Angelmaker

XV The limitations of Yama Arashi; the Recorded Man; the most orange place in England.

“Hello, Joe,” Vaughn Parry says conversationally. “Commander Banister.” The Ruskinites beside him rustle at the name, and one steps softly forward. The others duck in behind it. Parry holds out his arm at chest height, and the Ruskinite stops.

“I’m so sorry to have been less than honest with you, Joseph,” Parry murmurs gently. His voice is different, shorn of its friendly West Country tones. Now it is deeper, more elegant, more insinuating. A voice to speak blasphemies and reveal secrets. “My name—my real name, which most closely approaches an accurate summation of my history—is Khaygul-Khan Shem Shem Tsien Sikkim, of the nation of Addeh Sikkim. I was a soldier and a scholar and an emperor of thieves. More latterly a monarch, and then a fugitive, but always, always, I was on a path to something greater. Something which cannot be prevented. Because when I am done, it will always have been inevitable. I am a tautology.”

Edie points the gun directly at him.

“You are dead,” she says. “You are dead, and before you were dead you were old. You are not here, and you are not, not, not young, not… you! It is not possible!” This last, in what is almost a shriek, and as she says it, she pulls the trigger.

Shem Shem Tsien—Vaughn Parry—Brother Sheamus—moves from his chair with impossible grace, letting the bullet fly over his shoulder and on into the wall. If he is old, it is a strange, new kind of old, a serpentine kind where bones melt and become muscle and frailty becomes sinew. He whips his hand around and produces a narrow blade like a gymnast’s ribbon, and forward he comes in the same appalling motion, the blade a flicker of light slashing this way and that towards Joe, Polly, Mercer, Edie, around and about and back, ever closer even as he weaves away from the line of Edie’s aim as if the gun is nothing more than a long, heavy spear and he can duck the bladed point. From behind him, with him, come the Ruskinites, heron shadows bobbing in line with his own eerie, awkward, perfect steps.

Edie Banister, knobbled finger pressing the trigger with painful slowness, fires again, misses again, then uses the trigger guard of the gun to guide the blade past her shoulder, and barges her bony hip into her enemy’s gut. He rocks back, ripples his shoulders like a juggler rolling a ball, and the pommel of the sword smacks sharply into her wrist. The revolver skids away across the floor. They draw back from one another, assessing. Edie moves her weight to her back foot, settles her hips. Somewhere inside, a joint goes pop, and Edie winces. Shem Shem Tsien shifts the line of his body by a fraction, and exhales.

After a moment in deadlock, the Opium Khan smiles contentedly. “Yes,” he says. “Yes. It is finished between us.”

“Run,” Edie says over her shoulder, offering the dog in his bag to Polly Cradle, fiddling briefly with the contents and then seemingly changing her mind.

Polly keeps her eyes on the sword. “What about you?”

“I’m not leaving.”

“We can—”

“No, we can’t. Don’t you recognise this? He’s having fun. He’s better than I am. He always was, and now he’s younger and faster, too. Just run, girl. Take the boy. Do what you can.”

“Edie—”

“You’ve got what you need. Aglœca.” She grins. “Now, go.”

“They won’t let us—”

“Of course they will. This is a step on his path to godhood. It’s not… legendary enough if he just mows you down. It has to be dramatic with him. Canonical.” Edie points at them. “He’s saving you up for later. But me… I’m old news. Old and tired. And… it’s time. I can do this. The rest is up to you.”

She thrusts the dog into Polly’s arms, then turns and shakes her hands lightly and winces. She smiles a fey little smile and stands waiting. “Go,” she says again, without looking back.

Shem Shem Tsien raises his sword behind his head.

Bastion sets up a feeble howl from Polly’s arms, but it has little defiance in it, only an old, bone-deep sorrow too big for a small dog.

Edie’s feet flicker across the floor, smooth and very definite. Small steps, perfectly chosen. Her back is straight, her hands out like a schoolteacher conducting an orchestra. She moves again, and the point of the sword slips past her as if her opponent has simply misunderstood what it is for. She sways towards him and her palm flicks out towards the weapon’s hilt, catching nothing but air. They separate, regaining distance. Edie smiles, and waves her hand. A tiny circle of light glitters: a crescent of metal. Shem Shem Tsien glances at his hip and finds an empty sheath. Edie opens her other hand, palm down, letting a few hairs drift away. “Nearly had you.”

He smiles. “No.”

The Opium Khan moves forwards again with that same lighthearted fluidity, and Edie swirls to meet him, arms outstretched. Her feet brush the ground as she steps, and her face is a serene smile of certainty.

Her arms collect Shem Shem Tsien’s, the little knife deflecting the sword’s edge as he changes direction at the last minute, and she corkscrews down and around: Yama Arashi. They blend into one.

Shem Shem Tsien tumbles through the air and lands on his back. Edie follows him down, her hand on the sword to bring the blade close across his neck, but the Opium Khan changes his grip and does not release the blade. He holds her off, and smiles upward into her eyes.

“The limitations of Yama Arashi, Commander Banister,” he murmurs almost fondly.

“Oh, yes?” Edie growls.

“Yes. It works with swords. Less well with a pistol.”

And as realisation dawns Edie looks down, to see his other hand pressed to her chest, and the muzzle of a small modern gun against her ribs.

“Look after Bastion, please,” she says calmly to the room. “He doesn’t do well by himself. And I’m sure I told you all to get going. Young people today…” And then she glances back at her enemy. “You think you’ve won, don’t you? But you’re in real trouble now, you silly sod.”

Shem Shem Tsien arches one eyebrow, and pulls the trigger. Edie Banister’s back erupts sharply, a narrow hole spraying bone and blood. She shudders once, and then she dies, collapsing to the ground as rags and bone.

For a moment, there is silence, like the end of a piece of music. Then the dog Bastion locks his pink, sightless eyes on the Opium Khan and makes a hard noise in his chest. You are mine, old fiend. Mine.

Shem Shem Tsien gets to his feet.

“Oh, Mr. Spork. How very uncouth of you to bring old business into all this. Old baggage. Really, it won’t do. I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re a coarse sort of person, in the end.” He indicates his bruised forehead, the faint yellow smudge of an impact.

Joe Spork just looks at him. Yes. The beard, the wild eyes, the straggly hair, all gone, and in their place, this smooth, appalling man.

