Diapason Lang had been his English editor since Denton’s second book. Lang was older than Denton, almost emaciated, his skin taut over his cheekbones but ruddy with good health. His father had been a noted organist, hence the first name. Denton liked him well enough but found Lang’s seemingly wilful mislabelling of his books as ‘horror’ irritating. More than irritating, in fact.

He had come to his publishers by way of Mrs Johnson’s, charging her again to mobilize her women for an assault on the Metropolitan Schools Board. She had, with a toughness she usually masked, pointed out that the women hadn’t been paid in full as yet. Embarrassed, Denton had stood at her door and counted out notes, then coins, not finding it easy to make up the total. ‘The bonus - for finding each Mulcahy - ah, I’ll bring that by - another time—’ He had walked away very quickly.

And so he had come to his publishers. The firm was in a narrow building off Fleet Street, only two houses from the one once occupied by Izaak Walton; it had a look of untidiness that correctly embodied the business it housed: door jambs tilted, floors sagged, cracks in the plaster had become so institutionalized that baseboards had been cut to accommodate them. Yet the firm itself was a good one with a notable backlist in fiction and botany, the combination pure accident, the reasons no longer remembered. Diapason Lang had been with them for more than thirty years and was in good part responsible for the fiction list. A type not unknown among editors, he often misunderstood the books he selected but selected well, nonetheless. Like his saying now, ‘Horrors, Denton! I want horrors!’ Then he leaned forward and said, as if they were friends with a common passion, ‘You know!’

In fact, Denton didn’t know. He would never have told Lang that he was there because if he didn’t get some money, his manservant was going to leave him; and he hadn’t yet had the gumption to tell Lang that he had decided to abandon the book that he was due to deliver in three months. Or - the worst - that he nonetheless wanted another advance. ‘I’m never quite sure what you mean by “horror”,’ he muttered. Playing for time.

Denton hadn’t started out to be a horror writer - if that’s what he was, and he didn’t see it - or in fact to be a writer at all. All he’d managed to become after the war was a failing young farmer who didn’t know he was failing, able to keep going by not adding up his debts. Then, after he failed completely and everything was gone, his wife dead and his sons sent off to his sister because he had failed as a father, too, he had gone farther west and rattled about, done his marshalling, gone on to California. Then he’d begun writing because his head was so stuffed with sorrow he thought it would burst, and he had had to get it out. He had written half of a novel called William Read before he realized it was self-pitying claptrap - more failure. Then, disciplining the self-pity by realizing that it was not the same thing as sorrow, he had begun to set down experiences as if he were writing instructions on how to harness a team to a plough, and the result was The Demon of the Plains. That first novel ended with the farmer-hero hanging himself in the barn he had built with his own hands, and his body being wrapped in a horse blanket, already frozen, and stacked with the cordwood until the ground might thaw enough to bury him. Denton had found his method: a plain, unfeeling style that embodied appalling events.

The Demon of the Plains had given him a reputation beyond America. The French had made comparisons to Poe (whom he despised), the English to Le Fanu (whom he didn’t know). In fact, he saw no horror in The Demon of the Plains except the horror of solitude and unending labour and failure, and the hero’s sense that a force, a demon or perhaps a ghost of the Indians who had lived there, persecuted him. Denton thought he had made it clear that the demon was only in the character’s mind, a way of making the untractable and the appalling comprehensible, but the word ‘demon’ set people going. When his second book, At Battle’s End, proved to have ghosts in it (who were not ghosts to him but fantasies of the war-maddened hero’s collapse), the word ‘horror’ was everywhere in the reviews. At Lang’s urging (at that time not yet met in the attenuated flesh, expressed as a letter to his American publisher), his third book was titled Jonas Sniden’s Horrors, and it was compared favourably to the Stevenson of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Diapason Lang, when they finally met in the late nineties, had told him he was the best horror writer in the English language.

It had made Denton squirm.

Now Lang bent forward over his desk. ‘We English love horrors. It comes from hiding everything from us as children; we have dreadful nightmares. Unaskable questions answered out of our imaginations. Do you know my picture of the nightmare?’

Lang had spoken of it before, so of course he knew it; Lang in fact had a print on the wall, was pointing at it with a bony finger without turning his eyes towards it. Elihu Vedder. Denton nodded. ‘I suppose it refers to something sexual,’ Denton said. It showed a hideous figure - demonic but certainly male - crouching over a nude woman in a bed. He thought of Janet Striker’s idea of men and women.

