Angelmaker

XIV The Secret History of Vaughn Parry; the Monte; homeward bound.

His name’s Dalton,” Parry murmurs meditatively in the shady back seats of the night bus. Having paid their way with Mr. Ordinary’s cash, he is examining the credit cards. “Oh. Driving licence. Home address. I wonder if he’s married…” and then, seeing Joe’s look, “Oh ey, for God’s sake, no! I only meant if he’s not we could break in and get some clothes, empty his fridge. No reason to…” He sighs, maligned. Joe stares out into the grey-green landscape of concrete and pathetic little trees in local-council industrial pots.

Neither of them is entirely sure where the bus is going, because they’re not entirely clear on where they are. Vaughn Parry was all for ducking into the hedgerows, but Joe persuaded him that a city was a better place to hide than a field. They climbed aboard and said “into town.”

“That business with the lift was clever, turning me upside down. Smart, that is. Your man Brother Sheamus, that’ll be, no? Nasty mind he’s got, I will say.”

Joe Spork looks at Britain’s most wanted serial killer and wonders if this is professional admiration. Vaughn Parry sees it, and sighs again.

“I ain’t what you think, Joe. Granted, I’m a bit feral now, but I bin in there a long time and it wasn’t any kind of fun. But I ain’t what you think.”

“I’m not sure what I think.”

Parry looks at him, sceptical, then—apparently considering their situation—nods. “You want it from the beginning?”

“It’s a long drive, evidently.”

“An hour, he said. Well, then.”

Parry talks.

The nursery in the Parry household was decorated in pictures of scarecrows. Vaughn Parry’s first memories are of playing with wooden building blocks in the middle of the red rug, looking around at ten different ghoulish turnip faces and their withered arms, and—being an undertaker’s boy—he deduced at the age of four that all men die, and all women, too. He grew up numb. He disliked the other children, who seemed to be unable to understand what this entailed. If death was coming with such pointed inevitability, of what possible value was the Earth and anything on it? He lived in a darkness he couldn’t penetrate. It lurked at the edge of his vision. He slept with the lights on until his father made him turn them off, and each night they fought like dogs, snarling and snapping at one another. His mother had died already, of pneumonia. He went to the Waiting Game because it was as good a way as any to wait for his own burial.

“And then they bloody pranked me,” Parry mutters. “Bloody ghastly, ey? Stitched up some fox in a corpse, I don’t know. I passed out on my feet, like. Didn’t remember a sodding thing after, and there’s some old gaffer telling me I’m a monster. I said ‘Bollocks’ and stormed out.”

He drifted. At some point he got into the make-up trade, an offshoot of what he already knew from undertaking. Dead faces are harder because they’re dead, easier because you can use plaster and putty and actual paint. You can even cut bits off if you have to, but don’t tell anyone.

And then he was living in a town upcountry, in some old house, when a thin man and a fat man came calling. He was using a false name because he didn’t want anything to do with his family, but they knew who he was anyway, no notion how.

“This was years ago, mind. Five, six. Don’t know what the bloody date is now.”

Nor does Joe, in point of fact. How many weeks has he been imprisoned? Or is it months? He has no idea. He’s exhausted, he knows that much.

“‘Mr. Parry,’ says the thin one, ‘there’s a certain task we’d like for you to do. It pays well, but it’s quite secret.’ Well, I did it, didn’t I? Dress a corpse, they said. Make him look respectable. I knew how to do that. A few weeks later there was another, and another. Two thousand quid a time, thank you kindly, and the promise of more work to come. But I was getting a funny feeling, wasn’t I? These lads—they were all lads, thank God, no lasses and no kids, or I couldn’t have stuck it—they had the look of… well. We know now, don’t we? They’d been in that place back there, or somewhere like it, and they hadn’t made it out. Died on the operating table, most like, and here was I covering the tracks. They tried to make me patch up your friend Ted, you know, left me in there with him and some slap and so on. I told ’em to fuck off. Screamed it… God, you get like an animal, don’t you, it doesn’t take long, or much. You get like King Kong in a cage!” He laughs, a strange, unwholesome laugh, like a plague survivor.

“Ey, so. They noticed me noticing, didn’t they? One day I turn up with my kit and there’s the body, but he’s… fresh. Still warm. I good as pissed myself, and then I heard sirens. Didn’t occur to me until they come in through the front door what was going on. They’d set me up, hadn’t they, to take the fall for the whole lot. For fifty or sixty poor dead bastards… and then there was the back room, wasn’t there?”

