“Mrs. Harriet Spork,” Polly Cradle says.
“Sister,” Harriet objects vaguely.
“I am Mary Angelica Cradle. We once made biscuits together. With Smarties.”
“Oh. Yes, dear. Of course.”
“I wish to confess to you, in the interests of full disclosure, that I ate about two-thirds of the Smarties during the cooking process.”
“Yes,” Harriet says again, with a slight smile. “I believe I knew that.”
“Also, I am engaged in a very satisfactory emotional and sexual relationship with your magnificent son. This relationship is not sanctioned by the ostensible rules of the Christian Communion, but falls into the category of committed partnerships tacitly approved as a modern prelude to possible marriage and procreation.”
Joe Spork tries not to swallow his tongue. One of the laymen slaps him cheerfully on the back. “You’re in serious trouble with that one, boy.”
Harriet nods. “I understand.”
“I mention all this because I wish to invite you to participate in a significantly illegal plan I have recently devised to save your son’s life and extract some measure of justice from those who have caused him and others considerable pain. I also believe that it will contribute to the process of saving the human race from a conclusion which is not only appalling but probably also blasphemous, or at the very least reduce the risk to society from a man of notable wickedness.”
“Oh,” Harriet Spork says.
“If you wish to take part, you must come with me now and do exactly as I say. I will not conceal from you that there is some risk. Say hello to your son.”
“Hello, Joshua.”
“Hello, Mum.”
“I’ll get my coat,” says Harriet Spork.
“Good,” Polly Cradle says. “That’s one.”
Abbie Watson sits on an uncomfortable bench outside the Hospital of St. Peter and St. George in Stoker Street. The wife of an anarchist who “makes time with terrorists” looks fragile and alone. She barely glances up as someone sits next to her.
“Mrs. Watson,” the other woman says.
“Go away.”
“Very shortly. I haven’t much time. I am about to kidnap and interrogate one of the men ultimately responsible for your husband’s injuries. I will then give that information to my lover, Joe Spork, who will use it to thwart the machinations of the individual who hopes to gain by their actions. It is likely that that person will expire in the course of this thwarting. If he doesn’t, he will go to prison for ever. Also, those within the government who have sanctioned and even endorsed his behaviour will be held to some species of account.”
Abbie Watson looks up. The woman is small and dark and very pretty, but there is a steel in her which Abbie has encountered only rarely. Behind her, somewhat abashed, is an emaciated-looking nun. Harriet Spork smiles nervously.
“I should also tell you,” the woman goes on, “that unless you object, Griff will be moved to the care of a Swiss specialist later today. Dr. von Bergen is flying from Zürich with his team. Griff will be the recipient of an experimental treatment in which tissue and organs are seeded on a polymer matrix using a neutral stem-cell line. I understand the speed of this process is now so rapid that you can almost see them growing. Dr. von Bergen anticipates that Griff will recover quite happily, given time and care, both of which he will have in abundance. There is almost no risk involved, especially given what I understand are the somewhat limited alternatives. You may therefore wish to avoid any involvement in my activities. I would entirely understand.”
Abbie Watson scowls. “Like Hell,” she says.
Polly Cradle nods. “Then that’s two.”
“I thought you’d never bloody get here!” Cecily cries before Polly can even speak. “And then I thought you’d decided I was too old! Where is the bugger? Shut up, Foalbury, I’m going, and that’s all there is to it. Oh, Harriet, hello, thank goodness, now I feel less like a crone among babes and more like a grandmother out with her brood. Speaking of broods, where’s the boy? Never mind, never mind, let’s get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I’ve brought my most alarming teeth!”
And indeed, she has, a steel set made in 1919 for an American prospector who liked to chew rocks and taste the precious ores.
“Three,” Polly Cradle says, and then explains what they are going to do. Joe Spork, listening in the back of the minibus Polly made him steal for the occasion, feels there is altogether too much cackling.
They follow the bus’s excellent (female) satellite-navigation system to the address Polly has chosen from the two on the Hon Don’s list, and take the lift to the right floor. With Joe waiting at the end of the corridor and Harriet, Abbie, and Cecily arranged behind her, Polly rings the bell.
