“He hid it in your flat,” Miss Morning said. “I discovered it behind your television.”
“So I’ve heard,” I muttered. “What does it do?”
The old lady smiled again. “It’s going to stop the Prefects.”
“How will it do that?”
“Your grandfather promised it would work. But Henry?”
“Yes?”
“If anything goes wrong in there. If we get separated. Trust the Process, won’t you?”
“What?”
“When the time comes, you’ll know what I mean. Just promise me — trust the Process.”
With impeccable timing, my mobile phone began to trill. When I saw who it was, I think I might actually have groaned aloud. I turned away from the others, hit the answer key and sighed: “Hello, Mum.”
“Gordy’s a shit. He’s a shit like all the rest.”
“Are you still in Gibraltar?” I asked gently.
“God, no,” she said. “Back home now, thank Christ. Jesus, what a disaster. The man’s an absolute bastard.”
“Not a good holiday, then?”
“It was a catastrophe. His only topic of conversation was his exes…”
Barbara tapped me on the shoulder. “Time to go in now.”
“Mum?” I said. “I’m sorry. But I’ve got to get to work. I’ll call you later, OK? We can catch up then. Have a natter.”
Mum gave a protractedly theatrical sniff. “If a day at the office means more to you than a conversation with your mother—”
“Bye, Mum.” I finished the call and turned back to Barbara.
Miss Morning, still holding that insanely improbably weapon, had begun to walk toward the office, tottering heroically onward in little-old-lady steps. We easily caught up.
I spoke quietly so that only Barbara would hear me. “Something I’ve never understood… If Estella’s in there — the real Estella — then what do we do when we find her?”
“It’s not going to be nice,” she said. “Not nice at all.” Barbara’s face had turned chalk-pale and she seemed to move more mechanically than ever, propelled forward by some irresistible force. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to kill her.”
Slimy with sweat, oppressed by spasms which shook the whole of his body and struggling to swallow the lake of bile in his throat, the next king of England crouched in the passenger seat of Mr. Streater’s Nova and whimpered about the end of the world.
The driver’s gaze passed casually over the prince, his voice a twitch of disdain. “What’s up with you?”
Outside, a gaggle of girls, belt-skirted, orange-peel-skinned and mountainously stilettoed, lurched and reeled along the pavement. Streater honked the car horn, at which one of the revelers raised her middle finger in contemptuous salute.
The driver sniggered. “Always liked a woman with a bit of attitude. With a wiggle in her walk and steel in her arse. You’re the same, aren’t you, chief? You like a girl who knows what she wants and how to get it. Your missus is like that. Just a shame these days it’s not you she wants.”
The prince whimpered again, a pitiful, helpless threnody, like the sound a puppy makes on catching a glimpse of the veterinarian’s knife and guesses, too late, what is to come.
“Up for some tunes, chief? Something to blow away the cobwebs? Something to get us in the mood?” Streater’s left hand drifted away from the steering wheel toward the glove compartment, clicked it expertly open and unleashed an avalanche of old cassettes. Arthur moaned and Streater noted, with something akin to satisfaction, that his charge had actually begun to drool. He tossed a handful of tapes onto Arthur’s lap.
The prince stared dumbly down at them and saw that they were all identical, all labeled with the same short word.
“What is this…” he began, squinting at what was written in front of him as though he was not quite certain of its reality. “What is this… Boner?”
Streater grinned. “That’s my old band, chief.”
“Band? You’re a musician?”
“Played bass. Used to do a lot of gigs. How else do you think I met Pete?” Streater plucked out a tape and thrust it into the mouth of the car’s cassette player. “Here we go. Let us know what you think.”
The prince groaned again, Mr. Streater pressed play and the car was filled with the beehive roar of static. There was a moment’s silence, followed not, as Arthur had expected, by the cacophony of modern music but by a clipped, strangulated voice, a masterclass in received pronunciation.
“Good morning, Arthur.”
At the sound of it, the prince wriggled up in his seat, wiped his mouth and felt the distant pull of lucidity. “Mother?” he said.
He turned to Mr. Streater, intending to ask the meaning of this strange recording, only to see that the blond man was rhythmically tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and humming, a little discordantly, as he drove, as though he was joining in with some chorus or refrain which the prince was unable to hear.
The tape went on. “Of late, I have been thinking a good deal about the first stalking party your father took you on. You must have been terribly small. Six, perhaps, or seven.”
The eyes of the prince moistened at this, for he knew what was coming, knew with what he was about to be confronted.
“You seemed so eager for the adventure. I recall that for once I felt a small measure of pride in you — that warm maternal glow which one is often told that ladies in my position are expected to feel. But then, as usual, you lived down to our expectations. You came home early and in tears. You had walked out with the rest of them but when the moment came for the belly of the kill to be slit open and for you, as the most junior member of the hunt, to receive the honor of having its blood laid across your forehead, you began to cry. You mewed as though you were still a baby. You refused to be blooded then and have spurned it ever since. That awful woman you married has done nothing to encourage you. You have turned out so spineless, Arthur, that I saw no choice but to place you in Mr. Streater’s care. I only hope that he has prized some semblance of manhood from you.”
