Standing outside was the baby-faced man, Mr. Jasper.
“Hello, Henry.”
The sight of him there of all places was so incongruous that, for a moment, I couldn’t speak.
“We need your help,” he said. “Invite me in.”
The cat followed me downstairs and now crouched between my legs, shaking in fear. “What are you doing here?” I asked at last.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” Jasper sounded as though he was making the most reasonable request, as though this wasn’t strange in the slightest, this unwarranted intrusion into an old man’s home. “Your grandfather put certain safeguards in place. Here and at the hospital. We’re going to need your help.”
“My help? What on earth do you want?”
“Just let me in, Mr. Lamb.”
“No,” I said, suddenly afraid. “I think you should leave right now. You’re trespassing.”
Jasper bared his teeth in a humorless approximation of a smile. As if at the sight of the grimace, the cat wriggled free of my legs and bounded away.
“Have you been following me?”
“You’ll regret it if you don’t let me in. We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your house down.”
“Go away.” My voice shook only a little. “I’ll call the police.”
“Oh, Mr. Lamb. We’re above the police.”
Then he did something very odd indeed. His head snapped upwards and he stared fiercely toward the ceiling. “I agree, sir,” he said, and there was nothing in his manner that suggested he was addressing me. “I thought he’d be better looking too.” His eyes flicked over my body. “Slimmer, frankly. And cleaner.”
“Who are you talking to?” I asked.
Jasper smiled. “I’ll go,” he said. “But remember that whatever happens next, you have brought it entirely upon yourself.”
He turned and walked away. I listened to the click of his expensive shoes upon the pavement but soon even this was swallowed by the sounds of London (the growl of traffic, the howl of sirens, the hectic tattoo of a car stereo) and there was nothing left to prove that Jasper had ever been there at all, nothing to say he wasn’t merely a figment of the city’s imagination.
When I woke the next morning, it took me a while to recollect all that had happened since Tuesday. For a few merciful seconds, it seemed as substanceless and evanescent as a dream. Of course, by the time I’d levered myself out of bed, reached for my dressing gown and meandered, bleary eyed and tousle haired, toward the kitchen, everything had come scrambling back and I groaned aloud at the memory.
To my delight, Abbey was already up and sitting on the sofa in her pajamas. My landlady was the kind of woman who looked sexiest when at her least groomed and at her most irresistible freshly out of bed, unkempt, disheveled and smelling faintly of sleep.
“Morning,” she said.
“Good morning.” Although I pined for our meetings, when it came to them, I always found myself a little embarrassed, stutteringly short of words.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Been a weird few days.”
“I know.”
I swallowed hard. “I could tell you about it tonight, if you want.”
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
I noticed something different about her. “Where’s your nose stud?”
“Oh, I got rid of it. Never really me, was it?”
It was probably my imagination but I was sure I saw her blush.
When I got into work, Barbara was standing over my desk, diligently placing all of my possessions into a cardboard box. Stapler, potted plant, box of tissues, an ancient photo of my dad.
“Morning,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Henry.” The girl’s face turned white. “Haven’t you heard?”
Before I could ask what she meant, the phone on my desk clamored for my attention.
I picked it up. “Henry Lamb speaking.”
“It’s Peter. I want a word. Pronto.”
I put down the phone and turned curiously to Barbara, who gave me a sympathetic shrug in reply.
“I’d better go, I said, and walked into Hickey-Brown’s office without bothering to knock.
A familiar figure stood next to my manager.
“You remember Mr. Jasper?” Peter asked.
“Good morning, Henry,” said the well-exfoliated man.
“Morning,” I said.
Mr. Jasper smiled. “I’ll see you outside.”
He left, taking care to close the door behind him.
Hickey-Brown sighed, settled himself down behind his desk and waved a hand to indicate that I should sit opposite.
“Sorry if this seems a bit overwhelming,” he said. “I realize you’ve had a hell of a week.”
“What on earth’s going on?”
Peter looked at me blankly, whether from discretion or ignorance I couldn’t quite be sure. “Mr. Jasper will answer all your questions.”
“Oh, really? Who is this Jasper anyway?”
“I told you. He’s from a special department. Don’t look so worried. It’s part of the Service.”
“He came to my grandfather’s house. He said he was above the police.”
Hickey-Brown couldn’t meet my eye. “He must have been joking.”
“Joking? Why’s Barbara packing up my stuff? Are you getting rid of me?”
“You’re being transferred.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ve made it, Henry. Your filing days are over.”
“What?”
“Promotion time, Henry.”
“I don’t-”
“Better run along now. He’s waiting for you.”
Hickey-Brown got to his feet and strode past me to open the door, making it palpably clear that our conversation was at an end.
I walked outside, where Jasper was leaning against what had been my desk, talking animatedly to Barbara. She was giggling in reply, stroking her hair, placing her fingertip in the side of her mouth and generally playing the coquette.
Jasper grinned at the sight of me. “There you are!”
Barbara, curiosity emboldened, kissed me on the cheek. “Good luck, Henry.”