When the doorbell rang, Arvin Cummerbund was in the walk-in shower of his apartment in Paddington. It is a modern apartment; off-white walls and sharp-edged furniture, a glass dining table in one corner of the open-plan space and an expensive cream leather sofa in the other. Arvin Cummerbund is very keen on the sofa, because it has a clever arrangement of rails which allows the back to be moved around for convenience. He has never actually used this facility, but he feels that its presence enriches his life.
Arvin, in the shower, considered himself, and found that he looked like a glistening Aztec pyramid made in flesh, step after step after step of glorious pink fat. Luxuriantly, he soaped. His hands lifted and loo-fahed, burnishing the edifice. He slipped his fingers under each precious layer, into the crease, around, and onto the top, beginning the process again. He examined himself, and found that he shone wetly in the mellow bathroom light. His strong, conical legs and knotted knees carried the remarkable burden of his body without strain. Arvin knew himself to be light on his feet. In a couple more decades, he would have to forsake some part of this majesty, lest his heart and joints begin to complain. In any case, his skin would stretch and droop, lose the resilient elasticity which made him so remarkably erotic.
He had it from Rodney Titwhistle that morning—a collegial bit of trivia over the morning reports—that sumo wrestlers, in the course of their training, must wash one another. Specifically, the younger, less lauded must assist the others in their ablutions. Arvin could not imagine wanting help. This daily ceremony was his chance to appreciate himself in fullest glory. Each roped handful was a memory of some vast, sumptuous, indulgent feast; every pound was earned in delight, represented physical excesses and lust. He treasured the stories beneath his skin almost as much as he enjoyed having this fabulous body. Arvin Cummerbund was more than fat, and far more than obese, which was a nay-sayers’ term, a sad little epithet born of puritans and fear-mongering, and probably of jealousy. He was gigantic, and as he stood in his special wash-box, with its concrete floor and mirrored walls, and the many jets of water scoured and exfoliated him, he fancied he resembled Poseidon himself. He made a mental note to secure a trident and a fishy costume. Magnificent Arvin the water god.
Alas, all things must pass. He stepped out of the shower and considered his lotions. For Arvin, the business of getting ready to go out could take an entire day. But the rewards were equal to the effort: women—in all shapes and sizes, of all ages and from all corners of the Earth and all walks of life—once they had overcome the initial fashionable reluctance to be encompassed by a man of his measure, found in themselves a powerful fascination with his body, a need to throw themselves across him and wallow in him. His current girlfriend, Helena (by any standard utterly beautiful, also Argentinian by birth and monstrously wealthy), had declared via the electronic mail her intention to feed him caviar with her fingers and ride him like a polo pony. It was an idea which Arvin Cummerbund felt had distinct promise.
And then the doorbell rang. Helena was early, but eagerness, Arvin Cummerbund thought to himself, was a trait he could only accept gracefully. Still, she would have to learn patience as well. The business of preparing Arvin for the fight was long and splendid. Perhaps he would pe
rmit her to assist. The notion of her, dressed no doubt in some long evening gown, climbing nimbly around Mount Cummerbund, diligently and even worshipfully applying unguents, possessed a degree of appeal.
He hitched a bath towel—custom-made—around his middle, and stepped lightly to his front door. He inhaled, so as to be at his most enormous, and flung it wide.
“My booty shake brings all the girls to the yard!” sang Arvin Cummerbund, striking a heroic pose.
None of the women on his step was Helena, and one of the Not-Helenas was staring at him and smiling with what appeared to be steel teeth. There were four of them, or rather, a group of three and a ringmaster or divine huntress who stood apart, whom he recognised unhappily from surveillance photographs as Mary Angelica “Polly” Cradle.
“I find that … profoundly disturbing, if true,” she said.
