“We’ve been thinking about all the things she lets him do to her. About his hairy arse in her face.”
The other one again: “We’ve been picturing their screws, guv. Their quickies. Their tumbles. Their knee tremblers.”
“We’ve been imagining the mucky bits on your behalf, guv. Been wondering who likes it dirty. Who likes it rough. Who puts what in where.”
“I hope you appreciate this, guv. We’re looking out for you here. We’re watching yer back.”
The conversation which followed was a long one, endlessly, inventively upsetting, and by the time detectives Virtue and Mercy had finished speaking, the prince’s eyes were red and raw from weeping.
Chapter 21
We were waiting at the Directorate in expectation of a miracle. That was what the odious Mr. Jasper had called her — “a genuine, irrefutable, copper-bottomed miracle.”
Dedlock’s squad of killers had found nothing. Hawker and Boon were still at large and the air seemed to crackle with a perplexing combination of urgency and exhaustion.
I stood apart from the others, staring out of the pod, past the illusory tourists and toward the real world, where, beyond the mirage of camera wielders and guidebook flourishers, I could see the snake of real punters waiting patiently in line. Past them — the lights of the South Bank, the neon and halogen of real life.
A hand on my shoulder. “You look tired, Henry.”
It was Miss Morning, more battle weary than ever.
“I am,” I said. “And I’m starting to wonder whether this miracle of Jasper’s is ever going to show up.”
Mr. Jasper strolled over to us, a look of smug self-satisfaction uncurling itself across his face. “Trust me,” he said, “she’ll be worth the wait.”
In this, if in nothing else, Jasper was right. As we watched, the queue of tourists began to part in wonder and envy as a woman, a stranger, strode through the crowd and stepped smartly into the pod like she belonged there. The door hissed shut and we began to move, but with a judder, as though even the Eye itself had been thrown off kilter by the newcomer.
Straightaway we knew that she was what we’d been waiting for, that she was Jasper’s miracle.
She was tapered, statuesque, with a mane of jet-black hair, and the curves of her exquisite figure were encased in a tightly belted trench coat which flapped about her like a cape. She was flawlessly complexioned and what light make-up she had applied served only to accentuate the splendor of her cheekbones, the imperious curve of her nose, the glacial sensuality of her lips. Most striking of all were her eyes. Once they had been turned upon you, it was impossible to imagine denying her anything she might desire.
There was something terrible about this woman. Hers was the bleak beauty of nature, the desolate grandeur of an ice field, the awful grace of a tiger stalking its prey.
But the most surprising thing of all was that I thought I recognized her from somewhere.
“Barbara?” I asked.
I looked closer and I was certain. It was her. A stretched, plucked, distended parody of her, perhaps, but unquestionably the girl from the office all the same. She favored me briefly with a condescending glance but did not offer a reply.
“Gentlemen.” Jasper was wearing the look of the cardsharp who knows he can never lose a game. “This is our hunter.”
The woman did not smile or bow or in any way acknowledge the introduction but gazed at us in much the same way that the first Cro-Magnon may have surveyed a gathering of Neanderthals.
“Remarkable,” Miss Morning murmured. “Repugnantly immoral, of course, but still — remarkable.”
“Barbara?” I asked again. “It is you, isn’t it?”
She turned her head in my direction with a motion that was strangely mechanical. I noticed that she already wore the same earpiece as the rest of us and I wondered if I might not be able to hear the whir of motors, the clank of gears.
“Hello, Henry,” she said, and I could tell from her voice that it was still her. Changed, alchemized, transformed, but somehow still Barbara. Her perfect lips formed words as though they were still learning how. “Barbara’s in her somewhere. Buried very deep. She says hello.” The word ‘hello’ was spoken as though it was barely familiar to her, alien and slightly dirty, like a judge struggling with the patois of some young offender brought before him in the dock.
I turned to Jasper. “What the hell have you done to her?”
He giggled. “I’ve made her better. This is Estella come back to us. This is victory.”
