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T WO DAYS LATER, THE memory of the look on Fowler’s face was still giving Joel pleasure. It had been immature and stupidly risky, but what was life without a bit of fun?

If he wanted a serious answer to that question he should probably ask Fowler. Lord above, that man needed relief. He clearly wasn’t joyless—if he hadn’t been playing along by the end, Joel would eat his hat—but talk about self-control, a thing Joel respected more in the breach than the observance.

He should be glad of it in this case. He’d already done two months for soliciting a policeman, albeit by accident; a repeat offence was the absolute last thing he needed.

Anyway, he had better things to think about. The trickle of Bright Young Clients continued, thanks to Miss Barbara Wilson’s enthusiasm, or Mr. Paul Napier-Fox’s overactive prick, depending how you looked at it. Joel had added three quid to his savings this week alone, and his balance was looking positively healthy.

He did feel the occasional twinge of conscience. Fowler was quite right that he had no qualifications and no proof that he could do what he claimed. Joel’s only defence was the fact that he could do it.

He didn’t know where it had come from. He’d been an outlier all his life: red-haired, obdurately left-handed, a flamboyant show-off at least by the dour standards of his family, but he’d never considered himself psychic or any such damn fool thing. Heaven knew how badly his brother and father would have taken that, since they had been quite sufficiently embarrassed and enraged by him as it was. They’d demanded conformity and obedience; his mother and sister had supported those demands in order to keep the peace. Unfortunately, Joel was not one of Nature’s peace-keepers. It had become necessary to leave home at sixteen; he had found a job in a newspaper office, sorting through letters from members of the public; and that was where it began.

So many letters, in so many hands. Rambling and ranting, fury about trauma and trivia, endless pedantry, cries for help, long screeds into the void. All of them ended up on Joel’s desk, and after a while he’d realised that he was sinking into them, ignoring the text in favour of the personality behind it.

He’d actively tried to do it at first. It added interest to the day, and felt like a challenge, trying to pick out the whispers of character that underlay the droning or jabbering on the page. He even read a couple of graphology books but found them meaningless. It wasn’t the angle at which you crossed a t, it was the motivating spirit in the way it was dashed or forced or drawn.

He’d pursued it as a diversion, nothing more. Looking at hands, dreaming himself into other people. Only, as he practiced, the whispers of character when he read rose to a murmur, and then to a call, a cry, a shout, a shriek.

He’d left after three years: he simply couldn’t stand the barrage any more. He was looking for work in an office where everyone used typewriters when the war broke out.

And now here he was. He couldn’t work with handwritten text because to have needs and hurts and worries screamed in his face all day was intolerable. He also couldn’t write legibly, type at acceptable speed, or do anything requiring dexterity, because the doctors who’d promised his right hand would soon acquire the facility of his missing left had lied through their teeth. You should have been using your right hand all along , he’d been told several times, with an implication of Serves you right, you persistently left-handed wretch . As for manual labour, the clue was in the name and he’d never liked heavy lifting anyway. He thought he might be a good salesman, but that thought had occurred to a lot of men with physically incapacitating war wounds, and many of them were better spoken and better educated than him.

With a suitable prosthetic he might do a factory job, but he didn’t have any prospect of getting one. There were too many able-bodied men looking for work, and too many mutilated ones who already had the experience if they could find a workaround, and thousands upon thousands who lacked both usable skills and usable bodies and desperately needed support. And there was nothing like enough money to provide for them all: Joel had spent a year or more fighting to get the hook. The Ministry for Pensions had made things entirely clear in their literature at the end of the war. “You are going back to ordinary civil life,” the leaflet had said, “and it is up to you to make yourself as fit for that work as possible.” Which was not exactly in the spirit of the election promises about making Britain a fit country for heroes, but here they were.

Joel intended to make himself fit for civil life and work. He had a plan. But for that he needed money, and so he’d turned his talent to account. He could read character in handwriting: if you called it graphology, it sounded like something you could charge for. As such, he’d built up a bit of a reputation and a growing clientele, enough to afford this poxy little room all to himself and start to accumulate savings. He was a respectable member of society if you didn’t look too closely and Fowler’s disapproval was neither here nor there.

He had just one client this morning, a regular. She ran a secretarial agency and was sufficiently concerned about the morals of ‘her girls’ that she wanted all potential new recruits assessed for decency. Joel wasn’t surprised she couldn’t keep staff. He picked out three submissions he thought had enough force of character to stand up for themselves, and sent her on her way.