The back room was famous—infamous. Parry had been escalating, according to the story. Serial killers apparently do this. Not content with one expression of their madness, they develop more and more outré, dreadful rituals and appetites until they are stopped.

In the back room was the latest victim’s family. What was done there had caused one of the investigating detectives to take an overdose. Two more retired from the force.

“They said it was all me,” Parry reports woodenly. “The mother, the kid. All me. I’m sorry if I can’t cry any more,” he adds, “but I’ve been in for over a year. First in the police nick and then some hospital and then there. I’ve been Vaughn the killer all that time. I’ve got false teeth now, after they kicked them in. I’m… someone I never was, now. It’s what happens, isn’t it? We lose who we are. Become someone else.” He shudders.

“What about you?” Vaughn Parry says at last. “What’s the deal with you? The way I hear it, they hate you even worse’n me.”

Joe sighs, and gives an abbreviated version of recent events, and an even more curtailed description of life in the House of Spork. He doesn’t want Parry inside his life, even if his confession is a true one. The man who was considering giving Mr. Ordinary a taste of his own medicine is not someone he wishes to share intimacies with, more than he must.

“Mechanical bees,” Vaughn Parry mutters. “And you say it’s big?”

“Huge, I think. Going-to-war sort of big.”

“Bloody hell.”

The road surface changes, the whine of the tyres giving way to a deep grumble.

“Well, for what it’s worth,” Parry goes on, “I’ve got more to tell you. I s’pose I owe it to you, or to bloody Dalton. Payback. And if it’s that important, too…”

“What is it?”

“Your friend Ted… confessed to me, is the only word. Because I was an undertaker once. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t a Waiting Man proper. Didn’t seem to matter much at that point. Not to him, anyway.” Parry’s face flickers with something like horror. “He was all messed up. They’d had at him, then they let him know who I was and brought him to me. They wanted him to be scared of Monstrous Vaughn, you see, but he was past caring. Something was broke in his chest. You could hear it flapping about… he wanted absolution.” Parry sighs. “From me. Of all the people on God’s Earth, he wanted absolution from the man supposed to be the worst bastard ever walked. And I couldn’t give it to ’im because it’s bin so long since anyone even looked at me with anything other than hate I didn’t have the words. I just stared at him and he choked out the ’ole thing and then he died.”

Vaughn Parry shudders. “You’ve got this thing they want, though?” Vaughn Parry says abruptly. “I mean, it’s not all a complete bloody joke, right? Not a total waste of time?”

“Yes,” Joe says absently. “I worked it out, in there.”

“Sholt said you had. It was like a kind of revelation for ’im. Like an angel, he said. But I was—” He stops. “I’m rattling on like a pillock.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“I haven’t talked for a bit.”

No. You haven’t. But Parry’s lisp is already better.

“It’s fine,” Joe assures him. “What were you saying?”

“When he said that, I was, well… I was afraid. For the first time in howeverlong I had something to hope for, that you’d find this blessed whatsis and stick it up their collective arse, ey?” Parry laughs. “Although, maybe you better just hang onto it. Keep it in a safe place.”

It’s a relief to be able to talk about this aloud. Joe has been screaming it, in rhyme, for—he doesn’t know how many days. Breath of the docks. Beneath the rocks. Frankie’s drum has chicken pox. He frowns and makes an uncertain gesture with his hand: this way, that way. “It’s safe for the moment,” he says. “It’s in the Death Clock. She sent it to my grandfather and he kept it in the Death Clock, because it’s so ugly no one looks at it twice. And he commended it to me for ‘special study.’ I thought he was just being annoying and educational. And now they’ve got it and they don’t even know. All this,” he waves at himself, his bruises and by extension the whole of Happy Acres, “and it was there, all the time. They’ve probably got it in a box.”

Vaughn Parry peers at him. “Well, I’m sure you know what that means to the world at large,” he says at last. “Buggered if I do, though. No, for God’s sake, don’t tell me! Bloody hell, I don’t want your trouble as well as mine, do I?”

Joe Spork shakes his head. He feels an urge to get back to his natural habitat, even if he has to hide beneath the streets among the Tosher’s Beat, in the rooms the toshers don’t bother with.

The bus stops briefly, and a man climbs on board who must be a fruit picker. His hands are swaddled in elastoplast. He wears a T-shirt written in a European alphabet Joe doesn’t recognise, and carries a white plastic bag full of unseasonal greenhouse plums.

