“Quick!” Fenella said in her ear. “I can hear them running.”

Lydia and the blond man, Fenella and Mr. Goldman almost tumbled into the house. Lydia closed the door behind them and rammed the top bolt home. Mr. Goldman was gasping for breath.

“Damned barbarians,” the blond man said. “Are you all right, sir?”

Lydia ignored them. She knelt and opened the flap of the letter box. This gave her a narrow, rectangular view across the road to the chapel. At the far right of the rectangle was the left-hand leaf of the double gates to Bleeding Heart Square. To her horror, she saw Serridge standing in the angle between the gate and the pillar supporting it. He was smoking a cigar and staring placidly down the length of Rosington Place.

They had a witness.

Marcus burst into view, followed by three Blackshirts. They hesitated for an instant on the forecourt. Marcus walked into the road and looked up and down. He saw Serridge.

“I say!” he shouted. “You there! Which way did they go?”

Serridge unhurriedly removed his cigar. “Who are you talking about?”

“Two women and two men. You must have seen them.”

Serridge pointed the cigar down Rosington Place toward Holborn Circus and the thin, fussy tower of St. Andrew’s beyond.

“But we’d still see them if they’d gone that way.”

“No, they went down past the lodge and turned right.” Serridge turned his head to his left. “Ain’t that right?”

Another man came into view-Howlett, stately in his uniform frock coat, with Nipper at his heels. He touched the brim of his top hat to Marcus. He looked every inch the loyal servant. But whose servant, Lydia wondered, and why?

“That’s right, sir,” Howlett said. “Went down there like bats out of hell. As if the devil himself was after them.”

23

YOU ARE HAUNTED by the ghosts of what might have happened. If Philippa Penhow had had the sense to run away to the village. If she had hammered on Mr. Gladwyn’s door. If she’d run into the Alforde Arms. If she’d stumbled across the muddy fields to Mavering.

Sunday, 20 April 1930 I think he’s looking for this diary. He was searching my things this morning. Someone-it must have been him, unless it was one of the maids-prised open my little writing box where I used to keep the diary. They forced the lock. I didn’t dare say anything. Rebecca went away last night. Amy’s getting worse. At breakfast, she was positively insolent when I asked for fresh tea. I’m sure she’s wearing lipstick too. Joseph told me to stop fussing. He said I was only making the girl nervous. But she’s a nasty baggage. I said to Joseph at lunchtime that they must think us strange in the village because we hadn’t gone to church. He said, not at all-he had told the Vicar I wasn’t well, that I’d had a breakdown and couldn’t stand meeting people or crowds, and that was the real reason we’d come to live in the country. So I see it all now. He’s made them think I’m a mad-woman. And he’s made them think that he’s a saint, looking after me. I wish I hadn’t signed all those papers. “Another one for your autograph, my darling.”

So you see she couldn’t go to the village or anywhere else because of the shame of it. She believed they already thought her a lunatic. And she and Serridge weren’t married. Either way she would have faced ridicule and censure, either way she would be ruined. At the back of her mind was the bitter knowledge that she didn’t know what she’d signed over to him during the last few weeks.

Most of all, you believe, she stayed at Morthams because in some small and tender place in her heart there still lived a sickly hope that this was really a bad dream, and that soon her Joseph would change back to the man she knew he really was. Perhaps this was some sort of test, and all she need do was endure. Perhaps she could make him love her, as she did him. She would tear out her heart for him if it would make him happy.

The smell of cats was stronger. The cold seeped from the flagstones and oozed out of the walls. He sat on the table, his back against the rough, whitewashed wall.

It was not entirely dark. As his eyes adjusted, Rory made out a faint rectangle at the other end of the room, which must mark the door. On the other side of the door was the cloister and the fading, gray light of a winter afternoon. But very little sound penetrated the thick walls or the heavy door. It was as if he was entombed. The loudest sound was his own breathing. He was very cold-he had left his hat and his raincoat in the undercroft.

They had taken his notebook, presumably during the fracas. In his mind, he went over the sequence of events, trying to memorize them. He was damned if he was going to let them prevent him from writing this article. First, there had been an interruption to Fisher’s speech-the tall old man who looked Jewish, though presumably not orthodox or else he wouldn’t have been here on the Sabbath. Then the scrap, when the Blackshirts waded in to remove him. Then Lydia was mixed up with it and then Fenella and Dawlish.

Why the hell had Lydia been there? Surely she wanted to avoid her husband?

When the row started, Rory had stood up without thinking, drawn partly by a journalist’s instinct to move toward trouble rather than away from it, and partly to help Lydia. But the Blackshirts were already on him.

The timing was important. It suggested they must have been told to keep an eye on him, presumably by Marcus. Told to pounce when there was trouble in the audience, told to extract him neatly and swiftly as though he were a troublesome tooth, and they were a pair of pincers. He gave them full marks for efficiency. They had frogmarched him out of the undercroft. One of them kept his hand clamped over Rory’s mouth. They had been so extraordinarily polite and unemotional about the whole thing.

“Excuse me, sir, would you let us through? Gentleman needs a breath of air.”

Everyone must have known that he was being ejected, Rory thought, but his escorts contrived to do it in such a way that many of the bystanders would have assumed the fault was his, not the Fascists’.

More Blackshirts had been milling around in the cloister, mainly at the far end, near the door to the street. His escorts hadn’t waited for orders and they hadn’t tried to turf him out. That must be significant as well. They had simply wheeled him round to the right and down into the Ossuary, where they kicked his legs from underneath him and forced him down to the floor.

Rory had forced himself not to cry out, not because he was brave but because he thought if he did he might attract more violence. Mercifully they seemed to lose interest in him: closed the door gently and turned the key in the lock. Darkness fell like a stone. The light switch was outside the door.

When they left him alone, he had stood up and swept his hands over the walls, exploring the Ossuary by sense of touch. All it contained was the table. The chairs had gone. He hooked his hands under one side and lifted. It rose a couple of inches, and then the weight was too much for him. He considered trying to wedge the door with it, but remembered that the door opened outward, toward the steps down from the cloister.

Sooner or later, he told himself, someone would come. This will end. Everything ends. He shied away from the thought that whatever replaced this might be worse. Time passed. At one point he thought he heard distant music on the edge of his range of hearing. Perhaps the meeting was over, and they were playing the National Anthem. The theory was confirmed when he heard the rumble of voices and footsteps, a whole tide of them, in the cloister. All those clerks and commercial travelers and office boys were going home to the suburbs for the weekend. He would have given anything to be one of them. He hammered on the door and shouted, trying to attract their attention.