“Vaughn Parry,” he says.

The other man shakes his head.

“No. I am Shem Shem Tsien. The Recorded Man. Vaughn Parry is dead. A coat I wear. A vehicle of flesh that I inhabit. An avatar, if you prefer.” He smiles.

“If you aren’t going to run—and I’m afraid Commander Banister was entirely correct in saying that you should—let me tell you a story. Unlike the last one I told you, which was of course entirely fictional, this one is true. It is the true story, Joshua Spork, of the rebirth of a living god—so you may wish to consider it a new Bible story.”

The Opium Khan gestures, and the Ruskinites move to surround the little group. As they go past the corpse of Edie Banister, they seem to stutter, even bow.

“Once upon a time,” Shem Shem Tsien begins. He is circling them, almost casual, a fastidious cannibal considering whom to eat next. “Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a boy born in the nation of Addeh Sikkim, in the royal palace, who wanted nothing more than to lead his people into a new world of prosperity and hope. He was suited to the task: clever and able and well-favoured.” The Opium Khan looks nostalgic.

“I locked him in a steel box and burned him alive. I used the ash to dye my mourning cloth, and I took his kingdom for my own. I needed it, you see, to understand divinity.” Joe Spork steps slightly to one side, keeping Shem Shem Tsien in front of him. The Opium Khan nods approvingly, and moves on. Behind him, the Ruskinites bob, in unison with their master.

“I tested God quite scientifically. It was the commencement, after all, of the true scientific age. I assumed His role in every particular. I abused His servants—of every creed. I racked His people. I healed the sick and raised the dead. I reached out and found a magician, a foreign woman who could show me the universe as God sees it. And when, in the fullness of my own life, I began to wane, I realised that I must submit to the last test of godhood. I must return from death myself. Only then would I be able to meet God as an equal. Only then could I become Him.”

Bastion growls in his bag. Polly Cradle watches Shem Shem Tsien as he moves past her, sword and pistol held lightly in his hands.

“She was right,” he murmurs, indicating Edie’s corpse. “You are so very like her. Not physically. But you have that same infuriating, utterly unmerited confidence in your ability to match me.” He moves on, going back to his story.

“I caused myself to be recorded. Written down. Transcribed. I became, in the modern parlance, information. Do you see? I carved the pattern of my life into the world, in words and images. I measured the actual activity of my brain. And I stored it. I had a ready stock of test subjects in the orphans of the Wistithiel experiment. While I was still alive, I refined my apparatus by using it on them. I played them fragments of my life and taught them—with electric shocks and so on—to emulate me perfectly. Each of my Ruskinites is an aspect of my self…” He gestures, and the Ruskinites around him echo him, fluid motions indicating one another.

“Of course, I never allowed the whole to be shown to anyone. And to be honest with you, the Ruskinites are imperfect. They were neither entirely erased nor willing to learn. One had to employ crude, Pavlovian teaching methods. Pleasure and pain.

“Vaughn Parry was different.”

He considers Cecily and Bob Foalbury now, reaches out with the tip of the sword towards them.

“Vaughn was an empty corpse walking. He had nothing inside him at all. He was a natural miracle: a body pretending to be a living man. And in that corpse, a desperate hunger to be a real boy… he studied so hard. He learned and learned and practised and practised and eventually he knew it all. He moved like me. He felt what I feel. He was surgically altered to look like me.

“And then he sat, day upon day upon night upon night, wired to my machines, and matched the pattern of his living brain’s impulses to my own. Until, little by little, I returned. Do you not see the genius of it? No? You object, perhaps that there is a soul, a part distinct which I do not possess? But consider: if there is, that part fled when my body died, but my mind persists. In which case, I am the first man ever to possess not one soul, but two.”

The attack comes as he says the final word, but his breath is completely even. He flourishes the sword around and back, light glinting on the blade, and as he does so his other hand stabs out towards Polly Cradle, pulling the trigger, and he screams a feral howl of triumph and delight.

But Polly Cradle is no longer there. Joe has caught her up, was moving even before Shem Shem Tsien was, knew instinctively the denouement of the Opium Khan’s speech. Because that’s what bastards do.

It begins in his chest as a heart-attack tightness, then unravels immediately in all directions like an electric shock. When it reaches his fingertips and toes it bounces, and his eyes fly open very wide. He can see now, quite clearly. The strange monochrome of his vision has receded, given way to sharp, vibrant colours. He’s pretty sure he’s glowing from within like Jack O’Lantern. The bounce reaches his stomach and there’s a weird instant of calm before he can put a name to what is happening, and when he does it seems insufficient to the thing itself.

Rage.

It’s not like a red mist or a thunderstorm, it’s like a weight lifted from his shoulders and a clear light falling across the world.

Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it?

Then screw you, too.

A man who tortures in white cells; who hates and has no appreciation of the beauty of what he destroys; a man who takes what is not his over and over and over again, who would casually shatter the strange, beautiful library of Edie Banister’s brain: for the first time in Joe’s entire life, here is someone he can hit as hard as he knows how, without fear of going too far. There is no such place. He can hear Polly Cradle and her brother saying something like “go” which is more probably “no,” but in Polly at least he can hear the rawness which is also in him, and her soul’s approval even as her mind urges caution.

Joe feels his face wrinkle up in a boar’s-head snarl, and charges straight at Shem Shem Tsien. He hears a furious warble which resonates in his chest, sees the dog, Bastion; he scoops up this unlikely ally in a single motion and carries on. The dog’s growl becomes a song of war.

Come, horologist. The old, dead man offends me. Let us be about him.

Ruskinites converge, black linen dolls with grasping hands and empty hoods. Halloween ghosts. Man or machine? Joe dumps Bastion on the first one and the dog latches onto the man’s cowl and gets to work, does something appalling which will leave scars, Joe knows it will because he can hear screaming. He had no idea Ruskinites could scream, until now. His anger takes note: pain works.

Joe fields the second monk and lifts him bodily from the ground. The Opium Khan is firing his gun and the Ruskinite takes the hits, one, two, three. Six. Don’t guns have six bullets? This one has more. An automatic can have fourteen, Joe dimly remembers, but it doesn’t matter anyway; the distance is short. He throws the Ruskinite directly at Shem Shem Tsien and finds his arms occupied with more of them, but they’re so light, so clumsy. He bites one of them horribly, grabs another with his hands and forces his arm in a wrong direction, hears something snap and crack. HAH!