Lang looked pained. ‘Americans are so much more outspoken than we are.’ Now he glanced at the painting. ‘Perhaps - perhaps. You think she’s having a nightmare about the sex act itself ?’ His voice was high, a bit cracked. ‘Fearing it? All women do, you know.’

‘Not knowing what it is, more likely. But possessed by it.’

‘It isn’t titled “Desire”, my boy. I’ve never asked a woman what she thought the painting meant. Nor would I, of course.’ He tittered. Lang’s sexual preferences were matters of speculation but no evidence.

Denton smiled. ‘I don’t think it’s just children you English keep things from.’

‘There are some things one doesn’t mention. To women, I mean.’

Denton thought that Lang travelled in the wrong circles. Among Emma Gosden’s friends, anything could be said; the same was true among the artists who clustered at the Café Royal. Denton looked again at the painting. And, he suspected, anything could be said to Janet Striker. ‘I had a man tell me recently that he’d been watching another man cut a woman’s throat while coupled with her. Maybe that’s what the nightmare is.’

Lang blinked. ‘Ah. Mmm.’ He grew cheerful. ‘Might be a book in that.’

‘The sex act itself a kind of murder,’ Denton said, still looking at the picture. Like his wedding night. The blood, of course. He shook the idea off. ‘I wanted to see you, Lang.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, and I wanted to see you! I have an idea - a horrible idea!’ He cackled. ‘But routine business first - how’s the new book coming?’

There it was. Denton looked into his eyes, pursed his lips, said, ‘I’ve thrown it into the trash.’

Lang tried blankness, then a titter - it must be an American joke, he seemed to imply - then severity. ‘You’re not serious.’

‘I’m afraid I am.’ He tried to explain the revelation he’d had while he’d talked with Janet Striker - the woman not a real woman, the marriage all wrong, the book sick at its very heart.

‘I’ve always thought your women quite good,’ Lang moaned. Denton didn’t say that this might say more about Lang than about Denton’s women, or that perhaps Hench-Rose had been right when he’d said Denton knew nothing about women. He brushed residual drops of rain from his hat, which was on his lap; the warren of publishing offices had no place for visitors’ clothes - hardly room for visitors, in fact. ‘But you can’t have thrown it out,’ Lang said. ‘You can’t!’

‘I did.’

‘It’s what first novelists do. It’s what young men do.’

‘I have a better idea. A new book.’

‘Pull it out of the trash, Denton, we can salvage it. I can salvage it.’

Denton waved a hand. ‘I’ve got a better idea, I told you.’ Lang looked sick, then profoundly annoyed, then, with an effort, attentive - that smiling, wide-eyed look that women learn to put on when men talk. ‘It’s called The Machine,’ Denton said.

‘The Machine. A little too H. G. Wells?’

Denton sketched it for him: a young husband and wife who build together the machine that destroys them, their marriage.

‘But a machine? I’d think something organic would be more likely, something that they nurture—’

‘I see it as a machine.’

‘Well - of course, it’s your idea—’ Lang sounded dubious. ‘Rather fashionable, perhaps - machines, I mean. Fear of the clang and bang of modern life, the dark Satanic mills, all that. Motor cars.’ He raised his eyebrows and waved a hand. ‘But a machine as the embodiment of horror, Denton—’

‘Oh, forget your damned horror!’

‘Oh, dear, oh, no—’

‘Lang, the horror is something you’ve all read into the books. I write about people, about suffering, about—’

Lang waved his fingers again. ‘Writers don’t know what they write about. It’s horror, take my word for it. But a machine, oh dear—’ He tittered. ‘Perhaps a runaway motor car with an evil engine? Something that goes about murdering people at crossings? You’re not amused, I see.’

Denton put his hands on the desk and spoke slowly and with great emphasis. ‘Lang, I need money!’

‘Ah. Oh, it’s that way.’

‘It’s exactly that way.’

Lang looked about as if for a secret exit he’d forgotten the exact location of. ‘I suppose we could do something—’

‘My royalty account.’

‘Statements aren’t due yet, you know.’

‘But there’s money you owe me. There always is!’

‘Well, I suppose—Oh, well, of course - as you’re such a pillar of the backlist—’ He rang a little bell. Heavy footsteps sounded in the corridor, and a young man materialized in the doorway. Lang cleared his throat. ‘Ask Mr Frewn to step around, please, Meer.’