“Enough,” Dedlock snapped. “I want proof.”
Barbara sashayed past and walked as close to the tank as she could. “The first Estella is inside me. And she knows you, Mr. Dedlock.” Why, at this, I was put in mind of Marilyn singing “Happy Birthday” to the president, I really couldn’t fathom.
“Estella…,” the old man stuttered. “You’ve come back to me.”
“It’s good to be back, sir,” she said, although her voice was wholly without conviction.
The man in the tank squirmed. If it had been possible for us to see, I have no doubt that Dedlock’s upper lip would have been coated in sweat, in the shifty rime of mendacity and betrayal. “How much do you remember?”
“I remember almost everything.”
“Almost everything?”
“I can recollect some of the smallest details of Estella’s life. I can remember a great deal of the existence of poor Barbara. But I am more than either of them.”
The head of the Directorate looked afraid.
“Gentlemen, we’re wasting time.” Barbara paced briskly back to the center of the pod. “The Directorate had frittered away the last twenty-four hours. We should have the Prefects in custody by now.”
“Tell me,” Dedlock said in a little boy’s voice. “How do we find them?”
“The answer’s been staring you in the face. Any one of you could have worked it out for yourself.”
Most of us could no longer stand to look at her so we gazed dolefully at the floor or stared shamefacedly out of the window, like a line-up of new arrivals at the kind of penitentiary where they favor throwing away the key.
“Dedlock,” snapped Barbara. “Bring up a heat map of the city.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“We don’t have time for your game playing. Just do it. Say a ten-mile circumference from Whitehall.”
Dedlock’s fingers twitched in the water and behind him, miraculously, we saw the lines of London shimmer into existence, the streets and roads form themselves out of the fluid in some impossible liquid cartography. Overlaid upon the familiar landmarks were splashes of yellow and orange.
“A heat map’s no good,” Dedlock protested. “Everything has a signature.”
Barbara raised a hand to silence him. “The Prefects are creatures of fire and sulphur. Watch the screen. They will reveal themselves.”
Amidst the blurs of oranges and yellows, there appeared two jets of red.
Others in her position might have found it hard not to sound triumphant, but Barbara’s voice held no trace of vanity or conceit. “There. We have our men.”
“Somewhere in Islington,” Dedlock muttered. “I’ll get an exact grid reference.”
Barbara turned away from the tank and started dispensing orders. “Jasper — get Barnaby to meet us. I want to drive directly to the site. Henry and I are going in together.”
“Me?” I said, my guts clenching like a fist at the prospect of another confrontation with the Domino Men. “What on earth do you want me for? You look pretty capable yourself.”
“Oh, I’m immensely capable, Mr. Lamb, but for some reason these creatures have taken a shine to you.”
For a moment, Jasper looked at his creation almost doubtfully. “I’ll organize the jackboots. Get the place surrounded. We’ll take them by force.”
“Hawker and Boon cannot be stopped by conventional weaponry,” Barbara said. “How much more blood do you want on your
hands before you learn that simple lesson?”
“Then what can stop them?”
The ghost of a smile appeared on Barbara’s impossibly perfect lips. “Miss Morning. How pleasant it is to be working alongside you again.”
The old lady squinted at Barbara. “I’m not sure precisely what you are, young lady. But you’re not Estella. You’re something new.”
“You know what I need. Get me the weapon.”
“I thought it was lost.”
“Then you were misinformed. The old man hid it in the safe house.”
Miss Morning smiled faintly. “Such a clever fellow in his own way.”
“Find it and bring it to me.”
Miss Morning nodded.
Starved of attention, the man in the tank beckoned Barbara back across the room. “I have the address. It’s somewhere on Upper Street. But where on earth could a couple of grown men dressed as schoolboys hide in Islington?”
“There’s a little place I know.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s good to have you back, Estella.”
“It’s good to be back, sir.”
“And so wonderful to see that everything’s been forgiven and forgotten.”
