There was a flat on the floor above, fitted out with every convenience and decorated in shades of pink. No one lived there, and Nellie found it extraordinarily soothing to go upstairs and sit in its untouched atmosphere. It was perhaps the only unsullied corner of her life.
The head barman, a smooth Spaniard, assiduously polishing glasses, said, “Welcome back, Mrs. Coker.” Could he get her anything? To his surprise, Nellie said, “A whisky. A malt. A good one, mind. Neat.”
A Macallan was poured generously and served with great courtesy. She must be celebrating her release, he thought. “Is she all right?” the manager, a man named Templeton, asked. He had arrived quietly and they observed Nellie together unseen.
“She’s drinking whisky.”
“What does that mean?”
“No idea.”
Templeton’s days were numbered at the Crystal Cup. Edith had told Nellie that he was suspected of having his hand in the till.
Nellie took a cautious sip from her glass. It was a long time since she had drunk whisky and she was not sure what memories would surface with the taste. Just a faint, peaty one of her wedding night, when she had been tutored in the meaning of the word “conjugation,” which previously she had thought only applied to Latin verbs.
The Crystal Cup ought to be deserted at this hour, that was its charm for Nellie, but when she glanced up she saw that there was someone sitting at one of the tables, over by the far wall.
It was Maud, of course, who else? She was dripping water onto the lovely herringbone maple of the floor. Nellie had to stop herself calling for a mop; the floor had cost a fortune.
There was a glass of absinthe in Maud’s hand and she raised it in a toast. Nellie raised her own glass in silent acknowledgement.
“She’s definitely not herself,” Templeton murmured to the barman as they watched Nellie toasting the empty air.
* * *
—
When the band started to trickle in and unpack their instruments and the dance hostesses began to primp themselves in the cloakroom, Nellie heaved herself up from her table and signalled for her coat. Templeton rushed to comply.
“Welcome back, Mrs. Coker,” he said as he helped her on with her matinée coat. Jail, he noticed, seemed to have shrunk her.
He noticed, too, that she had acquired a cane, topped with the handsome head of a silver fox. It didn’t seem to indicate weakness, as rather than using it as a support she wielded it like a drum major’s mace. He half expected to be whacked on the head with it.
“On to the Amethyst now?” he asked, more for the sake of conversation than curiosity.
“Where else?” Nellie said. It seemed like a genuine question. The manager had no idea how to answer.
* * *
—
The Amethyst was still quiet when Nellie’s Bentley drew up outside. Hawker helped her out. That new cane, he thought, was more like a theatrical prop.
Rather than entering the Amethyst straight away, Nellie took a little promenade along the street, an animal reclaiming her territory. The club was surrounded by a variety of establishments—restaurants, cafés and all manner of shops, from a ship’s chandler to a knife supplier, a barber, a cobbler, a tea importer, and so on. Several of these proprietors came out to greet her. She was a character. She gave the street notoriety. They appreciated that.
Nellie paused for a moment outside the Amethyst. It was disguised by soot-encrusted brickwork and peeling paintwork. The windows on the ground floor were blacked out and the fa?ade gave no clue as to the vastness inside. The building had once housed a Huguenot family, not the silk workers who settled in Spitalfields, but the precious-metal-workers who had made Soho their refuge. Their workshop had been on the upper floor, where there was the most light, and when magpie Nellie first moved in she had spotted a tiny nugget of gold, wedged between two of the broad oak floorboards. It had seemed like a good omen. A promise of greater treasure. Nellie kept it in a silk drawstring bag, where it nestled alongside other charms acquired over the years—the tooth of a Scottish wildcat, a piece of rock crystal, a hare’s foot and a lock of hair cut from the corpse of a hanged man, although she would be the first to acknowledge that there was no proof he had been hanged, let alone that he was dead, when the hair was removed from his head. If Nellie had a soul—and there was no verdict as yet—then it was a pagan one.
The bag was kept beneath the mattress of the small brass bed in her bedroom in Hanover Terrace. She had felt the lack of it in Holloway. When she had looked for it on her first night back in her own bed, she was disturbed to find that the bag was no longer there.