Someone is next to him, a stout, grey-haired figure with a crowbar: Bob Foalbury, former Chief Petty Officer, in defence of his wife. “Bollocks!” Bob is yelling. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!” and with each shout he slams his crowbar, to good effect—but he is slowing, old muscles betraying him. Joe grabs the crowbar—no, it’s a length of Victorian iron pipe, even better—and yells to him: “Get Cecily! Get her out!” And Bob says “Aye aye,” which almost makes Joe smile despite everything, and off he goes. Joe turns to find the next enemy, slaps him open-handed and spins him around, then slams an elbow down and across in the opposite direction. He follows with the pipe, hears a clang as he smashes a metal head.

He recalls his epiphany in the white room. Survival rests on an absolute lack of compunction. Martial artists achieve this through repetition: the decision to harm is taken in advance, the motion practised. The average person hesitates in order to judge what is necessary. Humanity requires the calculation: what to do, how far to escalate? Joe Spork is not escalating so much as he is erupting, straight up, from a deep well of anger at the world’s injustices, at his mother’s chill and his father’s ease, at Frankie’s abandonment of Daniel, at Daniel’s weak response. Joe need not hold back. He is fighting machines and monsters, and beyond that, he is not fighting. He is fixing something broken. The world having Shem Shem Tsien in it is a flaw, like rust in the cogs. He feels no compunction at all.

They hit him. Often, they hit him quite hard. He knows it’s happening, but pain is a register of inconvenience, and he has a great deal he wants to express to these people through the medium of crippling blows and wrenched limbs, and a little thing like knocking him over isn’t going to stop him. Injury is different, and he guards against it—but there’s a magic in forward momentum and molten rage: anyone wanting to injure him must come within reach. From the ground, he grabs a man leaning over him by the soft flesh under the arm, and heaves. The man screams, hauls back, and Joe Spork rides the movement upwards, regains his feet, reverses the position; softness underfoot. Shem Shem Tsien draws a line across Joe’s arm with the sword, and he feels ice and then blood running freely. He yells, and the Opium Khan grins, steps forward again, blade teasing, tapping Joe’s shoulders. Joe bellows, and tries to catch hold of him, plucks at his sleeve as Shem Shem Tsien steps lightly past him. The gun is in Shem’s other hand, but he shows no inclination to use it. He closes down Joe’s defences, whispers in his ear almost like a lover. Joe can smell brimstone on him, and realises he is breathing the shot which killed Edie. Hellfire, indeed. The Opium Khan’s breath is minty, and his fingers are like Daniel’s vise.

“You delight me, Mr. Spork. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I should have the privilege of killing Frankie Fossoyeur’s grandson in person. It’s too good of you.” The gun comes to rest under Joe’s ear.

And then a storm wind hurls them both across the room. Glass cases burst and papers whirl in a blizzard as Edie Banister’s last piece of exploding Tupperware goes off belatedly and fills the room with smoke and flame.

Joe spins around and around, imagining Shem Shem Tsien doing the same, then finds a wall and moves along it, looking for… he doesn’t know. He staggers to his feet, brushing himself down, preparing to go another round, knowing this time that he will not win. What does it take to beat him? How, how, how? Joe grinds his teeth. He will find out. He will.

Polly Cradle appears directly in front of him with Bastion, and it takes him a second to realise that she is real: an angel in faded jeans, ushering him out. In the corridor is Mercer.

“Move,” Mercer yells roughly. Then, into what appears to be not a cellphone but an actual satellite handset, “Bethany! It’s Mercer Cradle. The word is: ‘Passchendaele’. We’re crashing the shop, do you understand? We’ve been caught—you may be under direct threat. Burn the boxes, drop the shutters and turn the key. I say again, ‘Passchendaele’.”

Crashing the shop. Noblewhite Cradle’s last gasp, in the face of utter destruction: records gone, guilt erased, favours called in. Money takes flight to the Caymans, to Belize and the canton of Thun and the Bahamas. House of Cradle flees on predetermined routes. The company is born again abroad. The U.K. is considered scorched earth.

“Mercer,” Joe Spork says, “I’m sorry.”

“Get a move on!”

“Yes,” says another voice, “you had better do that.”

Shem Shem Tsien stands in the smoke. He has lost his gun, but he still has a sword, and he is flanked by two of the remaining Ruskinites.

Joe growls, feeling the heat in his chest again, the urge to tear something with his fingers, and then Bob Foalbury steps smartly past him and with comical precision presses a stud in the wallpaper.

A vast, clanking iron curtain falls into place between them, and then another, and water pours from the ceiling. Somewhere, an alarm klaxon sounds, like an old-fashioned air-raid siren. From behind the screen comes a howl of thwarted fury.

“Cop that, you murdering sod,” Bob Foalbury says, with feeling. And then, to Joe, “Fire and theft system, Baptiste Frères of Marseilles circa 1921.” He turns sharply, beats on the metal grille. “Come into my house? Threaten my wife? Call me an old man? Well, I beat you, didn’t I? My name is Bob Foalbury! With an F, you bastards!”

Cecily puts her hand on his arm, and he folds down onto her, relieved and afraid and tired.

“No time,” Mercer says.

Joe Spork follows the Cradles back to the street and into yet another anonymous car. His exhaustion feels like a great, dark lake on which he floats and which will shortly drown him. And yet, at the same time, as he slips gratefully into the back seat for a few minutes, for an hour, for however long until his next staging place, he hears a part of himself—aloud or not, he does not know—asking a question.

Why am I always the one running away?

In the semi-darkness of public street lights and twilight gloom, the safe house in Sunbury looks to Joe Spork like a giant, rejected, saliva-covered mint. It makes him feel slightly sick. On the other hand, it is anonymous, which ultimately must be the point. A safe house: a house which is safe. Bartered on the spur from a startled estate agent, and paid in cash. This day, this money, no discussion, no visitors. Are we clear? Oh, yes, sir, and thank you very much.

Joe finds that his anger has drained away and, with its departure, his sense of hope. He does not honestly believe anywhere is safe.

He will be on the run for ever. Or—more likely—he will die.

