Boxer, Beetle (27 page)

Fond regards
,

Adolf Hitler

Reichschancellor

Sinner couldn’t make out most of the words, and he didn’t know much about Hitler, but he recognised the name, and he knew enough about Erskine to realise that he’d be thrilled to get a letter like that. So he crumpled the letter up and stuck it in his pocket before kicking over the table. He crossed the room, took the creepy painting of the dissection off the wall and flung it out through the window. Then he went into the laboratory, which was unlocked.

The tuck box housing
Anophthalmus hitleri
was gone. In its place was a tank that looked as if it might have been specially designed. The lid, the base and three of the four sides were made of steel, while the fourth side was made of thick glass reinforced by a steel grille. The tank was full of soil and chicken bones, and through the grille Sinner could see the occasional darting movements of the beetles inside. He closed the door of the laboratory, then went back to the tank, unhooked the catch of the lid, opened it, picked up the tank and tipped everything out on to the floor, just as Erskine
had once made him tip it from the broken glass case into the tuck box. Immediately, several beetles shot out of the pile of soil, escaping into the corners of the room; but Erskine, to prevent a repeat of the enicocephalid calamity from his university days, had sealed up every tiny gap in the skirting board, so they had nowhere to go, and Sinner was able to go round crushing them one by one under his boot heel. Often they took two or even three hard stamps to stop moving. Afterwards, he kicked through the soil. All gone.

He celebrated with a long swig of gin, and let the empty bottle drop to the floor. He had become tremendously drunk. In fact, he hadn’t felt quite so unsteady since the night of the Polish honey mead, and although he hadn’t had any intention of staying here he decided now that it might be a good idea to lie down for a bit in his old bedroom. After that he would get up, go back east and ask every single person in Whitechapel, every single one of the tens of thousands of men and women and children out on the streets today, whether they had seen Anna in the last three years. And if anyone lied he would know and he would beat them as he used to beat his father.

But as he was about to stagger out of the laboratory, he noticed one last pair of insects cowering on Erskine’s bookshelf. He lunged for them, catching them in his hand, and held them up in front of his face for a proper look. Immediately he felt a stinging pain, and realised with surprise that one of them had drawn blood from his index finger. Since when could a beetle break the skin? They reminded him of Erskine, somehow, as they flounced their little patterned wings and nipped irritably at his grimy hands. He thought of cutting them open to see what they looked like inside, but he’d lost the knife while he was up on the rooftops. On a whim, he stuffed them both into his mouth.

Biting down, Sinner felt black legs crunch between his teeth. Fried and salted, he thought, they would probably taste no worse than pork scratchings. But before he could
bite down again his eyes widened and his jaw went stiff. He couldn’t breathe. The beetles were crawling down his throat.

He groped desperately at his neck, and then he gagged hard as he felt them scratching at his tonsils like transubstantiated whooping cough. He staggered forward and leaned against the wall, trying to pump them out like a gob of phlegm, but they were much too big, and they were already moving further down into his windpipe, deeper into the dark wet warmth of him. Even half-chewed, even crippled, they carried on – that was how Erskine had bred them. He tried to make himself vomit but he couldn’t, and he tried to shout for Mrs Minton but he couldn’t. In fact, the only sound he could make was a wet chitinous clicking, as if the beetles themselves were talking out of his mouth; little skittering blurs appeared before his eyes, and they reminded him of beetles too. He tasted blood, and for some reason he thought he could smell fish. Hammering at his throat with his fist, he dropped slowly to his knees, and wondered if he could smash the gin bottle and dig the beetles out with a shard of glass – people had done that sort of thing in the war with shrapnel. If he let himself die he would have delivered his body to Erskine like a birthday present, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. But before he could reach for the bottle his vision went black, his arms went limp and he slumped sideways on to the floor.

Seven minutes later, a twenty-two-year-old girl ran into the laboratory.

