The Luminaries

that I had known
you
to be a creditor of this kind, two weeks ago,’ Anna said now, and in a waspish tone. ‘I should never have accepted your help, otherwise.’
    ‘Perhaps your memory is faulty,’ Gascoigne said. ‘I will remind you that I gave help only because you asked for it.’
    ‘
This
? This mouldy dress? This is “help”? I’d rather give you back the dress—and keep the gold!’
    ‘I got you out of the gaol-house, Anna Wetherell, at great personal risk to myself—and that dress belonged to my late wife, in case you did not know it,’ Gascoigne said. He dropped his cigarette onto the floor and ground it to nothing with his heel. Anna was opening her mouth to make a retort, and so he said, loudly: ‘I’m afraid you are not in a fit state for my surprise.’
    ‘I am perfectly fit, thank you.’
    ‘A surprise,’ Gascoigne said, raising his voice still further, ‘that I organised for you for reasons of the purest charity and goodwill—’
    ‘Mr. Gascoigne—’
    ‘—for I felt that it might do you good, to get out and enjoy yourself a little,’ Gascoigne concluded. His face was very white. ‘I will inform my lady that your spirits are low, and that you won’t be seen.’
    ‘My spirits aren’t low,’ Anna said.
    ‘I think that they are,’ said Gascoigne. He drained his glass, and then set it on the nightstand next to Anna’s pillow, the centre of which was still pierced by a single blackened hole. ‘I will leave you now. I am sorry that your gun did not fire in the way that you intended, and I am sorry that your lifestyle exceeds your means to pay for it. Thank you for the brandy.’

MEDIUM COELI / IMUM COELI
    In which Gascoigne raises the issue of Anna’s debt, and Edgar Clinch does not confide in him.
    As Gascoigne was crossing the foyer of the Gridiron Hotel, the door was wrenched open, and the hotelier, Mr. Edgar Clinch, entered at a pace. Gascoigne slowed in his step so that the two men would not have to pass too close to one another—an action that Clinch mistook for a different kind of hesitation. He stopped abruptly in the middle of the doorway, blocking Gascoigne’s exit. Behind him, the door thudded shut.
    ‘Can I help you?’ he said.
    ‘Thank you, no,’ Gascoigne said politely—and hovered a moment, waiting for Clinch to move from the doorway so that he might leave without having to brush shoulders with the other man.
    But the valet had been alerted by the slam of the door. ‘Oi—you!’ he called out to Gascoigne, coming forward from his cubicle beneath the stairs. ‘What was the story behind those pistol shots? Jo Pritchard came downstairs like death incarnate. Like he’d seen a ghost.’
    ‘It was a mistake,’ said Gascoigne curtly. ‘Just a mistake.’
    ‘Pistol shots?’ said Edgar Clinch—who had not moved from the doorway.
    Clinch was a tall man, forty-three years of age, with sandy-coloured hair and a harmless, pleasant look. He wore an imperial moustache, greased at the tips, a handsome accessory that had notsilvered at the same rate as his hair—which was likewise greased, parted in the middle, and cut to the level of his earlobes. He had apple-shaped cheeks, a reddish nose, and a blunted profile. His eyes were set so deep in his face that they seemed to shut altogether when he smiled, which he did often, as the crowfoot lines around his eyes could testify. At present, however, he was frowning.
    ‘I was down here at the desk,’ said the valet. ‘This man, he was there—he saw it. He’d run up, on account of the shouting—the gun went off just after he walked in. After that there was another shot—a second. I’m about to go up, to investigate, but then Jo Pritchard comes down, and tells me not to worry. Tells me the whore was cleaning the piece, and it went off by accident—but that explanation only accounts for the first.’
    Edgar Clinch slid his gaze back to Gascoigne.
    ‘The second shot was mine,’ Gascoigne said, speaking with ill-concealed annoyance; he did not like to be detained against his will. ‘I fired the piece experimentally, once I could see that the first shot had fouled.’
    ‘What was the shouting on account of?’ asked the hotelier.
    ‘That situation is now resolved.’
    ‘Jo Pritchard—laying into her?’
    ‘Sounded like that from here,’ said the valet.
    Gascoigne shot the valet a poisonous look, and then turned back to Clinch. ‘There was no violence done to the whore,’ he said. ‘She is perfectly