The giant mint has a small door-knocker in the shape of an animal’s head. It’s probably supposed to be a lion, but it looks more like a sheep. Mercer fusses with the key and lets the little gang of refugees inside.

“Harticle’s was prettier,” Mercer says moodily. Polly nods.

“Yes, it was,” she says. “But this is what we have.”

She turns to Joe, looks him over. She’s being careful. It’s nice when someone who cares about you is careful. It means that they care. He’s tired again, so tired he wonders if he can ever sleep enough. He wonders if he will dream of electric shocks. If he will keep her awake. If she will still want to share the bed if he cries in his sleep.

Mercer slips past them up the stairs. “I’ve got a change of clothes. You should shower, Joe, I don’t mean to be unkind, but you smell bad enough that people will notice and you don’t want to be noticed.”

Story of my life. Don’t make a fuss. You don’t want to be noticed. Pay on time, work to order, play by the rules. Don’t misbehave. Do as you’re told, and you’ll be all right.

Except I did, and I’m not.

Bastion slouches, jellied by grief, and whines very softly. Joe rocks him. The woven-gold bee, the one Ted Sholt gave Joe in Wistithiel, crawls out of Polly’s handbag and flies slowly around the room as if in mourning. After a moment, it alights on a plastic shelf.

“I’m sorry,” Mercer says a little briskly, reappearing with a pair of jeans and a shirt. “We did everything we could, but we just couldn’t find you. We tried everything, Joe. We did. I promise.” He nods to himself. “Anyway. What you need now is a way out of the country, a place to go, and all that bloody quickly. We can do that much, at least. You’ll also need a false identity for travel, and then another one to live in, and finally an emergency one or maybe two. You’ve got to disappear.”

Joe shrugs. Mercer hesitates, then: “You’re very wanted. Very. Do you understand?”

Joe finds himself unsurprised. “What have I done? Did I blow up parliament?” He’s not bitter. He’s always felt there was no point in taking things personally. It’s just a slack, empty curiosity. He has nowhere left to fall.

“No,” Mercer says quietly. He slides a tabloid newspaper across the table. The front page is about the bees, a map showing their route around the world, the conflicts marked as little fires. Mercer sighs, and opens the paper. On pages four and five—just after Belinda from Carlisle in nothing but a pair of denim shorts—he finds SPORK: BLOOD WILL TELL! and LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. Garish crime-scene photographs of places Joe has never seen, bodies draped. Old pictures, and new ones. A history of violence.

“This can’t be right!”

“I’m sorry, Joe, it is. The houseboat’s gone. The Watsons… It must have been the day after you borrowed the whaler. There was nothing you could have done. It’s not your fault.”

Joe feels the weight of it settle on his shoulders all the same. “What happened?”

“Someone set a fire. Abbie woke up just in time, she got the kids out, they’re fine. Griff… he’s in hospital. Smoke inhalation. He tried to save what they had. The police say you did it. Abbie called them to demand a full investigation and that little shit Patchkind told her this sort of thing was bound to happen if she made time with terrorists.”

“Terrorists? What the fuck does that mean?”

“That’s you, Joe, I’m sorry.”

“I’m a terrorist now?”

“You are a suspect in a terror investigation. Yes.”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong!”

It is a cry of agony, emerging from somewhere in his gut, and his voice climbs, stretches, and breaks on the last word into something animal, kicked and bewildered.

“They are fucking with you, Joe,” Polly Cradle says evenly into the silence which follows. “They are talking to you in the language of fucking. The message is: do as you’re told. Do what we say, when we say it, tell us what we want to know even if you don’t know it. The message is: don’t piss us about, sonny, or you’ll go the David Kelly road. The de Menezes road. Or whatever that poor bugger was called they topped at the G20 for walking with his hands in his pockets. This is the system coming down with all its might. The message is: this is what happens when you don’t behave yourself.” Her eyes are cold and flat, and there’s something prowling in their depths.

Mercer draws breath and carries on. “In the course of your terroristic activities, you were discovered by several people who are now missing or dead.”

“Who?”

“Billy, first of all. Then Joyce.”

“Well, she’ll say that’s not true. They weren’t going to be married. And she’s not dead, so that’s just ridiculous.” But they are both looking at him, and he realises he still has somehow not understood something fundamental.

Mercer carries on, inexorable. “And a girl named Therese Chandler, of Wistithiel, in Cornwall, who was found dead in her home early this morning. Apparently you met her in a pub.”

“Therese? Tess? She’s dead?”

“Yes, Joe. Joyce as well.”

“Joyce wasn’t even with Billy any more!”

“I know. This isn’t about that.”

“They killed her to get to me?”

“Or because they thought she might know something, however tiny. Yes. And now that I’ve met the enemy, I should think just for fun, wouldn’t you? I’m pretty sure he did for Billy in person. That seems about his style.”

Yes. It does. But it also seems impossible, even now, with the smell of Edie’s death still in his nostrils: blood and gunsmoke. “This is all wrong. It’s against the law. All that stuff.”

And somehow Mercer is angry, because he nearly shouts. “Yes, Joe! It is against the law! It always is! And yet it happens. Or did you think they only did this to taxi drivers from Karachi? They do it when they feel like it, when it’s expedient, when the situation demands it. And no one cares because it never happens to them!” Polly puts a restraining hand on her brother’s arm. “Sorry.”

In the paper, pictures of Tess and Joyce, alive. Descriptions of how they died. Descriptions so lurid you can’t help but wonder, unless you really know someone well, whether they might have done it, after all.

Almost everyone who trusts him that much is here, now.

Joe Spork stares at the dead faces, and the headline.

Every man’s hand is against him now.

Joe Spork stares into nothing and waits for his heart to break, or his mind. He waits for the impact of this appalling, impossible lie to cause everything he is to crumble and collapse. He looks up and sees Polly watching, and Mercer, and knows they are waiting too. Sorry, he thinks. I’m done. I don’t have anything left. He waits to hear his own mouth make nonsense sounds, for his body to curl up into a ball and just stay there, until they come for him.

Instead, a completely other thing happens which catches him quite by surprise. He comes to the end of himself and finds, at the last, a piece of solid ground and a hard wall to set his back against.

