style="font-size:15px;"> He took off his leather glove in preparation for shaking Gentle’s hand.
‘I’d like the letter from your contact,’ Gentle said.
‘It barely makes any sense,’ Estabrook said.
‘If he is dead, and she dies too, that letter’s evidence whether it makes sense or not. Hand it over, or no deal.’
Estabrook reached into his inside pocket, as if to pull out the letter, but with his fingers upon it he hesitated. Despite all his talk about having a clear conscience, about Gentle being the man to save her, he was deeply reluctant to hand the letter over.
‘I thought so,’ Gentle said. ‘You want to make sure I look like the guilty party if anything goes wrong. Well, go fuck yourself.’
He turned from Estabrook and started down the hill. Estabrook came after him, calling his name, but Gentle didn’t slow his pace. He let the man run.
‘All right!’ he heard behind him. ‘All right, have it! Have it!’
Gentle slowed but didn’t stop. Grey with exertion, Estabrook caught up with him.
‘The letter’s yours,’ he said.
Gentle took it, pocketing it without unfolding it. There’d be plenty of time to study it on the flight.
1
Chant’s body was discovered the following day by 93-year-old Albert Burke, who found it while looking for his errant mongrel, Kipper. The animal had sniffed from the street what its owner had only begun to nose as he climbed the stairs, whistling for his hound between curses: the rotting tissue at the top. In the autumn of 1916 Albert had fought for his country at the Somme, sharing trenches with dead companions for days at a time. The sights and smells of death didn’t much distress him. Indeed his sanguine response to his discovery lent colour to the story when it reached the evening news, and assured it of greater coverage than it might otherwise have merited, that focus in turn bringing a penetrating eye to bear on the identity of the dead man. Within a day a portrait of the deceased as he might have looked in life had been produced, and by Wednesday a woman living on a council estate south of the river had identified him as her next-door neighbour, Mr Chant.
An examination of his flat turned up a second picture, not of Chant’s flesh this time, but of his life. It was the conclusion of the police that the dead man was a practitioner of some obscure religion. It was reported that a small altar dominated his room, decorated with the withered heads of animals forensics could not identify, its centre-piece an idol of such explicitly sexual a nature no newspaper dared publish a sketch of it, let alone a photograph. The gutter press particularly enjoyed the story, especially as the artifacts had belonged to a man now thought to have been murdered. They editorialized with barely concealed racism on the influx of perverted foreign religions. Between this and stories on Burke of the Somme, Chant’s death attracted a lot of column inches. That fact had several consequences. It brought a rash of right-wing attacks on mosques in Greater London, it brought a call for the demolition of the estate where Chant had lived, and it brought Dowd up to a certain tower in Highgate, where he was summoned in lieu of his absentee master, Estabrook’s brother, Oscar Godolphin.
2
In the 1780s, when Highgate Hill was so steep and deeply rutted that carriages regularly failed to make the grade, and the drive to town sufficiently dangerous that a wise man went with pistols, a merchant called Thomas Roxborough had constructed a handsome house on Hornsey Lane, designed for him by one Henry Holland. At that time it had commanded fine views: south all the way to the river; north and west over the lush pastures of the region towards the tiny village of Hampstead. The former view was still available to the tourist, from the bridge that spanned the Archway Road, but Roxborough’s fine house had gone, replaced in the late thirties with an anonymous ten-storey tower, set back from the street. There was a screen of well-tended trees between tower and road, not sufficiently thick to conceal the building entirely, but enough to render what was already an undistinguished building virtually invisible. The only mail that was delivered there was circulars, and official paperwork of one kind or another. There were no tenants, either individuals or businesses. Yet Roxborough Tower was kept well by its owners, who once every month or so gathered in the single room which occupied the top floor of the building in the name of the man who had owned this plot of land two hundred years before, and who had left it to the society he had founded.
The men and women (eleven in all) who met here and talked for a few hours and went their unremarkable ways, were the descendants of the impassioned few Rox-borough had gathered around him in the dark days following the failure of the Reconciliation. There was no passion amongst them now, nor more than a vague comprehension of Roxborough’s purpose in forming what he’d called the Society of the Tabula Rasa, or the Clean Slate. But they met anyway, in part because in their early childhood one or other of their parents, usually but not always the father, had taken them aside and told them a great responsibility would fall to them: the carrying forward of a hermetically protected family secret, and in part because the Society looked after its own. Roxborough had been a man of wealth and insight. He’d purchased considerable tracts of land during his lifetime, and the profits that accrued from that investment had ballooned as London grew. The sole recipient of those monies was the Society, though the funds were so ingeniously routed, through companies and agents who were unaware of their place in the system, that nobody who serviced the Society in any capacity whatsoever knew of its existence.
Thus the Tabula Rasa flourished in its peculiar, purposeless way, gathering to talk about the secrets it kept, as Roxborough had decreed, and enjoying the sight of the city from its place on Highgate Hill.
Kuttner Dowd had been here several times, though never when the Society was assembled, as it was tonight. His employer, Oscar Godolphin, was one of the eleven to whom the flame of Roxborough’s intent had been passed, though of all of them surely none was so perfect a hypocrite as Godolphin, who was both a member of a Society committed to the repression of all magical activity, and the employer (Godolphin would have said owner) of a creature summoned by magic in the very year of the tragedy that had brought the Society into being.
That creature was of course Dowd, whose existence was known to the Society’s members but whose origins were not. If it had been, they would never have summoned him here and allowed him access to the hallowed Tower. Rather they would have been bound by Roxborough’s edict to destroy him at whatever cost to their bodies, souls or sanity that might entail. Certainly they had the expertise; or at least the means to gain it. The Tower reputedly housed a library of treatises, grimoires, cyclopaedias and symposia second to none, collected by Roxborough and the group of Fifth Dominion magi who’d first supported the attempt at the Reconciliation. One of those men had been Joshua Godolphin, Earl of Bellingham. He and Roxborough had survived the calamitous events of that midsummer almost two hundred years ago, but most of their dearest friends had not. The story went that after the tragedy Godolphin had retired to his country estate, and never again ventured beyond its perimeters. Roxborough, on the other hand, ever the most pragmatic of the group, had within days of the cataclysm secured the occult libraries of his dead colleagues, hiding the thousands of volumes in the cellar of his house where they could, in the words of a letter to the Earl, ‘no longer taint with unChristian ambition the minds of good men like our dear friends. We must hereafter keep the doing of this damnable magic from our shores.’ That he had not destroyed the books, but merely locked them away, was testament to some ambiguity in him, however. Despite the horrors he’d seen, and the fierceness
