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By Root 829 0

any more like strings at all. The notes sounded less drawn from a violin by a bow than ground out by a handle turning a street-corner organ. The music had turned harsh and mechanical and the melody perished in the dead pub on every phrase. Seaton shivered. It was not, out there, the spring of 1983 he had lived through and remembered. He pictured weary slums spreading southward beyond the pub doorway under a soot-spangled sky. The faces of the people dwelling in them were pale and pinched and wretched. It was cobbled and damp and the tenements sagged and the vermin writhed in the plaster lattices and mattress ticking, in the absence of light and heat and soap. It was a wasteland of polio and rickets, of hand-me-downs and head-lice and unremitting, gnawing undernourishment. It was a place of long-perished hope. Joy there was the scant ghost of hopscotch games in chalk washed from the pavements by rain. It was a locality entirely lost to faith. It was the South London of Edwin Poole’s jaded imagination, or his nocturnal travels. Some nagging instinct told Seaton that Poole had been no stranger to the night exotica luring toffs to the dockside dives of Wapping and Rotherhithe seventy years ago. But the North Lambeth lurking beyond the pub door was not exotic. It was a wasteland of the Great Depression, a vaguely remembered and reconstructed limbo, holding scant attraction, ever, for anyone. It owed itself to Poole’s disdainful glances, through the cold blear of cab windows, on his way to, or home from, somewhere else, long ago. It was fearful and grotesque.

The pub, though. The pub was almost perfect. They had taken a memory from his most treasured time, plucked and traduced it. And he thought he knew how. It had been Covey’s achievement. A willing subject, every bit as suggestible as Mason had assumed he was, he must have told Malcolm Covey all about himself in the secure, intimate betrayal of the hypnotic state the bogus doctor lulled him into at the hospital. How many sessions had there been? They had stolen from him, looted the locked closet of his most secret emotions. And the realisation brought with it not just indignation but confusion, because although he was sure of the how, Seaton had not the remotest understanding of the why of what had been done to him. Why? In God’s name, why pick on him?

The smell of the beer he had drawn was a rotten, brisk rebuke in his glass on the counter in front of his nose and the music wheezed towards its conclusion in his ears.

Spare the rod and spoil the child.

He hefted the poor, velvet-clad remains he gripped in his hand. Oh, well.

He turned around and walked across and pulled out a chair and sat down with them at their table. He rested the bag in his lap. ‘I’ll go last,’ he said.

Gibson-Hoare picked first and drew the jack of clubs. Seaton tried to concentrate on the game. It was a simple enough game. And he needed to be cool and he had never needed more to have his wits about him. But in his mind he saw Lucinda, the patella bone flapping through skin when she worked the treadle of her sewing machine. And he felt the fury shake him like a stampede.

Breene picked. He drew the nine of hearts. Seaton tried to calculate odds as he thought about Mason’s sister, bruised and unconscious in bed in Whitstable, having been dragged naked from the sea in a sheet by her weeping brother.

Edwin Poole drew with pale and expert fingers and he flipped over the queen of diamonds on to the tabletop with a snap. And all Paul Seaton could see in his mind was a woman with her throat expertly slit, stranded on the mud on a foggy, long-forgotten dawn at Shadwell Stair.

He expected his own hand to tremble when he drew. But it did not. With his left hand, he turned the drawn card and showed the two of spades. And Poole smiled at him. A gold incisor snagged the smile on its owner’s lower lip. Seaton noticed that the music had stopped. Billy Paul had finished singing his maudlin tribute to the wife of another man. He dropped his card. He put his right hand on the stock of Wheatley’s revolver. And using