‘You had a bad dream,’ she said.

the man in the beaver hat

——

His tongue was thick and unresponsive. He sat up and the room swam. Nothing had changed. The clientele was still arranged artistically on their cushions. The girls administered to their medicine. The film continued to play silently on the opposite wall.

Scene: the man in the beaver hat sitting down with another man who looks dazed.

Title: Have I been asleep?

Scene: close-up on the man in the beaver hat, his grotesque eyes and deathly pallor.

Title: No, and neither have I.

‘I want to know your role in this.’

‘My role in what?’ Madam Seng said.

‘What was Mo doing here?’’

Her eyes, expanding slightly. ‘The detective?’

‘He had your card.’

She shrugged. ‘He came here a couple of times.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do any of you?’

‘No,’ Joe said. He shook his head and his vision swam. ‘He was investigating something. Some people. He came here… he must have seen them here.’ Her eyes regarded him calmly. He described the man in the black shoes.

Madam Seng: ‘I don’t know why I should even talk to you.’

Joe: ‘Why do you?’

Madam Seng: ‘You remind me of a boy I used to know.’

Joe: ‘What happened to him?’

Madam Seng: ‘He…’ slight hesitation. ‘Went elsewhere.’

Joe blinked, wanted to sneeze. Held his head in his hands – it felt like a lead weight. ‘Do you have coffee?’ he said.

‘This is an opium house, not a coffee shop,’ Madam Seng said, and Joe smiled. ‘Please?’

She made a gesture to one of the girls.

‘So tell me about these men,’ Joe said.

On the opposite wall the film stuttered slowly to a halt.

‘I am not a Snake Head,’ Madam Seng said.

‘But they thought you are.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did they want you to take them?’

She shrugged. ‘Into fuzzy-wuzzy land.’

‘Did they find what they were looking for?’

‘No.’

‘What were they looking for?’

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Lady, I just have a job to do.’

She looked amused. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘Lady.’

The girl came back. She carried a silver tray and put it down on the low table beside Joe. Black coffee in a white china cup, a bowl of sugar cubes, a small pouring-jug of cream. She looked up at Joe and smiled. Madam Seng said something Joe didn’t catch and the girl left them quickly.

‘I’m looking for…’ he said, and then fell quiet, and stirred sugar and cream into the coffee, and took a sip; it seemed to set his brain on fire. ‘Osama Bin Laden,’ he said, wonderingly.

Madam Seng slowly nodded.

‘I think that’s who they were looking for, too,’ she said.

forget Chinatown

——

He knew the way now. He retraced his steps for the third time, though one had been only in a dream.

‘Don’t come here again,’ Madam Seng had said. On impulse he had leaned towards her, kissed her on the cheek. Her skin felt cold. She pulled back from him and smiled. Her eyes were hidden behind mist. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘you can never go home again.’

He nodded, once. She put her hand on his face, looked at him as if searching for something hidden, the lines of someone else in his face. ‘There is no path this way,’ she said. ‘Forget it, Joe. Forget Chinatown.’

He turned his back on her. As he stepped outside the air was cooler, waking him. The door closed behind him without noise. The tableau of silent drinkers at The Edwin Drood was undisturbed through the grimy glass. He went down Little Newport and wondered if it had been named for a particularly small and agile chimney sweep. He turned left on Charing Cross Road, crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, saw Foyle’s in the distance. On an impulse he went in. Though the hour was late the store was open. There was a girl sitting behind a desk in the front. He approached her.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Do you have any of the Mike Longshott books?’

‘Mike Longshott…’ she said. ‘Hold on.’

She reached for a thick folder and began leafing through it.

‘The Osama Bin Laden series,’ Joe said. The girl looked up. Closed the folder. A moue of distaste. ‘Oh, those.’

‘Do you have them?’

‘We don’t stock that sort of stuff here,’ she said. ‘Try further up the road.’

Joe followed her pointing finger. It was showing him the doors.

With a sense of déjà vu he left the bookstore and continued on his way, walking down London’s chartered streets, searching the faces of the night people out at this hour, knowing that he was being watched. He could have gone straight down Shaftesbury Avenue to his destination but he chose this route, willing them an awareness of him. There were no cameras in this London, but still there were secret watchers. He turned on St. Giles, away from gallows that weren’t there, walked along High Holborn, feeling in his back the intensity of the hidden watchers increase.

There was no British Museum underground station.

But there had been, once.

Tracked them down to Holborn. Lost again.

Where High Holborn met Bloomsbury Court…

He’d looked it up on his way from the Dog & Bone. A trains and transport bookshop of the kind one can only find in London. A proprietor with hundreds of private notebooks stashed away, recording days spent on foggy platforms, recording times of arrivals and departures. There was no British Museum station there, but there had been, before the war. They said it was haunted, the proprietor said with a whisper, and laughed. They said there was an Egyptian mummy down there. They said there was a tribe of cannibals down there. It was an air shelter during the war. It was a military post. It was home to a group of refugees from a war no one had heard of. It was off High Holborn but the station building no longer existed. All that remained were the tunnels…

The offices of a Building Society. A shuttered pub. Around the back, a small wooden door, locked and unremarked, grainy wood and peeling green paint. A little way away, a dark-blue police box stood empty, its light dead. Joe approached the door. The handle had been removed. He stared at it. He could feel the silence around him. What lay beyond the door. He could turn back, walk away. Answers were buried underground, in unmarked graves. He breathed in London’s night air, then kicked the door. The wood splintered, the door fell back, revealing the darkness beyond. He went towards the darkness.

hell is an abandoned station

——

Walking down stone stairs slippery with moss. His Zippo held up before him, illuminating crumbling brickwork sprayed with ancient graffiti. For a moment he thought of the man in the beaver hat holding a lantern, deathly-pale face coming down the grand staircase. Down and down into the ground. The weight of packed earth above his head. Down to a level surface: a platform. He had Mo’s gun, still. He held it in one hand now, the lighter in the other, the flame dancing, his shadow ending at the end of his feet. A voice, as cold as a subterranean spring, spoke through the darkness. ‘Mr. Private Investigator,’ it said. ‘You should not have come here.’

Joe stopped, let the flame die. ‘I wish people would stop telling me that,’ he said. The unseen speaker laughed. Joe heard a rustling sound, and something brushed against his feet in passing. There were rats down there, he thought.

Some even had four legs.

‘Those who go underground,’ the voice said, ‘sometimes never come back.’

It wasn’t the voice of the gentleman in the chequered shirt. Someone else…

Stealthy movement behind him. They must have followed him down the stairs, the ones who were watching above. Joe stepped carefully sideways, felt the wall against his shoulder.