Quill went over to the juke box, in exactly the same place as in the bar above. This one was an old-fashioned job with vinyl singles, and the selections were all songs about London: the Kinks; Blur; the Small Faces. To play one cost only twenty pence. But he didn’t feel like being the first to select a track. He went to a table and picked up a menu. These cocktails had names like the Lambeth Walk, the Ally Sloper, the Black Shock. That last name made something echo in his head. Like déjà vu for something that hadn’t yet happened. Quill didn’t know one bottle of champers from another, but the top of the range down here was considerably cheaper than upstairs. He went to check out the paintings on the walls. These were all portraits of individuals, their names underneath, nothing spooky about them. Though, wait a sec, Aleister Crowley – there was a name he recognized: fat bloke, a sort of coked-up mania about him, half performance, half something a bit more worrying. Beside him: Dion Fortune; Austin Osman Spare; Gerald Gardner … There were many more – a complete circuit of them on the walls – and in between the portraits were what seemed to be action scenes, or at least metaphorical versions of such. Here were a group of figures under the searchlights and blimps of wartime London, their arms arranged in stark stick-figure angles, protesting against or attacking what was surely the threatening shape of a falling V2 rocket. Here was a parting of the ways, a splitting, as many figures walked many different paths, some falling off into nothingness, into a sunlit map of London.

So someone in this community knew at least a bit about the history of it. Looking around, though, Quill decided that even the punters down here seemed about as useless as the general public he was used to.

*   *   *

Ross looked into the white face of the barmaid. ‘What can I get you, my darling?’ said the woman, her mask of make-up not equalling the welcome of her broad East End accent. The mask was extraordinary, now she was up close. Some of it, around the eyes, was obviously cosmetics on the surface of skin, but some of it was absolutely smooth, blank, as if there was only the artificial colour of the cosmetics and nothing underneath. If she wiped it all off, the woman looked as if she might be just eyes and what was around them and a mouth floating in mid-air.

Ross realized that she was staring and ordered a glass of red she had no intention of drinking. The barmaid gave it to her. Ross could see fine old cuts in almost every inch of the skin of her hands, making it look like a map on vellum. Her fingernails were cut to the quick. ‘And how are you going to pay for that?’