TEN

Fonthill left the box on his desk and hurried back into the drawing room.

The man was still there. Standing opposite the house, his collar still turned up against the weather, flat cap pulled down tightly on his head.

This time, he didn’t even bother to withdraw when he saw Sir Aidan watching him through the window. He was daring Fonthill to acknowledge his presence.

Fonthill felt his face burn with shame. By now he had no doubt who was keeping vigil on his house. If he was honest, he had known it from the moment he had first seen him. But he had dreaded this man’s reappearance in his life for so long that his mind had obliterated the memory of their first encounter, just as earlier the sudden hailstorm had obliterated his form.

He thought back to the night in question. It had started off innocuously enough. That is to say, when he had left the house he had not been aware of any intention on his part to go down the path that had led to his present difficulties. Perhaps there had been a vague and nagging sense of resentment against Emma, which is always a dangerous mood to start the evening in. But at the time he had simply wished to put distance between himself and his wife.

The business with Anna had come to a head, and so Fonthill had taken himself off to his club. The place was a refuge – a bolt hole – when things got too sticky on the outside. It did him good not to see a female face for a while. It was like a respite from himself, from his nature, his appetites. To compensate, he always tended to indulge what might be described as his other vices, though they were mild enough. Before the war, he could always count on the club to provide a slap-up dinner. Admittedly, the fare had become somewhat more frugal in recent weeks, testing the chef’s initiative and the members’ forbearance, but the cellar was well stocked with enough French, and even German, wine to hold out for some time yet.

And the company was invariably convivial. One always bumped into someone. That evening there had been quite a party. Old ‘Soapy’ Soames had been there, together with the incorrigible Symington and the mercurial Lucas, and some fellow called Parker or Porter or Potter or some such, who apparently had been at Sandhurst with Winnie. He must have been a new member, or someone’s guest, because Fonthill didn’t remember seeing him before. Lucas had a quite appalling story to tell about him, which he imparted in a confidential undertone, tapping the side of his nose at the finish. Fonthill paid no attention to it at all, as Lucas had a reputation as an outrageous peddler of scurrilous lies. Quite understandably, Winnie himself was not there, what with the war and everything. There were a few others, whose names eluded him now, and whose faces had blurred into anonymity.

The other chaps had persisted in a rather tiresome joke, which he seemed to remember had started with Lucas. As Fonthill had been at Harrow at the same time as Churchill, Lucas thought it was amusing to get Fonthill and the Parker/Porter/Potter chap mixed up. It was part of his joke that he claimed they were virtual doppelgängers, which of course they were not.

After God knows how many brandy and sodas, and several bottles of Château Pomys 1890 (a good year, as it happened), together with a snort or two of ‘Doc’ Symington’s pick-me-up, he had felt capable of anything. At a certain developed stage of the proceedings someone – he could not for the life of him remember who – had gleefully and inanely pronounced, ‘The night is young!’ The phrase had appealed to him inordinately. He declared himself to be very much in favour of the night and all young things. Someone else, he suspected it was Lucas, had suggested they move on. The fellow was strangely sensitive to subtle shifts in atmosphere and mood, and unerringly knew when it was time to vacate one location for somewhere more conducive to whatever was afoot.

And so, capes and hats had been called for. They had bundled noisily out of the club, picking up a few extra roisterers along the way. Taxis had been hailed. Directions given. And off they had hurtled, into a night which, though young, was undeniably dark. Fonthill had no idea where he had been taken, except that it was to a nondescript room in a nondescript house on a nondescript street, where there were tables, and men seated at those tables for the purpose of playing cards for money. Gambling, in other words. For high stakes, too, judging by the seriousness of the participants’ demeanours.

It was all oddly exhilarating, and irresistible.

‘You know where we are, don’t you?’ Lucas had whispered. ‘This house used to belong to a murderer, a very nasty murderer, or so they say. It was here where he used to commit his grisly crimes.’

‘Here?’ Fonthill had looked around open-mouthed.

‘Right here was where he used to drain the blood from his victims.’ Lucas’s eyes had widened with excitement as he had murmured his thrilling confidences.

Somehow the knowledge of the crimes that had been committed there made the whole thing even more intoxicating.

When he crossed the threshold to that room, he felt himself stepping into a place of danger and risk. And he could feel Emma’s disapproval dogging him, which of course made him all the more eager to throw himself into whatever excitements the evening offered.

