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  ‘What makes you think I won’t get my brains knocked out again?’

  ‘This time we have the advantage. The best defence is attack. We’ll strike fast and we’ll hit hard. They won’t have time to spit.’

  ‘What are you going to do to them?’ says Frank doubtfully.

  ‘Nothing nasty.’

  ‘You’ll just scare them,’ suggests Frank.

  ‘Squeeze ’em. Scare ’em. Teach them a lesson.’

  ‘Do you know where to find them?’ says Frank, to humour him. It’s plain there’s nothing to be gained by trying to reason with him. He’ll have to be patient. There’ll be an opportunity to escape. When they leave the house. When they go in search of the Cockers.

  ‘I’ll put out the word. They’ll be easy enough to track down.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘We’ll have you home by the weekend,’ says Webster confidently.

  ‘But what happens if we get caught?’ argues Frank. He likes to count the cost. He wants to know the risks.

  ‘How exactly do you mean?’ Webster frowns and probes a hollow tooth with his tongue.

  ‘What happens if they call the police?’

  ‘This doesn’t concern the police! This is private family business. Do you fancy a biscuit?’ He rattles the packet at Frank and covers his corduroy trousers in crumbs.

  Frank shakes his head.

  ‘They’re Ginger Crumbles.’

  ‘How did you get involved with a man like Conrad Staggers?’

  ‘Don’t be fooled by the frock, Frank. He’s a very powerful man. He’s dined with kings and presidents. He was sent an invitation to the coronation of the Emperor Bokassa.’

  Frank gazes around the walls at the rows of fading photographs. Men in rented dinner jackets, grinning, grinding cigars in their teeth. Women standing, smiling, stranded, sucked into wonderful pyramids of fluttering black lace skirts.

  ‘How long have you worked for him?’

  ‘A long time. I met him during the scuffles that followed the Curzon Street Midget Murders. It must be twenty years ago.’

  ‘Do you live up here in the attic?’ asks Frank, tilting his head and staring at the pegs in the ceiling.

  ‘I like it. I like the solitude.’ Webster nods towards the chimney-stacks. There’s another door, as narrow as a coffin lid, half-hidden in the whitewashed brickwork.

  For a long time Frank stands silent, listening to the sound of the rain as it crackles against the slates and gurgles in the gutters beneath the windows. The room grows dark.

  ‘Do you have a razor?’ he says at last.

  Webster grins and stuffs his packet of biscuits into the safety of his shirt. He takes Frank by the arm and leads him deeper into his kingdom of cobwebs and rafters.

  At ten thirty Jessica phones the Fancy Wholesale Tropical Fruits Corporation and asks to speak to Hastings Bassett. His secretary, a sour blonde who is paid to guard him against intruders, recognises Jessica’s voice and puts her through without argument.

  ‘What’s happening?’ demands Bassett. He sounds angry. ‘Frank has a big meeting with the chairman of the Gooseberry Guild in half an hour. Where the hell is he hiding?’

  Jessica chokes back the tears as she struggles to blurt out her story. ‘He’s disappeared! He went out to post a letter yesterday afternoon and when he didn’t come back I started to get worried and I went out to look for him and he’d just vanished and I called the hospitals and I called the police and this morning he phoned and told me he wasn’t coming home.’

  ‘Hey! Calm down!’ Bassett says gently, afraid that she’ll suffocate with fright.

  ‘He’s gone!’ she shouts back at him.

  ‘Do you want to come over here?’ he says, raising an arm, snapping his fingers at the sour blonde and waving her from the office.

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I’ll be all right.’ She snuffles and wipes her nose on her sleeve. Her hand reaches down for the glass of Bacardi and Coke she’s brought with her from the kitchen. She never drinks in the morning. It’s Frank’s fault. He’s making her sick with worry.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here.’ She thinks of him sitting at his desk with the brass lamp casting its puddle of light over the big leather diary and already she feels more secure. She trusts this man’s command of the world.

  ‘What did he say when he called you?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was nonsense. He said he’d spent the night with some drunks he’d picked up in the street.’

