The door leading to the cellar was open. Lydia heard Serridge’s voice below, and Howlett replying to something he had said. They were moving furniture around down there. Serridge intended to sell the better pieces.
She tapped again on Mr Fimberry’s door, which he had shut in her face five minutes earlier. She heard scuffling on the other side.
‘Who is it?’
She did not reply. She waited, her body tense, just outside the door. The men’s voices continued in the cellar, backwards and forwards like a long rally in a tennis match. It was all nonsense about women being gossips, she thought — men were just as bad.
There was stealthy movement in Fimberry’s room. Almost simultaneously Lydia heard the clatter of claws on the cellar stairs. Nipper appeared at the end of the hall.
The key turned in the lock. The door began to open. Nipper yapped and launched himself down the hall. Lydia flung her weight against the door and pushed her leg into the gap between it and the jamb. Fimberry’s pink, sweating face appeared, only inches away from hers.
‘Please go away, Mrs Langstone.’
She pushed harder. ‘If I scream, Mr Serridge will hear me.’
Fimberry stood back. The door swung open, banging against the edge of his washstand. Nipper shot through the gap. Lydia followed. The dog ran round the room, sniffing vigorously.
‘Please, Mrs Langstone,’ Fimberry whimpered, ‘please leave.’
‘Serridge and Howlett are in the cellar,’ Lydia said firmly. ‘In a moment or two, I’m going to go and see them. I’m going to tell Mr Serridge that I saw you buying offal at Smithfield. That I saw you buying
‘But, Mrs Langstone, I didn’t. You
‘I don’t care what is true or untrue,’ Lydia interrupted, magnificent in her ruthlessness. ‘The only way you can stop me is by letting me borrow the chapel keys for five minutes.’
‘I’ve already explained-’
‘And I’ve explained what will happen if you don’t let me have them. You don’t have to come with me.’
Nipper sniffed Fimberry’s ankles. Fimberry edged away from him, his eyes still fixed on Lydia’s face.
‘Oh, and by the way,’ Lydia added, deciding that she might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, ‘I shall also tell Mr Serridge that you tried to kiss me.’
Fimberry backed over to the bed, sat down and put his head in his hands. For a moment she felt a terrible urge to comfort him.
‘Please, Mrs Langstone. Please.’
‘None of this need happen,’ Lydia said gently. ‘Not if you’re sensible. Where are the keys?’
‘In the top drawer. On the left.’
She knew she had broken him. She felt ashamed. She opened the drawer and took out the keys. ‘Which is which?’
‘The small modern one is the door into the cloisters from the road. The Yale keys are for the storeroom and the vestry.’ His voice was muffled because his head was still in his hands. ‘The others, the big iron ones, they fit the Ossuary, the undercroft and the chapel itself.’
Lydia glanced round the room. His overcoat was on the back of the door. She lifted it off and dropped the keys in the left-hand pocket.
‘I’m going to leave your overcoat on one of the hooks in the hall. Then I shall take the keys from your pocket. So if anyone asks, you’re in the clear. You happened to leave your coat in the hall, and the keys happened to be in the pocket. And somebody happened to come along and take them. But nothing is going to go wrong, is it? No one’s going to ask you anything.’
He raised his face to her. His eyes were puffy. ‘Mrs Langstone, it’s already gone wrong.’
Nipper followed her out of the room and ran down the hall towards the door to the cellar, towards the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Hurriedly she took out the keys, dropped them in her own pocket and hung up the overcoat. The door on the other side of the hall opened a crack. Mrs Renton looked out.
‘That dratted dog again,’ she said to Lydia. ‘I wish he wouldn’t bring it in the house.’
She shut the door. Serridge came into the hall, followed by Howlett.
‘Ah — Mrs Langstone.’ Serridge’s heavy features rearranged themselves into a smile that was the next best thing to avuncular. ‘And how did you enjoy the meeting this afternoon?’
She stared at him. He was probably unaware that she had seen him, and therefore he did not realize that she knew he had sent Marcus and his Blackshirts on a wild-goose chase for her sake. ‘I found it very interesting, thank you, Mr Serridge. But I had to leave halfway through.’
‘They certainly had a good turnout, ma’am,’ Mr Howlett said, bending to scratch Nipper. ‘Mind you, I don’t know how much use it all is. The world goes on turning, whatever we try and do about it.’
‘They get some rough types there, though,’ Serridge went on. ‘I hope you’re all right.’
Lydia nodded, smiling like an idiot, and said goodbye. Nipper tried to follow her outside. She shut the front door in his face, remembering as she did so the little dog Rory had seen in the photograph of a naked Amy Narton astride a bicycle. That was the reality, she thought, not this amiable old chap like Father Christmas in mufti: Serridge was a middle-aged man who had a taste for vulnerable girls without any clothes on, and preyed on elderly spinsters with more money than sense.
She ran across Bleeding Heart Square.
Marcus Langstone was alone, and that was something Rory had not been expecting. Langstone was cautious, though: he switched on the light, opened the door and then stood back.
Fisher and his men had left perhaps twenty minutes earlier. Langstone looked at Rory leaning against the wall near the table at the far end of the Ossuary. Rory felt sick in the pit of his stomach. But there was relief of a sort that the waiting was over.
Langstone slipped a bunch of keys into his pocket. A short rubber cosh was looped over his right wrist, swinging like a pendulum in a clock case. He was a big man, Rory thought, not just tall but surprisingly broad. His face looked so misleadingly wholesome — the pink and white complexion, the fair hair, the baby-blue eyes.
The cosh swung to and fro. Langstone didn’t speak. There was an element of calculation in all this. Rory felt an extra spurt of fear which mysteriously converted itself into something like anger. The man was being so bloody childish. This was how bullies behaved in the school changing room or the corner of the playground. Standing there in his uniform he looked more than ever like a sinister Boy Scout, his emotional and intellectual development doomed to remain for ever somewhere between thirteen and fourteen years old.
‘I hope you’ve come to let me out,’ Rory said. ‘And an apology would be nice too.’
Marcus actually raised an eyebrow — a single eyebrow, just as though he were a villain in an old-fashioned melodrama. He thwacked the cosh against the palm of his left hand. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You can’t really think it’s a good idea to go around treating members of the public like this. Surely it’s bad for business?’
‘You’re not a member of the public. You’re a dirty little journalist and a lying cheat.’
‘For all you know I could be a dirty little journalist who supports Fascist principles.’
Langstone shrugged. The black shirt and dark trousers flattered his figure but there was a distinct thickening around his middle. ‘In my book, all journalists are dirty,’ he said. ‘It’s not a job for a gentleman, is it? But you’d be dirty whatever you were. And that’s why I’m going to teach you a lesson.’ He walked slowly towards Rory. ‘I’ve known about you for a long time. You live in Bleeding Heart Square. You’ve got the room on the ground floor on the left of the front door.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ Rory said. ‘I-’
‘You can’t lie your way out of this. I’ve seen you there.’ He added with an air of triumph, ‘You even admitted it to my colleague.’
Rory swallowed. ‘You’ve done more than see me, haven’t you? The other weekend — that was you, wasn’t it?’
