Freda summoned every last shred of strength and snapped her teeth onto her offender’s fleshy jowls, like a dog. And like a dog she hung on, even though she was gagging with disgust.
Owen Varley squealed—as well as a man can squeal when his jaw is clamped between a girl’s teeth—and tried to pull away from her, but still Freda hung on. If she could have done, she would have torn his face off, but eventually she had to let go. Owen Varley crumpled heavily onto the floor and lay still. Had she killed him? Could you kill someone by biting them?
Run, Freda thought, run and don’t look back. Run for your life. She had the presence of mind to grab Vanda’s bag—her portfolio of photographs had been thrown to the floor, she didn’t care about retrieving them, but she was not going to sacrifice their money or Mrs. Ingram’s jewels to Owen Varley.
No thread to guide her back out of the maze, Freda had no idea how she found her way out of the theatre, but she did. She sprinted past the stage doorman, past the surprised snake of fresh hopefuls on Maiden Lane. She was close to Corpus Christi church. Freda knew you could seek sanctuary in a church, but she preferred the safe haven of the Lyons on Coventry Street, where Florence was waiting for her.
* * *
—
Freda regarded herself in the mirror of the Ladies’ in the Lyons. She had rinsed her mouth out many times, but she was sure she could still taste Owen Varley’s blood. She looked a fright. Her comb was in her handbag and the best she could do was splash her face with cold water and smooth her hair down with her hands.
“Are you all right, dear?” the elderly Ladies’ attendant asked her solicitously.
“Yes, perfectly all right, thank you,” Freda said. The attendant’s kindness made her want to cry all over again and she would have left a tip for the woman, but her money, thank goodness, was safely in her handbag, on a chair next to Florence. Imagine if she had left it in the Adelphi—she would never have been able to return for it. Florence would keep a guardian eye on it. Wouldn’t she? Freda experienced a sudden sense of overwhelming dread and, gripped by an awful panic, she ran back into the body of the café, where a commotion was occurring. One of the nippies was shouting, “Thief!” and many of the patrons were on their feet, as if they were at a spectator sport.
The excitement was already beginning to die down by the time Freda reached their table. People had resumed their seats, returned to their pots of tea. It was not their loss.
“They took your bag,” Florence said miserably when she saw her.
“They? They who?”
“Thieves. Women.”
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Freda asked. She was cold, almost frozen with anger. How could Florence have been so careless as to take her eye off the bag? How could she have been so stupid?
Florence’s lip started quivering. “It wasn’t my fault. It was you that ran off and left your bag, Freda. I knew you’d blame me.”
“Yes, I do!” Freda said. “You are a stupid, ignorant donkey, Florence! I would be much better off without you!”
The Invisible Man
Frobisher loitered at the end of the street, coat collar up, hat brim down, aware that he must look rather furtive to anyone watching him. Frobisher, however, prided himself on being good at blending into the background, like H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man. It would have surprised him to learn, therefore, that in fact he was himself being observed—by a man holding a small notebook that looked similar, nay identical, to the kind of police-issue notebooks that were doled out from the supplies cupboard that was in turn fiercely policed by a grey-haired shrew of a senior clerk in his own station at Bow Street. A new pencil was not granted until the stub of the old one was presented. Frobisher admired economy but disliked parsimony. He thought he might have a word with her, but she was low down on his list of priorities. Unless somehow she, too, was in the pay of the nightclub owners of Soho.
Frobisher had, in fact, been under this surveillance since the previous day, when the owner of the little notebook had been engaged to spy on him. The notebook already contained a plethora of jottings so banal that if Frobisher had been privy to them he would have been dismayed （although not surprised） at the mundanity of his life.
JOHN FROBISHER left house in Ealing 6:20 （a.m.）， arrived Bow Street at 7:45 （a.m.）。 12:00 p.m. Frobisher left Bow Street at midday, walked around Soho/Covent Garden. Ate lunch （ham and chips） in Jonnie’s in Floral Street.
The notebook was snapped shut and pocketed.