and then there’s a stage of absolute euphoria. I think that I’d have been wiser to stop at euphoria and not drunk anything tonight.’ He sighed. ‘Not to mention what I had with lunch and the one or two before.’ He sat back in his chair and clutched his head.
Denton said, ‘I need a bit of advice.’ Harris was supposed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the darker side of London - indeed, of the darker side of a lot of things. ‘Who can tell me about vice in the East End?’
Harris turned his red eyes on him, looked at him for long seconds as if he’d forgotten who he was. ‘You’re talking to an expert,’ he said.
‘There was a girl murdered there last night. I want to know who she was - where she came from, who her—’
‘East End?’
‘Well, the Minories.’
With his head back, Harris looked at Denton as if he were looking into a too bright light. ‘What’s the allure of a murdered tart? Idea for a book?’
Denton mentioned Mulcahy, said only that the man had told him a wild tale and been terrified - his now-familiar recitation.
Harris wrinkled his nose and stuck out his lips, then rubbed his eyes. ‘You know Ruth Castle?’
‘Mrs Castle?’ She was a famous madam; of course he knew her. ‘We all know Mrs Castle.’
Harris laughed. ‘Could make a comic song of that. “Oh, we all know Mrs Castle here in London—”’ He sang it a bit tunelessly. ‘What the hell rhymes with London?’
‘Done-done. Undone.’ He looked at Harris’s empty glass. ‘Y ’know, you’d do best to go home.’
‘At this hour? My God, what would people say?’
‘Why Mrs Castle?’
‘Why not Mrs Castle? What are we talking about?’
‘Vice in the East End.’
Harris waved a hand. ‘She knows everything. Tell her I sent you. Better yet, don’t tell her I sent you; I think she had me thrown out last time. But go and see her. Fount of knowledge.’ Harris ordered himself another brandy and began to lecture about Bohemianism and the decline of art. Denton, finishing his choucroute as fast as he could eat, muttered a goodbye and got up.
He left Harris trying to start an argument about Fabianism with a man he didn’t know and went out. He debated following Harris’s advice to talk to Mrs Castle that night but thought his own advice to Harris was best: early to bed.
Home again, he dropped his hat and coat on a chair, added coal to his living-room fire, stood there looking into the orange heat that was still deep inside the black pile, thinking of the stupidities people, himself included, do.
He poked the fire and put the poker back in its iron stand and heard a sound that might have been the poker hitting another piece of metal but that might have been something else. He stood still, listening. He really believed the sound had come from somewhere else. Outside? Most likely not; it had been too muffled. And closer.
‘Sergeant?’
They had had trouble with rats for a while. The sound was not unlike that of an animal dropping to the floor from a table. When they had had rats, a cat had got in once; it had made that sound, dropping in the dark on a rat to break its back.
Denton hated rats. He took up the poker again.
The gas light was on by the door nearest him, the only light in the long room other than the coal fire. If Atkins had been home, a lamp at the far end near his door would probably have been lit, too; instead, the room receded into darkness, past the dumb waiter, past the alcove on the left where the spirit stove and the makeshift pantry were, to the stairs and the window at their foot, now only a silvered reflection of the light.
Later, he would think he should have taken the derringer, but then he would think that it wouldn’t have mattered. When the attack came, it came so fast that he was unable fully to react, and it came from his left side; the derringer would have been in his right. The poker - well, it saved his life, if not his arm.
He had started to pass the opening to the pantry alcove. He was listening, his head slightly cocked, and he was thinking that the light near Atkins’s door should have been on, whether Atkins was there or not. He had reached the point of wondering why the light was out, and he