Sometime between the moment when his father’s heart went ba but not boom and the dropping of Mathew’s silver-chased casket into the earth, Joe Spork buried the part of himself which knew how to hustle, cheat, and rob in a coffin of its own, and in some indefinable way accepted that his was to be a life of inconsequence and hohummery. He studied with Daniel in an effort to turn back the clock to some previous point when Mathew was not just still alive but not yet criminal; he sought, in fact, to become the man his father might have been under other circumstances.

He stares into his own reflection in the double-glazed window, and tries to remember the man he could have been. Crown Prince of Crime. Worse than his dad ever was, and that’s God’s honest truth. Mad bastard, he is. Not afraid of nothing.

That person has never existed, and yet he has always been possible. He has never gone away. Now, finally, is the moment to make him real. And yet it seems to Joe a very long journey to that place in himself, a long, hard uphill struggle against years of accumulated obstacles and self-made fences.

He begins with the man he is now: Joe Spork, who did not murder his friend, but is accused of it, and of things more desperate and vile for reasons which are not his fault; who shares his bed with Polly Cradle, and means to make that matter.

He rolls his shoulders, sets his jaw, and goes on.

He is the man who was taken by monsters, and tortured, and is not dead.

He is the man who knows that innocence is not a shield, and that keeping your head down does not mean you will be safe.

He is the man who was set up by an old woman in the name of love and a better world, and who watched her die to save him.

He is the man who will look after her dog.

He is the man who charged a loaded gun and a sword with nothing more than his anger.

Oh, yes, and his father was trouble, too. And his grandmother before that.

A slow, satisfied grin moves across his face. Mad Dog Joe. White Knuckle Joe. Run-Amok Joe.

Crazy Joe.

All right, then. He looks at his reflection again. He judges the work good, but not finished: the new Joe should not slouch.

He breathes in and sticks out his chest, looks again. No, too much. Less is more. Solidity, not hot air. Strength, not bluster.

He straightens his back, flexes his arms, but the power is carried in the core, not the fists. The gangster doesn’t bluff, doesn’t threaten. He simply is, and you know the score.

The city belongs to me. The world. It is mine. Other men rule because I have more important things to do.

Good. Now, the hat. The gangster is perpetually wearing a hat. Even when he is not, he carries himself as if he is. The light falls across his face just so; one eye is in darkness, glinting. Piratical. A wolf eye on the edge of the firelight, a pirate captain in a storm. Defiance.

The coat, like armour. It needs to hang wide, open, to emphasise his scale. It casts its own shadow, hides him yet again. His hands are by his sides, so he might be armed… No, scratch that. One way or another, he is armed. Is it a baseball bat? Very American. Where would he get such a thing? A length of pipe. A gun. A boathook. Good. And in his pocket, some further surprise. Not a gun. Not a knife. Something more alarming. A Molotov cocktail, perhaps, or a grenade. He has heard that Russian mobsters use grenades. It seems like massive overkill. Ah. Yes. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Overkill. Bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight. Bring a tank to play chicken. It’s not about subtle or measured. Shem Shem Tsien is subtle, a crooked spider in the dark, a liar, a thief of hope, a killer of Watsons and Joyces. Murderer of old women and sorrower of dogs. I am not a subtle or a measured man. I am Crazy Joe Spork, and I will bring you down if I must topple the house around us.

Yes.

From the window surface stares back the man he must be from now on: one-eyed wanderer; battlefield ghost; stranger; titan; mobster; angel of destruction.

A man who might be able to win, after all.

“Your escape route goes through Ireland,” Mercer is saying. “Ferry, then a flight to Iceland, on to Canada. Canada’s great for disappearing. It’s very big and there’s nothing in it. If you leave in the next few hours we can get you out before the bees arrive. I don’t know if that will help, but it’s worth a try.”

Joe Spork doesn’t seem to hear. Mercer moves around him, waves. “Do I have your attention, Joe?”

“Station Y,” Joe says. Mercer raises his eyebrows. Joe nods. “Okay. Do that in a minute. Does anyone have the box from my mother?”

Mercer frowns.

“Yes,” Polly says.

“May I have it, please?”

She rummages in her bag, produces it. The key is taped to the bottom, in the fashion of nuns rather than gangsters. He opens it.

Old pictures, Polaroids, wrapped with an elastic band from the Post Office—of course. Smiling lockpickers, the very first Old Campaigners of Mathew Spork’s inner circle. Parties with women in baby-doll dresses and men in velvet suits. A candid picture of Harriet which Joe hastily pushes to the back, so lustful and alarmingly ripe does she appear.

And then, very much out of place, three more pictures in their own little group, with a smaller elastic band around them and a piece of paper with the single word “Josh” on it just to make the point, and Joe Spork finds he can read them as if they were postcards:

Uncle Tam and Mathew, looking very grave, shaking hands on a deal in the Marketman’s fashion, a double clasp. Your Uncle has something for you.

Mercer and, yes, Polly, clasped in the arms of their parents on the steps of Cradle’s. These are the people you can trust.

And Joe himself, in a sheepskin jacket, perched on Mathew’s knee and punching the sky, Mathew’s face for once quite open and joyous, gunman’s hands on his son’s narrow shoulders. That one’s almost too simple, too primal to put into words. Even I love you doesn’t really do it justice.

He can feel Mathew’s breath on his hair. His father used to inhale him from time to time, simple, honest, mammalian.

“Ireland, Joe,” Mercer says.

Joe looks over at him, genuinely surprised. “Oh, I’m not running.”

“What? Of course you are.”

“No.”

“Joe, you can’t fight this. It’s too big.”

“He’s going to kill the world, Mercer. And he’s already killed me. The old Joe is done. I won’t be doing a lot of business now, will I? Even if the bank doesn’t foreclose, which they will.”

“It will blow over. Someone else will no doubt stop him. There are people who do those things.”

“The Legacy Board. Rodney Titwhistle. Yes. He’s on top of it, all right.”

“For God’s sake, Joe! You’re a clockworker. That’s what you wanted. That’s who I’ve been trying to help!”

“And he says ‘Thank you.’ From the bottom of his heart. But he’s gone, Mercer. Now it’s me.” He glances over at Polly Cradle.

“Tell him!” Mercer demands, but Polly just smiles back at Joe and slowly claps her hands, eyes shining.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mercer shouts. “You’re not serious!”

“Yes,” Joe says. “I began to get it when I was in there. I don’t know when. Maybe after the first month.”