Barbara peered into the tank and the head of the Directorate shrank from her gaze. “That’s all in the past, sir.” She bared an unnaturally bright white set of teeth. “That’s water under the bridge.”
Mercifully, at that moment, the pod’s revolution was complete, and we were pushed back out into the freezing night air.
Barnaby was waiting. Barbara had climbed into the passenger seat and Jasper was clambering in the back when Miss Morning tapped me lightly on the shoulder.
“You need to call home. Tell Abbey I’m coming round.”
Exhausted from the battering of the past few days, my brain couldn’t really compute this information. “What?”
“Just tell her I’m on my way.”
“OK… Why are you going to my flat?”
“That flat isn’t your flat. It’s a Directorate safe house.”
“What?”
“Henry, it’s where we carried out the Process. Its’ where we cut poor Estella. Don’t act so surprised. Why else do you think your granddad was so keen for you to live there?”
The window at the front of the car whirred down. “Henry,” Barbara said quietly — although this new softness in her tone made me feel more afraid of her than any shout or scream would have done. “Get in the car.”
“You have to go,” Miss Morning said. “I’ll explain later.”
For a second, I hesitated. Then I heard Barbara’s cool, clear vice (“Time is of the essence, Henry”) and I climbed in beside Jasper. Miss Morning slammed shut the door and as the car drove away, she mouthed something at me. A single word. I couldn’t quite make it out, but now, looking back on it as the days of my life almost certainly dwindle into single digits, I’m certain I know what it was.
“Sorry.”
Jasper was fidgeting, interlocking his fingers, touching the end of his nose, fiddling with his chair, periodically clearing his throat and then, growing bored with the rest, poking me in the ribs.
“Isn't she wonderful?” He nodded toward the front, where Barbara was giving our driver directions in the dispassionate tones of a satellite navigation system.
“Why did it have to be Barbara?” I hissed. “Why did you have to choose her?”
“She was perfect, Mr. Lamb. Just perfect.”
Swallowing my disgust, I took out my mobile and stabbed in Abbey’s number.
Barbara swiveled around, suddenly suspicious. “Who are you calling?”
“My landlady.”
“Make it quick, then.”
As it happened, I only got her voicemail.. “Hi, Abbey,” I said, almost in a whisper, acutely aware that the others were listening. “Listen, I know this might sound a bit odd but I’ve got a friend coming round to the flat. Is there any chance you could be there for her? Help her out with anything she needs. I can’t explain. But it’s really important. Anyway, I’ll call you later. And…” I couldn’t begin to articulate what I wanted to say. “I’m thinking about you a lot.” I broke the connection.
Jasper, still buoyant from his triumph, started smirking knowingly at me, but I ignored him and took to staring moodily out of the window.
We moved into the city and were passing a department store, open late for Christmas shopping, festooned with fluorescent Santas, blinking baubles, and Day-Glo snowmen, when Barbara suddenly said: “Pull over here.”
“Why?” Barnaby asked.
A hint of a smile. Or perhaps just a trick of the light. “We’re going to need costumes.”
At the far end of Upper Street, sandwiched between the kind of newsagent that makes most of its money from the magazines on its top shelf and a place which will sell you fried chicken at four o’clock in the morning, there was a nightclub called Diabolism.
Its name was a vestigial piece of pretension from an old proprietor who had nurtured plans to take the place upmarket. Unlike him, his successors knew their market.
Once a week, every week, the club hosted an event called Skool Daze, which, with its mélange of cheap alcohol, hoped for promiscuity and chemically induced good humor, seemed no different from any other evening at Diabolism — except for a single innovation. In an attempt to recapture the carefree sybaritism of their adolescence, everyone who came through the door had to be dressed in an approximation of school uniform.
So you see now why Barbara insisted that we stop to pick up costumes.