  ‘So why hasn’t he come home?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Did he tell you anything else?’

  ‘No. He wouldn’t even tell me where he was hiding.’

  ‘Hell! It doesn’t make sense!’ he complains and glances at his watch. He demands law and order in his life. Everything must have a purpose. Nothing must be wasted.

  ‘Has he been acting strange at work? Have you noticed anything unusual about him?’

  ‘You know Frank.’

  ‘Anything different about him?’

  ‘No. I’ve had him brainstorming baby grapefruits.’

  ‘Well, did he seem peculiar to you last week when you came over here for supper? Did he say anything to you?’

  It’s nearly two years since she first asked Frank to bring his boss home for her inspection. She’d been anxious to get involved and take an interest in Frank’s career. He was being considered for promotion. She’d thought it would help him. She’d taken a lot of trouble that evening preparing herself as the perfect, well-dressed, obedient wife. She remembers she wore the black stretch silk with jet studs and flat shoes.

  Hasty had arrived late, flustered and grinning, bearing a box of fresh lychees, scented eggs in blushing, goose-pimpled shells. She’d thanked him, confused, whisked them away, left them somewhere in the kitchen, served him sour grapes and cheese at the end of a long and difficult meal. But Hasty had been friendly, Frank had seemed relaxed and she’d been careful that evening not to pour herself too much of the wine.

  The following day Hasty had sent her a spray of roses and the supper had been declared a success. Since that time he’s become a regular visitor to the house. He eats with them once or twice a month. She feels easy with him. She trusts his advice.

  ‘I didn’t notice anything,’ says Bassett.

  ‘Well, something’s wrong!’

  They are silent for a moment. Bassett seems lost for words. Jessica gulps at her drink.

  ‘Do you think there’s another woman?’ she says finally.

  ‘Frank? No! Where would he find the time? He does nothing but work and eat and sleep.’

  ‘These things happen …’

  ‘They don’t happen to Frank!’ She frowns, rakes at her scalp, impatiently shrugging the telephone hard against her mouth.

  ‘So perhaps he met a few old friends and they dragged him away for a couple of drinks and one thing led to another and he got himself rotten stinking drunk and now he’s ashamed to come home.’

  ‘You think I’m being stupid.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘But that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I think you’re wasting your time chasing after him. He stayed out last night. So what? It’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘But he’s never stayed out all night. He’s never walked out without a word.’

  ‘Do you want to come over here to the office? I can always cancel the Gooseberry Guild. It’s nothing important. We could go out and have some lunch.’

  ‘No. No, thanks. I want to stay here.’

  ‘Call me if anything happens.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Call me whatever happens.’

  ‘I’m going to kill him! I swear I’m going to kill him!’

  Frank squeezes through the coffin door and finds himself standing in a great timber hall that runs the length of the house. The roof beams curve above him like the blackened ribcage of a shipwrecked gall
eon. Glass lamps hang from these beams on a system of silver chains. The walls twist beneath the weight of thick iron pipes that erupt from several water tanks, expand and divide, throw out cankerous flowers of rust and burrow into the floor. The tanks themselves are polished black cauldrons decorated with laurel wreaths and the grinning heads of demons. Beneath the first of these tanks, a sofa and a chest of drawers command a strip of Turkey carpet beside a tottering column of books balanced on a bamboo table. In the shadow of the second tank, a conspiracy of armchairs, hump-backed and huddled, filled with spidery horsehair cushions. Anchored to the timber blocks of the third and largest tank, a fleet of painted cupboards and chests. Beyond the tanks a buttress wall contains a bathroom no bigger than a confessional and beyond the bathroom, at the far end of the hall, in a nook of curtains, a hammock hangs from a cradle of pipes.

  ‘It needs a lick of paint. But it’s warm and secure and it smells sweeter since I killed the starlings,’ says Webster, hunting for towels as he leads Frank to the little bathroom.

  Frank shaves and takes a shower, scalding himself with water from a bilious and belching boiler, while Webster makes a series of phone calls in search of Lloyd and Harry Cocker. He broadcasts threats and promises, collecting a debt, bestowing a favour, chasing his quarry from shadow to shadow.