Arvin Cummerbund hoped very much that his towel was well-secured, because he was conscious of shrinkage. The three women with her were, to a graduate of a good university, alarmingly familiar. The Graeae. The fates. The maiden must be (oh, Jesus!) Abbie Watson, with what appeared to be her husband’s boating hook in one hand; the mother was Harriet Spork, gangster’s moll and flagellant nun now apparently resuming her career in thuggery, and the crone—the teeth! My God, the teeth!—had to be Cecily Foalbury of Harticle’s. His eye settled hopefully on Polly Cradle. She was small, and very intent, and … resolved. Discreetly, as if not wanting to make too much of a fuss about it, she was carrying a large pistol. It was an old one, very well-kept, and it seemed to have seen recent deployment. Arvin Cummerbund thought of the two dead men in Edie Banister’s flat, and of the other piece of news Rodney had imparted to him, of Edie’s death.
Not the Graeae. Worse: “Tricoteuses!” some part of his mind gargled in alarm. “The guillotine hags! Knitting of corpses’ hair. Flee, Arvin! Flee!”
However, a Cummerbund does not flee at his own gate. He stands. Most especially when there is the additional issue of a Webley Mk VI whose target is one’s own enormous belly, an easy mark at some remove, but at close quarters almost literally impossible to miss, even with the rather iffy Webley.
All of which is recent and regrettable history. Looking now at these three very determined women, and at the mistress of hounds with her enormous certainty, Arvin Cummerbund feels very cold, and very small. He glances southward, to his towel.
“Oh,” Arvin Cummerbund says damply.
“Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle murmurs. “Would you be so kind as to come with us?”
Somewhere back in the flat, there’s a satellite-linked panic button which he carries in his pocket at all times. It actually has a lanyard so that he can wear it in the shower, but it gets in the way of the soap situation and is—being designed not by Apple or Sony but by the MOD—extremely ugly. It is therefore notably out of reach, even if he has remembered to replace the battery recently. He glances back at the boathook, seeing the name WATSON in large painted letters along the haft, and he chills—even further—as he tracks the message inherent in that. Abbie Watson glowers.
Arvin Cummerbund sighs, and allows them to lead him away.
“The error you have made,” Polly Cradle says in the house by Hampstead Heath, “lies, if you will forgive me, in your assessment of yourself in relation to your enemies—of whom, incidentally, your attack upon Joshua Joseph Spork makes me one. You believe, because it suits you to do so as emissaries of a great and powerful conspiracy in service to commerce and personal gain, that you and your charming friend Mr. Titwhistle have what I will call the ‘moral low ground.’ ”
Mercer Cradle sits at a kidney desk on the other side of the room, watching his sister work and leafing through a copious file. The tricoteuses occupy a nasty little semicircle close by, also watching. Cecily Foalbury has the largest chair, a wooden rocker, profoundly inappropriate for an interrogation, which she appears to enjoy. She is drinking tea and slurping it around her metal teeth. Leaning against a bookshelf at the back of the room is a tall, bulky figure in a long coat. He is in shadow, but Arvin Cummerbund recognises Britain’s Most Wanted by the line of his jaw. That said, there is something … collected … about him. He’s come of age somehow.
Arvin’s own chair is an expensive one from Liberty, in chintz. It’s very comfortable. He has also been allowed to retain his towel and even given a blanket for warmth. He fusses with it.
Polly Cradle waits until she has his full attention, and continues. “You think there are no depths to which you will not stoop. From this perception you draw a sense of invulnerability. You believe that you are—if I may put it crudely—the bad guys. You cherish the notion that you serve a great necessity, and thus your evil deeds, from which you derive a certain frisson, are legitimised. Nonetheless, though regrettably necessary they are unquestionably evil, and in some small way, so are you. You bear this burden for the nation and the world, sacrificing your own nobility in the cause of higher salvation. I’m terribly impressed.
“This construction would make us,” she indicates the room in general, “the good guys. Misguided, but morally clean. As a consequence of our goodness, you feel safe in this very quiet, very secluded room.”