He was frying sausages for lunch when there was a knock at the door. For a moment he considered not answering. It was lunchtime, damn it, and he wasn’t expecting anyone.

On the other hand, his last unexpected visitor had been Fowler. Joel turned off the gas ring, went to the door, and came face to face with a policeman in uniform.

His stomach plunged instantly. For all the bravado he’d put on with Fowler, the sight of a uniform still made him feel sick and fearful.

“Mr. Joel Wildsmith?”

“Yes?”

“My name’s Sergeant Hollis. May I come in?”

“Why?” Joel asked.

“Just a chat, sir.”

Joel did not want him to come in at all. He also didn’t want his landlady to take the hump about policemen cluttering up the halls, so he stepped back and Hollis let himself in.

“I was just making lunch,” Joel said, with an absurd sense of shame at being caught preparing food. “What’s this about?”

Hollis glanced at the kitchenette, but if he thought he was getting asked to sit, let alone offered a cup of tea, he could fuck off. Joel had his limits. “Bit of a question, sir. I understand you interpret people’s writing. Fortune telling, sort of thing.”

“I use the principles of graphology to analyse handwriting. It’s nothing to do with fortune telling: it’s a scientific study. There’s books on the subject.”

“There’s books on palm reading too.”

“There’s books on all sorts of subjects,” Joel said sharply, and bit back the urge to give ‘miscarriages of justice’ or ‘police corruption’ as examples. “I don’t do magic or tell fortunes, and I don’t claim to, either.”

“Mmm. We have received a complaint that you made a series of slanderous allegations against a gentleman on the basis of his handwriting.”

Shit. “I haven’t made any allegations against anyone,” Joel said. “I give assessments of character based on handwriting. I don’t ask who the handwriting belongs to.”

“I expect people tell you, though. No? This is my fiancé, this is my superior...?”

“That’s up to them,” Joel said. “For all I know they’re not telling the truth. And I don’t think it’s slanderous to say This hand suggests weak character . I think that’s free speech.”

“Oh, undoubtedly, sir. But making a specific allegation of immoral conduct against a gentleman which cause his fiancée to break the engagement—that sounds like slander to me, and I suspect there’s a very material claim for damages there.”

Joel was rapidly approaching panic. He couldn’t be sued for slander: even if he won, the lawyers’ fees would eat every penny of his painstakingly accumulated fund.

This had to be the Paul Napier-Fox business. But Fowler had said he’d been right about Napier-Fox’s post-love letter, and it wasn’t slander if it was true.

Of course, it wouldn’t matter if a thing was true if a Detective Sergeant and his posh cousin stood up in court and denied it. Joel knew exactly what value truth had to a policeman in the witness box. If Fowler said Napier-Fox had never admitted any such caddish thing, and Barbara Wilson gave only Joel’s stupid bloody insight as the reason she’d ended her engagement, he was screwed. Could you be gaoled for slander? He couldn’t remember. He felt cold all over, dizzy with fear, and with Fowler’s betrayal.

Not that he knew the man to call it a betrayal. Maybe he’d panicked him with that stupid fucking flirting: Christ, he was a fool. But still, for Fowler to side with his shitty cousin to the point of telling lies in court—

Joel shut his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath.

He’d had an extremely good look at DS Fowler’s handwriting, and if that man was going to err, it would be on the side of insufferable rectitude. He surely wasn’t going to perjure himself to help a shitty cousin sue; that simply didn’t mesh with anything Joel had seen. Which suggested there was more to this.

“I don’t know about that, Sergeant,” he said, as calmly as he could. “I’m no lawyer. I’ll have to look into the matter. Only, do correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t slander a civil matter?”

He said that with a look of intelligent curiosity, and held it on his face till Hollis said, “Yes, sir, it is.”

“Not the Met’s area, then.”

“No, sir.”

Joel didn’t say anything to that at all. One of the journalists at the paper had advised him, in a moment of slightly inebriated expansiveness, that silence was the greatest weapon. If you were silent in a negotiation or an interview, the other party felt compelled to fill the gap. So he simply stood without a word, keeping his eyes clamped on the policeman’s face despite the head-to-toe social discomfort, setting his back teeth to make himself not speak.