  ‘I’ve found them!’ he says triumphantly, when Frank emerges from the shower. ‘I spoke to a man who spoke to a man who says they were seen at the Golden Goose. I knew they wouldn’t be far away – they’re so lazy they wouldn’t pull a soldier off their own mother.’

  ‘What happens now?’ Frank hangs the towel from his head like a cowl. He didn’t know it would happen this fast and he’s scared but he wants the Cockers caught for the sake of his own liberation.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Webster suspiciously. ‘What did you expect?’

  Frank shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I thought you’d go down there and sort them out.’

  ‘It’s raining!’ says Webster. He looks appalled. ‘We can’t go out in this weather!’

  Webster’s reluctance to get his shoes wet strikes Frank as a trifle squeamish, but he isn’t going to argue with him. So he settles into one of the hump-backed chairs and, while they wait for the skies to clear, Webster entertains him with a dog-eared scrapbook stuffed with snapshots and yellow press clippings. Tragic Beauty Found in Freezer. Six Dead in Banjo Bomb Blast. And here, between Mystery Blaze in Soho Nightclub and Kilburn Drug Gang Slaughter, a small, tobacco-coloured snapshot clings to the page like a pressed flower. The face that stares from the photograph is a blurred shadow, the eyes wild, the mouth pulled open in fear or surprise.

  ‘Rinso the Human Torch,’ says Webster. ‘The man who turned arson into art. An alchemist. A pyrotechnic genius. He could eat flames and fan the sparks.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He drowned in his bath,’ says Webster.

  He licks his finger and turns the pages in his catalogue of crimes and pauses to glance at the true confessions of Garibaldi the Gorgon, the man in the animal mask.

  ‘Remember the Beast of Baker Street?’

  ‘The Mad Butcher?’ says Frank. ‘He murdered women and ate them and what he couldn’t eat he buried somewhere in Regent’s Park.’ It must have been ten or twelve years ago. He remembers the story from the papers.

  ‘That’s it!’ says Webster. ‘That was the Gorgon. Poor devil. He used to live with his mother somewhere in Camden Town. They ran a little grocery shop. He found God when they locked him away. We always send him a Christmas card.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘I knew his mother. Conrad liked her home-cured bacon.’

  He turns another page and Garibaldi the Gorgon surrenders to Hangman of Hanover Square who yields to Fat Turk in Torture Chamber who succumbs to Redhead in Bank Raid Blunder who resigns to Chinese Conjurer Killings: Fear Walks Abroad in Chinatown and there, beneath Panic in Park Street and Riddle of Head in a Hatbox, a photograph of Conrad and Webster, wearing Brylcreem and buttonholes, standing, smiling, disguised as young men.

  ‘A rogue’s gallery,’ says Webster proudly, as he closes the book and presses it against his knees. The bandits and buccaneers. The spoilers and smudgers. He’s lived through interesting times.

  ‘Those bastards tried to kill me!’ says Frank, haunted once more by his fear of the Cockers. ‘I’m not going to give them a second chance, I must be crazy!’

  Webster stands up and hugs the scrapbook to his chest.

  ‘You made a lot of stupid mistakes, Frank.’ He takes the book to a painted cupboard and carefully locks it away. ‘You have to understand the basic rules of self-defence. And the first rule of defence is attack.’

  ‘You’ve told me. What’s the second rule?’

  ‘Never get caught in an empty street. If you think you’re being followed, change direction and mix into the crowd.’ He sits down beside Frank and retrieves the packet of Ginger Crumbles from the pocket of his shirt. ‘Killers hate working with an audience.’

  ‘I’ll remember that, the next time I want to post a letter.’

  ‘Rule number three. When you’re cornered, never try to engage your killers in the art of conversation. It’s a common mistake, but it’s fatal. You tried to reason with them, Frank. You can’t reason with a man swinging a baseball bat at your head.’

  ‘What should I have done?’

  ‘Rule number four. Strike out. Hit hard and fast.’

