‘You all right?’ Dora asked him anxiously, wondering if he was about to pass out cold.

‘Let’s get you a drink,’ he said, ignoring the question.

He led her over to the makeshift bar and whistled up a gin, then left her there and went over to the men who’d just entered. Frank and a huge thuggish man were making their way over there too. The man with Frank was hideous, a looming presence at over six and a half feet tall, the skin on his cheeks acne-scarred. There was a massive purple horizontal scar across his upper forehead, near the hairline. Frankenstein’s monster, Dora thought.

Suddenly there were raised voices. Someone said, loudly: ‘I’ve had just about enough of you, you fucking cunt.’

Over by the stairs there was pushing and shoving. A couple of the dancing men surged forward and then stopped. A woman standing by Dora, her face a comic-horror mask of alarm, let out a shriek. Over by the record player, Kim’s face was bleached out, her eyes stretched wide with shock.

‘What’s . . . ?’ Dora began – and then she saw the gun in Dickie’s hand.

12

Screams erupted in the packed room, deafening her. Someone scrambling for cover knocked the record player over. The music screeched to a stop. With the stairway blocked, no one knew which way to turn. People surged and pushed and knocked into each other. A woman fell over, several others trampling her in their stiletto heels while she lay there shrieking. Everyone was trying to get away but there was nowhere to go.

Dora couldn’t take it in. Her Dickie, with a gun in his hand! And then the gun fired, a deafening report, and the panic in the room overwhelmed everyone. She was shoved up against the bar, bottles cascading to the floor, glasses spilling. She lost her footing and fell over a man on the carpet who was curled up like a giant foetus, his arms over his head.

Winded, she lay there and looked around at chaos. People were pushing and shoving, trying to get out of the way of what was happening beside the stairs. Sticky sherry or something dripped onto her face from an upturned table. She saw Dickie raise the gun and pull the trigger for the second time, aiming square at the chest of the man in the brown Trilby. But this time, the gun just clicked; nothing happened.

Then Frank charged in, hand raised. Dora saw the knife catch the light as it plunged down. The man in the Trilby hat crumpled. Again and again she saw Frank’s arm go up and down, saw his hand become a crimson glove as he slashed at the man in the hat.

When Frank stopped and stepped back, his shoulders were heaving like he’d run a mile, his coat spattered with scarlet blood. There was silence. Dora saw the Trilby man lying at the foot of the stairs, but he wasn’t a man any more, he was a butchered lump of meat. His innards were crowding out of wounds in his belly, his throat was slashed from ear to ear.