Billy paused as if to concoct some elaborate lie, thought better of it, and finally said, ‘I know better than to show something like that to Mr Charles. It’s worth more as a secret than it is shared.’

Raymond shook his head wearily. Then he stood up, ferreted in a drawer for a single pound note and pushed this into Billy’s hand. ‘There’s a couple of crowns on the dresser. Take them, Billy. They’re yours.’ Raymond sank back to the bed. ‘You’re the only one who’s read this?’

‘I am.’

‘Then, anyone else hears about this, I’ll know it comes from you. Understand?’

‘I understand, Mr de Guise. You have been very charitable.’

Charity, thought Raymond. Charity and blackmail, they’re all the same to lads like Billy Brogan. But I’d be doing the same in his shoes. Getting something out of nothing, that was always my father’s way too. And the boy’s got family to take care of. Billy Brogan’s doing nothing that the Ray Cohen of old wouldn’t do.

His eyes scanned over the letter:

Dear Ray,

I know you said not to contact you, but you left us the name of your boy, so perhaps you did not mean it. In any event, there are things you should know. No doubt you’ve been too caught up in your palaces with your princesses to know what happened on these streets. But 4 October 1936 is a date that will echo loud through the years.

As Raymond read on, a sick feeling curdled in his stomach.

They were calling it a battle. Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists had marched into Whitechapel and Stepney Green. They called themselves patriots, but that wasn’t what they were: they were just common thugs, Blackshirts every last one of them. They’d been marching east. It was all over the daily news sheets – and at least Raymond had been able to read these, while locked away in his tower all day and night. It was just like that man in the Midnight Rooms had said. Even now, Raymond could hardly remember who he was. Just another one of those thugs from the streets where he grew up, just another man full of hate. Raymond was probably not the last person who’d felt the fire of his fists.

They’d come to – what? Demand a cleansing of the streets? Show their allegiance with the National Socialists in Germany, who were putting bricks through Jewish shop fronts at night and daubing crude yellow Stars of David over every Jewish door? Or just to lash out, at something they didn’t understand?

But we weren’t going to let them, Raymond’s mother wrote. Your father would have been out there with the best of ’em, and so was we. Hundreds and thousands of us turned out to see it done. Even when the police showed themselves, we was there.