  ‘Thanks. You’re full of bright ideas. I’ll always make it a rule to keep a brick in my pocket.’

  ‘Rule number five,’ beams Webster, forcing a biscuit into his mouth. ‘Don’t waste time with a brick in your pocket. You’ve strength enough in your hands and feet. Pick a soft target. The eyes. The nose. The throat. The bollocks. Keep it simple. Hit him where it hurts.’ He sighs and sucks sugar from his fingertips.

  ‘Why?’ says Frank in exasperation. ‘What makes you do it?’

  ‘Excitement,’ says Webster, looking at Frank in surprise. He’s honest enough to admit it. The reasons are obvious. ‘There’s nothing else like it. How much excitement do you get selling fruit?’

  ‘I’m not looking for excitement,’ says Frank and, all at once, remembers when he was eighteen and hungry for adventure, planning to join a two-year expedition to the mountain forests of Belize. Young and inexperienced, with no particular qualifications, it had taken him months to win the trust of the team. The expedition leader, an authority on the jaguar and elusive jaguarundi, had finally agreed that Frank could join them as quartermaster at the base camp in Cockscombe Basin. Frank was jubilant. He’d spent the winter reading everything he could find on the region, studied jungle survival techniques, struggled to learn a few words of Spanish. And then, a few weeks before they were due to leave for Central America, he had unexpectedly been offered a job with the dried fruits and nuts division of Lotus Pitcher International. His friends congratulated him. His parents were absurdly proud. He was eighteen years old and still anxious to please the people who loved him. He surrendered his ticket. He felt like a man caught trying to shirk family responsibilities. Lotus Pitcher promised early promotion and the chance to work in one of their foreign outposts. So the expedition went to Belize and Frank stayed at home. He was never posted abroad. He found himself sharing an office behind the typing pool and working as assistant brand manager on Calypso Fried Banana Bites. He worked hard and rarely complained. We learn to regret the things we have done – we grieve for those things left undone. Years later he would still find himself startled awake at night by the sight of a beautiful jaguar, a spectre of sunlight and shadow, stalking the forest that grew in his dreams.

  ‘But there must have been a time in your life,’ insists Webster.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There must have been a time in your life when you nearly lost control. A moment when you wanted to push a chair through a window or screw a knife into someone’s chest.’

  Frank recalls the moment
at an ill-fated Christmas party when Jessica, so drunk she’d become a stranger, had clambered onto a dining-room table to perform a queasy, shuffling striptease, dragging at her wine-soaked clothes while a rabble of men had gathered around to encourage her with their shouts and whistles and he’d wanted to lash out at those stupid, leering faces and overturn the table and drag his wife home by the scruff of her neck.

  ‘There must have been moments,’ he admits.

  ‘That’s good!’ says Webster. ‘There’s a monster sleeping in every man … It’s dangerous to ignore your monster. What happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He shrugs. She’d fallen from the table and capsized into his arms. He’d taken her home and put her to bed and her vomit had fouled the sheets and pillows.

  ‘That’s bad,’ says Webster, shaking his head. ‘You shouldn’t smother your desires. Anger turns to acid in your stomach. Hurts your head. Burns out your system.’

  ‘If we didn’t keep control we’d be sloshing around in our own blood. There’d be executions on the streets. The city would be a bonfire. There’d be no law and order left in the world.’

  ‘That’s true. And a life of crime depends on a sense of law and order. It’s a world of goats and wolves, Frank. Goats and wolves.’

  The rain crackles against the roof and snuffles in the throats of the soot-choked chimneys. Great gusts of wind try to lift the house away by the eaves, making the attic windows bulge and the silver lamp chains swing in circles.

  The storm excites the water tanks, making them echo with distant thunder, their murky depths scoured by the raging of whirlpools, and then, with a rattle of rivets, they send a tumultuous surge of water screeching along the iron pipes and into the trembling floor. The pipes scream and bellow, banging themselves against the walls until, as night creeps into the attic, they create such a cacophony, such a battlefield of noise, that Webster conducts a smart retreat down the servants’ stairs and now Frank finds himself at a long table where the Staggers are gathered for supper.