Paul grabbed his bag and tugged the greatcoat free from beneath the inert body. The woman had now been joined by a second who took up screaming as well. Paul ran down the alley. He had just reached the hotel kitchen door when that, too, opened and a porter carrying a bin full of trash stepped out. Paul stopped. The porter stopped. The porter looked at Paul and at the women beyond and then finally at the body lying on the ground.
He was a stocky brute, Paul couldn’t help noticing, muscled from humping all those bins around, he supposed. Ugly too, and looking at Paul as if he were weighing up the odds.
Paul turned again. Deciding the women were a safer bet, he ran at them. They scattered, their faces filled with horror. One retreated through the door she had come from and Paul followed, into a room filled with startled seamstresses sitting at sowing machines. The screaming woman had taken to cowering in a corner and Paul ran past her, dodging down an aisle between tables. The Gladstone bag banged against them and knocked over a dressmaker’s dummy.
‘Sorry!’ he called as he went. ‘Sorry…’
Through another door and he found himself in a changing room at the rear of a shop. To his left a heavily corseted lady grabbed her clothes in panic, her mouth frozen open. He rushed past her into the shop, side-stepping mannequins in flowing Edwardian frocks. A young sales lady shuffled in front of him, one way then the other, trying to avoid him. Paul swung around her and collided with the shop counter. Then he saw the street door and a second later was outside. From somewhere he heard the shrill of a police whistle and, turning the opposite way rounded a corner before stopping to catch his breath.
Across the street he saw a gentlemen’s outfitters and he hurried over and slipped inside. Finding a secluded corner at the back of the shop, he bent his head and began examining a rack of hacking jackets. Looking sideways, he caught sight of his reflection in a mirror, a wild-eyed stranger looking like a civilian caught in no-man’s-land.
He saw the dead man’s blood had stained his jacket and had the idea of exchanging it for one on the rack. But, as he began pulling one off, remembered that his own jacket had his name sewn into the collar. His mother again. He pushed the hacking jacket back onto the hanger and pulled on the greatcoat instead, examining that for blood as a sales assistant stepped towards him. He was a thin elderly man with expectations and both eyebrows raised. Paul shook his head and sidled off towards a rack of ties, sorting through them with a bloodied hand. The assistant watched him from a few feet away, his eyebrows having descended into a perplexed furrow.
Given enough time, Paul supposed the man would eventually make a connection between a new, overdressed customer with blood on his hands and the police whistles that could be clearly heard outside on the street.
Paul forced himself to smile.
‘Not today, I think,’ he said to the assistant. ‘Thank you very much,’ and made a run for the door and Liverpool Street Station.
PART TWO
All at Sea
— July 21st 1918 —
10
‘They’re good boots,’ said Pinker. ‘Warm and durable.’
‘I’m sure they are.’
‘No,’ Pinker insisted, ‘take a look.’
Paul took the boot, tweaked the leather uppers and examined the sole.
‘They look excellent quality.’
Pinker, small, moustachioed with receding hair, nodded enthusiastically.
‘Top of our line. They’re bound to sell well.’
Paul had found Pinker in his cabin, having discovered only then that he was expected to share, only why not with Hart he couldn’t imagine. Busy searching his pockets for a sixpenny tip for the sullen steward who had carried his bag, Paul hadn’t seen Pinker behind the cabin door until the steward had departed gracelessly as soon as the coin had crossed his palm. Paul, pushing the door open, had knocked Pinker against the bunks that took up one side of the cramped cabin. The other side consisted of a chair, and cantilevered table and a gimballed wash basin and water jug. Edging into the cabin he found most of the remaining space taken up by Pinker and his various bags and cases.
The ablutions Pinker explained — rubbing his barked shin while Paul apologised — were a shared facility along the corridor.
Once the door was shut the two performed a cramped waltz as they attempted simultaneously to stow their luggage. After a series of collisions and several more apologies, Paul as last man in, conceded the field to Pinker. He took the greatcoat and leaving his bag on the lower bunk climbed back on deck for a cigarette.
There was an east wind blowing and after the stuffy cabin Paul pulled the greatcoat on once more.
It had been almost seven-thirty before the train from London reached Yarmouth. Once he’d arrived he had locked himself in the station lavatory and sponged off his jacket with a cloth. In the dim reflection from the clouded mirror his suit looked even cheaper than before and no doubt would have dropped him even further down the social ladder in his mother’s eyes. Having made himself as orderly as possible, exchanging the blood on his jacket for damp patches, he had made his way to the quay.
There were still crowds thronging the waterside stalls, being harangued by costers shouting their wares. Men in uniform strolled arm in arm with girls; women and children walked along the piers. The evening air was heavy with the aroma of bloaters and the smell of the sea.
He found the steamer easily enough, tied up alongside the few pleasure craft that despite the war still plied the coastal towns and up the River Yar. But the boat was an unprepossessing sight. Streaked with rust and grimed with soot, it leaked a thin trail of grey smoke into the air like the contaminated breath of a tubercular patient.
The name on the stern, Hesperus, gave him a sudden sense of foreboding as the Longfellow poem he had studied at school came back. He couldn’t have recited a single line of The Wreck Of The Hesperus now, only vaguely recalling a story of a captain’s hubris, a huge storm, and a girl lashed to a mast. It had not turned out well. He remembered that much. The ship had sunk and the captain’s daughter had washed ashore, drowned. Not an ending to dwell upon, he decided. He hung around the quayside for a while awaiting the elusive Hart, but no one seemed to be hanging around waiting for him so eventually he passed under the stern of the ship toward the gangway.
The officer to whom he passed his ticket welcomed Paul aboard, addressing him as Mr Filbert which made Paul stare at him blankly until remembering who he was supposed to be. Then he passed his bag to the sullen cabin steward and followed him below to encounter Pinker.
Now, back on deck, Paul found a spot aft to sit where through the deepening gloom he could see the quay. A dim light on a bulkhead shed almost sufficient light for him to read the evening paper he had bought at the station and he looked through it for any report of murder in London. There was nothing, though, only the usual amalgam of hopeful news from the front and fatuous articles about the sterling work being done at home.
He saw two men carrying bags approach the gangway and put the paper down and stood at the rail. They were dark and dapper and wore brown suits and bowler hats. As they climbed the gangway he saw they both wore beards, one full but short and trimmed, the other man’s worn as a goatee, pointed beneath pince-nez balanced on a thin nose.
They looked familiar — but then he had thought that about the man in the cap. He put it down to their superficial resemblance to Lenin and Trotsky. The omen momentarily gave him an odd turn, but the pair looked more like music hall impersonators than the real thing and he decided it was nothing but a coincidence. Still, he was reminded again of Kell’s admonition. Despite the likelihood, he shouldn’t suppose the agent he had been warned against was the man he’d left dead in the alley and resolved to take the appearance of two ersatz Bolshevik leaders as a reminder against taking anything for granted. Doing that had almost got him killed once already.