East India Dock Road was covered with ash, like it had snowed. Glass crunched under the tyres, and he kept his fingers crossed he wouldn’t get a puncture. Be just his luck.
The great East India Dock on his right was a floating graveyard – burnt hulls listing against each other. The stink of it was incredible. Burnt rubber and burnt meat.Ships from all ends of the empire, all that way just to end up twisted metal.
The seafront at Southend was blustery. A cold wind whipped off the North Sea, bringing the smell of salt and seaweed with it. Even a bit of snow in the air, he fancied, carried all the way from Norway.
The beach was covered with barbed wire, but a few patches of sand were accessible. A few brave souls had set up windbreaks, temporary walls of bright striped fabric, held up by sticks hammered into the ground like oversized cricket stumps.
The seafront offered dozens of shops to choose from. All the same – little stands of postcards, fishing nets, buckets and spades. The season was coming to an end and the shopkeepers watched him eagerly each time he slowed. He picked the only shop with other customers in it – a well-dressed couple with two children. A day’s holiday by the sea.
He bought a couple of postcards. One of the pier, one of the front – looked like it had been taken from an aeroplane. They sold him a couple of stamps to go with the postcards and he bought a pencil as well. Thinking ahead. No point in having a postcard and a stamp if you find you’ve got nothing to write with when the time comes.
He was fully aware that one day the game would be up. He’d make a mistake, get seen by the wrong person, take the wrong girl. But he didn’t feel like it was coming any time soon.
He should sell up, make the move to the country a full-time thing. He liked the thought of that. Those farming girls, all fresh rosy cheeks and plump round bodies, always enough food in the house. The problem with these EastEnd girls – skin and bone most of them. Halfway to starving to death. Not much to catch a man’s eye, to get his blood stirring.
Ruby was different. She always had been. Always been able to catch his eye, get him thinking about things he shouldn’t be thinking. Still, what was a man supposed to do.
She had it coming, when you thought about it like that.
52
The Empire was a hundred yards along Piccadilly, back towards the bus stop, towards Piccadilly Circus.
Cook stood across the street, under the awning of an art dealer on the corner of Albemarle Street. A tramp had made his home in a closed-off doorway. Cook felt awkward invading the man’s territory, so he strolled ten feet up the side street, away from the main road. Two telephone boxes huddled together as if for protection. Cook stood next to one of them with the air of a man contemplating a phone call. He was being foolish, he realised. Nobody cared which street he stood in or what buildings he looked at. One of the few advantages of the city. You could stand where you wanted, and watch what you wanted, and nobody gave a monkey’s.
Cook had an excellent vantage point to watch the front of the hotel. It wasn’t that he was expecting Ruby to come out, exactly, but there was always the chance.
Whatwashe doing? A young woman had gone out to work and never come home. Hardly the first time, and unlikely the last. When Cook had delivered the news that Ruby hadn’t been on the bus, even her own mum had seemed content that the girl would show up.
So why was he lurking in a side street like a criminal, rather than striding up to the door of the hotel?
It wasn’t a simple matter, Cook told himself, watching people coming and going from the hotel. For a start, therewas a doorman controlling the only obvious access point. Dressed in a fine suit in the colours of the hotel’s livery, complete with top hat, the doorman seemed to possess a preternatural understanding of who he should open the door for. As Cook watched, people walked to and fro, past the hotel entrance. Most of them had no business with the place. Some did, however. Cook watched as an elderly gentleman, dressed in a shabby suit, walked towards the door from the direction of the park. Without any communication from the gentleman to the doorman, the latter stepped out of the way of the door, held it open, and guided the gentleman into the hotel.
Cook wasn’t an idiot. He knew what was going on. The Empire was a place for a certain type of person. The gentleman was an example of that type. Cook was not. He had been many things, a soldier, a farmer. But he was not the kind of man who walked into a place like the Empire as if he belonged there. He didn’t even know, he realised as he stood there, whether he’d be let in. Cook was startled to realise he was feeling something akin to fear. Fear of transgressing one of England’s most inviolate rules. A rule that never once needed to be spelt out, but one that was implicitly understood by every one of the King’s subjects, in every country of the empire – a quarter of the world’s population, from the slums of London’s East End to the tea plantations in India.
Know your place.
53
Cook walked back along Piccadilly, as far as Hyde Park Corner. He stood at the edge of the pavement and raised his hand. A black cab passed by on the opposite side of the road, waited for a gap, then swung around in a tight U-turn, pulling up next to Cook.
Cook climbed into the cab, fumbled in his pocket for some coins. He leant forward to the driver.
‘Up the road. The Empire. Pull up like we’re in a hurry.’
‘The meter won’t even get running,’ the driver complained.
‘Half a crown if you put some effort into it,’ Cook said.
The driver’s eyes lit up.
‘Hold on,’ he said.
The driver took his charge seriously. He sped along Piccadilly like he was on the speedway at Brands Hatch and completed another tight U-turn, much to the complaint of every other car on the road, earning him a cacophony of horns. He slammed on the brakes outside the Empire, wrong-footing the doorman, who had to hurry from the front door to offer assistance.
Cook climbed out, ignoring the doorman who had managed to get to the car in time to grab the door for the last couple of inches of its arc. He crossed the pavement to the steps of the hotel, in the shade of the famous awning. It was only a few yards but it felt like a mile. A second doormanclicked his heels and held the heavy brass door open. Cook felt a bead of sweat trickle down his back. It was a warm afternoon, but not warm enough to account for the sweat.
Know your place.