I stood mute and motionless as a shop-window dummy as Jasper thrust the box into my hands. “There you go. We’d better get a move on.”
“Now?” I asked.
Jasper nodded.
Barbara squeezed my arm. “Well done,” she hissed. “Good luck.”
Nervously, I cleared my throat. “Well, goodbye everyone,” I announced to the office at large. “It’s been great working with you all. I’ve enjoyed myself. But it looks like I’m moving on.” My colleagues ignored me, my only answer the tap of keyboards, the drone of telephones, the lazy burr of the photocopier. Somewhere, inevitably, someone was crunching their way laboriously through a packet of crisps. Cheese and onion, I think. I could smell it.
As soon as we were outside, Jasper grabbed my cardboard box and heaved it into the nearest bin.
“What did you do that for?” I asked, trying not to sound too wheedlingly plaintive.
“Where we’re going…” The man was striding off ahead. “Take it from me, you’re not going to need a potted plant.”
I trotted next to him, struggling to keep up. We walked along the South Bank beside the river, past the National Theatre, the restaurants, bookstalls and pavement caricaturists, past the Big Issue sellers and skateboarders and the men in furry coats roasting chestnuts, heading toward the great, gleaming edifice of the Eye.
“Where’s your department?” I asked.
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“By the way,” Jasper snapped, “I think you should get a new suit. You can’t wear that thing anymore. Wouldn’t be respectful.”
“Oh.”
“That girl in your office… Barbara, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you happen to know if she’s attached?” Jasper’s
tone had switched from understated menace to something approaching chumminess.
“What?” I asked.
“I mean does she have a boyfriend? Someone special in her life?”
Nonplussed: “I’ve no idea.”
“Hmm. I wonder.” He appeared to savor some sort of mental image before exclaiming: “Perfect, Mr. Lamb. That girl was perfect!”
“What are you talking about?” I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of office prank, if for the purposes of someone else’s entertainment I’d been yoked to a lunatic for the day. Surreptitiously, I looked around for hidden cameras.
Jasper stopped short. “We’re here.”
Baffled, I looked up. “But this is the Eye.”
“Come inside.”
There were dozens of tourists shuffling patiently in line, tortoising forward a few inches at a time. Jasper barged past them all to get to the front of the queue, and the curious fact was that none of them seemed to object, almost as though they hadn’t notice we were there at all. I observed, too, that for all his bravado and swagger Jasper seemed to be inspecting each of them carefully, like he was searching for someone he knew. More than once, I noticed him turn and nervously scan the line behind us.
“Looking for someone?” I asked.
“The enemy, Mr. Lamb. The enemy are always watching.”
“Enemy?” I said, feeling even now that this was most likely to turn out to be some insanely elaborate practical joke.
We reached the front of the queue, pushed past a ticket inspector who offered not the slightest objection to our presence and stood before an open pod filled with a group of Japanese tourists, all of them bristling with guidebooks and cameras, totally oblivious to the two of us.
Jasper gestured into the pod. “After you.”
The tourists were still ignoring us.
“But it’s packed.”
“Trust me.”
I didn’t move.
“Mr. Lamb, what you’re about to see is above top secret. Breathe the merest word of what you see here today and the most extreme measures will be set in motion against you. Is that understood?”
I nodded, feeling oddly light-headed — like I was in a dream and knew it, that my actions would have no real effect in the waking world.
“Well then. Walk on.”
“I can’t. It’s full.”
Jasper seemed to lose patience. “Just go.” He pushed me forward and I stumbled into the pod.
To my amazement, I seemed to pass through the ranks of tourists as though they were no more substantial than mist — will-’o-the-wisps clutching souvenirs, digital cameras and laminated maps of the city.
Jasper stepped smartly in behind me. “Smoke and mirrors…,” he murmured, in the kind of tone you might adopt trying to soothe a child woken in the night by bad dreams.
Inside, it was darker and larger than I had expected. Dimly, I heard the door hiss shut and the pod begin its smooth ascent. There was a smell in there which seemed tuggingly familiar, redolent of floating bandages and verrucas. It took me a moment to pinpoint. It was chlorine — the smell of a public swimming pool.
Our view of London was obscured by what appeared to be a large tank of water which took up almost half of the pod, as though we had somehow entered an aquarium by mistake. Through it, I could see the landmarks of the city, distended and made strange by refraction — St. Paul’s elongated and obscene, the Houses of Parliament shimmering and fragile, the spires of Canary Wharf stretched out and distorted, its citadels of commerce glimpsed as though through the bottom of a clouded glass.
More disconcertingly even than this was what floated in the tank. It was a man, evidently at the extremity of old age, his skin wrinkled and puckered, wattled, creased and liver-spotted. He was naked save for a pair of faded orange swimming trunks and seemed to be floating underwater, his ancient body, backlit by the sun, bathed in a halo of yellow light.
I wondered how he could possibly breathe inside that tank, before dismissing the notion that he could actually be alive as absurd.
