No sign of him now. No sign of the cook or the little scullery maid either.
He went into the house and heard a mumble of voices coming from the dining room upstairs. Through the open doorway he could see Nellie sitting at the table, calmly turning over her cards. She caught sight of Niven and gave an imperceptible shake of her head. He was put on guard and entered the room warily.
“Mr. Coker,” Azzopardi said. He was holding a gun, the barrel casually resting on the table and pointing in the direction of Nellie. A Luger. A Parabellum. From the Latin, meaning “always prepared for war.” Niven had seen enough of them in his time. The rusty box, he noticed, was also on the table.
“The mice and the ring,” Nellie said to Azzopardi, unfazed by the circumstances she found herself in. “Dishonest promises.”
“How true,” Azzopardi said.
Niven nodded at the box and asked, “Is something wrong?”
* * *
—
It seemed that Azzopardi had taken his precious box to a jeweller in Hatton Garden, intending to finally cash in his ill-gotten loot. He knew the jeweller from before the war, when he had dealt discreetly in the more valuable kind of goods, never questioning their source.
The contents of the box, the jeweller told him sadly, were nothing more than baubles—paste-and-glass replicas of the originals. “Fakes.”
“Very good fakes,” Nellie murmured.
Niven stared at his mother in amazement. He had thought she might have lost her fire, but she was blazing. She’d had the brass neck to try to palm off counterfeit goods with no regard to the consequences. “A thief,” Azzopardi said.
“Stealing from a thief,” Nellie countered. “Seems fair to me.”
Where were the originals? “I don’t have them,” Nellie said stoutly. “I sold them and invested the money. Stocks and shares. It would take weeks to get it back, even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”
Why, Niven puzzled, had she replaced the jewellery with fakes?
“Good question,” Azzopardi said.
“As insurance against this day, of course,” she said. Nellie had always been good at playing the long game. “I saw it in the cards,” she added, a piece of nonsense that was the final straw for Azzopardi. He raised the Luger, cocked it and aimed it at Nellie’s head.
“Everything all right here, Mrs. Coker?” Hawker asked loudly, appearing boldly in the doorway with the aim of disrupting this tableau.
Azzopardi’s aim twitched towards Hawker. The shot was deafening, the noise ricocheting around the inside of Niven’s skull. For a brief second he found himself back on the battlefield. Part of the ornamental plasterwork fell from the ceiling and plaster dust snowed down on Hawker, immobile now on the carpet.
Niven dived swiftly on Azzopardi and knocked his bulk to the floor and the Luger was sent skidding across the floor. Azzopardi was all blubber. Niven banged his opponent’s head off the floor several times, as it seemed to be the simplest way of putting him out of action. Nonetheless, as soon as Niven was on his feet, Azzopardi was too, coming towards him like a lumbering bear intending to crush him in its arms. Niven took up a boxer’s stance, ready for the fight, but then another deafening shot rang out and the bear dropped.
Nellie was holding the Luger. It looked ridiculously big in her hands. Plaster continued to shower down on their heads. When in God’s name had his mother learnt to handle a gun? (Deer-stalking in the Highlands with her father, apparently.) Niven knelt beside Azzopardi and felt for his pulse, although his eyes were glassy and a great red stain was spreading on his white dress shirt.
Hawker, ghostly with plaster dust, struggled to sit up, surprised to find that he was alive and only winged by the shot. “Christ,” he said with feeling.
“All right?” Nellie said to him.
He supposed that would be all the thanks he would get from her.
* * *
—
Landor was called for and he produced men who were easily bribed into hauling Azzopardi’s carcase away. They drove it out to Canvey Island in a builder’s van, where they launched him into the river on an outgoing tide, far beyond the reach of the Dead Man’s Hole.
And for That Minute a Blackbird Sang
After he parted from Gwendolen, Frobisher’s mind was so befuddled by the kiss she had bestowed on him outside the Sphinx that when he crossed Long Acre he failed to see the lorry bearing down on him. It had come from Spalding, bound for Covent Garden, and when it braked it shed some of its load—cabbages that rolled into the road like heads from the guillotine.
* * *
—
Gwendolen had taken the watch at many a deathbed vigil, but this one was perhaps the hardest of all to bear.
“He won’t last much longer,” a nurse had whispered to Gwendolen as she lifted the marble hand and touched the marble brow. A massive injury to the brain. “Why didn’t you look where you were going?” she said crossly to him as tears rolled.
Frobisher was beyond rebuke.
He had been delighted to find himself suddenly transported from lying amongst the filth and ordure of a London street to strolling through a hay meadow in full midsummer fig. He murmured the names of the wildflowers to himself. Yellow rattle and red clover, wood cranesbill, lady’s mantle, meadow foxtail. Such lovely words. He wished he could show them to Miss Kelling.
A lapwing was disturbed and took flight from its nest on the ground. A curlew cried. And—oh—the scent of the lilacs in the lane. His soul rose. He could put down his burden. He was home. At last.
A Long Prove
“So today I found an agent for The Age of Glitter,” Ramsay said happily. “He says he’ll have no problem finding a publisher.”
“You’ve finished it already?” Gerrit queried. “I thought you’d only just started it.”
He was like an animal, Ramsay thought, limbs slack with sleep yet ready to move in an instant. They were lying naked in bed, one of Gerrit’s great tattooed arms behind his head, the other around Ramsay’s shoulders. Gerrit shifted and reached for his cigarettes, lit two and gave one to Ramsay. Ramsay sighed with pleasure. His life had finally begun.
* * *
—
Freda never went back to the Sphinx. She had recognized the man who rescued her from the Thames—he was the one who had kindly given her the half-crown, but he was also a policeman, and as soon as he had dragged her out of the water he told her that people were looking for her, and she wasn’t about to hang about and find out who. But for the rest of her life she regretted that she had failed to thank him for risking his life to save hers. Nor did she ever go home to York. She never saw her mother again, or her sister, Cissy, never even sent them word of her new life.