Free Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

shelters. They had it to themselves in the noisy stifling night. ‘Why, I was in a choir once,’ the Boy confided and suddenly he began to sing softly in his spoilt boy’s voice: ‘Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.’ In his voice a whole lost world moved—the lighted corner below the organ, the smell of incense and laundered surplices, and the music. Music—it didn’t matter what music—‘Agnus dei’, ‘lovely to look at, beautiful to hold’, ‘the starling on our walks’, ‘credo in unum Dominum’—any music moved him, speaking of things he didn’t understand.
    ‘Do you go to Mass?’ he asked.
    ‘Sometimes,’ Rose said. ‘It depends on work. Most weeks I wouldn’t get much sleep if I went to Mass.’
    ‘I don’t care what you do,’ the Boy said sharply. ‘I don’t go to Mass.’
    ‘But you believe, don’t you,’ Rose implored him, ‘you think it’s true?’
    ‘Of course it’s true,’ the Boy said. ‘What else could there be?’ he went scornfully on. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,’ he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, ‘torments.’
    ‘And Heaven too,’ Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.
    ‘Oh, maybe,’ the Boy said, ‘maybe.’
    Wet to the skin, the trousers sticking to his thin legs the Boy went up the long unmatted flight to his bedroom at Frank’s. The banister shook under his hand, and when he opened the door and found the mob there, sitting on his brass bedstead smoking, he said furiously, ‘When’s that banister going to be mended? It’s not safe. Someone’ll take a fall one day.’ The curtain wasn’t drawn, the window was open, and the last lightning flapped across the grey roofs stretching to the sea. The Boy went to his bed and swept off the crumbs of Cubitt’s sausage roll. ‘What’s this,’ he said, ‘a meeting?’
    ‘There’s trouble about the subscriptions, Pinkie,’ Cubitt said. ‘There’s two not come in. Brewer and Tate. They say now Kite’s dead—’
    ‘Do we carve ’em up, Pinkie?’ Dallow asked. Spicer stood at the window watching the storm. He said nothing, staring out at the flames and chasms of the sky.
    ‘Ask Spicer,’ the Boy said. ‘He’s been doing a lot of thinking lately.’ They all turned and watched Spicer. Spicer said, ‘Maybe we ought to lay off a while. You know a lot of the boys cleared out when Kite got killed.’
    ‘Go on,’ the Boy said. ‘Listen to him. He’s what they call a philosopher.’
    ‘Well,’ Spicer said angrily, ‘there’s free speech in this mob, ain’t there? Those that cleared out, they didn’t see how a kid could run this show.’
    The Boy sat on the bed watching him with his hands in his damp pockets. He shivered once.
    ‘I was always against murder,’ Spicer said. ‘I don’t care who knows it.’
    ‘Sour and milky,’ the Boy said.
    Spicer came into the middle of the room. ‘Listen, Pinkie,’ he said. ‘Be reasonable.’ He appealed to them all, ‘Be reasonable.’
    ‘There’s things in what he says,’ Cubitt suddenly put in. ‘We had a lucky break. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. We’d better let Brewer and Tate be for a while.’
    The Boy got up. A few crumbs stuck to his wet suit. ‘You ready, Dallow?’ he said.
    ‘What you say, Pinkie,’ Dallow said, grinning like a large friendly dog.
    ‘Where you going, Pinkie?’ Spicer asked.
    ‘I’m going to see Brewer.’
    Cubitt said, ‘You act as if it was last year we killed Hale, not last week. We got to act cautious.’
    ‘That’s over and done,’ the Boy said. ‘You heard the verdict. Natural causes,’ he said, looking out at the dying storm.
    ‘You forget that girl in Snow’s. She could hang us.’
    ‘I’m looking after the girl. She