“The answer is yes. For God’s sake. Have you got that? The answer is yes.” The window cleaner took a deep, rattling breath and pivoted himself away.
“What was that about?” I asked, as much to myself as to him.
Taking no notice of me and mumbling a grab-bag of expletives, he made his way unsteadily over to a beaten-up Rover on the other side of the parking lot in which his unfortunate family was waiting and probably wondering why he couldn’t have fallen just that little bit harder.
When I got home to Tooting Bec and walked through to the sitting room, Abbey was there, wearing a little black dress, surrounded by balloons and smiling sheepishly. An unsuccessful-looking chocolate cake sat on the table, decorated by a single unlit candle.
“Happy birthday!” she said.
“This is unexpected. I don’t know what to say.”
“Sit down. I’ll get you a drink.”
She sashayed through to the kitchen, from where I could hear clinking glasses, the jingle of ice, the glug of juice and liquor. She called through: “How was your day?”
“Slightly strange. You?”
“Mostly dull. Till now.”
“Thanks for all this. You really needn’t have bothered…”
She came back into the lounge, carrying two glasses of something fizzy, ice cubes bobbing on the surface.
“What’s this?” I asked as I took mine.
“Cocktail,” she beamed. “Home-made. Try it.”
I took a tentative sip — tingly, sweet, pleasantly numbing. Emboldened, I took another mouthful. Then another. It was only the presence of my landlady that prevented me from downing the thing in one.
“Wonderful. What’s in it?”
Abbey arched an eyebrow. “Trade secret.” She produced a box of matches and lit the candle on my cake. “Make a wish.”
I closed my eyes, blew out the candle and made a wish which, for a short time, came true.
“There’s more.” Abbey scampered into her bedroom and returned with a soft parcel which she thrust excitedly into my hands. “Here you are.”
“This is too much,” I protested, feeling a blush start somewhere at the bottom of my neck and gradually stain my whole face.
“I wasn’t sure of your size. I’ve kept the receipt if it’s not right.”
I tore open the paper to reveal an irredeemably hideous V-neck sweater, precisely the shade of lemon curd.
“It’s fantastic,” I lied, then lied again: “I’ve always wanted one of these.” Frankly, at that moment, Abbey looked so rapturously beautiful that she could have wrapped me a dead weasel for my birthday and I’d have thanked her for it.
She beamed, I thanked her for a second and third time and there followed a bungling couple of seconds in which I tried to kiss her on the cheek only to chicken out and offer her my hand instead.
“Aren’t you going to try it on?” she asked.
I flinched. A lurch of panic in my stomach. “What?”
A smile, almost sly. “The sweater…”
As I struggled into my birthday present, Abbey cut us both a generous slice of cake.
“Made this myself,” she said. “Could be interesting.”
“What do you think?” I asked once I had squirmed inside the pullover.
“Very nice,” Abbey said. “Very tasty.”
I think I must have blushed again. Certainly I didn’t say anything further, and as we sat in silence on the sofa eating cake, Abbey wriggled a bit closer.
“Thanks for the cake,” I said. “Thank you for my present.”
She sighed with what seemed like frustration. “Henry?”
“What?”
“You can kiss me now.”
Like an idiot, I just stared, crumbs of cake cascading from my mouth.
My mobile began to buzz. Abbey said later that she wished I’d turned it off and just leapt on her but I think some pusillanimous part of me was grateful for the distraction.
“Hello?” I said, a little wearily.
“Darling! Happy birthday!”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks very much.”
“Sorry I’ve not got you anything this year. I’ll give you some money when I get back. I know you used to like something to open but you’re a big boy now. You’d prefer the cash, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. Sounds nice.”
“Are you having a good evening? Doing anything special?” She stopped, suddenly suspicious. “You’re not at the hospital, are you? Not with the old bastard?”
“Actually, I’m in the flat. With a… friend.” I turned to Abbey to check that the description was OK and she smiled impatiently back.
“I’d better go, Mum.”
“Many happy returns, darling.” At the other end of the line I heard the bass rumble of male laughter.
“Bye then,” I said softly.
“Bye-bye, sweetheart.”
I switched off the phone and flung it into the corner of the room. Abbey was watching with an amused look. “Your mum?”
“Yes.”
“She OK?”
“Sounded fine.”
“Good.” Abbey stretched herself out and leaned back into the sofa.
“Listen,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Before the phone rang… Does that offer still stand? Would it be possible-”
Abbey lunged. In a glorious moment, I felt her mouth pressed hard against mine, the honeyed warmth of her breath, the moist intrusion of her tongue. We came up for air and sat gazing at one another, stupid sloppy grins on both our faces. No one spoke.
Then the phone rang, the landline this time.
Abbey shook her head in silent, irritated warning.
I’m afraid I’m the kind of person who gets superstitious about ignoring the telephone. I can’t walk past a ringing phone booth without feeling an irrational stab of guilt. So of course I got up, walked across the room and tried not to sound too out of breath.
“Hello?”
“Henry Lamb?” The voice sounded aggravatingly familiar.
“Speaking.”
“I’m calling on behalf of Gadarene Glass.”