It should go without saying that she looked extraordinary. She had picked out a skirt which displayed an impressive amount of leg and a blouse which, generously unbuttoned, revealed the aerodynamics of her cleavage. She was gorgeous — ravishingly, ridiculously so — yet I felt not a flicker of desire for her. The more time I spent in her company, the less real she seemed, as though she wasn’t quite there, more like a fantasy come to strange half-life instead of a real woman. It was only when I caught occasional glimpses of the Barbara I knew, in the way that she moved or a sudden dimpling of her cheeks, that I remembered the essential tragedy of the woman.
I’m rambling, of course, doing my best to avoid having to describe how Jasper and I climbed reluctantly into our little outfits, our shirts and striped ties. I couldn’t find shorts to fit me so I had to make do with rolling my trousers up above my knees. Actually, it was a look that Jasper almost pulled off, even if he did resemble the kind of kid who always came top of the class in mental arithmetic. I just looked ridiculous.
We left Barnaby in the car, engrossed in Peril Fiction and the Yellow Movement: The Fallible Narrator in the Lives of Sexton Blake. The photograph on the back cover was a younger version of our driver, uncharacteristically clean shaven, quietly pleased with himself, full of expectation for the future.
“I might have a sniff around in a bit,” he said, glancing up from his book. “See if there’s any sign of the enemy.”
I wish now that I’d said something to him. Thanked him, perhaps, for giving us a lift. Shaken his hand or something. Told him to let the bitterness go and enjoy what little was left of his life. But how could I have guessed? How could I have known that I was never going to see him again?
We strode over to the club. There was a ridiculously weedy bouncer at the door, sporting a little spiv’s moustache like no one had bothered to tell him that the Blitz was over and we didn’t have rationing anymore. He smirked at Barbara as she walked past and nodded brusquely at me, but just as Jasper was about to strut through, he held out his arm to stop him.
“Sorry, sir. Couples only.”
Jasper looked at him in astonishment. “What did you say?”
“Couples only. That’s the rules. Makes it a level playing field, you see.”
“Just let me through,” Jasper said, and tried to push his way past. All I can say about the struggle that ensued is that
the bouncer must have been very much more forceful than he appeared.
“OK.” Jasper stood back, put his hand in his pocket and produced a twenty-pound note. “Would this help change your mind?”
“Rules is rules,” the bouncer said sententiously.
“Fine.” Jasper dragged out another twenty-pound note. “How about this?”
The mustachioed man just shook his head.
“Brilliant,” Jasper snapped. “London’s only honest bouncer. Listen here,” he said, and I could see he was on the cusp of losing his temper. “Right now, inside your club, there are a couple of creatures who’d think nothing of making every woman in this city a widow just because they’re bored. Now, for God’s sake, let me pass.”
“No offense, sir. And I don’t mean to be rude. But would you mind awfully buggering off?”
I’d been watching this performance with no small amount of amusement, but when I turned to look at Barbara there was nothing but stern professionalism on her face.
“Mr. Jasper,” she said. “We can’t afford to waste time to here. See if you can gain access with another party. Henry and I must go inside.”
Jasper whined, “You could disable this man with a twitch of your wrist.”
“I don’t want to draw attention to us,” she said.
“You can’t leave me out here.” He contemplated his pale, almost hairless legs and shivered. “Not like this.”
Barbara gave him a look of sardonic dismissal, turned her back and vanished into the club. As I followed, she spoke quickly into her earpiece. “We’re at the club, sir. Near the targets. We’re going dark.”
Dedlock’s voice in both our ears. “Understood. And good luck.”
At the door, we both paid ten pounds to a woman who sat slouched on a stool chewing gum, who then grudgingly invited us inside.
Diabolism turned out the be a large concrete space packed with several hundred people swelling and roiling in an ocean of sweaty desperation. There seemed to be a vaguely festive theme, and I recognized the song which was making the floor thump and quiver as a dance remix of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland,” which had climbed alarmingly close to the top of the chart that year. There were firemen’s poles fixed around the room, about which the uninhibited could cavort. It was the kind of place that served Bacardi Breezer by the pint, and I’m afraid I hated it on sight.
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