Mercer hesitates. “Joe, you weren’t in there a month. It wasn’t even a full week. I know it must have seemed like longer, but you escaped after five days.”

Joe Spork shakes his head, and his smile is very fey indeed.

“No, Mercer,” he says gently. “It just felt like that to you, because you were on the outside.”

There is a ghastly silence. Mercer starts to object, to correct him, and then the upside-down truth of this sinks into him and he crumples.

“I’m so sorry, Joe,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help. I’m sorry. I did my best, and it wasn’t… it wasn’t anything like enough.”

“You were superb,” Joe Spork tells him gently. “They tried to tell me you’d given up. Both of you.”

They bristle, and he smiles. “Look: this is just how it is now. My whole life I’ve been telling myself to be calm, to be reasonable, to be respectable. To toe the line. But here I am, all the same, because they cheated. They changed the game so that I couldn’t win by being an honest man. But the thing is, I wasn’t very good at being an honest man. I had to put so much of me away to do it. But being a crook, now… I’ve got the skills for that. I can be an amazing crook. I can be the greatest crook who ever lived. I can do that, and still do the right thing. I’m not bonkers, at all. I’m free.”

Polly Cradle cocks her head, and considers.

“What right thing?” she asks.

Bastion growls softly.

Joe gestures at the newspaper.

“They’re coming after me. They’re killing people and it’s only a matter of time before they get”—he looks around, and finds himself gazing at Polly, looks away—“one of you. I’m not running any more. It’s time to give them something to think about.”

He folds his arms.

Mercer opens his mouth to argue, and Bastion Banister chooses this moment to open his mouth and snap at the circling bee. To his own evident surprise, he captures it, and there’s a curious little glonking noise as he swallows it whole. Mercer cringes slightly, as if expecting the dog to explode.

Nothing happens.

“All right,” Polly Cradle says, and then, pro forma, “Bastion, you’re a very naughty boy.”

“Yes,” Mercer says acidly. “The dog has consumed a possibly lethal technological device of immense sophistication, deprived us of our only piece of tangible evidence and possibly doomed us all to some sort of arcane scientific retaliative strike. By all means, chide him severely with your voice. That will solve everyone’s problems.”

There is silence, and then Joe Spork starts to sputter, and Polly Cradle snorts, and then Joe actually laughs: a small snigger which grows into a loud, open laugh, and finally a great shout of mirth, and Polly is laughing right alongside him, with relief and delight and in honour of the expression of profound affront on her brother’s face. Finally, even Mercer joins in.

When the fit is over, they regard one another with glad eyes.

“Mercer,” Polly says, “we are now going to hug. As a group. The experience will be very un-English. It will be good for you. Do not speak, at all, especially not in an attempt to diffuse the emotional intensity of the situation.”

They hug, somewhat awkwardly, but with great feeling.

“Well,” Mercer says, after a moment, “that was certainly—”

“I will hit you with a shovel,” Polly Cradle murmurs.

The clasp goes on a second longer, and then they step back.

“All right, then,” Joe Spork says. “Let’s get started.”

“This is actually not something I’ve done before,” Joe says a few moments later to the man in the pink shirt, “but I felt almost sure I would have natural talent.”

The man nods hurriedly, but very gently, because he’s worried about the Sabatier cleaver resting just under his chin. Joe liberated this gruesome item from the kitchen in the giant mint, and his face brightened significantly as he appreciated its weight and general nastiness. The owner of the house is apparently some sort of closet gourmet, because Polly was able to arm herself with a brace of short, fat-bladed items used for shucking oysters which, while small, possess a similar measure of menace and utility.

Joe smiles benignly, which in the circumstances makes him appear completely deranged. “Do you read the newspapers? No, don’t nod again, that’s not a good idea. Make a sort of squeak if you can… yes, there we are. One for yes, two for no… Good. So you are aware that I am an escaped mental patient, a sociopath, and an accused terrorist?”

The man squeaks.

“Great. So we’re clear on the absolute and incontrovertible awfulness of your situation and how very dangerous I am? Oh, by the way, this is Polly. Polly, say hello to Mr… well, perhaps we won’t ask his name, in case it makes him nervous. Say hello, anyway.” Polly Cradle smoulders.

“Now, where was I? Oh, yes. This car. It is absolutely lovely. I can almost promise you it will not be damaged. I say ‘almost’ because there’s a slight possibility that any car in which I travel will be shot at and blown up. It’s a negligible risk from my point of view in that I would be past caring, but I can see that you might take exception. Anyway, it’s a lovely car and I’ll do my best. You don’t mind, do you?”

An emphatic double-squeak: mi casa, su casa.

“Thank you. Now, can you tell me, will it get us to Portsmouth on that much petrol, do you think? No? Well, I suppose I can rob a garage. Now, can we be reasonably sure that you’ll wait an hour or so before calling the police? Because otherwise I’ll have to ask you to accompany us. How is the boot, by the way? Comfy? Oh, you’re leaving? Yes, I think that might be best…”

Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.

“Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmurs, “that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?”

Joe swallows. “Yes, we can,” he says carefully.

“There will therefore be no more ‘Say hello, Polly’?”

“There will not.”

The knife disappears immediately, and she slides over to him, plants her lips on his. He feels her tongue, wide and muscular, in his mouth. Her hand puts his firmly on her arse.

“Start the engine,” she says. “I find car-theft sexy.”

“This was technically a car-jacking,” Joe says.

“Do you want extra points for that?”

“Yes, please.”

“Then don’t say ‘please.’”

From St. Albans they head north.

A brief conversation with Cecily Foalbury via public phone at a petrol station yielded the information that the “Station Y” of Ted Sholt’s final, desperate confidence was better known as Bletchley Park. Cecily was somewhat scathing about this. “For God’s sake, it’s common knowledge, Joe. I took you there myself. They broke the Enigma code, won the war. Invented the digital computer. No?”

And yes, of course, Joe remembers Bletchley, with its mysterious Nissen huts in various stages of decay, surrounded by suspect little hills which were clearly anything but, and the sprawling red-brick house which had been home to the greatest mathematicians an embattled Britain could lay hands on. He’d been almost equally impressed by the model-train club which occupied part of the house and helped to pay the rent, and by the mothballed Harrier jump jet on the lawn. A decayed British institution, abandoned by its secrets and left to run to seed. You could hide almost anything at Bletchley. Who would ever ask?