To Evelyn Erskine, the ‘laws’ of probability were nothing but playground cant, as tiresome as all her brother’s theories of eugenics. Would she ever see Sinner again? The chances, Philip would probably say, were minuscule. Well, of course they were, but the chances were also minuscule that she should ever have met someone like Sinner in the first place, and it had still happened. So the problem was not simply that Sinner had vanished among the East End’s hundred thousand Jews. That was no real obstacle – there are a hundred thousand seconds in the day, almost, and any one of them might find her bumping into Sinner in the street. The problem was the sadness of those Jews: their children dead of typhoid, their parents at the mercy of some Nazi passport clerk, their lovers NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS nor at any other that anybody knew. There must be so many in the East End who had missed so many others so deeply for so long that, in some stern moral sense, it just didn’t seem to matter a jot that she, Evelyn Erskine, happened to miss somebody too: in this cauldron of tragedy her own little narrative took no precedence, and the reunion she desperately desired did not have the cheering inevitability of the really important things – like becoming a composer.

On top of all that, here was Mosley. When all those legions of anonymous poor were following the orders of history, of proper newspaper history that Evelyn could take no part in, it felt even more plausible that Sinner would just melt into this gigantic neighbouring world, and that the sheer earnest intensity of her desire to see him again wouldn’t be quite enough
to make sure that it actually happened. In other words: while, to Philip Erskine, the fascist march through the East End was the first time since Claramore that he really thought he had a chance of finding the boy, to Evelyn Erskine it was the first time since Claramore that she really thought she had a chance of losing him. And yet, despite all that, her basic optimism might still have been enough to sustain her – if only it hadn’t been so badly mauled by what had happened at Claramore.

She’d grieved far more over her fiancé, eventually, than she ever would have expected. One may think one doesn’t care, but one always does – she realised that now. But at least death was final, whereas what Bruiseland and her father had done hadn’t ended with Morton, and might never truly end, because Tara was still in hiding.

Caroline Garlick had telephoned her only a few hours after Morton’s body had been discovered on that day in August. Tara hadn’t told Caroline very much, only that she needed Evelyn’s help, but Evelyn could guess at least part of it, so she told Caroline to give Tara some money and to tell nobody else. Morton’s funeral took place in London the following week, and after hours of begging Evelyn’s parents let her stay on with Caroline afterwards instead of going back to Claramore. So the next day, finally, she had a chance to visit Tara in the boarding-house where she was staying under a false name and to learn the whole story. It was even worse than she’d imagined.

Of course Evelyn wanted Bruiseland and her father to be punished for what they’d done – but she knew that if she went to the police and they didn’t believe her, she might only succeed in exposing Tara. With every hour that passed, justice seemed more impossible: it was as if Tara had her arm trapped between the gears of one of Claramore’s machines and was being pulled further and further in. And so all Evelyn could do was help Tara to lead as decent a life as possible, while inwardly feeling so guilty about her inaction that she
could hardly sleep. They spent many of their days together, often joined by Caroline, who was an enthusiastic accomplice and had not yet married her Scotsman. That wasn’t too bad, but she didn’t know what they’d do in the long run. They had to be careful to avoid any acquaintances who might recognise the fugitive maid; once, in the street, a man did remember Tara’s face from a picture in the newspaper, but Evelyn just scolded him until he skulked away, convinced of his unspeakably rude mistake. At least in future, after all this practice, she expected she would have no trouble conducting a discreet infidelity.

So Tara was with her on the Sunday of the march, when Evelyn concluded, at last, that she really might never see Sinner again unless she asked Philip about him. She’d promised herself she’d never stoop that low, because she didn’t want her brother even to suspect how she felt, and it took her the whole weekend to work up the resolve to pick up the telephone. Infuriatingly, he didn’t answer, but she knew he never went out, so he was probably just preoccupied with his insects. Or could it even be that Sinner was living with him again, in secret? She decided to visit the flat in person that afternoon.