The heavy footsteps went away, went up some stairs, faded. Lang tapped on his desk. He said, ‘Frewn doesn’t get around as well as he used to.’ Denton put his coat and hat on the floor and crossed his legs. When slow, light footsteps sounded overhead, Lang smiled and murmured, ‘There we are,’ but it was another long silence, marked by increasingly loud footsteps, before a white-haired, bent man looked in. His black suit hung on him, giving him the look of a wet raven. In a surprisingly deep voice, he said, ‘You wanted something?’

‘Mr Denton - you know Mr Denton, one of our best authors, one of our most successful authors, Frewn - would like a cheque for the balance current in his account.’

The old man stared at Lang, then at Denton, as if he couldn’t believe his own rather large ears. ‘A cheque?’

‘Yes. Now, we’ve done this before, Mr Frewn - you remember, I’m sure, it can’t have been more than half a dozen years ago—’

Frewn shook his head. ‘Never heard of such a thing.’

Lang smirked at Denton and muttered, ‘We’ve done it again and again; it’s just—’ He smiled at Frewn. ‘Of course there’s a balance in Mr Denton’s account, Mr Frewn.’

‘No idea.’

‘There is, of course there is. So please, have Mr French write a cheque for the full amount for Mr Denton to take with him when he goes.’

The old man sucked in his breath. ‘Today?’

‘Now, Mr Frewn, this is too bad of you - of course, today - look here, I’m writing it out so you’ll have something on paper, eh? An authorization, all right? “Balance of account to this date, to be paid by cheque—” That’s quite clear, eh?’

He came around the desk and put the sheet of paper into the old man’s hand; he brought it close to his eyes, and his breath hissed in again. He muttered something, in which Denton caught only ‘ruin’, and patted off up the corridor, his voice mumbling on. Denton saw, as he left the doorway, that he was wearing carpet slippers that were almost hidden by remarkably long trousers, possibly somebody else’s, possibly his own from some earlier, longer-legged self.

‘Mr Frewn is rather a character,’ Lang said. ‘Quite the stuff of legend in the firm. I don’t know what we’d do without him.’

‘He’s the accountant?’

‘Ah, no, not—He’s actually a, mm, the—Mmm. Hard to explain - rather a vestige of an older way of—’ He smiled wanly. ‘He’s a kind of bottleneck for anything one wants to get done.’ Almost to himself, he added, ‘But things do get done. They really do. You’ll see—’ He tapped some more on his desk, looked at The Nightmare, and, apparently taking inspiration from it, said, ‘Well, this gets no books written. Not to pry, Denton, but - do you want to pay us back the advance on the book you’ve so rashly thrown away?’

‘Of course I don’t. I can’t.’

‘Then—’

‘Then I want to substitute The Machine for it.’

Lang made a face. ‘On the same schedule?’

‘Can’t be done. There isn’t time, Lang.’

‘No-o-o, there isn’t. Well, I suppose an extension of six months—’

‘During which I have to live.’

‘One would assume so, yes. Yes, quite.’ Lang squeezed the bridge of his nose between long, thin fingers. ‘You’re going to ask for more money, aren’t you?’

‘It won’t hurt you to raise the advance on the book I trashed to something like what my books actually command. ’

Lang rapped on the desk with a knuckle. Denton fell silent; it was as if the editor had called a meeting to order. Lang gave another, more decisive rap, and sat up very straight. ‘I told you I have an idea,’ he said.

Denton looked at him, thinking, My God, not a book idea—

‘Transylvania,’ Lang announced. He sat back. ‘There!’

‘Transylvania.’ Denton had the vaguest idea what Transylvania was. He lacked the British elite’s passion for travel, usually for sport - Norway for salmon, Switzerland and beyond for game - and lacked as well the Latin that might have led him to make a translation of the word. But he was honest. ‘What is Transylvania?’

‘Oh, my dear!’ Lang tittered. ‘It’s the far end of the Alps, the place everyone was thinking of when they used to write about haunted castles and ghastly vales and mountain peaks. A place of legend and lore - and peasants who speak unintelligible languages.’ He leaned forward. ‘Werewolves! Vampires!’

‘Fairy tales.’

‘My dear Denton, I’ve made a study of vampires. Hardly fairy tales, unless very grown-up ones. Did you know there was a play called The Vampire way back before our dear Queen was crowned? Now Stoker’s gone and written Dracula, and why, oh, why didn’t you get in ahead of him with the idea?’

Denton shook his head. ‘Sucking blood? Doesn’t interest me.’ Although the mind, he thought, of somebody who believed he was a vampire would interest him.

