The smile that broke across Joel’s face was bright dawn. “That sounds pretty good,” he said. “Same. All right. Let’s.”

Author’s Notes

JOEL’S GRAPHOLOGY IS of course fantastical. However, my grandmother used to read handwriting and I have to tell you, she wasn’t all that far off.

A few factual bits and bobs...

A small wave of Indian restaurants opened in the UK in the 1920s, including Veeraswamy, which is still going strong. Shafi’s Restaurant was a well-known home from home for Indians, particularly students, until the 1940s, but there is an amazing variety of claims out there as to the identities, names, and occupations of the original owners. In the absence of finding anything definitive, I’ve based my fictional version on the very brief mention in Curry: a Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham. I would love to know more.

Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini’s birth name was Ottavio Handley. He was the son of either Ottavio Sabini or Charles Handley; his mother wasn’t sure, so he got named for both men, and then switched them up for his nom de guerre. It’s possible to conclude he had issues.

Darby dominated much of London and the South-East’s organised crime between the wars, running a 300-strong gang based in Little Italy (the Clerkenwell area of London). He made a fortune extorting bookmakers and nightclubs when he wasn’t in savage fights with rival gangs or ordering people to be carved up with razors, but was apparently a very pleasant chap otherwise. The Italian and Jewish gangs of the area formed an alliance against other London and Birmingham gangs that lasted till the Second World War. Darby was interned as an enemy alien in 1940, despite being born in Holborn, being only questionably possessed of Italian heritage, not speaking the language, and never having set foot outside England.

Commissioner Sir William Horwood, who really did escape an assassination attempt involving arsenic-laced Walnut Whips because truth is always less plausible than fiction, was known for his dogged refusal to accept there could be wrongdoing in the force he supervised. He was instrumental in the disgrace of Sergeant Horace Josling, who had come to him to accuse a colleague of taking bribes. Horwood made Josling face an enquiry where he was aggressively grilled for two days, called self-righteous, and finally forced to resign for impugning another officer’s good name. This rather backfired a few years later when the man Josling had accused got eighteen months’ hard labour for, er, taking bribes. Josling was vindicated in Parliament and the press, and paid a large sum in compensation. He didn’t get his job back.