She smiles, then tuts as the dog Arvin Cummerbund earlier observed tugs at something in a carpet bag under the table, a rubbery sort of item. Harriet Spork picks the bag up off the floor and starts absently to unpack it. A rubber apron. A length of surgical hose. Arvin Cummerbund feels a sort of rushing feeling in his stomach. Polly Cradle nods a thank-you and goes on.
“The thing is, Arvin—you don’t mind if I call you Arvin, do you?—the thing is that you and Rodney are really quite nice people. You don’t break the law if you can help it, or misuse your personal power. You don’t bear grudges. You’re probably expecting me to say I don’t hold a grudge, either, because good people don’t, but actually I rather do. You sent my lover to be tortured. I do take that personally, Arvin. May I say also, inter alia, that torturing someone by proxy is even more contemptible than doing it oneself?”
From the bag: a box (half full) of surgical gloves. Gauze. Lint. Tape. Distilled water. Spirit. A pair of those odd little bent scissors which look like the ones used for cutting grapes, but which are intended for a more medical purpose. Cecily Foalbury leans over and scrabbles for a piece of plastic tubing, and measures it against her arm, then bites through it and measures again. Better.
Harriet Spork sighs. Something is missing from the pile. What is it? Has the dog got it? A quite obvious, commonplace something, a trivial item, no one in their right mind would leave home without one … where is it? Abbie Watson comes to her rescue.
“Bastion! Drop!”
There it is, dratted dog. Tourniquet. Abbie Watson sets it on the table, and looks at Arvin Cummerbund without compassion.
“My husband,” she says distantly, “is going into surgery right about now.”
Which gives rise to the first genuine silence Arvin has heard in years. Even Cecily Foalbury stops drinking her tea.
“Yes,” Polly Cradle murmurs after a moment. “Even so, I must regretfully inform you that you and your friend Rodney are not bad men at all, not in that sense. You are driven by a perceived necessity. You are good. The corollary of which is that we are very much the other thing. You are fallen into the hands of villains. I would advise you to consider the implications of that for a moment.” She does not point to the items on the table. Arvin looks at them anyway. “Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle goes on gently, “you are under the delusion that your safety is assured by common decency, but it is not. We are wicked and we are angry. There is no decency in this room. You have connived in the assassination of Edie Banister. You have taken Harriet’s son and put him to the question. You have done harm to this woman’s mate. And you have deprived me of my lover.
“I do not know, at this point, whether Joshua Joseph Spork is the man of my life. He could be. I have given it considerable thought. The jury is still out. The issue between you a
nd me is that you wish to deprive me of the opportunity to find out. Joe Spork is not yours to give or to withhold from me, Mr. Cummerbund. He is mine, until I decide otherwise. You have caused him grief, sullied his name, and you have hurt him. If anyone is going to make him weep, or lie about him, or even do bad things to him, it is me.
“We are more angry than you can understand. And you are here, with us, in the land of do-as-you-please. It’s like wonderland, Mr. Cummerbund. Only much less good.”
She smiles sharply.
“A friend of mine would have said,” she adds, “that we are aglœc-wif. Monstrous hags. Or you could say we are ‘women of consequence.’ What happens to you here, in this room, can reflect that as little or as much as you wish.”
And then they sit there without speaking, listening to the muffled sound of traffic, and the wind in the trees, and Cecily Foalbury working a piece of bourbon biscuit out of her heirloom dentures. The dog Bastion pads across the room to Joe Spork and burbles mournfully until he is lifted up and held.
Abbie Watson sorts through the sinister apparatus on the table as if wondering where she will begin. Arvin Cummerbund dimly remembers that she is a qualified nurse. He wonders who is watching her children, and whether she wanted to bring them along. Even Mercer Cradle looks a little windy about what will happen next, and this is truly alarming because, as far as Arvin Cummerbund has been able to ascertain, Mercer is absolutely devoid of compunction of any kind where those who interfere with his family’s happiness are concerned.
A shadow falls across Arvin; a shadow which fills him with a measure of guilt. He inhales slightly, and winces at the odour of dog breath. Bastion snuffles at him curiously, and then yawns, displaying tooth stumps and slime.
Angelmaker Page 51