At five o’clock there was a smell of lemon peel in the Clerkenwell air, and everything seemed quiet until Evelyn caught sight of her brother’s painting, the one modelled on Rembrandt’s
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
, lying on the pavement outside the flat, the frame cracked, shards of glass all around. She looked up and saw that one of the flat’s windows was smashed. Puzzled, she went inside, while Tara, who obviously could not be allowed to cross paths with her brother, waited in the taxi. Upstairs, she found the front door broken down and the table overturned. Assuming there must have been a burglary, wondering if it was safe, she took a few cautious steps into the flat. ‘Hello?’ she called out. And then, through the open door of the laboratory, she caught sight
of a body sprawled beside a heap of soil like an exhausted gravedigger.

As she ran to it, her first wild thought was that Bruiseland had come here and murdered her brother, too. But then she saw it was Sinner wearing one of her brother’s shirts. His eyes were closed, and although his face looked pink and bloated he was almost as beautiful as before. She dropped to her knees and put a hand to his cheek. It was warm, but she couldn’t tell if he was breathing, so she slapped his face and shook his shoulders roughly, but that only made his head loll around. There was no blood on him, except on the tip of one of his fingers. The white shirt was half off one shoulder so that one of his small nipples was uncovered; she hadn’t seen him so naked even at Claramore, and some small brainless part of her felt almost embarrassed. With tears in her eyes she jumped up and sprinted out of the flat and down to the taxi, almost falling headlong down the stairs in her haste.

‘You’ve got to come upstairs,’ she said hoarsely to Tara.

‘I can’t.’

‘You’ve got to. You’ve got to. Philip’s not here.’ The driver watched them in his mirror, uninterested.

Tara got out and Evelyn led her upstairs and into the laboratory.

‘What’s happened?’ said Tara, seeing Sinner.

‘I don’t know. I can’t tell if he’s. …’

Tara knelt down and listened to Sinner’s chest, then tried to take his pulse. She turned sadly to Evelyn and shook her head.

‘Oh, Christ, can’t you do anything? Or we could get a doctor?’

‘It’s too late, love.’

‘But he just looks as if he’s passed out. What can have … ?’ Tara gestured sadly at the empty bottle of gin by Sinner’s right hand, and Evelyn felt as if rotten floorboards were giving way beneath her feet. ‘Oh no! No, no, no!’

Tara got up and held on tightly to Evelyn while she sobbed. After a few minutes Evelyn sniffed and said, ‘We’ve got to get him away from here.’

‘I’ll go. Then you can call the police.’

‘No. Not the police. We’ve got to get him away ourselves. Remember what he said to me. About my brother.’ Evelyn had told Tara every single detail of that night in the drawing room.

They carried Sinner downstairs, Tara taking his feet and Evelyn taking him under the armpits. ‘Our ridiculous friend’s got himself terribly drunk, I’m afraid,’ Evelyn shouted to the driver as they approached the taxi, just managing to keep her voice steady. ‘Will you help us, please?’ Grudgingly, the driver got out, opened the door for them, and helped them slide Sinner into the seat.

‘Where to?’ he said when they were all inside.

‘Cable Street,’ said Evelyn without thinking. It was the only street in the East End that she could name.

‘You know it’s that big march on today?’

‘Yes.’

‘You Blackshirts, then?’ joked the driver.

‘We’re undecided,’ said Evelyn.

By the time they got to the western end of Commercial Road, the streets were too choked with revellers to drive on any further.

‘Wait here,’ she said to the driver, and gave him some money in advance.

‘Where are you going?’ said Tara.

‘There must be someone who can help us.’

Feeling as if this was the bravest thing she had ever done, Evelyn got out of the cab, went up to the first man she saw and said, ‘Do you know Seth Roach?’

‘You looking for him?’ He leered, revealing brown teeth, and took her hand. ‘I just seen him round the corner. Come along and I’ll show you.’

She pulled her hand free and strode on. She wanted desperately to get back in the taxi and go home to Caroline’s, but she’d already failed Tara and she couldn’t fail Sinner too, so she tried three more passers-by, and finally found a man who said, ‘Yeah, I know him. Haven’t seen him, but if he’s anywhere he’s probably in Dabrowski’s.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Dabrowski’s pub. That’s where all the Premierland lads have gone.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Cannon Street Road,’ he said – and when it was obvious that she didn’t have any idea where that was, he gestured with his thumb and added, ‘Few streets down on the right.’