I felt myself begin to simmer. “I thought I’d told you to stop bothering me.”
“So you did. But I felt I really owed it to you to try one last time. Might I interest you in a new window?”
“No,” I said flatly. “You might not.”
“And that’s your final answer? Your answer is no?”
“Absolutely.”
The caller said nothing. There followed a long silence as the truth of it smacked me in the face and slapped me viciously around the chops.
“On second thought…”
“What?” She sounded utterly exasperated, like a teacher hand-holding a spectacularly dim-witted child through their ABCs. “What’s your answer now?”
“The answer is yes,” I said, cautiously at first, then growing in confidence. “The answer is yes!”
The line went dead.
Abbey was looking at me as though I was mad. “Who on earth was that?”
The doorbell began to jangle, hectically, insistently, without pause — the kind of ring you’d expect if someone was being murdered on your doorstep.
“Stay there,” I said, fueled by cocktail, birthday cake and the best kiss of my life, I strode to the front door and wrenched it open.
A little old lady stood outside. With her prim demeanor, outsized glasses and neatly curled hair, she looked as though she ought to be running the jam stall at the church fete instead of standing on my doorstep in Tooting after dark.
Her right hand was pressed hard against the bell. Mercifully, when she saw me, she let go. “Your grandfather said you were intelligent. Evidently, he was blinded by sentiment.”
“Who on earth are you?”
“You’re in the most terrible danger, Mr. Lamb.”
“Didn’t I ask who you were?”
“I’m an ally. That’s all you need to know for now. I assume your grandfather never told you ab
out the password?”
“My granddad’s in the hospital,” I said. “He’s in a coma.”
“But he laid plans, Henry. I’m merely playing my part in the process.” She peered past me into the house. “Extraordinary. It hasn’t changed one bit.”
“What?”
“You know by now, I suppose, who your grandfather was? What he was?”
“Chief field officer in the Directorate. Mr. Dedlock’s number one. The leading light in the secret war against the House of Windsor.” She lowered her voice. “More kills to his name than any other soldier.”
“It’s all true, then?” I said softly.
“All true, Mr. Lamb. With a good deal of the really unpleasant detail still to come.” She seemed to be surveying the street. A battered car, effluent brown, grumbled past and she stared interrogatively at its driver. “I mustn’t stay long tonight. They’ll have put watchers on you.”
“Watchers?”
“Tell no one you’ve seen me. Not even Dedlock.”
“You know Dedlock?”
“I know them all. Knew them all, at any rate.” She gave me a disgusted look, as though I’d just broken wind and laughed about it. “What a hideous sweater.”
“It was a present,” I said defensively. Then, remembering the gravity of the situation: “I think you’d better come inside.”
“Not tonight. The enemy is very close. We’ll meet again soon, Until then — tread carefully.”
Before I could stop her, she was gone, trotting spryly into the dark. I peered out at the street and could see no sign of those “watchers” she’d spoken about. But I was careful to double-lock the door all the same before I went back into the sitting room, where Abbey, still aflutter from our kiss, was polishing off another slice of cake.
“I was thinking,” she said, “how about we go to the cinema tomorrow? I’m not sure what’s on-” She saw my face. “What’s happened? Who was that?”
“A ghost from the past,” I said, before, in a sudden surge of pessimism, adding: “Or the shape of things to come.”
Chapter 9
Somehow another night had passed, another cheerless journey had been endured with Barnaby and I had come again to the Directorate, back to that glass bubble and its impossible occupant.
“You look tired, Henry Lamb. I do hope that landlady of yours isn’t keeping you up nights.”
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, starchily affronted that this half-naked ghoul should even know of Abbey’s existence, let alone be talking about her in such a way.
Dedlock laughed and a thin trail of bubbles left his mouth, popping as they reached the surface. “An old man’s joke,” he said, as a second stream drifted after the first. “God knows we need something to laugh about now.” In his arthritic doggy paddle, he swam close to the pane and grimaced. “How’s your granddad?”
I felt a trickle of sweat creep down my back. “No change. No change at all.”
Jasper spoke up, all business. “There is still a sliver of hope. It is just possible that your grandfather left us a clue. We need to see his home.”
“You want to go to my granddad’s house?”
“It’s what he would have wanted,” Dedlock said. “Trust me, it’s really important that you give us your full cooperation.”
I thought for a moment. “There is a condition.”
A spasm of irritation disrupted Dedlock’s face. “What?”
“I want you to tell me exactly what it was that Granddad did for you.”
“Ignorance is a virtue in our business. Relish it. Believe me, you would not wish to know the truth.”
“You owe me an explanation.”
The old man banged the side of his tank, fury bulging in his ancient eyes. “Just do your duty! Time is running out.”
Barnaby drove Jasper and me to 17 Temple Drive, where my grandfather had lived out a life far richer and more strange than I could ever have guessed.
On the journey, I made myself unpopular by insisting we pull over at a corner shop to buy a couple of tins of cat food. I’d been feeling profoundly guilty about the old man’s pet, terrified that we would arrive to find the poor animal with its ribcage poking through its fur, mewling at me in piteous accusation.
