Risk your neck. The words took Charles back to the dark doorway next to Harry’s, with the bald-headed man holding the knuckle-duster under his nose. First time, you get this. Second time, you get your bloody neck broke. Then he saw the heavy boot stamping on the brass-ringed hand. Violence, agony, dark bruises. He did not want any more of that: he had been on the fringe of that world, and never wanted to go so close to it again. If Bunder, or any of the myriad others in the organization, thought he was responsible for putting this barking little terrier on the scent, it would certainly mean violence on a scale he had never known before, with himself at the wrong end of it. Oh, damn this innocent fool!

‘Now, see here, Harry,’ he said, forcing himself to relax and grin. ‘Just let’s drop the whole thing. It took me a long time to get this job, and I don’t want the sack, and I don’t want the reputation of bringing casual strangers along to keep an eye on our conditions of work. I don’t want anything to do with your schemes for becoming a Fleet Street Tycoon. Just you do your job and I’ll do mine.’

‘Do my job?’ echoed Dogson with some bitterness. ‘God! Isn’t that just what I’m trying to do? How else do you think a newspaper man works except by personal contacts like this? You’re a disappointment to me, Lumley, you really are.’

‘The road to Fleet Street,’ said Charles with mock solemnity, ‘is paved with disappointments. I’ve taught you a useful lesson.’

Dogson finished his drink and went out. Charles sat staring into his glass. His heart was heavy with a vague sense of menace; something inside him stirred with the gnawing consciousness that the evil consequences of his surrender could not for ever remain hidden from his sight, and that, when the time came for them to break and blaze forth, one more iron door would slam behind him.