Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

Quinn looked down at the large knife sticking out of his stomach in disbelief. A coup de grâce. It was not the bull who had been gored, it was the matador.

She had occasionally thought that she would herself be willing to be a man’s mistress but not his wife, but one should be open and honest about such things, not sweep the poor wife under the carpet as if she didn’t exist.

Gwendolen had no intention of ever honeymooning but she didn’t see why she shouldn’t have the trousseau.

Phyllis wasn’t the kind of girl you noticed. A wasted gift, her mother and aunt thought, given their trade. Phyllis didn’t need to lurk behind trees or duck beneath hedges, she could simply stand in plain sight and yet not be seen. “It’s like looking at water,” her Auntie Agnes said.

A proper gentleman, Phyllis thought. A policeman though, definitely. Given her ancestry she could spot one a mile off.

“By the way,” Phyllis said by way of greeting, “you’ve got rats.” “Tell me about it,” Nellie said.

The girl read books. Nellie sighed.

as if he were the worst of Lotharios. Well, perhaps he was. His actions may not have been those of a lover, but his intentions were.

Just because she’s run away doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me, you know.”

The locket, the crucifix, the spectacles and the solitary silver shoe now all lay in cardboard boxes in a cabinet in the evidence room. It was fast becoming a reliquary.

She had a name now. It made it worse, rather than better. It would have been preferable if she had remained missing for ever, stranded somewhere between two worlds, rather than being committed to the endless night without any hope of recall.

Freda often came across some strange items in the flat—riding crops and rubber masks and washing-line rope. “Joan’s specials,” Vanda said. She didn’t have enough room in her own flat for all the “accessories” she needed.

Ramsay explained his plan. It didn’t seem exactly legal to Freda to forge a letter from his mother to her bank so that he could swindle her, but he said that she’d been perfectly happy to lie about her age and experience to get this job (it was completely different!) and anyway he had no intention of swindling Nellie, he wasn’t taking her money out of the bank, he just needed to see some paperwork she kept there.

She had become very bold since working at the Sphinx. She was beginning to understand her worth.

Nellie was always the first and last resort in an emergency for any Coker.

“The worst thing was that he laughed all the time, as if it was the greatest joke in the world to try and choke a girl to death.”

Surviving a brush with death is a powerful tonic.

He could have sworn that the girl had been dead when he left her in that storeroom, yet here she was, walking, talking and sitting in the back of Nellie Coker’s Bentley. And not only that—there were now two of them, as if she’d multiplied in there. They were so alike that he didn’t know which was the real Freda Murgatroyd. Now Oakes had two problems on his hands.

Freda supposed that dying and coming back to life would give you an appetite. Jesus probably felt the same when he came out of his tomb. She was reminded of the big crucifix that hung over the altar in Florence’s church. She had been going in regularly to light a candle. You light them for someone else, not yourself, Florence had said. Freda was lighting them for Florence.

Although the whole endeavour was terrifying, Ramsay was also finding it exhilarating. He wasn’t just writing a crime novel—he was living one. Fiction had nothing on what it felt, after a lifetime of passivity, to be finally doing something.

He liked her too much. He worried it was making him weak. But what if it was making him stronger?

purposefully to take a young life and snuff it out like a candle for some perverse gratification defied her understanding.

She wondered how often Cherry was expected to have dinner with people. With men.

Now he had somehow managed to obfuscate it, to eclipse her radiance with his shadows.

ago. For a paranoid moment, Ramsay wondered if he had killed Vivian Quinn himself.

Committing crimes seemed to give him energy.

He placed the two sheets of paper on top of Quinn’s manuscript.

His initial plan had been simple—to put Nellie out of business by degree, orchestrating a series of misfortunes—the raid on the Amethyst, the raid on the Sphinx, the fire at the Pixie, the Huns running amok in the Amethyst—death by a thousand cuts, lingchi,

They had some business together occasionally. Dope and girls, the twin pillars of crime in London.

Due process, Nellie thought. The dry meal of affidavits and witness statements. The slow grind of the courts. And at the end of it, Maddox might be convicted, but equally he might not. Justice should be swift, not slow. It should be a knife in the heart.

Nellie was feeling rather perky for a woman so under siege.

Theatre and music hall, they were also agreed, couldn’t hold a candle to a good trial.