Yes, it was all very well with hindsight saying that he should have known better. He remembered only too well the way things had ended the last time he had been tempted to woo Lady Luck. (He felt a second flush of shame at the memory of that, his hands tightening on the sharp-edged object in their grip.) But that had been at roulette. A game of chance. This was different. All he had to do was keep his wits about him. To watch the cards and read the faces of his opponents.

Besides, he had had the conviction – the absurd conviction, he now acknowledged – that lightning does not strike twice. In other words, the very fact that he had lost so catastrophically at the casino in Baden-Baden all those years ago meant he could not possibly lose now.

And he had been carried along by the momentum of the evening. Despite the fact that the game was taking place in a decidedly unglamorous room, its nondescript walls exuded a kind of allure. The room seemed to favour him. The flicker of its gas lights was like the flirtatious glance of a pretty girl. It fortified him. Somehow, from somewhere, he picked up the idea that he couldn’t lose.

And there was something about the way the other players were looking at him. They seemed to acknowledge his superiority. He believed he could see the defeat in their eyes as soon as he walked in.

Everyone accepted that tonight was his night. He was ‘the one’. Everything would go his way.

He felt it. They knew it.

Lucas, it was all Lucas’ fault. Lucas shouldn’t have raised his hopes with his confidential asides. How it was possible to make ten thousand a year as a professional gambler. If he hadn’t then proceeded to reel off the names of a whole host of chaps who managed to do so. Quite ordinary chaps possessing no special qualities, or skills. The least likely professional gamblers, in short.

If it hadn’t been for Lucas, the fatal idea would never have taken hold of him: Well, if they can do it, so can I.

At first the game had gone his way. Which had added to his already exalted sense of invulnerability. The compliments of his opponents lulled him. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was clear that everyone was in awe of him.

They were meek and humbled, humiliated even. Some people even threatened to leave the game if things carried on the way they were going.

But of course, things did not carry on the way they were going.

The table had turned on him.

And before long, the solemn mood that he had first picked up on turned gleeful. They scented blood. Their awe evaporated, if it had ever been there at all.

IOUs were signed. Lucas – the damnable fiend – had vouched for him, up to a point that is. He would not, of course, stand as guarantor for his debts. But he had assured the room that Sir Aidan Fonthill was good for a long line of credit. Didn’t he have a rich wife, after all?

Fonthill had laughed nervously at that but had been obliged to go along with it because he needed to win. And to be able to win, he needed to play.

If he couldn’t play, he couldn’t win back his losses. And then go on to win the fortune that the room had promised him. Though, to be honest, it had lost whatever allure he had once imagined it to possess. It now looked positively sinister.

The energy from the stimulants he had taken earlier in the evening suddenly deserted him. His palms grew moist. The cards slipped and slid in his fingers. At one point he even dropped his hand on the table, to much predictable hilarity among his opponents.

The cards slipped through his mind too. The numbers confused him. He mixed up suits. He forgot the most basic rules of the game – even what game they were playing.

Soon he could feel the beads of sweat trickling down his face, so that he was obliged to mop his brow with a handkerchief that grew quickly sodden. He pushed his fringe back out of his eyes and rolled his shoulders.

‘Are you all right, old chap?’ Of course, it was Lucas, feigning concern but secretly delighted.

Like all the other players, he had grown fangs and talons. Or so Fonthill suspected – he could no longer look any of them in the face to confirm this impression.

At some point he had noticed the unpleasant smell in the room and realized soon after that he was the source of it. It was his fear.

One by one the others dropped out. Soapy, Symington, the Parker-Porter-Potter fellow, and all the nameless blurred faces, pocketing their winnings or cutting their losses before it was too late. Even Lucas eventually cashed in his final hand, leaving only Fonthill to face a man who was the most unprepossessing of them all, a man whom Fonthill had hardly noticed at first, but who had emerged over the course of the night to be his veritable nemesis.

A man with the bulbous eyes of a frog, and a wide, loose mouth from which, at any moment, Fonthill had expected to see a long reptilian tongue whip out and snap a fly from the air. And a common, cockney accent, with a vulgar turn of phrase and a habit of sniffing noisily, so violently that it caused his eyes to pop out even more than usual. It ought to have been a tell, but neither Fonthill nor any of the others could work out what it told them, as he seemed to engage in it indiscriminately.

At last, the end had come. The pop-eyed cockney had sniffed and pulled his winnings – so many scribbled IOUs – towards him for the last time. Fonthill’s whole body had turned to ice. He had simply no idea how much his losses amounted to. How much he would have to go cap in hand to Emma for.

