* * *
—
Eventually, Freda escaped the sanctity of Corpus Christi, after much bowing and muttering. （“Mumbo-jumbo,” Duncan’s words came back to her.） When she returned to Henrietta Street, she discovered that the front door was locked against her and her suitcase stood forlornly on the pavement. The satanic door knocker seemed to grin at her with fiendish delight.
Never in the whole history of girls, Freda thought, had one of them felt as wretched as she did now.
Sacrifice
Frazzini had sent a message to Hanover Terrace “requesting Nellie’s presence” at an obscure address down by the docks. It was almost midnight by the time she set off. She had dropped off to sleep in the back of the Bentley during the course of the journey and when she woke with a start she was not entirely sure where she was. “Somewhere in the docks,” Hawker said. They seemed to be in the hinterland of a railway line, Nellie could make out the sound of a goods train trundling its slow way through London. The smell of sugar was in the air, so she thought they might be in Silvertown, near the Tate and Lyle refinery.
There was hardly any street lighting and no houses, just the goods yard and some warehouses and lock-up sheds. It was the kind of place that was heaving during the day and dead as a graveyard at night.
Hawker was as confused as Nellie. In his hand he was holding a piece of paper on which was drawn a makeshift map with directions that Luca Frazzini had given to Nellie.
“Give it to me,” Nellie said impatiently. Hawker put the light on for her and she peered at the paper and said, “I think you have to take a left up ahead.” She was holding the map upside down, but Hawker didn’t point that out and the car continued its slow crawl through the cobbled streets.
“There,” he said eventually. They stopped beside a big barn-like wooden shed on the front of which was painted “BA Holt—Removals.”
Nellie wondered if that was a euphemism.
“This won’t take long,” she said to Hawker as he handed her out of the car. She rapped on the large door with her cane and was admitted by an unseen hand.
* * *
—
“Ah, Nellie, welcome,” Frazzini said when he saw her, as if she were arriving at an elegant soirée in Pall Mall rather than what at first sight was a Dadaist torture tableau. Not that Nellie had heard of Dada. For Nellie, art stopped at Frans Hals’s Laughing Cavalier.
“Mr. Frazzini,” she said, nodding her head in acknowledgement.
A lone chair sat in the middle of the vast packed-earth floor. A man in a bloodstained Pierrot costume was bound to the chair with rope, his now hatless head hanging low. He gave every indication of recent torture. Several of Frazzini’s roughs stood around, as if interrupted halfway through their task. “Squeezed him till the pips squeaked,” Frazzini said with some satisfaction. Another whine from the Pierrot.
The Pierrot had “coughed up” Maddox, Frazzini said. “Our guest here tells me that the Huns were paid to go to the Amethyst last night and cause trouble.” It was their bad luck, or plain ineptitude, that “they ended up shooting one of my boys. I’m afraid my man Aldo is dead, but it could easily have been one of your guests.” The torturers crossed themselves reverently at the mention of Aldo’s name.
It was Maddox, too, who had attempted to burn down the Pixie. In fact, it was himself, the Pierrot admitted （although not freely）， who at Maddox’s behest and for a reward of two pounds had bought a tin of Aladdin pink paraffin, soaked a rag in it and then lobbed it into the Pixie’s kitchen.
“What are you going to do with him?” Nellie asked, contemplating the sorry figure of the Pierrot.
Frazzini ran his finger across his throat. “Set an example,” he said.
“An eye for an eye,” Nellie said, unperturbed. A corpse for a corpse.
* * *
—
Hawker was snoozing when Nellie rapped sharply on his window with her cane, nearly causing him to have a heart attack.
“I think I’ll ride up front,” she said, to Hawker’s further alarm, clambering in beside him. “See a bit of this part of London on the way back.”
“Not much to see,” Hawker said.
“There’s always something to see,” Nellie said, “even if it’s nothing.” She chuckled to herself. It was the stuff of nightmares to Hawker’s ears.
Den of Iniquity
London after the war was full of people who would sell you anything—drugs, guns, women. They would sell you back the goods they stole off you and offer their souls up for a square meal, but Niven was only in the market for information and in exchange for a small sum he was able to learn where Landor was to be found most evenings, drinking and gambling with his fellow lowlifes in a den of iniquity in Bayswater.