V 02 - Domino Men, The (34 page)

“I think I’m a cul-de-sac.  I think I’m a dead end.”  She got to her feet.  “And I think I need to try to pee.”

As Barbara walked into the back of the café I suddenly remembered something.  I fumbled for my phone and punched out a text message to Abbey.

So sorry.  Been a horrible night.
Can’t wait to see you again.

I pressed send although I didn’t expect a reply for several hours.

Barbara returned from the bathroom.  I tried to draw her back into a discussion of the transformation which had overtaken her but it seemed that our moment of intimacy had melted away as quickly as it had arrived.  She asked if I’d like another coffee.  I said yes, and whilst she was ordering at the counter my phone shuddered in my pocket to announce the arrival of a recent text message.

So glad you’re ok.  Can’t wait to see you too.
Sorry I didn’t tell you about Joe.
I missed you holding me tonight.

Then, best of all, the letter
X
repeated three times.

“Girlfriend?” Barbara asked, setting another coffee in front of me.

“Maybe,” I said.  “Not sure, to be honest.”

“Is it the girl we met?  I mean — that Barbara met.  Your landlady?”

I nodded.

“Have a little happiness together, Henry.  Grab it while you still can.  You’re lucky.”  Barbara stretched herself out felinely.  “I know that’s not for me.”

“Surely,” I said, “looking like you do…”

She just stared ahead.  “You know that they fought over me…”

“Who fought over you?”

“Dedlock and your grandfather.  I can’t quite recall the details.  Not yet.  But I know that there was a struggle.  Backstabbing.  Treachery.  Nothing changes.  Jasper wanted me, too.  He tried to touch me.”

“Jasper?”

“I say only that he tried, Henry.  He made the attempt.  That’s all you need to know.”

“And Barnaby?  What about him?”

“Barnaby’s dead,” she said flatly.  “They killed him.”

“Who?”

Rather disgustedly, she spat into her coffee.  “You know their names.”

Suddenly, mercifully, Barbara’s PDA bleeped for attention.  She seized it and grinned.  Two small spots of black had reappeared on the screen.

“Gotcha.”

I felt a paroxysm of fear.  “Where are they?”

“Oh, very good.”  Barbara laughed, and this time it sounded almost natural.  But there was no happiness in her laugh, no genuine mirth.  “Very droll.”

“Barbara,” I said softly.  “Where are the Prefects?”

“You know the address.  We both do.  They’re at One Twenty-Five Fitzgibbon Street.”  Now Barbara’s laughter sounded a hairsbreadth from tears.  “They’re at our old office.”

B the time we got to the Civil Service Archive Unit, it was almost nine o’clock and a stream of gray-faced men and women was slouching despairingly into work.  The safety officer, Philip Statham, walked straight past and didn’t even recognize me.

Barbara was outlining the situation to Dedlock.  His voice crackled in our ears.  “What are they doing in there?  What the hell are they doing?”

“I think this is it, sir,” Barbara said.  “I think they’re here to find Estella.”

“You know something?”

“Nothing concrete.  Just ghosts.”

Engrossed in their conversation, I slowly became aware that someone was shouting my name.

“Henry!”  Miss Morning was walking along the pavement toward us, clutching a carrier bag.  Strangely, she appeared to be smiling.

The croak of Dedlock in my head:  “Who is it?”

Barbara told him.

“What does she want?” he spat.

Miss Morning reached us, still brandishing her plastic bag like she’d won it at bingo.  “Tell that unhappy old man that I have our salvation in this bag.  Are the Domino Men inside?”

“Yes,” we said, pretty much simultaneously.

“Thought so.”

I asked her why.

“You think your job was an accident, Henry?  You think anything in your whole life has been left to chance?”  She took the carrier bag out from under her arm.  There was something heavy inside which she unwrapped with the reverential care of a priest opening a fresh delivery of wafers.  “Your grandfather built this.”

What was in the carrier bag was an impossibility.  Shaped like a revolver and constructed with perfect intricacy, it was formed entirely of glass, glinting in the early morning sun, the product of a technology so far out of step with contemporary thought that it almost qualified as science fiction.

“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.