‘I already told Bryant I was going.’
‘Then eat your words. No one will think less of you. Tell him you’ll stay.’ Forthright followed his gaze to the river beyond the railing. ‘I came back, didn’t I? Swallowed my pride. I was supposed to get married. I could have kept away, but I didn’t.’
Biddle looked at her. ‘Why not?’
‘Mr Bryant needs me.’ She checked her watch. ‘God, I can’t remember the last time I ate. You must be starving.’
‘There’s a decent workman’s café near Coin Street.’
‘I need sausages. You’re allowed a hearty breakfast on the morning of your execution, aren’t you? I’m in charge of the unit’s petty cash, and you won’t shop me, will you? You can tell me more about this monster you saw in the rafters.’
They passed a skinny brown nag drinking noisily from a corporation horse trough. Forthright paused to give its milkman a cigarette. The poor man looked on his uppers, as thin as his horse and the empty wire crates on his cart. It was the first animal she had seen in days; she wondered if they were being taken out of the city.
Biddle waited for her, then they resumed walking in comfortable silence through the miasmic mist that ebbed over the Embankment, down to the roads where daylight and life were returning to the city.
Arthur Bryant gently placed the framed photograph of Nathalie, the one he had taken by the river that terrible afternoon, into a cardboard box, added his carved Tibetan skull, tossed in some incense sticks, some mystical diagrams of Solomon’s Temple, several beeswax candles, a gramophone record of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Te Deum, two volumes of criminal records from Newgate Gaol, a three-dimensional bronze model of the Kabalistic Pentagram of the Absolute, a rare limited edition of Seymour’s British Witchcraft and Demonology and a paperback copy of RAF Slang Made Easy, then closed the lid and bound it with thick brown tape. Set beside each other, the three crates contained almost everything he owned. It’s not a lot to show for my life so far, he thought gloomily.
He propped the letter of resignation, addressed to Davenport, against May’s desk lamp. He wanted to leave before his partner arrived. He felt that he had passed the point beyond which no amount of apology and retraction could return him, and he did not wish to place John in the embarrassing situation of having to defend him to their superior.
Perhaps it was for the best. He wasn’t cut out to be a politician. It was clear now that the unit was little more than a public relations exercise. For a while he had believed that the old-money occupants of the HO could be superseded by a new breed of experimentalists for whom the past held no loyalties, that brave new rules would operate throughout British government, from the lowliest town council to the offices of Whitehall. Now he doubted that the war would make any difference to government at all.
Bryant loved London. He had been born in Whitechapel, in the lowliest of circumstances, and had grown up on the streets of Wapping and Borough and Mile End. He was proud of having got this far. But now the city was changing. Its sense of good cheer was being chipped away by bombardment in a war that Neville Chamberlain had insisted would never happen.
He was going to load the boxes into a cab if he could find one, but remembered that he had packed some hefty mementos, including a paving stone that held the burned-in handprint of Jack the Ripper, and decided to have them delivered instead.
There was no place for his arcane studies in the police force of the future. He thought of his friends in the Camden Town Coven, and their arch-rivals, the Southwark Supernaturals. He gathered together the scrawled addresses of the Mystic Savoyards and the Prometheus League, the emergency numbers of the Insomnia Squad’s sleepless academics, the diary that contained lists of assorted primitives, paranormalists, idiot savants, mind-readers and madmen, all available to the unit if someone only trusted him enough to use them wisely.
All for the best, he told himself. John was young and bright. He might be able to modernize the unit and bring fresh technology into their casework once Bryant himself was out of the way. They were clearly doing something wrong if they couldn’t keep lads like Sidney Biddle interested enough to stay on.
He unclipped a small glass case of poisonous caterpillars from the wall behind his desk and emptied it into the bin. There was a time when he would have taken them out of their case and dropped them in Oswald Finch’s teapot, but the spirit had gone out of him.
Bryant saw now that he had willed a culprit into existence because he wanted to be challenged. The real solution would doubtless prove to be rather ordinary, not peculiar or paradoxical at all, a disgruntled employee, a youth filled with such directionless anger that he could equally have decided to attack the staff of a bus depot or an insurance office. Grey crimes for a grey nation.