Joe has swapped the car’s number plates with those of another of the same make, and Polly disabled the satellite tracker, so the stolen vehicle has effectively vanished unless someone looks at the engine block. There’s a strange feeling of freedom on the open road, however illusory.

“What’s at Bletchley?” Polly asks, as Milton Keynes draws closer ahead of them.

He grins at her. “A train,” he says, and sees her answering smile.

After the motorway, the road to Bletchley is flat and dull. It winds between bits of contoured landscape and modern box houses; the strange, tame outskirts of Milton Keynes, created whole and inviolate by the planners and somehow never quite human in its execution. Bletchley Park is on the outskirts, served by a spur road which opens onto what may once have been a machine-gun emplacement. Joe parks the car very neatly in a space. Even though it shouldn’t be there, the English curator-type will usually ignore something which isn’t in the way.

The dawn is coming, and with it comes a measure of risk. Joe hesitates, briefly worried that some late watchman or early modeller will catch him in the act, then remembers that he doesn’t really care about that. He clambers onto the roof of the ticket office and peers around in the twilight.

Ted Sholt’s instructions are not clear, were never exactly lucid. Joe lays them over the terrain like a pencil sketch, and adds another layer of his own, his Night Market instinct for concealment and deception. If I were hiding an unlicensed boxing ring… And sure enough, there it is, a long, low barrow which is too straight and too unexpected to be a natural rise, but too big to be easily recognised as artificial. And yes, it does indeed give onto a curve in the old railway, a suspicious valley with long grass at the bottom which he has no doubt will reveal a short stretch of track. He points. Polly nods, but when he makes for the mound directly she shakes her head.

“Over here,” she murmurs, and draws him to the small, shattered remnant of a hut away to one side. A sign reads “Officers’ Water Closet: upper ranks only.” Inside, she produces a torch from her bag—which also contains, somewhat to his surprise, Edie Banister’s dog—and illuminates a hatch in the floor which leads down into a passageway beneath ground level. She grins, and Joe nods, acknowledging her score.

Hand over hand, they climb down into the earth.

The passage smells of musty concrete and damp. At the end of it there is a door, very solid and serious. Hermetic, Joe suspects. He could have blown it, with the right gear—and where would he get that? The question of proper gangstering tools is next on the agenda, and right speedily.

But he doesn’t need to blow this one, and that’s for the best, given what may be behind it. The combination lock is old and rather pretty, rich brass dials engraved with Roman numerals. Done by hand, he thinks. Open the door with Lizzie’s birthday, Sholt said, and yes, indeed: XXI-IV-XXVI does the trick, the arrival in this world of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

When he opens the door there is a rush of air inwards. Beyond it there’s another door, forming a kind of dust trap, and hanging on the wall is a row of wind-up lanterns. He lifts one down, turns the handle a few times. Then he steps through the inner door.

The room beyond is comparatively narrow—it’s more of a tunnel—but it’s enormous. It slants gently down into the earth; the near end, the one leading out into the world, is at ground level. And there, in front of him, is what he came for. Endless scrolling patterns ripple along lines of sheer power. The boiler is taller than he is and long as a bus. The sections fade away into the distance—ten of them? Twelve? Each is as perfectly made as the last, and each one is subtly different. The name is cut into the black iron cowcatcher at the front: Lovelace.

The exterior looks like metal, but it could be something else—resin, ceramic… Joe runs his hand over it. The surface is cool and a little damp, because there’s a layer of protective oil. He smells coal and a cosy, storage-space scent of leather and wood. As he moves the beam of the lantern up and around, he begins to get a sense of the thing, its scale. Trains are familiar things, clattering drones which rush by or wander through the countryside; passenger trains have windows through which one can see harried parents or commuters squeezed like chattels. Goods trains, these days, are rare. You have to watch for them on local lines or sidings, or sit in Polly Cradle’s bedroom and feel them go by. Joe Spork glances at Polly. She is walking along behind him, silent, one hand tracing a single finger along the skin of the Lovelace. He can see a tiny rim of dust and rubble building up where she’s touching the carriage. She’s smiling as if he’s given her diamonds.

The next door has the goose-foot symbol on it. The dog Bastion barks suddenly, and yearns towards it from his bag. Polly shrugs.

“This one, then,” she says.

They open the door and climb aboard. There’s a faint hiss as the door unseals, and a whisper of motion as a ventilation system starts working. At least, Joe hopes it’s a ventilation system and not, for example, a deadly gas attack. He sniffs, then feels like an idiot, but since he doesn’t fall over and die he assumes this is not poison, and steps forward.

Inside, the lantern picks out two workbenches. One of them is cluttered and covered in a now-familiar scrawl, rows of mathematical notations and scraps of metal and other substances more obscure. The other is perfectly neat, almost prim. A vise, a selection of tools… Daniel.

Yes, boy. This one was mine. We sat back to back and worked, and I listened to her frustration and her triumph and I never told her how much I wanted her back, because I knew she had no room for me any more. For Mathew. For you. She was just desperate to make things right.

Joe reaches out and touches the bench. It is a caress, a gesture of fellowship.

Then he hears a voice, and turning, sees a woman made of light.

“Hello,” the woman says. She walks forward. Her body is an outline, like a shadow in reverse. Looking around, Joe realises that she is composed of bright beams from a hundred tiny lenses around the compartment, reflecting off a column of moisture in the air. Her face is indistinct. Just barely, he can see her profile when she turns to one side, and the outline of her mouth when she speaks. Her voice is a recording, much better than the ones in Daniel’s record collection—and with that realisation he names her, of course. Frankie Fossoyeur.

He studies her features, or tries to, feels fleeting recognition as the image turns and moves, though whether it is from old memories of Frankie or her reflection in Daniel and Mathew he does not know.

The whole numinous vision is… well. Not otherworldly. It’s quite simple, just brilliantly executed. A three-dimensional magic-lantern show. Holograms without lasers. Exactly what you’d expect from the kind of genius who builds a truth machine in the shape of a beehive.

Frankie cocks her head to one side. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are. I hope Edie is there, somewhere. Or Daniel. Or both of you, perhaps. Maybe you are in love. That would be tidy… Mais non. I am cruel. I am sorry, both of you.

“So sorry…” She waves her hand, brushing all this away.