At last, Barnaby pulled up outside the old bastard’s house. “Doesn’t look like much,” he said. “Not for him.”
“You knew him?” I asked.
Barnaby summoned up a look of astonishingly undiluted bellicosity. “Thought you had a job to do.”
We stepped out of the car, slammed the doors, and Barnaby sped into the distance.
Once he was gone, Jasper looked up at the house and wrinkled his nose. “After you.”
I fumbled with the key, opened the door and walked inside. Jasper, embarrassed, hung back, waiting by the threshold.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“You need to invite me in.”
“What?”
Jasper looked at his feet. “You need to invite me in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your grandfather was prudent. There are snares here, too. Psychic traps and etheric burglar alarms. He’s made sure I can’t enter without permission.”
I grinned. “Like a vampire?”
“Just ask me in, Henry.”
“Very well.” I shrugged. “Come in.”
Jasper stepped inside, looking agitatedly around him as though he expected at any moment to be perforated by a booby trap or tumble through a trapdoor. “We don’t want to linger. They’ll be watching.”
Leaving him to his melodramatics and struggling against the memories stirred by the smell of burnt sausages, I began searching for the cat, scouring kitchen, bathroom and lounge.
“Is there a safe?” Jasper asked.
“Granddad hasn’t got a safe,” I said.
“He’d have disguised it. It wouldn’t necessarily look like a safe. Probably more like a sheet of metal.”
For a second, I wavered. Then I made my decision. “You’d better come upstairs.”
The bedroom was just as before, mummified and changeless — the coffee-stained newspaper, the clock stopped at 12:14, the photograph of me as a child. I expected Jasper to make some quip at the sight of it, some nugget of sarcasm about Worse Things Happen at Sea, but he was fizzing with nerves, glancing feverishly into shadows, jumping like a startled squirrel at the slightest sound.
I moved the photograph aside to reveal the sheet of metal underneath. “This what we’re looking for?”
Jasper leaned close, peering at the keyhole and the metal pincers which ran around the circumference of the hole. “DNA lock,” he murmured. “Give me your hand.”
“What?” I said. “What are you going to do with me?”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re not here for your good looks and your six-pack, Henry. Just give me your hand.” Jasper grabbed my left hand. “I need to borrow your thumb for a minute.”
“Oh,” I said doubtfully.
“Press it against the hole. Make sure you draw blood.”
“What? Why do you want me to do that?”
“Like I said — DNA lock. Knowing him, it’s bound to be a family thing.”
I protested that I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“Henry, please. Just trust me.”
“Are you sure?”
“For God’s sake, we’re running out of time.”
Warily, feeling rather as though I’d been bullied into it, I pressed my thumb hard against the hole. The pincers instantly drew blood and I yelped in shock. When I took my thumb away, the metal was stained with red.
With a soft click, the metal sheet slid open.
“See?” Jasper said.
Just as this happened, something furry brushed against my legs. I looked down. “Hello,” I said, and the cat purred happily back. To my relief, he looked every bit as plump as before. “I’ve got some food for you.”
“Forget the cat,” Jasper snappe
d. “What’s in the safe?”
There was a small compartment built into the wall, entirely empty except for a hardbacked notebook. I pulled it out and saw that someone had pasted a white sticker to the cover, on which was written:
For Henry
So nakedly covetous was the look in Jasper’s eyes that I thought he was about to snatch it away from me, like a jealous schoolgirl grabbing at a classmate’s love letter.
“What does it say?” he asked. “Quick — what does it say?”
Flipping it open, I saw that the book was filled with familiar handwriting, the pen pressed down so hard upon the paper that every leaf of it was ridged with the outline of letters.
The first page read:
Dear Henry,
If you are reading this, then I have met with some disaster, either by my own folly or at the hand of the enemy. I imagine that you must by now have been inducted into the Directorate and that you will have guessed that there was considerably more to my life — and to yours — than I ever let you know. For this my sincere apologies.
Both the Directorate and the House of Windsor will be looking for a woman named Estella. The secret of her location has kept the war in stalemate for years.
This book is a list of instructions for how to survive what follows unscathed. You must be certain to follow them to the letter and, above all else, you must trust the Process. Remember that, Henry. Whatever else happens — trust the Process.
The cat nuzzled against my legs and meowed.
“What does it say?” Jasper asked, excitement and relief his voice.
“He says it’s a set of instructions. Something about a process.”
Jasper sounded close to giggling. We’re saved!”
The cat nudged past my ankles, mewed and stalked imperiously to the door. He stopped, looked back and gave a final impatient yowl.
“Do you know?” I said. “I think that cat wants us to follow him.”
“Ridiculous,” said Jasper, although I noticed that when I walked across the room he was close behind me. Or perhaps it was simply because I had that book and Jasper was drawn to it as a dog to aniseed.
Whatever his motive, it proved fortuitous, because if Mr. Jasper and I had stayed where we were, the two fizzing balls of flame which smashed through the window a minute or so later would have almost certainly have hit us square in the face. Instead, they bounced off the wall, dropped onto the carpet and set themselves to burning.
The Domino Men v-2 Page 7