He remembered how his hand had trembled involuntarily on the baize surface of the table.

And how the man’s eyes had stood out even more as he fixed Fonthill with a steady gaze, the very blandness of his expression more chilling than any histrionic demonstration of power.

‘You good for this.’ A statement, not a question. A slow blink offered no relief from the oppressive sense that time had stopped.

‘You’ll have to give me some time, of course.’

The man’s eyes had stayed on him, growing even more bulbous if that was possible, as the most violent sniff yet drew half of his face up. ‘I don’t have to give you nothin’. You have to give me …’ Somehow the man kept his eyes on Fonthill while managing to tally up the various notes. ‘Five hundred and sixty-two pounds, thirteen shillings and six pence. I tell you what, I’ll let you off the six pence.’

‘That’s very generous of you.’ Fonthill had felt his jaw tremble as he had spat out the sarcastic riposte.

Lucas had leaned in to whisper something in Fonthill’s ear. He hadn’t caught the words exactly, but he got the drift. It was a warning. Steady on, old chap! perhaps. Or, I say, don’t you know who that is?

Fonthill knew the man’s name all right. He had written enough promissory notes to him in the course of the evening.

T.G. Benson, Esq. was the name he had been directed to make the notes out to.

It had seemed an ordinary enough name. The sort of name a clerk might have. Or a shopkeeper. Or a minor official in the civil service.

It was only in the cab on the way back to the club that Lucas had filled him in.

‘Tiggie Benson. Not the kind of chap you want to be in debt to, if I’m honest.’

Fonthill didn’t like the sound of that Tiggie. It had a sinister ring to it. He distrusted its faux chumminess, and its dissonant air of playground nostalgia. What kind of man holds on to such a name? ‘What do you mean?’

‘Far be it from me to spread rumours.’

‘Come on, man. Out with it.’

‘Well, it is said that he is something of a rotter.’

‘What kind of a rotter?’

‘A rather professional and well-organized rotter. The kind of rotter who would not think twice about causing trouble for a chap who owed him upwards of five hundred pounds. Quite a tidy sum, old thing.’ This was added in an infuriatingly censorious tone, as if Lucas hadn’t been the one goading him on to take ever greater risks to recover his losses.

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Oh, you mustn’t pay any attention to rumours. I shouldn’t have said anything. I have myself always found him a perfectly charming cove. But then, I have never been in debt to him.’

‘Is he some kind of … criminal?’

‘Good heavens! You ought to be more careful what you say, dear thing. You can’t go around calling Tiggie Benson a criminal. That’s slander. Tiggie Benson don’t take too kindly to slander. I believe the last fellow who slandered Tiggie Benson came to a very sticky end. Found floating face down in the Thames with his throat cut, he was, if memory serves.’

‘Isn’t that slander?’

‘Shouldn’t think so.’

The cab disgorged them outside the club on St James’s Street. They got out groggily, the early morning air shocking them into a buzzing wakefulness.

Fonthill had felt suddenly sick, for all sorts of reasons.

‘Buck up, old chum.’ Lucas again. The man was a human gadfly. ‘It’s not like you have anything to worry about. Emma will straighten you out. Damned smart move that, marrying into money.’

‘It’s not quite that simple. Emma and I …’

‘What’s this? You haven’t been biting the hand that feeds, have you? Oh, that’s why you’re staying at the club! Of course! Tut, tut. Naughty boy.’

‘It’s not funny, Lucas. I can’t pay this Benson fellow and I can’t go to Emma for the money. I say, I don’t suppose you could …’

‘That’s not the way it works, dear heart. Frightfully sorry and all that.’

‘Perhaps if everyone …’

‘A whip-round? No, no. That’s not the done thing at all. A gentleman has to settle his own gambling debts, you know. Or get his wife to. Don’t you worry. It will all look better in the morning, after a good night’s sleep.’

‘I’ll pay you all back. You know I will. I just need time to sort things out with Emma.’

‘Perhaps you should join the Methodists and become a missionary in the Congo. I doubt very much Tiggie Benson would follow you out there.’

Lucas had been right about one thing. In the morning, it had all looked very different. In fact, the whole thing had felt like a bad dream and Fonthill had decided the easiest thing to do would be put it out of his mind. In the meantime, he would do what he could to get back in Emma’s good books.

Despite his best efforts, he had not been entirely successful in the latter objective; the former, though, he had achieved almost too easily. Until now.

Until Tiggie Benson himself stood outside his house, his ugly face resolutely set for confrontation.