from the City.’
‘Coincidence,’ said Tom.
‘And that is not all,’ said Helen more urgently as Tom was dismissing her words. ‘There was a man standing on the other side of the street this afternoon. I watched him from the upstairs window for a good ten minutes. Loitering, I would have said, and casting his eyes across the houses on this side.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Small and slight. Dressed in labouring clothes. But when I opened the front door to go and have a word with him he’d gone.’
‘It’s probably nothing,’ said Tom. But nevertheless he felt uneasy. The mysterious figure might have been a ‘crow’, as they were known, someone deputed to scout a district for potential break-ins. He reminded himself to make certain that all the doors and windows were well fastened that night. On the other hand, the whole thing might be a case of Helen letting her imagination loose. She made up stories, after all, and might see patterns and plots where someone else — Tom, for example — could see nothing at all. But he didn’t say this. Instead he changed the subject.
He told Helen about his instructions from David Mackenzie and outlined what he knew of the Major and his dagger, which wasn’t much. Her blue eyes opened wider. Now he too had an official reason to travel to Durham. Helen also believed that there’d probably been some collaboration between her mother and Mr Mackenzie. It could hardly have been prearranged though. Just a coincidence — yet another coincidence! — and a fortunate one from the point of view of Mrs Scott, who did not wish her daughter to go on her mission unaccompanied.
So while his wife would be doing her best to persuade her aunt Julia Howlett away from her devotion to Eustace Flask, Tom would take a statement from a Major-turned-touring-magician who wanted to let the world know that he had come honestly by the item known as the Lucknow Dagger.
It was all very odd.
Penharbour Lane
At about the same time as Tom and Helen Ansell were discussing Ernest Smight’s suicide, a man in working clothes turned off Lower Thames Street in the area immediately to the east of London Bridge. He walked down Penharbour Lane, which was little more than an alley between factories and warehouses. The evening was miserable with drizzle. The man arrived at a building which seemed to have had all the life squeezed out of it by its bigger, taller neighbours on either side. At the bottom of a flight of steps was a basement door. Above the door there swung and flickered an oil lamp, hanging from a rusty bracket.
The man knocked twice on the wooden door, and, after a pause, once more. There was a shuffling from the other side, the sound of a bolt being withdrawn, and the door swung open. Whoever had unfastened it was no more than a shape in the dimness, a shape so slight that it might have been a child but one which appeared to acknowledge the man by the slightest of nods as he walked in. At the end of a short passage hung a tattered curtain. Beyond the curtain stretched a long, low-ceilinged room similar to the Tween Deck region of a ship. There were storage places here too, arranged in tiers with a narrow aisle between them. Instead of goods, people were stowed away on tiny bunks. Once the visitor was accustomed to the very subdued lighting, he would have seen slight signs of life. The shift of bodies sitting or squatting, the glow of red embers, now brightening, now fading. From all around he would have heard sounds of disturbed dreamers: garbled phrases, groans and sighs. Above all, there was a sweet and pungent odour smothering the smell of the damp fustian which clothed most of the dreaming bodies.
A dangling hand clutched at the man’s face as he went down the aisle between the wooden tiers. He didn’t flinch or jump but brushed the hand aside. He moved by instinct rather than by sight. At the far end of the room was a second tattered curtain, beyond which was a short flight of stairs illuminated by a single flaring gas lamp. At the bottom was a door. The man knocked again — the same pattern, two quick raps followed by a third — and was told to enter.
The interior was scarcely bigger than a boxroom. A cadaverous man was sitting on a low three-legged stool. He had a long pipe in his hand which he had evidently been about to lean forward and light from a candle on the floor when the knock came at the door. The sweet, pungent smell was even stronger in this little underground chamber where there was no apparent ventilation.
A woman lay on a mattress which was pushed against the wall and which took up half the floor space. One of her legs was cocked up and her skirts had fallen back to reveal pale thighs. Her white face was turned towards the door and her eyes were half-closed. She did not acknowledge the newcomer. Her white complexion by the light of the single candle, together with the gash of her red lips and the dark rings around her eyes, gave her a clownish look.
‘Evenin’, sir,’ said the newcomer.
‘Good evening to you, George,’ said the man crouched on the stool. He spoke with an odd formality as he gestured with his unlit pipe in the direction of the woman. ‘The lady is in the arms of Morpheus. She’s two pipes down and I haven’t even started. But I am glad of it, George. Why am I glad? Because I can listen to you with full attention before I take my pleasure. Sit yourself down on the mattress.’
The man called George — or in full George Forester — took off his cheap mackintosh and lowered himself on to the mattress. He sat cross-legged with the damp garment over his knees. He was small and lithe and did not find the position uncomfortable.
‘How can you breathe in here?’ said George. ‘It’s stiflin’. The air is wicked.’
Even as he spoke he felt the thick atmosphere in the room settle inside his throat like wet flannel. He would have preferred to be on the outside, drizzling and cold as it was.
‘It’s what you’re used to,’ said the other man. ‘Me, I take to this like a fish to water — or is it a duck?’
‘Anyone would think you own this place,’ said George, meaning it as a compliment.
‘Ssh, less of that now. I have my reputation to think of. The owner is a Malay whose name is so polysyllabic that no one can pronounce it apart from me. The fact that I can pronounce it and that I reminisce with him about Penang are reasons enough for him to respect me, and give me a private room when I require it.’
George did not know where or what Penang was. And, although he got the general drift of the other man’s words, the meaning of ‘polysyllabic’ was unfamiliar to him. The individual who’d been about to light an opium-pipe was someone of education and breeding, no doubt about it. You only had to listen to his talk for a few moments to realize he was a cultured gentleman. He might have come down in the world and grown thin and pinched in the face. He might have lost most of what he once had but he still possessed a certain authority. Perhaps it was on account of his old profession, George thought. That was how they had met, through his old profession. George had good reason to be grateful, eternally grateful, to the man he always referred to as ‘sir’.
‘Well, what have you learned?’
‘It’s quite simple, sir. I hung around their drum and asked around their neighbourhood today and yesterday