‘The vampire in the old play had to marry a virgin before sunrise or die. Doesn’t that touch a chord in you, man?’ It didn’t, and Denton let his stoic face say so, although he had a brief and bad moment thinking again about his wedding night. Lang put a pleading note into his voice. ‘They rise from the dead !’

‘So do my debts. I need money, Lang.’ He stuck out his lips under his drooping moustache. ‘I can try to finish The Machine in four months, how’s that?’ Lang made a face and Denton said without conviction, ‘I suppose I could write about this man who told me he’d seen a tart murdered - it was in the newspapers—’

‘You cannot! I won’t let you.’ Lang sounded like a petulant child. ‘Real crime’s been quite taken over by the lowest kind of journalist; you’d ruin your reputation by associating with it. Prostitutes. Oh! Unspeakable mutilations, I suppose.’ He shuddered. ‘No, no - I want literary material, Denton, artistic material. Like the vampire. You may say it’s sensational, and that of course is part of the point, but I believe that there is something in vampirism that touches us. Deeply. Blood - insatiability - the application of great force in pursuit of a perverse sort of desire—’ He sighed and leaned back. ‘You don’t see it, I can tell. Oh, dear.’ He groaned, then threw himself forward to try again. ‘Vampirism could do for you what She-who-must-be-obeyed did for Rider Haggard!’

‘Haggard is claptrap.’

‘But claptrap that touches our souls, Denton! There’s something in his fantastic stuff - something - repellent but irresistible—Something - forbidden—A profoundly desirable horror, how’s that?’

‘Like The Nightmare?’ Denton said.

‘Oh-h-h—’ Lang twisted in his chair in disappointment. ‘Look here, I’ll talk to Gwen -’ Gwen was Wilfred Gweneth, the publisher - ‘about your, ah, financial crise, and I think I can get his approval to offer you expenses plus your usual for a travel book about Transylvania. The Land of Horrors. We’d make up an itinerary to take you to the sites of legends and great tales - Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example; now you’ll say that’s Switzerland, I know, but—’

In fact Denton didn’t know; he’d never read Frankenstein.

‘ - you could start there, poetic licence, and move through Bavaria - isn’t that Monk Lewis territory? - and so on, and then concentrate on Transylvania. You apply your great powers of description, that relentless honesty that makes your work so—’

‘Lang, I don’t give a hoot about legends and lore.’

‘You’re so very vexing sometimes. You Realist! Have you had lunch? We could walk to my club and have a late lunch and talk this over—’

‘I have to meet with some women about a girl who may have left school to get herself murdered. One of the desirable horrors of everyday life in London.’ He boosted his hat and coat back to his lap. ‘A travel book - me?’

Lang gave him a suddenly shrewd look. ‘Money, my dear - you need money.’

‘You told me once never to write for money.’

‘I am an idealist. But you are a Realist. And your creditors are literalists - they want twenty shillings in the pound. Come now, Denton - I’m sure I can get you the money for the right sort of book. A nice journey down the Rhine, some pleasant miles by train - Continental railways are perfectly acceptable, I believe - then, to be sure, a somewhat less luxurious mode of travel in Transylvania itself - colourful local carts, an ancient post-chaise, even a sledge—’

Denton was both angry and amused. He got up slowly and then went behind his chair and leaned his forearms on the back. Grinning none too pleasantly, he said, ‘A motor car to Whatsylvania.’

‘That’s an appalling idea.’

‘I’ll do it that way - but that’s the only way I’ll do it!’ Denton didn’t really mean it; it was simply something to say to vent his sense of outrage. ‘By Motor Car to the Land of Vampires.’

‘A motor car! That would ruin everything! It’s so - so disgustingly modern.’

‘All the more reason. Combine the new with the old, progress with legend and lore.’ He was improvising, atypically manic. ‘Start from Paris - I could pick up a car there; they’ve got thousands of them - and head east. Outrunning the werewolves in a Panhard Twelve! Flying over the steppe on a fuel of garlic and potato spirits!’

Lang was shaking his head and saying that Denton was being too bad, simply too bad. ‘You’re ragging me; I see what you’re doing. This is your little joke. Well, laugh. Surely you don’t think we’d buy you a motor car. Gwen doesn’t mind taking a flyer, but he’s not an outright idiot. Motor Car to the Land of Vampires, indeed!’

‘Buy the machine, keep ownership while I do the trip, sell it after. Famous motor car, used in Mr Denton’s best-selling new book. You’d make a fortune, Lang.’

