A Turkish grill on the corner of Dyne road across the A5 from Nando’s takes up the corner of a nondescript block that replaced a Victorian terrace in the early years of the last century. Before they knocked it down, the row had been home to a bordello; young women and some not so young in bodices cinched at the bust, floor length lace petticoats and with bright ribbons in their bonnets. Wayward shepherdesses forced by sad circumstance into bending over silk sheeted chaise longues, skirts above their heads and minds elsewhere. These were the middle years of a century where Spring Heeled Jack stalked the city, a man who could leap nine feet in a single bound, who attached iron claws to his fingers and slashed the throats of women. Terrible as this spectre might be, it was the violent boors on whose coins these women depended who were most to fear. Drunken johns with no need to pretend at the kind of affection they showed their wives; whose barked demands needed to be met, whose oily whiskers and foul breath repulsed the women, beatings commonplace. One girl, a teenager called Elsie May died here, bleeding out in a back room before a doctor could reach her, by which time the man, a gentleman in calfskin riding boots and nankeen trousers had long since returned to his rooms on Craven Park Road to take tea, read his paper and discuss the emancipation of slaves in the colonies with dinner guests. When the terrace was condemned and rebuilt, the shop on the corner became a cobbler’s where, a hundred years after Elsie May had died, a cripple named Best repaired heels and resoled boots in a back room. The man reported locks breaking, tapping on doors and bulbs popping out of their sockets. The shopgirls who worked with him backed up his story; an unexplained knocking, a workbench smashing, and shoes leaping from their shelves. One morning, Best arrived to find nails scattered over the floor and when a flying hammer narrowly missed his head, he left the store after twenty years’ service. “The Kilburn Poltergeist” shouted the headline in The Willesden Chronicle, and for months afterwards, buses slowed so that passengers could gawp at the haunted building.

The clown had often been in the brothel and knew Elsie May to look at, though he preferred passing time with a bosomy, yellow haired strumpet who called herself Anastasia in the fashion of the Russians, and who had a cracked laugh, a quick tongue and a love of gin. What God thought never crossed his mind. God had judged and he had forfeited his soul. Just as no amount of Lazaruses could rescue the rich man from the fire, the clown too remained irrevocably chained to his treadmill. He often hovered outside the shoe shop on his to-ing and fro-ing, in the hope that he might catch sight of another trapped soul doomed for immortality. After all, it might be Elsie May, and if she were willing, he had a pocket full of coins.