Her eyes adjusted slowly to the lack of light. No one seemed to be about. The so-called square was an irregular quadrilateral, with the pub and the church on the two longer sides. She picked her way across greasy cobbles towards an uneven row of houses on the right. The houses were built of smoke-blackened brick, and the ground-floor windows, a mixture of modern and Georgian sashes, were protected with vertical bars. At the far end of the row was a short flight of steps leading up to a panelled door with a grimy fanlight above and a tarnished brass 7 above the letter box. There was a card in the window on the right of the door, bisected by one of the bars.
M. RENTON — DRESSMAKER LATEST FASHIONS — ALTERATIONS CUFFS AND COLLARS TURNED APPLY WITHIN
At least the address really existed. Lydia rang the bell and waited. Nobody answered the door. She tried again, ringing the bell and giving a double rap with the knocker.
Almost immediately the door opened, as though someone had been standing just inside waiting for her to use the knocker. A small, plump man stared at her with intense curiosity. He had fair, curly hair and wore gold-rimmed pince-nez attached to his lapel with a black ribbon. His tweed suit looked as if he had slept in it. He smiled at Lydia and rubbed his right hand up and down his trouser leg.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Good afternoon,’ Lydia said. ‘I’m looking for Captain Ingleby-Lewis.’
‘First floor,’ the man said, standing back and holding the door open with an expansive gesture. ‘Second door on the left.’
He stood back to allow her to pass. But the hall was not wide and his arm brushed hers as she passed. She caught a whiff of his sweat, too, overlaying other smells which had something to do with old cooking and inadequate drains and rotten fish. Breathing through her mouth, she walked upstairs, her shoes tapping on the bare boards. She knew he was watching her.
On the landing she paused. The smell was really rather beastly, even up here. She tapped on the second door on the left. The plump man was now climbing the stairs.
‘He may be dozing,’ he called up to her. ‘Try the door. It won’t be locked.’
Lydia knocked again. She waited a few seconds, turned the handle and went in, partly to escape the man behind her.
The room beyond was at the front of the house. There were two tall windows. At one end was an unlit gas fire. At the other stood a heavy dining table, its top scarred with cloudy rings and dark burns. An old man in a shabby black overcoat slumbered in an armchair near the fireplace.
Lydia glanced from side to side, taking in unwashed plates, empty bottles, a pile of broken glass beside a table leg, a patched hearthrug and a pair of shoes, lying on their side at the old man’s feet. The uppers were well polished but the heels were worn down and there was a hole in one of the soles. She touched the top of the table with her gloved finger. It felt tacky, like drying paint, and left a grey oval smudge on her glove.
A change in the man’s breathing alerted her. She glanced at his face, which was dominated by a blunt, swollen nose and a neatly trimmed moustache. His eyes were open.
‘Who on earth are you?’ he asked, and yawned.
‘I’m Lydia,’ she said. ‘Your daughter.’
Herbert Narton slipped back into Bleeding Heart Square. He was just in time to see the girl who had passed him by the Crozier going into number seven. That fat little man Fimberry had let her in so she probably knew him or someone else in the house.
The door closed. He glanced around the square. No one was about, though the mechanics at the other end were making one hell of a din in their workshop by the row of garages. He stood back, sheltering in the shallow recess in front of a gate on the other side of the alley from the pub. It wasn’t dark but it was such a gloomy afternoon that there was little risk of his being seen unless someone passed close to where he was standing.
At number seven, they had already turned on the electric light in several of the rooms — in Mrs Renton’s on one side of the front door, and Fimberry’s on the other. There were also lights in the two windows on the first floor which belonged to the old drunk. Narton had seen him an hour or so earlier, weaving across the square from the saloon bar of the Crozier.
He waited. His feet and hands were freezing. His left wrist was itching again and he scratched it under the glove. In the end his patience was rewarded by a glimpse of the girl on the first floor. He watched her drawing the curtains across the windows. He was too far away to get a good look at her face. But she wasn’t wearing her coat any more. So her connection was almost certainly with old Ingleby-Lewis.
Now that was interesting because, of all the people in that house, Ingleby-Lewis was the closest to Serridge. Perhaps the girl was one of his, and he’d sent her here with a message. She looked a bit old for Serridge but the bastard had been known to stretch a point when there was money to be had.
The doors of the workshop opened, and light and noise spilled onto the cobbles. There were signs of life in the Crozier — it wouldn’t be long before they opened up for the evening. Better to call it a day, Narton thought, get out while the going was good.
He walked to Liverpool Street to save the bus fare. The exercise warmed him, and so did the sense that the day had not been entirely wasted. At the station he had time before his train to buy a cup of tea at a stall. While the tea cooled at his elbow, he took out his notebook and jotted down the afternoon’s movements.
Not a bad day, taken all in all. No sign of Serridge, of course, but at least he was building up a detailed picture of the house and its occupants. Also, at three o’clock he had seen the young man again, the one Narton suspected might also be watching the house. The chap didn’t fit the picture, and he had looked shifty in the unpractised way that people had when they were generally honest.
Finally, just before he had gone off duty, there had been that girl. He had a hunch about her, and he had learned to trust his hunches. She meant something. She was going to be important.
Around him swirled the crowds hurrying home through the glare, the din and the racket of the station. He didn’t want to go home. There was nothing he wanted there, not now. He wanted to go back to Bleeding Heart Square and wait for Serridge.
2
You wake to another day, another entry in the little green book. Enter the devil.
Monday, 6 January 1930