Joe Spork considers his good fortune. He has escaped from a heavily guarded institution in the company of a monster who turns out to be quite nice. He has eluded what must be a major search—by speed? Stealth? Confusion? And he alone in all the world—apart from Vaughn Parry—knows the location of the calibration drum.

Just the two of them.

“This bus is now non-stopping all the way to London,” the driver says. Joe feels a momentary claustrophobia, and then his mind jumps sideways and around a corner. Not claustrophobia. Vertigo, on the cliff of impossible convenience. A straight course, all the way home. Back to Mercer and Polly. Parry giving answers to questions desperately asked. Parry as Sholt’s confidant, in that strange clarity before dying. Parry, the country’s most wanted man, suddenly a kindred spirit.

Too easy.

All that time being tortured, and then this. So simple. A bit of pain and a bit of work, and the whole place gone. A prisoner’s dream.

They have shown you the stick. Soon, they will show you the carrot.

A prisoner’s fantasy.

There is no carrot. Polly and I are your only friends.

This game is fixed.

Not lucky at all. Three-Card Monte.

I thought I was choosing the card I wanted, but the bunco man was slipping me the one he wanted me to have. I haven’t found the lady. I’ve drawn the Joker.

Vaughn Parry.

In which case, you work for someone, don’t you? I’m wrong. You’re not a loner at all. You’re not what you say you are. You’re a lie and a liar, and I’m taking you where you want to go. Telling you what you want to know.

In which case, you could well be a killer, after all.

Hell, hell, hell.

But this is a new, activated Joe Spork. His body has a plan before he does, is already moving when he gives the okay, flows into the shape he needs without thought—thank God, because if he thought about it he’d mess it up, no doubt.

He times it exactly right. The driver takes off the brakes and the bus jolts. Joe Spork grabs Vaughn Parry by the shoulders and slams his head sharply into the chrome steel pole in the aisle. Parry’s face flashes through shock and pain, then for the briefest instant into a bottomless, appalling rage. Then the bus judders again and Joe repeats the manoeuvre, and Parry slumps. Joe rests him against the window, and rushes to the front.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, “I’m on the wrong bus.”

The driver sighs. “Anyone else?” he asks. The rest of the passengers shake their heads or stare in venomous accusation at the idiot Joe, and the driver lets him off.

He watches the red tail lights fade, and runs to a phone box to call Mercer.

Joe is expecting a large black car with tinted windows, or possibly several cars. He allows himself to wonder if there will be a helicopter. He is quite sure there will be people in dark suits, grave of mien and taciturn and fraught with black-lettered magic.

In the event, Mercer sends four ambulances, two fire engines, a climate-change protest, a Scottish travelling circus, and a fox hunt. These various distractions arrive separately but with immaculate coordination, so that one moment Joshua Joseph Spork is hiding in the shadows of a pub garden and hearing pursuit in every whisper of wind, and the next the whole suburb is lit with blue lights and resounding with sirens, and seventy-eight beagles and a gross of meteorologists are sharing road space with Darla the Bearded Lassie.

Through the midst of this paralysing confusion comes an unremarkable Volkswagen people-mover in green. It slips gracefully between the hunt master and a brace of urban foxes who are apparently admiring the view, Mercer himself at the wheel. The side door slides open.

“Get in,” Polly Cradle says gently, and Joe’s heart leaps to see that she is here. Then he stops abruptly: beside her sits Edie Banister, complete with odiferous pug and giant revolver.

“Come on, Joe,” Polly says. “It’s time.” She glances over her shoulder at Edie, then extends her hand to him. “Get in. We’ll explain on the way.”

By a circuitous route and through lanes and towns and all around the London Orbital, they leave the circus behind.

Joe Spork gazes at the back of the passenger seat. The leather—or it may be leatherette—is torn around the headrest, revealing a sliver of foam. Part of him wants to explore it with his fingers, touch something real and simple and solid outside Happy Acres and know that this is not a dream. That he is not still on the operating table, dying. The world is oddly quiet and colourless, as if he has slipped sideways into a monochrome film or an underwater documentary. He assumes this is shock or post-traumatic stress, but does not particularly care.

He lifts his eyes from his study of the leather and looks around. Polly Cradle is like a log fire, a warm, comforting thing. She catches him looking and smiles, puts her hand on his leg, and a little patch of heat grows where her palm is. He looks the other way and finds Edie Banister.