Lang sniffed. ‘I despise commerce and everything it stands for.’

‘But you want me to write a book about horrors because it will sell.’

Lang waved a hand. He put the left side of his jaw on the thumb and three fingers of his left hand, the index finger resting on his leathery cheek, and he said in a dry voice, ‘What I had envisioned was some colourful narrative of native carts toiling up the Alps.’

‘It might come to that. Motor cars aren’t much in mountains - you did say there were mountains?’

‘The Transylvanian Alps, which are always represented as the teeth of a saw.’

‘Motor-car enthusiasts would love it - conquering the mountains. Breakdowns while the werewolves howl. Tyre punctures in the dead of night. We run out of petrol and are pulled across the snow by a team of vampires!’

‘Yes, make a joke of it. You’re the one who needs money, not I.’

Denton hunched farther towards him over the chair back. ‘So I am.’ He’d forgotten. He shrugged. ‘Actually, it doesn’t seem such a bad idea, Lang.’

‘My dear Denton, motor cars—! They’re simply - vulgar.’

Denton heaved himself up, laughing. He saw Lang’s confusion and guffawed again. ‘So am I! So am I!’

Then Mr Frewn padded in with Denton’s cheque, which was for seven pounds, five and ninepence. Denton, having expected ten times as much, swore and rushed out.

‘The lists are handwritten, a lot of them in an appalling fist, and not at all up to date. The school heads aren’t held to the fire; they’ve too much else to do.’

When it was clear that he wanted them to search the lists for all of Greater London for the previous school year, one of them laughed outright. When he had difficulty explaining what he wanted, another muttered, ‘A local habitation and a name,’ and told the rest that what he meant was that they were to search for a girl named Ruth, who’d left school and who had a sister named Rebecca, who hadn’t.

‘And if we find them?’

‘Then you’ll find their last name.’

‘And then? We’ll have only their school. Only their town or village or ward.’

‘Then you’ll look for the family in the post office directories. ’

He suggested the census, but they pointed out that the last census had been taken in 1891. He went home and told Atkins not to talk to him. Using pantomime, Atkins pointed him to the mail, then took himself downstairs with his nose in the air, like a music-hall comedian playing a duke.

Among the bills was a note from Janet Striker. They could visit the Humphrey the next afternoon; she suggested that he bring a letter attesting to his character.

Tomorrow would be Thursday. It would leave him only one day to find the man who had now killed both the girl named Ruth and the man named Mulcahy. On Saturday, if he found nothing, they would rule that Mulcahy had killed himself while insane, and they would close the case. He could go on looking after that, but he sensed that he would not. He was about out of threads to wind on his spool.

And why did it matter? Mulcahy was nothing to him, nor the girl, either. Yet he thought of that thin body laid out on the table at Bart’s, the murderer’s crude gashes and the surgeon’s neat cuts, the men in rows around her watching, watching - and he cared.

Lang wanted horrors. This would be horror, indeed - meaningless, dehumanizing death, and his own failure to do anything about it.

He went out again to Hector Hench-Rose to ask for a character letter. Hench-Rose surprised him by being abject, ashamed of his behaviour of the other day and pathetically ready to do anything Denton wanted. Denton thought it odd - Hench-Rose was now wealthy, presumably powerful or about to be, with a parliamentary seat at his bidding, an estate, tenants, forelock-tugging ghillies, as Denton imagined them - but Hench-Rose seemed desperate for Denton’s approval. Odd, very odd - a need to have the world without exception approve of him? Or something special about Denton? Or was he, as Denton was with Atkins, caught in some snare of pride? Denton, at any rate, liked him better for his discomfort; the truth was, he had felt more comfortable with Hench-Rose the modestly poor ex-officer than Hench-Rose the wealthy baronet.

‘My distinct pleasure, old man,’ Hench-Rose said as he scrawled a note under the letterhead of the Metropolitan Police. ‘Want me to order the populace to cooperate or ask them? Asking’s probably better - flies and vinegar, and so on. Hmm?’ Hench-Rose proposed supper, promised no jokes, but Denton said he couldn’t, had too much to do. A drink at the club? Would Denton consider an expedition for salmon in February? Denton’s thought had been that the one thing he needed, money, and the one thing Hench-Rose had, money, was the one thing he couldn’t ask Hench-Rose for, although he suspected that Hector would have started flinging notes on the desk if he had asked for them. But Denton couldn’t ask.