Hollis broke first. “Very well, sir. Just giving you a word to the wise. When people claim they can do the impossible, especially if they make allegations about their betters, that’s a good way to get in a lot of trouble. We keep our eye on that sort of thing.”

“Glad to hear it,” Joel said. “Very responsible. Is there anything else I can do for you? In that case, good afternoon.”

He shut the door behind Hollis, heart thudding. Then he went back to his half-cooked sausages, stared at them for a while, and threw them in the bin. It was a horrible waste of meat, but he’d lost his appetite.

By mid-afternoon, the waves of panic had subsided a little, which allowed the jagged rocks of his personality to re-emerge. He was deeply, intensely pissed off that a copper had threatened him in his own home, over a civil matter, when he’d told nothing but the truth. He was not going to be pushed around by a uniformed bully boy, and he intended to do something about this.

The question was what.

A formal complaint was not a possibility. He wasn’t going to poke the hornets’ nest, not with his record. But he was going to complain to the only policeman he knew, and ask him what his cousin was up to and if he seriously intended to support it. After all, Detective Sergeant Fowler had come round to Joel’s home and accused him of dishonesty. He should have a chance to see how that felt.

He dug out Mr. Thurloe’s typed letter asking for an appointment. It bore an address of a mansion block in Lisson Grove, which wasn’t too far. He’d go and pay a visit.

***

J OEL TURNED UP AT ABOUT seven. He didn’t know what sort of hours detective sergeants worked, but they must go home eventually.

He’d realised on the way there that there might be a Mrs. Fowler. That would be a good thing: he needed to keep on the straight and narrow. Provoking Fowler had been fun—a lot of fun—but he’d probably have cold feet by now, he certainly would when Joel turned up at his home, and when some men got cold feet, they used them to kick with. Joel needed to keep it professional, demand what the hell was going on, and hope he’d read Fowler’s hand accurately.

Tollemache Mansions, Lisson Grove proved to be a newish three-story block of flats in yellow brick overlooking a little garden square, a short walk from Marylebone Station. It was quite a lot nicer than Great Percy Street. Plush for a policeman, Joel thought, and wondered for a second if Fowler was on the take before remembering his hand.

There was a line of doorbells, with Fowler at number three. Joel didn’t ring. He waited for someone to come out, smiled his way through the building’s front door, made his way up to the first floor and flat three, and rang the doorbell.

Fowler answered it, and the look of startled horror on his face was some compensation for the day Joel had had.

“Hello, Detective Sergeant. Could I have a word?”

“What are you doing here?”

“There’s policemen popping up at my place at all hours. Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it?”

Fowler narrowed his eyes but stepped back. “Come in.”

It was a distinctly swisher place than Joel’s. The kitchen was an actual separate room, as was the bedroom. Nice for some. There was a single picture on the walls, a print of some country scene, and a couple of photographs around the place; otherwise it had a rather plain look. There was no sign of female occupation. Or of another man either, or of anyone who particularly cared about their surroundings. Joel lived in a bleak empty room too, but at least he did it to save money.

“What can I do for you Mr. Wildsmith?”

“It’s what you may be doing to me,” Joel said. “I had a visit from a Sergeant Hollis today. He let me know that Paul Napier-Fox is liable to sue me for slander. I wondered what you knew about that.”

Fowler took that in for a few unblinking seconds. Then he said, “Sit down.”

Joel took the sofa, since there was only one armchair, which looked to be the room’s most-used seat. Fowler hesitated, then said, compelled, “Tea?”

“Had too much today, thanks.”

“Whisky, then?”

That was slightly unexpected. “Are you allowed to drink on duty?”

“I’m not on duty. And our conversations have never been official.”

Fair enough. “Thanks.”

Fowler poured two whiskies—generous amount, good heavy glasses, splash of water—and passed one to Joel, then took his own seat. “Explain. This business with Paul first.”

“Well, I don’t know for a fact it’s him,” Joel temporised. “Sergeant Hollis informed me that the Met have received a complaint about me causing a lady to break her engagement to a gentleman with a specific allegation of immoral conduct. He said there’s a claim for slander and material damages that the gentleman will be pressing.”

“Have you provoked any other ladies to break their engagements recently?”

“One,” Joel admitted. “But only your cousin’s affair matches the circumstances Hollis described, so I’m assuming it’s him.”

Fowler frowned. “He can hardly claim slander, given he did exactly what you said he did.”