Edie Banister looks back at him and waits. And so they pass a few miles: Polly, Joe, Edie. The front seat is another country.

“Did you do this to me?” Joe asks.

Edie sighs. “Yes. Well, yes and no. I put you in the line of fire.” After a brief struggle, honesty compels her to add, “I thought it was necessary and then I realised it was rather out of spite. I’m sorry.”

He looks at her some more, and wonders why he hasn’t pulled her head from her shoulders and thrown it out of the window. Carefully, so as not to cause an accident. He wonders if she is really sorry, and if sorry helps in any way. Then he says, “Spite?”

“Your grandmother, not you.”

It’s always about his bloody family, somehow. “How’s Harriet?” he asks belatedly.

“Your mother is fine, Joe,” Mercer says firmly. “The C of E has hidden her away—I’m sure you can talk to her if you want.”

Joe goes back to studying the seat, and finally does reach out to play with the loose edge. He flicks it one way and another until Polly very gently encloses his big hand in her two smaller ones and draws it away to kiss it as if he’d burned it on something. She does not ask if he is all right.

“I’m all right,” he says, a bit fuzzily, only now realising that it may turn out to be true. If only the colours will spread out from her, into the world.

She manages not to burst into tears, but it’s a close thing. Instead, she looks sternly at Edie and tells her to get going on the story. Edie nods, and then abruptly stalls, mouth open. “I don’t know where to begin,” she says. “I’ve lost it. Senility.”

Joe nods. He is familiar with the sense of not being able to trust your own mind. “Who are you?”

Edie nods, grateful. “You know my name. I used to—well, I used to work with your grandmother. We were friends. I’ve been a lot of other things, too. A spy, mostly. Sort of a policeman. And now a revolutionary, I suppose. A terrorist.” She sighs. “This changing-the-world business is harder than I imagined.”

“I didn’t know Frankie had any friends,” Joe says.

“Joe, don’t be dense,” Polly murmurs, kissing his hair to take the sting out of it. “They were lovers.”

Joe glances, automatically, at Edie, and sees her embarrassment become a wide grin.

“Well, yes,” Edie says. “We were. And you, young miss, are a bucketload of trouble, aren’t you?”

Polly shrugs. “I believe in getting these things out in the open. It saves misunderstandings later.”

Edie finds that she agrees, and a moment later she begins the whole story from scratch—albeit in highly abbreviated form—telling it without restraint from the moment Abel Jasmine came to the Lady Gravely school, all the way to her recent abrupt decision that something had to be done.

Joe listens to the secret history of the House of Spork—or Fossoyeur, as it seems—and feels, beneath the monochrome, a sense of place. This is where Daniel’s sorrow came from. Where Mathew’s mania was born. This is how it was, and how it came to be.

That it is also the root of his recent pain is less important. Edie is a treasure house of his own self, his roots. He wants to put her under glass, wind her up and play her in the evenings. Her life is so bright. And he, Joe, is part of this story, and her story is part of his. Finally, he is not too late for something, after all.

“The world is in the hands of idiots,” Edie cries, by way of exculpation, mistaking his quiet for doubt or disapprobation. “The Cold War is over and what do they do? Go looking for a new one. We’re richer than we’ve ever been. What happens? We burn the forests and borrow so much money that suddenly we’re poor. Everything’s upside down and it’s just because people don’t pay attention. It ought to be a perfect world! That’s what we wanted. That’s what I worked for. For decades! I hid Frankie’s machine for years and years. For nothing. For a bunch of charlatans to tell me I’ve never had it so good while they steal my neighbour’s pension!”

She subsides, muttering. Mercer purses his lips.

“The bees are now distributed over most of the globe,” he says. “From time to time there are outbreaks of truth, but I have to say I don’t see a new age of love and understanding being ushered in. The West Bank is in flames, but I suppose it was going that way already. A lot of Africa is looking bad. The Special Relationship is effectively finished. The nuclear states, by the way, have reciprocally pledged to launch their weapons should it turn out that the Apprehension Engine—they’re calling it a weapon of mass destruction—has been deliberately deployed against their citizens by another nation. All of which, I gather, is before the machine is properly effective. These are just tasters. If this is a global improvement of the lot of mankind, I don’t want to know what a crisis looks like.”

Edie ducks her head. “It’ll get better. Frankie worked it out. She was never wrong. When the bees come back, the array will be complete and things will… get better.” Her certainty is fading as she says it out loud. What made sense in the twentieth century sounds odd in the twenty-first. Blockish, even, and naive.