Then, impossible though I knew it had to be, the old man spoke. His lips moved underwater yet I heard him as clearly as if he were standing beside me. His was a deep, old, sad voice, full of strange inflections.
“Welcome, Henry Lamb!” he said — and he said it warmly, as though he knew me, like we went back years together, he and I. “My name is Dedlock. This is the Directorate. And you’ve just been conscripted.”
Chapter 7
“At the Directorate, we don’t deal in volunteers.” The man called Dedlock was grinning at me, bobbing up and down with a grisly vigor which belied his age. “You’re one of us now.”
I opened my mouth to say something but not a single word would come. Instead, I found myself staring at the old man’s torso, fascinated by a progression of creases that seemed to strafe his skin, flaps of flesh which throbbed and pulsated as though with independent life.
Gills?
Surely this man couldn’t have gills?
Dedlock was glaring. “You find us in the midst of war. And I’m rather afraid we’re losing.”
For several minutes my mouth had been too dry to speak. Now, at last, I squeezed out a sentence. “War? Who’s at war?”
The old man dealt the side of the tank a ferocious blow. Jasper and I flinched backward and I wondered what would happen if the glass were to shatter and the water gush out, whether Dedlock would flail and flop on the ground like a beached carp. “Secret civil war has been waged in this country for half a dozen generations. This organization is all that stands between the British people and their oblivion.”
I felt concussed. “I don’t understand.”
“Comprehension is unnecessary. From now on you simply have to follow orders. Is that understood?”
I vaguely remember nodding.
“Tell no one what you’ve seen here. There are less than two dozen men alive who know the true purpose of the Directorate.”
I managed an objection. “What happens if I say no.”
“To you? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. To your good mother, on the other hand… To your pulchritudinous landlady…” He seemed to soften slightly. “You’ll find your salary many times in excess of your old employment. And we offer a first-rate pension plan. Every cloud, Henry Lamb, every cloud…”
I began to get dizzy, felt the room and its impossible occupant slide away from me and become distant and faint, like the world viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Water…” I stuttered. “You’re underwater.”
“Amniotic fluid,” the old man hissed, grimacing as though at some wretched, long-neglected memory. “Not my design.” His eyes flicked dismissively over my body. “Were you close to your grandfather, boy?”
I said that I was.
He nodded. “And does the name Estella mean anything to you?”
“I just about managed a “no.”
“You must have heard something. Did he never mention her?”
“Never.”
The man in the tank made an awful clenching sound which I took to be his closest equivalent to a sigh. “If you truly know nothing then the war may already be lost.”
“What war? Who are you people fighting? Who is this enemy?”
“You know their name,” Dedlock said, his voice filled with rancor and bile. “You carry their likeness with you everywhere you go.” A twitch of his lips, as though he couldn’t decide whether to sneer or to smile. “We’ve been fighting the British royal family since 1857. We’re at war with the House of Windsor.”
I remember blurting out some objection before my limbs turned to rubber, everything started to fade and darkness closed over me.
Dedlock looked on, disdain and disappointment in his eyes. “Dear, dear. It seems we have ourselves a fainter.”
My balance went. I stumbled backward, fell into the arms of Mr. Jasper and, just before I passed out, I heard the old man’s voice again, bitter and sarcastic.
I woke the next morning, hours after the alarm clock usually pesters me into wakefulness, punch-drunk and groggy, with a dank, sickly sensation in the pit of my stomach. Beside my bed was a glass of water, a packet of Alka-Seltzer and a small square of cream-colored card on which was scrawled the following:
Report Monday morning.
We’ll send a car at 8.
Then, an unconvincingly hearty postscript.
Enjoy your weekend.
As soon as I had showered and felt at least 70 percent awake, I switched on my computer, logged not the Internet, clicked into Google and typed the phrase: “the Directorate.” It returned not a single hit. According to the most powerful search engine in the world, the organization which Dedlock had told me was the last hope for the British people did not even exist.
I had supper with Abbey before she went out, fielding her bemused inquiries by improvising something about having got an unexpected promotion, asked if anyone had come home with me the previous night. She shot me an oddly disappointed look. No, she said. She hadn’t seen or heard anyone but me.
We did the washing up together and she left to meet her friends, leaving me lolled in front of the television, flicking aimlessly from game show to sitcom to murder mystery, wondering whether all of it wasn’t so much lather and bubbles to mask the real truth of the world, the grime, the scum beneath.
On Sunday, partly because I couldn’t think of anything better to do, partly because Mr. Jasper had peremptorily suggested it, I went into town, where I bought myself a new gray suit, a couple of shirts and some fresh underwear, and where, for a short while, things felt almost normal again.
In the afternoon, I saw Granddad. The ward was busier and noisier than before, cramped with families trooped dutifully in to visit half-forgotten relatives, packing the place with their guilty faces, their bored offspring and wilting bunches of grapes. There they sat, disguising their yawns, making pointless small talk, checking their watches every other minute, counting down till the end of visiting time.
The Domino Men v-2 Page 5