“Well, that’s my problem,” Joel said. “There’s no proof he wrote that letter post-coitally except his own admission.”

“Which he made to both me and his fiancée. You could call us both as witnesses.”

“I could. But he’s your cousin, and the lady might not choose to wash her dirty linen in public.”

“I believe she’s been hanging it, and Paul, out to dry all over London,” Fowler remarked. “But in any case you don’t need her. My testimony will be enough.”

Joel blinked at him. “You mean that? You’d speak on my behalf?”

“Not as a character witness,” Fowler said, perhaps a touch bitchily. “But Paul told me in so many words that he bedded another lady before writing to his fiancée. I’m not going to deny that on the stand— You thought I would.” His face changed as he said that. “You came here because you thought I’d, what, refuse to tell the truth? Claim that he never said it? Perjure myself in court?”

“I wondered,” Joel said, a little defensively. “He’s your cousin. The police lie.”

Fowler started to say something. Joel distinctly heard the fricative of an Ffff before he stopped himself, jaw muscles tightening visibly. “I do not lie on oath. If I’m called I will tell the truth.”

That rather cut the legs from under Joel’s grievance. “Right. Yes. Well, thank you. I, er, didn’t mean to insult you.”

“You didn’t think insulting my professional integrity would insult me?”

The budding efforts at peacemaking instantly withered. “As it happens, I have personal experience of the Metropolitan Police in the witness box, and maybe you’re an honest copper but I can assure you, the one who testified against me wasn’t. I suppose everyone who is accused of anything insists that the policeman lied, but this one did . And if that leaves me with a prejudice against the police, I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, but that does tend to happen when you screw people over.”

“It doesn’t help you to assume bad intent of an entire group based on an experience with one man.”

“That’s true if you say it about Jews, or Greeks, or redheads,” Joel said. “I don’t think it applies to people who choose to do a particular job. Come off it, Detective Sergeant. You don’t believe there’s any corrupt police?”

“I know very well there are,” Fowler said, clipped. “A small minority. People love to say that one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, but I would say that most of my colleagues do a difficult job with dedication and good intent. If you encountered someone else—” He paused there for a second, then went on deliberately. “I am aware you were convicted. And of what.”

Of course he was. Of course he’d looked. Joel’s heart was thudding with a peculiarly unpleasant combination of fear and anticipation. “Are you.”

“You’re saying the charge was trumped up?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Do you actually want me to answer that? Because I will be obliged to go into details which you might not want to hear.”

“Go on.”

Joel shrugged. “Public lavatory. Minding my own business. A gentleman indicated I might want to suck his cock. It seemed like a good idea at the time and there was nobody else there, so I obliged him. He seemed to enjoy himself; he certainly made sure he finished before he arrested me.”

He’d been watching Fowler’s face as he spoke. It was unreadable, rigid.

“I objected on the obvious grounds, and he and his mate gave me a slapping about for it. Then when it came to trial, he stood up and assured the court he was innocently minding his own business when I accosted him. No possibility that he solicited me, and of course no mention of the part where he came in my mouth. My defence counsel advised me that my story would be an admission of gross indecency if they believed it, and slander of an upright servant of the public if they didn’t, so either way I’d be looking at a longer sentence than what I’d get for importuning, so I just had to sit there and take it. The judge gave me my two months as per, and the bastard smirked at me when I got taken down.”

Fowler contemplated his face for a long moment. “What’s his name?”

“Are you joking? Plenty of them do it. You know they do. Hanging around to entrap people—”

“I can’t stop that practice. But you’ve told me of a gross abuse of power, and if he’s done it once, he’ll do it again. Abuses are like mice: they don’t come in the singular.” He tipped his head, looking at Joel with a distinct challenge. “If you’re telling the truth you’ll know his name.”

“Constable James Sefton,” Joel said. “Big chap, brown hair. Marylebone Station. If he finds out I’ve been talking, he’ll probably come after me.”

“I can raise questions without naming you. Leave it with me.”

He actually sounded like he meant it. “Thanks,” Joel said, stifled. “That would—if you could do something about that—” Fuck. He wasn’t going to cry. Only, it had been so frightening and humiliating and shitty, and nobody had listened or cared at all.

The policeman was looking at Joel’s face closely. Too closely. He was going red, he could feel it, but he was not going to cry.