Mercer sighs. “Possibly. Although I was never very fond of perfect, sweeping solutions. I always feel sympathy with the people who get swept. But in any case… the machine is no longer going to do what it’s supposed to, is it?”

“I don’t see what he gets out of it,” Polly Cradle interrupts. “How does all this make him godlike?” She looks over at Edie.

Edie scowls. “Chaos. Confusion. Wickedness. It’s always like this with him. Becoming God is an excuse. He says God’s alien and appalling, so that anything ghastly he does just makes him more transcendent. It’s a fiddle. Not that it is him. It can’t be.”

“Only,” Polly goes on, “from what you say, he doesn’t strike me as chaotic at all. He strikes me as the opposite. You called him a spider. You said he loves elegance. Chess and bluffing and forked strategies. Heads I win, tails you lose.”

“Well,” Edie says, waving her hands vaguely to indicate, perhaps, that evil is as evil does, and you just can’t fathom it, you have to shoot it when the opportunity arises. Mercer waits a moment, but that seems to be the extent of her response. He carries on.

“But in the meantime it would appear that the apparatus from Wistithiel is now in the hands of a monster who proposes to abuse it in some way so as to bring about the end of the world or his own elevation to godhood or possibly both. And my best friend has spent the last while in a government-sponsored torture farm being given the full works. So while I greatly sympathise with your perception, Miss Banister, I imagine you will understand when I say that I’m not sure your actions have greatly improved our lot.”

Edie looks stricken. Joe finds himself confessing in turn the days of his captivity, and his brief, strange, un-friendship with Vaughn Parry.

“I should have killed him,” he concludes. “That would have been the professional thing to do. I told him what they wanted to know all along. I just didn’t think. I just wanted to get away. I should have finished it.”

Edie Banister sighs. “The professional thing. Yes. The tactically wise thing. You might have bought us some time, at a cost. But I have come to believe, young Joe, that it’s no bad thing to be a bit amateurish, in one’s heart. The professionals have been in charge for a while now, and it hasn’t done a blind bit of good.”

She shrugs, including herself in this damnation. Joe realises he has not touched her, this strange leftover person from his family’s life. He reaches out to shake her hand.

There is a noise like someone jointing a chicken, and the car fills with the sharp aroma of doggy regurgitate. The handshake never quite happens.

After a few minutes with the windows open, there is general agreement in the car that a brief stop for a cup of tea may be in order.

The café table is made of scratched red plastic with a metal surround. The chairs are uncomfortable, and the tea tastes mostly of sump. Joe Spork drinks his and then steals Mercer’s, too. Edie, having washed out her bag, stares into the swirling circle of her cup as if it is showing her mysteries. Mercer leans on the wall next to the till, watching the car park. Joe worries that they’re worrying about him, that he needs to say something which will make them all feel better. He can’t imagine what it would be.

Only Polly seems to be exactly who she always is. She smiles charmingly at the lovestruck teenage boy who brings the tray, tips him too much and tells him she’s a rock star and not to admit to anyone she was here, and then looks across at Edie.

“This isn’t what you had in mind,” she observes.

“No,” Edie says.

Polly waits, but Edie doesn’t continue, so she tries again. “What was supposed to happen?”

Edie waggles her hands in the air. “Good things. Frankie had the maths, you know. She actually calculated the consequences. If they’d just leave it alone, the machine would make the world better. Nine per cent better, she said. Enough to push us in the right direction over time. Make a perfect world.” She stops. “A better one, anyway. But I didn’t imagine all this would come out of the woodwork.”

“‘All this’ meaning Sheamus. The Ruskinites.”

“Sheamus is dead. The one I knew, the Opium Khan. He must be. He was years older than me.”

“You’re here.”

Edie snorts. “Barely.”

The roads are empty and the night is very dark. Inside the car, the only light is from the instrument panel and the street lights as they zip past. Joe knew a man once who made a career out of chopping them down and stealing them for the aluminium. It’s an expensive material. He counts, in his head, reckoning weight and value, and London draws closer, green motorway signs displaying the distance to the statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square. It occurs to him that he has no idea where the car is going.

“Can’t go to the shop,” Mercer replies, meaning Noblewhite Cradle rather than Joe’s shattered warehouse. “It’s being watched. Bethany’s gone in a few different directions to lead them off. I told her it was dangerous, and she said—they all said—‘Bring it on.’ They’re a doughty bunch, my Bethanys. And good lawyers in their own right, of course.

