‘Not him. Half drunk he was, and the brother wouldn’t have him in the room at all. I had to take him to the kitchen to keep him from skulking about and doing who knows what. He wasn’t a bad sort, oney in my way, and a bit deep in the beer for the time of day.’
‘Do you know the man?’
‘Me? Know some layabout that pushes a cart? I’m a decent girl.’
‘He didn’t give you a name.’
‘Oh, he did, like he expected me to shine it up and put it on the mantel for a keepsake. “Alf ”. If he’d had more front teeth and a clean shirt he’d have been about half the man I’d care to spend five minutes with.’
‘Old or young?’
‘Born old and got older quick, would be my guess. A lot older than me, I can tell you.’
‘Did he say where he could be found?’
She laughed. The laughter transformed her; he could see the robust farm girl she had been a year or two before. She pushed some hair back from her forehead. ‘I give him a cuppa tea and one of me scones and he tried to — ’ she glanced at Janet — ‘to what you’d call take a liberty with me, and he said if I was lonely I could always find him in the arches behind St Pancras station. I laughed in his face! I’d have to be dead lonely because there was nobody left on God’s green earth before I’d go prowling for the likes of him!’
Denton said she had a hard row to hoe, and he gave her another coin. She showed them out, and he heard her footsteps clumping back towards the rear of the house. On the pavement, he said to Janet Striker, ‘Well?’
‘My very thought.’
‘At least we know that Mary Thomason’s gone.’
‘To “the west”. Not very helpful.’
‘I think I’ll go looking for Alf.’
‘My very intention.’
They were walking towards Euston Road. At the corner, Janet Striker swung round and looked back at the house. ‘At the Society, we tell girls who’ve taken to the street that they’d have a better life in service. You see a girl like Hannah, you wonder.’
‘She’d be better off back on the farm.’
‘Oh, aye, except for the starvation.’
They crossed Euston Square and turned towards the Midland Railway station. The great medieval bulk of the station hotel loomed above the other buildings, its towers and walls like one of Ludwig’s wilder fantasies. Denton said, ‘“The arches behind St Pancras”. Where the rail lines cross St Pancras Road, I think.’
She took his arm. ‘I go to Old St Pancras Church sometimes. Bits of it were put up not so long after the Romans left.’
‘I didn’t know you go to church.’
‘No, I expect not. You don’t?’ So they talked, wading painfully through their ignorance of each other. Church- going, the war news, did he have old friends, ‘being political’ — were these issues worth testing each other on? Odd and unpredictable, the doors one opens to try to find the other person.
He told her more about Albert Cosgrove, muted the encounter in the dark house, the knock on the head. Reminded, by a roundabout linkage, of his back garden, he said, ‘Dammit — I promised Atkins I’d get somebody to dig. Sorry — not your concern-’
They turned down St Pancras Road, and the crash and rumble of Euston Road fell away. Here, the traffic was mostly carts and wagons, the odd bus, a cyclist dodging in and out. She said, ‘Do you really need somebody to do physical work?’
‘I don’t think a woman would do.’ He thought she meant her Society.
‘Would you take a Jew?’
‘I’d take a Hottentot.’
‘If a man named Cohan shows up at your door and says I sent him, put him to work.’
The street seemed to grow older as they walked, brick changed here to stone. Denton was aware of the plain-clothed policeman following them. Felt a stab of annoyance, wondered if it was because of something to do with Mary Thomason — hardly, as he’d gone to the police about her — or Janet Striker, or simply the fact of being watched. For whatever reason, he was tired of that presence always back there.
Ahead, the railway tracks crossed above them on a stone roadbed held up by massive arches, the central one open for the road itself, the others turned into small factories, machinists’ works, the odd rag-and-bone shop. They asked at only two of them before a red-faced man in a soft cap shouted ‘Alf the carter?’ over the rumble of iron tyres on macadam. ‘Cross under, third arch on the right. Though he might be out jobbing.’
He was. The arch was boarded up; set into the boards were a window that might have come out of a demolished house — six over six, the glass wavy, one pane replaced with wood — and a door with six panels and the remains of a fanlight over it. Next to it, a bell that also might have come out of a house had been nailed to an upright; it had been made to jingle when a rope was pulled — thoughts of Mrs Durnquess and Hannah inescapable here — but was now sounded by grasping the flexible metal of its support and giving it a shake.
‘Alf’s out jobbing,’ she said. She took out a card, wrote on the back. ‘Let’s see what that brings.’ She put the card in the crack between the door and its frame.
‘You’re taking over my pursuit of Mary Thomason?’
‘You said you were trying to finish a book.’
‘I didn’t mean for you to get pulled in.’
‘I’ve pulled myself in.’ She turned him back towards Euston Road. ‘Really, I think the one we want is the brother, not toothless Alf.’
‘Easier said than done.’
‘There are the directories.’
‘And a thousand Thomasons, I’ll bet.’
‘Hannah didn’t like him.’
‘He didn’t tip her enough.’
‘More than that. Odd. Mrs Durnquess thought he was common; Hannah thought he was — what, getting above himself? Although he wouldn’t be the first to be common as dirt and treat a servant as if he were the Prince of Wales.’ They walked along, almost back to Euston now. ‘Still-’
‘What?’
‘I don’t like the brother somehow.’
‘He’s a man.’
‘There is that.’ They walked on a few steps and he said, ‘I don’t like Geddys.’ He looked aside at her. ‘He lied to me.’
‘How?’
‘Saying he didn’t know where she lived. Mrs Durnquess said he’d seen her home and was “interested” in her. You deal with Alf; I’ll tackle Geddys again.’
Opposite the corner of Judd Street, she said, ‘I’ll leave you here.’ ‘Dinner?’
‘Not tonight.’
‘I feel like one of those knights in an old tale who’s being set a test to prove himself.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m the one being tested. You don’t understand. ’ She walked away towards Euston station.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He was at work again next morning by eight, hard at it still at three that afternoon, grateful for the eyeglasses that made hours of writing possible. He felt harried by the need to get the book out of his head and on paper — the more so because of Cosgrove’s theft of the outline, as if irrationally he believed that Cosgrove might replicate it. Atkins, when he had first seen the glasses — Denton, of course, had forgotten he had them on — had blinked once and raised his thin eyebrows a fraction of an inch. Joker though he was, Atkins had a sense of tact. Later, when Denton, in pacing around his bedroom, passed the mirror, he saw the strange face, its huge nose
