Chapter 52
The Empire was a hundred yards along Piccadilly, back towards the bus stop, towards Piccadilly Circus.
Cook stood across the street, under the awning of an art dealer on the corner of Albemarle Street.
A tramp had made his home in a closed-off doorway.
Cook felt awkward invading the man’s territory, so he strolled ten feet up the side street, away from the main road.
Two telephone boxes huddled together as if for protection.
Cook stood next to one of them with the air of a man contemplating a phone call.
He was being foolish, he realised. Nobody cared which street he stood in or what buildings he looked at.
One of the few advantages of the city. You could stand where you wanted, and watch what you wanted, and nobody gave a monkey’s.
Cook had an excellent vantage point to watch the front of the hotel. It wasn’t that he was expecting Ruby to come out, exactly, but there was always the chance.
What was he doing? A young woman had gone out to work and never come home. Hardly the first time, and unlikely the last. When Cook had delivered the news that Ruby hadn’t been on the bus, even her own mum had seemed content that the girl would show up.
So why was he lurking in a side street like a criminal, rather than striding up to the door of the hotel?
It wasn’t a simple matter, Cook told himself, watching people coming and going from the hotel.
For a start, there was a doorman controlling the only obvious access point.
Dressed in a fine suit in the colours of the hotel’s livery, complete with top hat, the doorman seemed to possess a preternatural understanding of who he should open the door for.
As Cook watched, people walked to and fro, past the hotel entrance.
Most of them had no business with the place.
Some did, however. Cook watched as an elderly gentleman, dressed in a shabby suit, walked towards the door from the direction of the park.
Without any communication from the gentleman to the doorman, the latter stepped out of the way of the door, held it open, and guided the gentleman into the hotel.
Cook wasn’t an idiot. He knew what was going on.
The Empire was a place for a certain type of person.
The gentleman was an example of that type.
Cook was not. He had been many things, a soldier, a farmer.
But he was not the kind of man who walked into a place like the Empire as if he belonged there.
He didn’t even know, he realised as he stood there, whether he’d be let in.
Cook was startled to realise he was feeling something akin to fear.
Fear of transgressing one of England’s most inviolate rules.
A rule that never once needed to be spelt out, but one that was implicitly understood by every one of the King’s subjects, in every country of the empire – a quarter of the world’s population, from the slums of London’s East End to the tea plantations in India.
Know your place.