“But we don’t have a lot of options. The firm is under a ton of pressure from the forces of illiberal and irresponsible government; writs and control orders and demands for our account numbers. We’re fighting back, but it’s hard to win anything when the other fellow changes the rules under you. I did persuade a local magistrate to grant me an Antisocial Behaviour Order in respect of Detective Sergeant Patchkind, which I must say was very satisfying…” He flashes a grin, then sobers.

“But we couldn’t risk using any of our regular London places. We set it up as if we were heading for our out-of-town offices, which are frankly a sort of fortress. I suspect they’d be delighted with that: all the rats in one sack… We’re going somewhere a little more out of the way. Blood over law. Or friendship will do, in the pinch.”

Joe doesn’t bother to point out that this is not an answer to his question. He’s too tired to fret, and the aches in his body are burning everywhere except where he rests against Polly Cradle’s shoulder. “Ted said we need to go to Station Y,” he murmurs, but the sounds of the car smother the words and only Polly hears them. He lolls, and mercifully does not dream.

When he wakes, he finds himself on familiar ground. The car turns a final corner, through a private drive—the Cradle slush fund has been at work—and over someone’s front garden and onto the road again, and there is Harticle’s, its great fortress doors open to receive them.

Joe glances at Polly. She shrugs. “Mercer’s better at this part than I am. I get very cross when he tells me how to investigate, so I do as he says for things like this. We can’t get you out of the country tonight. And if we could, I’m not sure where you’d go. So you have to go where people care about you and hope for the best.” She glances at Edie, who nods.

Joe Spork contemplates a world on the brink of chaos and disaster which still finds time to hunt for a bewildered clockworker.

He wonders whether they should call ahead, then thinks of all those movies where the fugitive briefly activates a cellphone and is immediately traced. He realises Mercer has been without his this entire time. It’s practically like seeing him nude.

They get out into the damp of the small hours. The car flashes its lights twice, orange lamps illuminating the gutter and the curtained windows of Guildholt Street, and wait.

After a moment, Mercer growls. “There should be thugs. I asked for thugs.”

“Stay or go?” Polly says.

When he hesitates, Edie intervenes. “We stay. If we’re buggered, we’re already buggered. If we’re not, we run from a safe place. Maybe your thugs had to take care of a scout.”

Mercer nods: possible. Joe the habitué leads the way up the steps, smelling the wet oak and iron. The door, unlatched, slides silently back at his touch. The corridor is discreetly dark, welcoming. He breathes in old carpet and lubricating oils. For a moment his nose tingles at a scent like pepper and he stops, but the flavour is gone and he cannot recapture it. Edie dawdles, peering at the pictures and the glass cases, and at an ornate waste basket (cut iron and laburnum wood, circa 1920). After a moment, she drops a lunch box into the bin, and carries on. It seems an odd moment to be cleaning out your handbag, but Joe supposes that when you’re old, the time is always now.

“Bob?” he murmurs into the dark.

From within, the sound of voices, a sense of a presence, but no reply. Edie shuffles forward, Bastion snuffling alertly from her bag.

“Cecily?” Joe calls.

“In here,” the gruff voice answers. Joe Spork smiles and half-runs to the reading room.

Cecily Foalbury sits in her usual chair at the long central table, surrounded by papers in a great pile of chaos and consilience. Two sets of false teeth lie discarded among the debris, along with the container for a third set and a plate of chewy caramels. Cecily looks tired and worn, and she smiles wanly at Joe and then looks away to the great, friendly log fire in the grate. The smell of woodsmoke wafts back, and the crackling flames give the hall a kind of medieval vitality. Joe grins at her, at the place, so far from the white room at Happy Acres.

The door is barely closed behind them before the dog Bastion starts to howl.

“I’m sorry, Sporklet,” Cecily says brokenly, looking up. “He got here five minutes ago.” Bob Foalbury takes her hand, but cannot raise his head at all, so great is his shame.

“Good evening,” a voice murmurs softly from the armchair by the fire. “It’s so nice to have you all here.”

Joe Spork stares at the craggy face and the cavernous eyes, the wild beard now trimmed close to the chin in a severe, grand vizier’s crop, the fresh purple bruise on one side of the head, and at the hooded, faceless figures bobbing on either side.

Vaughn Parry.

Edie Banister growls “You!”—and reaches for her gun.