Mr. Streater winked.
“It saddens me that you are to be the only heir of the House of Windsor. I suspect that by the time you hear this, Leviathan will be on his way at last. I do hope you are blooded in time. I pray you are man enough to welcome our savior and do what needs to be done. I only hope that at long last you can make me proud.”
The tape spooled to a finish and Arthur slumped miserably in his seat. “I never liked the sight of blood,” he said at last. “Why is that so wrong of me?”
Streater laughed. “Tough titty, chief. Gonna be a lot of it about in the next few days.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that Leviathan’s gonna make a few changes. A few improvements to the city. I mean that you’re expected to help out.”
The car slowed down, almost home now, back in the familiar alley of the Mall, the Nova processing with high seriousness along the wide stone channel. At last, the blond man pulled up outside Clarence House.
“Get out, chief. I’m not stopping. There’s still some shit I’ve gotta sort.”
Arthur groped for the door handle and, like a one-night stand on the morning after, stepped unsteadily, dazed and humiliated, from the car.
“Oi!” Streater had wound down his window and was leering out of it like a lecherous cabbie hoping for a tip. “I’ve got a couple of things for you.”
“What?”
“Here’s a little pick-me-up.” He shoved a shrink-wrapped syringe into Arthur’s hands. “And here’s something else. Just in case.” He shoved an object into the prince’s hands and, too late, Arthur saw what it was, caught the glint of dawn light on gun barrel, and felt nauseous at the sight of it, green with disgust.
“I don’t want a gun.”
“Just take it, chief. Remember what your mum said? You’ve gotta be blooded. And you might need it. What if you see something you don’t like? What if you’re
confronted with the truth?”
The window hiccoughed upward. Streater revved the engine and, without so much as a wave goodbye, turned the car and hot-rodded back into the city.
Stowing into his jacket pocket the accessories of a criminality from which, only a few days earlier, he would have believed himself completely removed, Arthur trudged indoors. Servants were already up and about, doing whatever it is that servants do — wiping, scraping and polishing, making ready, making clean. As the prince passed by, they stopped, looked down at the ground and said nothing. They asked no questions. Discretion had been bred into them and even at the sight of their master reduced to the status of a bum, all of them held their tongues.
Overcome with desire, helpless with craving, the prince lurched into an alcove and, with a grim facility which would have horrified anyone who had ever loved him, injected himself with another hit of ampersand. He sighed in dark delight. It was only when he was finished that he noticed that an under-butler was standing opposite, his eyes still cast feudally toward the ground. Making a stab at dignity, flailing toward decorum and falling horribly short, the prince rolled down his sleeve and tottered past.
The underbutler’s face burned with shame. Just as the prince was almost out of sight, he said: “Sir?”
Slowly, the prince turned around, dumbstruck by the insolence.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the man. “But I have to say something.”
“What?” hissed the prince.
“Fight it, sir! You have to fight it!”
The prince stared at the servant. No doubt he had passed the man a thousand times, but his face was entirely unfamiliar to him. The fellow had a strange, whiskery moustache and an air of almost feline sleekness.
“What…” he began. “What did you say?”
“I said you’ve got to fight it,” said the under-butler again. “For the sake of us all, you have to snap out of this.”
The man backed away and disappeared, his courage evidently all used up.
Arthur tried not to think too hard about this strange interlude and lurched on toward his quarters.
He heard the sounds before he even reached his door. Animal noises. Grunts and groans. Yells and screeches. He paused outside. Had he been mistaken? No, there they were, the sounds of passion, almost comical in their volume and excess. There were squealed suggestions of the most indecent nature. There were hoarse commands and whimpered pleasures. The prince heard his oldest friend yelp in delight and his lover moan in delirious abandonment.
As ampersand gurgled through his synapses, slimed down his nervous system and surged along his bloodstream, the prince felt the weight of the gun in his pocket and knew what he had to do.
He opened the door and walked inside. Who knows what he saw behind that door, what grotesquerie, what lurid pornography, what leering simulacra.
You might reasonably expect at this point, when the drug ampersand had almost completely destroyed his capacity for reason, for us to tell you about a couple of gunshots, to be told about the ferocious whip-crack of that revolver echoing around the corridors of Clarence House.
That wasn’t to be. Instead, two minutes later, the prince simply re-emerged, as inside the sounds of romance went on unabated.
Only one thing had changed in this picture. A single, unremarkable detail which none of us could have predicted but which immediately made everything different.
There was a small gray cat strolling by his side.
In the corridor, two old acquaintances stood waiting. Each held a pasty in his hand — half-eaten, their glistening insides dripping onto the floor, where they clung glutinously to the plush strands of carpet.
“Evening, cock!” crowed Detective Chief Inspector George Virtue.
“Wotcha!” bugled Detective Sergeant Vince Mercy.
“Why are you here?” Arthur asked.
One of the fat men wiped his meat chop of a hand across his nose. “Bottled it, didn’t you, scout?”
“Couldn’t go through with it, could you?”
“Wassock.”
“Toss-pot.”
“Nonce.”
“You gonna stand about and let people laugh at you?”
“You gonna let them take the piss?”
