“I had a dog with me,” he said to the night nurse when she was taking the sleeping Freda’s pulse on one of her rounds.
“That’s nice,” she said absently. There didn’t seem much point in pursuing the fate of the poor dog. It must have either wandered off from Southwark Bridge or in an act of misplaced fidelity plunged into the Thames after him and been lost for ever beneath the waters. Perhaps in some greater arc of justice the dog had been the price to pay for saving Freda. His heart clenched with pity when he thought of such a very small dog in such a very big river.
“Are you feeling all right, Chief Inspector?” the nurse asked.
“Yes, yes, quite all right,” he said.
“You should go home.”
* * *
—
It was three in the morning when he reached Ealing in a ridiculously expensive taxi. Tomorrow he must face the Austin again.
Lottie was asleep, of course, and he didn’t wake her. She was ignorant of his adventure and he doubted that he would tell her.
When he woke, she was not asleep by his side. He couldn’t remember her ever getting up first, but then he looked at the clock and saw it was well past midday. He had never slept so long in his whole life. It had done him good, he felt healed, almost whole, although slightly bilious, and his lungs were damp, as if they’d sponged up the Thames.
Lottie was in a good mood, too. She made him coffee in the little French pot he had found for her in a shop in Soho. She cut bread and buttered it for him, even volunteered an egg, which he refused. He felt renewed guilt. It should have been Lottie he had taken on that outing in the Austin. His wife.
* * *
—
He shied away from the Austin at the last moment. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to be a driver. He took a tram. Not to Bow Street but to St. Thomas’s, to see Freda.
“No Freda Murgatroyd here, I’m afraid, Chief Inspector,” the matron said. She had been summoned when none of the nurses on the day shift recognized the name.
“She came in last night,” Frobisher insisted. “I pulled her from the Thames myself. She was asleep when I left.”
Well, a girl had been brought in, the matron said, her brow creased as she scrutinized the ward’s records, “but she discharged herself this morning.”
“Did she leave an address?”
“No, but her name wasn’t Freda Murgatroyd. She was called Miss Fay le Mont.”
He set off to Bow Street in a renewed state of defeat. For a moment, he wondered if he had dreamt the whole episode.
The Age of Glitter
A raft of morning newspapers lay abandoned on the table in the empty dining room of Hanover Terrace. Ramsay had come down from his room in search of the coffee pot. Niven had told him yesterday evening that the spieler debt had been “fixed,” whatever that meant （he didn’t need to know, Niven said）， and that, as a bonus, he had persuaded their loving mother not to have Ramsay’s dead body dragged around Regent’s Park behind a chariot.
The coffee pot was cold and Ramsay wondered what the chances were that their recalcitrant cook would brew more for him. His eye was caught by the front page of one of the papers.
Journalist murdered. The body of the society diarist Vivian Quinn was recovered from the Thames yesterday morning. He had been stabbed by a hand or hands unknown near Berkeley Square. A curious detail of the affair was that Mr. Quinn was dressed in the costume of a Spanish matador.
Ramsay reached for the wastepaper basket and vomited into it.
Quinn? Murdered? It was the third item on the front page, not the headline—how Quinn would have resented that! He must have been killed minutes after Ramsay had spoken to him two nights ago. For a paranoid moment, Ramsay wondered if he had killed Vivian Quinn himself. He had certainly wanted to when Quinn was telling him about Folderol, and he had been in such a delirium of drugs and alcohol that he might have done anything and not remembered. Quinn’s novel would never be published now.
The coffee forgotten, he returned to his room, where the floor—the only space that was big enough—was carpeted with a jigsaw of （badly） typed pages. They fluttered and resettled like birds in the draught when he opened the door.
The scales of vanity finally fell from his eyes as he regarded the pages with despair. He had become the victim of his own vaulting ambition. The Age of Glitter was going to destroy him, eat him alive from the inside out. He was not a good writer, in fact he was an awful writer! The sooner he faced that fact, the better. He would have burnt all the pages, but the fires in Hanover Terrace weren’t lit until late afternoon at this time of year.