Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

At five o’clock there was a smell of lemon peel in the Clerkenwell air, and everything seemed quiet until Evelyn caught sight of her brother’s painting, the one modelled on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp , lying on the pavement outside the flat, the frame cracked, shards of glass all around. She looked up and saw that one of the flat’s windows was smashed. Puzzled, she went inside, while Tara, who obviously could not be allowed to cross paths with her brother, waited in the taxi. Upstairs, she found the front door broken down and the table overturned. Assuming there must have been a burglary, wondering if it was safe, she took a few cautious steps into the flat. ‘Hello?’ she called out. And then, through the open door of the laboratory, she caught sight of a body sprawled beside a heap of soil like an exhausted gravedigger.

As she ran to it, her first wild thought was that Bruiseland had come here and murdered her brother, too. But then she saw it was Sinner wearing one of her brother’s shirts. His eyes were closed, and although his face looked pink and bloated he was almost as beautiful as before. She dropped to her knees and put a hand to his cheek. It was warm, but she couldn’t tell if he was breathing, so she slapped his face and shook his shoulders roughly, but that only made his head loll around. There was no blood on him, except on the tip of one of his fingers. The white shirt was half off one shoulder so that one of his small nipples was uncovered; she hadn’t seen him so naked even at Claramore, and some small brainless part of her felt almost embarrassed. With tears in her eyes she jumped up and sprinted out of the flat and down to the taxi, almost falling headlong down the stairs in her haste.

‘You’ve got to come upstairs,’ she said hoarsely to Tara.

‘I can’t.’

‘You’ve got to. You’ve got to. Philip’s not here.’ The driver watched them in his mirror, uninterested.

Tara got out and Evelyn led her upstairs and into the laboratory.

‘What’s happened?’ said Tara, seeing Sinner.

‘I don’t know. I can’t tell if he’s. …’

Tara knelt down and listened to Sinner’s chest, then tried to take his pulse. She turned sadly to Evelyn and shook her head.

‘Oh, Christ, can’t you do anything? Or we could get a doctor?’

‘It’s too late, love.’

‘But he just looks as if he’s passed out. What can have …?’ Tara gestured sadly at the empty bottle of gin by Sinner’s right hand, and Evelyn felt as if rotten floorboards were giving way beneath her feet. ‘Oh no! No, no, no!’

Tara got up and held on tightly to Evelyn while she sobbed. After a few minutes Evelyn sniffed and said, ‘We’ve got to get him away from here.’

‘I’ll go. Then you can call the police.’

‘No. Not the police. We’ve got to get him away ourselves. Remember what he said to me. About my brother.’ Evelyn had told Tara every single detail of that night in the drawing room.

They carried Sinner downstairs, Tara taking his feet and Evelyn taking him under the armpits. ‘Our ridiculous friend’s got himself terribly drunk, I’m afraid,’ Evelyn shouted to the driver as they approached the taxi, just managing to keep her voice steady. ‘Will you help us, please?’ Grudgingly, the driver got out, opened the door for them, and helped them slide Sinner into the seat.

‘Where to?’ he said when they were all inside.

‘Cable Street,’ said Evelyn without thinking. It was the only street in the East End that she could name.

‘You know it’s that big march on today?’

‘Yes.’

‘You Blackshirts, then?’ joked the driver.

‘We’re undecided,’ said Evelyn.

By the time they got to the western end of Commercial Road, the streets were too choked with revellers to drive on any further.

‘Wait here,’ she said to the driver, and gave him some money in advance.

‘Where are you going?’ said Tara.

‘There must be someone who can help us.’

Feeling as if this was the bravest thing she had ever done, Evelyn got out of the cab, went up to the first man she saw and said, ‘Do you know Seth Roach?’

‘You looking for him?’ He leered, revealing brown teeth, and took her hand. ‘I just seen him round the corner. Come along and I’ll show you.’

She pulled her hand free and strode on. She wanted desperately to get back in the taxi and go home to Caroline’s, but she’d already failed Tara and she couldn’t fail Sinner too, so she tried three more passers-by, and finally found a man who said, ‘Yeah, I know him. Haven’t seen him, but if he’s anywhere he’s probably in Dabrowski’s.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Dabrowski’s pub. That’s where all the Premierland lads have gone.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Cannon Street Road,’ he said — and when it was obvious that she didn’t have any idea where that was, he gestured with his thumb and added, ‘Few streets down on the right.’

‘Thank you very much.’

After several minutes she found the pub, which had no sign. Dozens of people had overflowed into the street outside, and she endured several wolf-whistles and a pinch on the bottom as she made her way through; then, inside, there was no space to move, and a belligerent song was being sung in an interestingly atonal mode, so she had no choice but to stand where she was and shout at the top of her voice, ‘Does anyone know Seth Roach?’ After she’d shouted it three times the song diminished a little, and suddenly she felt as if every single person in the pub were staring at her. (She’d never been anywhere like this before, and as tremulous as she did feel, there was something exhilarating and libidinous about the crowdedness of the place, the sweat and beer and unforced jubilation all sloshing around under its low wooden ceiling. She thought of how commonplace her summer adventure with Sinner would probably seem to any of these men and women. And the bold, unruly, port-swilling boys her friends gossiped about at balls, the Wykehamists and Etonians who were ‘really wild, really too wild’: here, they wouldn’t last long enough to recite their middle names.) ‘Does anyone know Seth Roach?’ she said again, trying to keep her voice steady. Several people shouted back what she took to be some unintelligible expletive and all her confidence fled her, until she realised with relief that it was not an expletive but a name. ‘Frink? Frink?’ they were saying.

At last, Frink was produced from the back of the pub.

‘Yes, miss?’ He held a pint of beer in each hand.

‘You know Seth Roach.’

‘I knew him, indeed. But I ain’t seen him in over a year. You a friend of his?’

Evelyn was deeply grateful to this kind-looking man for asking that question without a hint of sarcasm or incredulity. ‘He’s dead,’ she said.

Frink’s face fell, but he didn’t look very surprised by the news. ‘Well. That’s a sorry thing to hear. I do thank you for coming to tell me.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Would have been eighteen, if I remember right. Does his mother know?’

Evelyn had never thought about Sinner having parents, any more than one thinks about a thunderstorm having parents. ‘No. But I need your help.’

‘With the funeral? I’ll put in what I can,’ said Frink, but a bit sceptically this time — Evelyn didn’t look poor.

‘It’s not that,’ said Evelyn, and she did her best to explain about Sinner’s terrible debt to her brother. He listened with a frown. ‘Is there anything you can do to help us?’ she finished. ‘To help him?’

‘You mean, bury a body so no one can find it?’ said Frink. ‘That’s not my line of work, miss. Never has been. I’m sorry.’