Free Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) by Janice Law Page A

idea of Aubrey Teck’s Brighton habitat.
    I might have gone straight to the inspector with this gen. Like that? More military slang: “general intelligence”; Liam keeps us up to date on all the latest. Except this intelligence was hardly general, and I was leery of handing over even Aubrey Teck to the inspector on such slender grounds. No. What I did was invent another asthma episode for the ARP post and got Arnold to run down to Brighton with me.
    I told him I was convinced there was nothing, nothing at all, in the business and no reason to put Teck in the way of the police. At the same time, a journey on the crowded trains to Brighton and an effort to locate the Brighton Something-or-Other of Wild Boys and Greek Drama would be a serious effort, maybe enough for the inspector to move on to other prey. I was joking when I said that, but many a true word is spoken in jest. There was something predatory about my personal cop, who more and more struck me as a man of two sides, neither of which was in good contact with the other. My importance lay in the fact that I was in touch with both the man who picked up boys in the park and the copper who arrested them. It behooved me to be careful.
    “Come see this, dear boy.”
    I stretched my arms and got up from the big carved bed with its creamy, luxurious sheets and fat down pillows—shades of Berlin and Uncle Lastings—and went to where Arnold was standing at the tall hotel window. The sky was dark and rather stormy to the east, fading red and gold to the west: spectacular Turner effects, now too impossibly beautiful for a serious painter. One of the little tragedies of modern life is that scenic beauty has become problematic, and the Brighton sky was nothing if not scenic. Down below was another matter. The hotel overlooked the pebbled seafront now strewn with rolls of barbed wire and studded with cubes of concrete as protection against landing tanks. Vaulting over both, the piers strode far into the sea on their long spider legs, their bulbous pleasure domes gradually darkening as the blackout commenced. We could hear the sound of pebbles rolling and rattling in the surf.
    Arnold draped one arm across my naked shoulders and recited, “The sea is calm to - night. The tide is full . The moon lies fair upon the straits . . . ” He is fond of poetry. “You don’t know ‘Dover Beach’?”
    I didn’t know “Dover Beach.”
    “Apt, maybe too apt: Listen! You hear the grating roar o f pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling . . . . With tremulous cadence slow, and bring the eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles is in it too. Though not Aeschylus, our present interest.”
    He recited the rest, though the only lines I can remember are: “Ah, love let us be true to one another” —perhaps Arnold’s hope for me—and the ending: “ And we are here as on a darkling plain . Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”
    As Arnold said, too apt.
    “Of course, he wasn’t thinking of invasion, but of the decline of Christianity, of faith in general.”
    I leaned my head on his shoulder and listened to his ideas about the poet. Arnold regrets my neglected education and is keen that I should be knowledgeable, that I should miss nothing, that I should be complete intellectually. If my father had spent half—even a quarter—as much time on me as Arnold has, I’d be a better man by far, perhaps one capable of fidelity and other impossible virtues.
    But this was not, as I know the inspector would agree, a time for virtue! A drink or two with Arnold, a little paint, a little powder, a little Kiwi polish in my hair—I like to go dark for night—white shirt, black trousers, black leather jacket.
    “Don’t tangle with the gangs,” warned Arnold, who feared the notorious Brighton toughs who prowl beneath the piers at night and fight with razors and bicycle chains, pastimes I regard as both exciting and ridiculous.
    A few kisses