“I will look into it,” Fowler repeated very calmly. People probably found his deep voice soothing. “And I will also bear witness to Paul’s admission if that’s required, but first I will let him know that I’m ready to do so. If he goes ahead with a slander suit in the circumstances, he’s even stupider than I realised, and more to the point, he’ll need an equally stupid lawyer. Unless he has anything else to complain of?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then I don’t think you need worry. Now, what was this about Hollis? Slander isn’t generally a police matter.”

“That’s what I said. He turned up and made a lot of threatening noises on the theme of it being unwise to make unsupported allegations about my betters. He didn’t have anything else. There isn’t anything else.”

Fowler humphed. “I’ll talk to him.”

“You know him?”

“I do, yes. It’s, ah, possible he thought he was doing me a service by warning you off.”

He looked slightly embarrassed, as well he might. Joel glowered, then reminded himself Fowler was—not on his side, as such, but being decent. “Yes, well. If you could disabuse him of that?”

“I will talk to him,” Fowler repeated. “If you’ve done nothing more than make some very lucky guesses, you’ve the right to go about your business unimpeded. That said, your line of work seems very likely to bring you trouble of this sort. You might consider that.”

“Thanks for the advice, but I don’t have a great deal of choice,” Joel said. “And, you know. Thank you for...” Being honest would probably offend. “I realise you don’t believe in what I do, and you didn’t have to listen to me at all, so—thanks, that’s all.”

He made to rise as he spoke. Fowler said, “No, wait.”

“What?”

“Well—finish your drink. That’s decent Scotch.”

“Shame to waste it,” Joel agreed automatically. It tasted like most Scotch to him, which was to say burning leaf mulch, but he settled back and sipped at it.

Settled back into the sofa of a policeman’s home. What the blazes. He’d have expected Fowler to welcome his departure, not delay it. He wondered whether he was obliged to make light conversation while he finished his drink. “Family well?” he tried. “Roses coming along?”

“It’s November,” Fowler pointed out, with what felt to Joel like a similar awkwardness to his own, then relapsed into silence. Maybe this was a new interrogation technique. You put someone in an embarrassing social position and they confessed everything just to get out of it.

“So is there a Mrs. Fowler?” he asked, mostly out of desperation.

“No. No, I’m not married.”

“Didn’t think so. The place lacks a woman’s touch.”

“I’ve seen where you live,” Fowler riposted. “You could put up a picture or two.”

“Yes, hammering in a nail is very much a one-handed job.”

Fowler winced. “Of course. I’m— No, hold on. You’ve surely friends who would do that if you asked.”

“What do you know about my friends?”

“Someone bet you to grow that moustache. Only a friend would be so malicious.”

Joel couldn’t repress a grin. “Fair enough. Yes, I know people who would wield hammers for me. To be honest, a picture feels like more commitment than I want to make to that hovel.”

“That seems entirely reasonable,” Fowler said. “At ten shillings the half hour, I’d have thought you could do better.”

“It’s a fine rate if you have enough people paying it. Once I’m turning clients away, I’ll move somewhere more salubrious.”

“Just you? There’s no Mrs. Wildsmith?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question of the light conversation type, and yet there was something about it, or the asking, or the way he was watching Joel’s face, and in that instant, something sprang to delicate, tingling life. Joel found his lips curving.

Not that he was going to do anything stupid. He’d only just got out of one lot of trouble, and he had too much sense to screw a policeman again, especially not knowingly, and it wouldn’t do to alienate Fowler, who was going to help him.

Unless Fowler was expecting a quid pro quo. He had, after all, asked Joel to stay. He didn’t seem the sort of man to demand it, but if he thought Joel was interested...well, he might not even be far wrong. Those dark liquid eyes, the mouth that needed to slacken and gasp—Joel had a lot of ideas about that mouth.

None of which he would be putting into practice, because he’d learned his lesson about obliging coppers.

“Afraid not. Probably for the best.” He knocked the last gasp of whisky back on that, and rose before he did anything stupid such as suggesting another drink. “I’d better go. Thanks again. I won’t say you’ve restored my faith in the police...”

“Yes, well, I lack faith in graphologists,” Fowler said, with a smile that didn’t look quite right. Disappointed? “Goodbye, then, Mr. Wildsmith.”

“The difference between police and graphologists is, you’ve never caught me in a professional lie. I’ll show myself out,” Joel said, and got out of there, leaving the tall, dark figure lonely behind him.