Jack said, ‘I twisted the boy’s arm to get him to bring us down here. He really didn’t want to do it. But, you know, we’d never have made it without him.’ He tilted his head towards Luke. ‘Why don’t you ask him? See what he says. He’ll not bullshit you. If he can’t do it, he’ll tell you.’
Luke grinned. ‘Then I’ll ask.’
They were almost back at the house when Jack said, ‘Luke... about tonight.’ He avoided looking at him. ‘You don’t have to come with us, if you don’t want to. We’ve already burned our boats, but none of this has to touch you. And God knows what it is that Maurie’s got planned.’
But Luke shook his head. ‘You think I’m going to let you old farts go out to the Victoria Hall on your own?’ He lifted his head to stare in thoughtful wonder at the sky. ‘The Victoria Hall. The very name of the place brings it all back. I’ve thought about that bunch of people a lot over the years. J. P. Walker. And that crazy woman, what was her name? Alice. Both dead now.’
‘Are they?’
‘She died sometime in the seventies. You probably wouldn’t have heard much about her up there, but she was a minor celebrity in London for a while. Cured by JP. Her art became quite fashionable. There were exhibitions, she wrote a book, started making a lot of money.’ He paused for a moment of reflection. ‘She dropped dead suddenly at a vernissage, a glass of champagne in her hand. An aneurism, apparently.’
‘And JP?’
A sadness crossed Luke’s face, like the shadow of a cloud as the sun slipped momentarily behind it. ‘His philosophy and his writings were à la mode for a few years. But he seemed simply to drop off the radar in the seventies. Overtaken by age and fashion, I suppose. Then I saw his obituary in The Times. Must have been mid-eighties. He’d got into a tussle with the American immigration authorities over a conviction for possession of cannabis in the seventies. Sometime before that he’d established a home, and some kind of relationship, in New York City. Came back here for the funeral of his ex-wife, the mother of his children, and they wouldn’t let him back into the States. He’d developed a drink problem by that time, too. Full-blown alcoholic, it seems. Anyway, they found him dead in a hotel room in the West End. Massive overdose of barbiturates.’
Jack was shocked. ‘He killed himself?’
Luke nodded.
And Jack remembered that day he’d found JP weeping in his office. And the last time he’d seen him. Dancing wildly on the roof of Dr Robert’s house in the moments before Jeff jumped to his death. And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Luke stopped and turned earnest eyes on his old friend. ‘I’m going with you tonight, Jack. Whatever really happened back then, I was as much a part of it as any of you. And I still am. I want to know what happened, too.’
Chapter nineteen
I
The last light of the evening had gone by the time they cruised slowly through the backstreets of Bethnal Green in Luke’s Mercedes, turning finally into the square that was bounded on its south side by the Victoria Hall, dark and dominating against a sky of low cloud that reflected back the city lights.
Rising up around the other three sides of it were the same blocks of council flats that had been there fifty years before. Face-lifted now, many of them privately owned and lived in by Arabs and Asians, Eastern Europeans, and a handful perhaps of native East Enders.
The gardens were even more overgrown than they had been back in the day, and the Victoria Hall itself was boarded up, graffitied and neglected, abandoned to future demolition and redevelopment.
Luke drew his Merc into the kerb at the front door and looked up at the grim, decaying edifice that had once played host to a brave experiment in the treatment of mental illness. ‘Locked up tight. We’ll not get in there.’
‘Aye, we will,’ Maurie’s voice came from the back seat, surprisingly strong and filled with resolution. ‘There’s always a way in. Help me out.’
Ricky and Dave slipped out from each of the back doors, then helped Maurie on to the pavement in front of the hall. Broken glass crunched underfoot, just as it had that final day when Jack came looking for the others to tell them he was going home. Jack came around to join them, and Luke stood hesitantly by the open door of his car.
Maurie managed a smile. ‘I don’t blame you, Luke. I wouldn’t want to leave my Merc here either — if I had one.’ He turned towards Ricky. ‘That’s why the boy here’s going to stay with it, park it a street or two away so we don’t frighten off our visitor. If you trust him with it, that is.’
‘Of course I do,’ Luke said.
But Ricky was disappointed. ‘I want to come in with you.’
Maurie shook his head. ‘It’s none of your business, laddie. And nor should it be. You stay with the car and keep it safe.’
Luke chucked him the keys, and Ricky caught them reluctantly.
Maurie looked at his watch. ‘Come back about twelve. We should be done by then.’
Jack nodded to his grandson, and Ricky slipped huffily behind the wheel, slamming the driver’s door shut and starting the engine. He revved several times, filling the cool night air with the toxic fumes of carbon monoxide, before slipping into gear and driving slowly away, turning at the end of the street to disappear from view.
As the sound of the motor faded, an uncanny silence fell on the square. Lights in windows dotted the darkness around them, but there was no one in the street. Four of the original five members of The Shuffle stood in the shadow of the Victoria Hall. They had neither played together nor stood together on this spot for half a century, and although fifty years had passed and much had changed, the ghost of Jeff still hovered among them, as if he had always been there.
‘So how do we get in?’ Jack said.
‘Service entry,’ Maurie said. ‘Always was the weak spot.’
He pulled his heavy winter coat around himself, as if he were cold, and Jack thought how he looked drowned by it. Diminished by his disease, a shadow of the man he had once been.
They followed the wall along the front of the building, ignoring the main door, until they reached a rusted wrought-iron gate that blocked the way into a narrow alley leading down the side of the building to a service door accessed through a brick archway. On the other side of a broken-down railing, the gardens lay brooding darkly in their leafy neglect.
Dave tried the handle of the gate, and it swung inwards with a creak of rusting hinges. The alleyway was littered with debris. Bricks and broken glass, bits of a dismembered doll, the ragged remains of a coat, the skeleton of an umbrella, a single, soggy trainer.
Luke drew a torch from his jacket pocket and shone it into darkness, picking out the detritus of decades of abandonment. They stepped carefully through it to a black-painted door beyond the arch. It was padlocked.
‘No way in here,’ Luke said.
‘Aye, there is.’ Dave’s voice boomed out of the dark. ‘Gimme that torch a wee minute.’
And he took the torch from Luke’s hand and made his way back along the alley, before turning the light and his attention towards the broken fence. It took him less than two minutes to break one of the palings free of its rusted anchor and return, brandishing it triumphantly.
‘Okay, light the lock for me. A wee leaf oot of Jeff’s book here.’
He thrust the torch back at Luke, and in the circle of its light slipped the paling through the loop of the padlock and braced himself against the door with his foot. Years of bending pipework, and hefting baths and sinks and toilet bowls, had built muscle in his arms and shoulders that was still there and still strong.