“Be a man, guv.”
“Get yourself blooded.”
Arthur stared, a little more understanding inching into his consciousness. “What did you say?”
“Blooded, guv.”
“That’s what he said. Get yourself blooded.”
The prince stared at them both, suddenly hopeful, suddenly aware of the possibility for redemption. “Gentlemen!” he said, sounding for the first time in days something like his old self.
“Yeah?” Mercy asked through a mouth of semi-digested mulch.
“I don’t believe you’re real.”
“Oh, that’s gutting, mate.”
Arthur went on. I can’t believe what I’m hearing from that room. Or what I saw in there either. It’s an illusion, isn’t it? It’s a trick being played on me be ampersand.”
“Don’t know what you’re on about, pal.”
The prince glared at them. “Why?” he asked. “Why do you want me to kill my wife?”
“What’s the matter with you?” Virtue shouted. “There’s a bloke in there porking your missus and you’re wasting time yammering with us.”
Deliberately, Arthur turned away from them (behind him, their cries went on — “Do it, you arsehole!” “Pull the bleeding trigger!”) and, his gun lowered, went back into the bedroom.
As the ampersand-filter descended from his eyes, he saw the truth of it — Laetitia on the bed, alone and fast asleep, curled up under the covers, the picture of innocence and chastity (though perhaps looking a little heavier than Arthur could remember having seen her before).
Back outside, the detectives Virtue and Mercy had disappeared. The prince fell to his knees in relief, wracked with sobs at how close he had come. At first he didn’t even notice what had walked in beside him and begun to nuzzle against his legs.
Arthur Windsor wiped his eyes, dabbed the snot from his nose and, miraculously, managed a kind of smile.
The gray cat looked up at him and purred.
“You again,” whispered the prince.
The cat purred, seemed to smile and stalked closer to the downed prince, please at what had been averted, knowing the dangers which still lay ahead but ready at last for the endgame.
The prince fell back upon the floor as the cat came closer. He was about to say something more, to offer the animal some thanks, some further words of gratitude, when exhaustion washed over him and everything faded away. The last thing he saw was a feline face, small and gray, filled with wisdom and concern, opening its mouth as though it was about to speak and, at long last, explain it all.
Chapter 23
At 9:01 A.M. that Tuesday morning, Mr. Derek Mackett, who had dedicated the great majority of his life to safeguarding the Civil Service Archive Unit, waved two of the most notorious killers in British history past reception without even asking for their ID. It was the only blot on a career which (with its 100 percent attendance record and five-time commendation for loyal service) stood otherwise unblemished.
Mackett was never able to forgive himself for the oversight. How could he have failed to stop two people who transparently had no business in a civil service building without getting them to sign in for guest passes? How could he have blithely hurried them through, even going so far as to speed them on their way with a gruffly avuncular smile and a friendly nod? Why did he think that there was nothing at all suspicious in two grown men dressed as schoolboys wandering into an office block? Why couldn’t he have smelt the bloodlust on them?
The counselors were good with him, awfully decent and kind. They told him that the Prefects were able to warp perception, that they were masters of deceit and that Mr. Mackett was far from the only person responsible for what happened. But Derek took his job very seriously indeed,
and as far as he was concerned, the buck stopped with him.
I heard that he died last month, not so much of a broken heart as of fatally punctured professional pride.
At 9:02 A.M., the Prefects were in the lift, chittering excitedly to one another, ascending toward the uppermost level. Theoretically, there should still exist CCTV footage of their journey, but you might not be altogether surprised to learn that the tapes for that day show only electric snow, that they are filled end to end with the miserable vacuum of static.
At 9:03 A.M., Hawker and Boon arrived at the tenth floor and the carnage began.
Their first victim was Philip Statham, the safety officer. He was leant over his desk, engrossed in a book of Sudoku, when Hawker and Boon strolled up to him, sliced away the front of his fan, deftly switched it on and pressed Mr. Statham’s face into the spinning blades. Blood on the puzzles. Desktop dappled, in a hideous kind of artistry, with red.
A secretary by the name of Emily Singer saw this happen. I understand that she has never fully recovered from the experience and is unable to sleep with the lights out. On that Tuesday, however, Mrs. Singer showed some presence of mind. She screamed as loudly as she knew how, smashed the fire alarm with its little plastic hammer and dashed pell-mell for the exit. This should have meant that the population of the entire building began an automatic evacuation onto the street, but for some reason the mechanism malfunctioned, failing to make any sound at all. A satisfactory explanation for this has yet to be advanced.
Singer escaped to the exit but many of her colleagues were not so lucky. They were corralled against the photocopier by the relentless storm of Hawker and Boon, who moved amongst them with penknives flashing and teeth shining, their eyes bright with the reaper’s joy on the first day of harvest.
“What ho!” said Boon, as he forced the hand of a Timothy Clapshaw (who I vaguely remember and who I think had something to do with accounts) into a paper shredder.
“Top of the morning to you!” said Hawker, energetically staple-gunning the hands of a brusque PA called Sandra Pullman to the surface of her boss’s desk. “I don’t suppose any of you fine fellows has seen Estella?”
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