“You realise that this is just a recording. A clever one. But no doubt by now this sort of thing is commonplace and I look hopelessly old-fashioned… Bien. And perhaps the entire conversation is out of date, and everything is well. But in case it is not, and since you’re here, I’m going to ask you to save the world for me. I hope that isn’t too much trouble.” She laughs, and then coughs. The cough is the bad kind, the kind which doesn’t get better. “Nom de chien…”

The ghost leans on something off camera, and sighs. The invisible face is slightly at an angle to them, the projection out of sync with the real world. It gives Joe the curious sense that she is looking at someone behind him. “This is where you say ‘Yes’,” Frankie adds. “And then I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

Joe glances at Polly Cradle. She takes his hand and nods.

“Yes,” they say together. There’s a faint click somewhere. B-side, perhaps.

Frankie—thirty years ago and more—cocks her head. “Bien. There are two things I must say, because I do not know what is happening,” the ghost of Frankie Fossoyeur says. “There is a prescription and a proscription. As Daniel would say, the stricture of the machine is hope, but in fact it possesses many virtues, many aspects, and one of them is the opposite of hope.

“The prescription is very simple. If it has not started, you must begin the process. Switch on the machine. The bees will fly. They will gather truth and sort it from lies, as they were rumoured to do when I was a child. Lies shall wither and a net improvement of nine per cent in the human condition will occur over time. Edie knows how to make it so.

“Understand that it will not be without pain. The world will reject the truth. It always has and it will again. There will be violence. But in the end, we will not be destroyed by it. There are enough good people that the foolish and the wicked will not drag us down. There will be a better world.

“The proscription is more serious. Very serious. It is like the one for nuclear material: do not push two subcritical pieces of uranium together at great speed. Only it is much more important!

“The wave that is the human soul is fragile. At Wistithiel I saw how fragile, and that was the barest beginning. Do you understand? If the Apprehension Engine is incorrectly calibrated, it exposes the mind to too much knowledge, and the mind in turn determines the world. In perfect perception of the underlying universe we find the end of uncertainty, of choice. Without choice, no consciousness. Without an uncertain future, no future at all. After a certain point, it is possible that this process would become self-perpetuating. What is possible would cease and be replaced by… immutable history. Ice instead of water. Life would become Newtonian. Clockwork.

“This is what Shem Shem Tsien desires from me. From the machine. He wishes a great, appalling determination. He will know the universe into a kind of extinction. His union with God will not be complete until he has ended what God began. Somehow, this catastrophe is what he most desires.

“He will, unless prevented, destroy everything, not just now, but for ever. Our universe will drift in the void, a solid, changeless block.

“If he is involved, in any way, you cannot trust him. No one can. If he has the Apprehension Engine, then what he intends is atrocious. You must stop him. You must.”

And the recording stops. The numinous ghost of Frankie Fossoyeur hangs in the air in front of them, pointing off to the side.

Joe leans one way, and then the other, gauging the angles. Then he lies down on his face and peers at the panelling, the floor, and then stands and taps gently at the polished ceiling. He takes a moment to reflect that this is the single largest and most beautiful mobile artwork he has ever seen. Ruskinite, he realises, from the days before Shem Shem Tsien. He could hate the man just for that, for the unmaking of the Order of John the Maker. If only there weren’t so many other things to hate him for.

There. Under his fingertips: a faint line. He follows it, up and down. A seal. Which implies a compartment. But how to open it? If Daniel made it, then it would be elegant. If Frankie designed it, it might be mathematical… no. No, she intended this for an ordinary mind. Ordinary, but familiar. So, how… oh. Of course. From his pocket he takes the car keys, moves them gently across the blank face of the panel. Yes, there—the keys twitch towards the wood, as if in a high wind. A magnet, this time on the inside, so that any metal will suffice to move the catch. There’s no pattern, though. How is he to know what movement will release the panel? He suspects a false step may have consequences greater than merely lost time. Frankie had learned caution by this point, of that much he is quite sure. He wonders if a decades-old booby trap will still work, and whether, if he doesn’t disarm it soon, it will blow him up just for being there. How long does he have? When will his grandmother’s ghost decide he is not her inheritor, but an enemy?

He drags his mind back to the job in hand.

No pattern. The line of the join? Like a number one? No. Meaningless. The square of the panel? It seems… too easy, and again, it means nothing. There is no way to be sure. Frankie was obsessed with certainty, for good or ill. With knowledge. And yet here, there is no pattern. A blank. No pattern where there should be a pattern.

He draws back, considering context, interrogating the puzzle.

What is the panel concealing?

A negation. Nothing where there was something, a very binary notion… Not a one, but a zero.

And there’s your answer.

All right, a zero. To be drawn in which direction? How does an ambidextrous French supergenius write her numbers?

Any way she likes.

“Which direction?” he mutters.

Polly Cradle kneels down beside him, kisses him on the forehead, like a blessing. She draws a circle with her finger, and he realises she has understood the same thing at the same time. Reassurance. Confirmation. He takes a moment to appreciate her presence, her amazing brain, sees it for a moment as a wonderful mechanical angel in her head.

“Clockwise,” she says. “Of course.”

Clockwise. A last message to Daniel. Do this, and all will be as it should be. Somehow.

Oh, Frankie.

He moves the keys in a circle, starting at twelve o’clock and moving around to the right. A moment later, the panel slides open. He peers in, and sees the small, solid knot of explosive. Had he moved the keys the wrong way… Well, he’s very pleased that he didn’t. He reaches in, and then abruptly he is holding a few pages of handwritten notes in his hands. He flicks through them, puts them away.

“What’s that?” Polly asks.

“The off switch,” Joe replies, and when she looks at him sternly, “Well, all right. Not a switch. A list of what to break in the right order so that the world doesn’t come to an end. A sabotage list.”

Bastion, from his place in Polly Cradle’s bag, snuffles through his tiny nose, and growls.

I am ready, horologist. Let us proceed.

Joe Spork looks at the dog.

“Simple as that, ey?”

On the way out, they close the doors and leave things exactly as they found them. At the railway station, Joe steals another car.

“Where now?” Polly asks.

Joe reaches into his pocket and passes her the Polaroid photo of Mathew and Tam. “Gentleman’s outfitter,” he says.

It takes longer to get to Uncle Tam’s place than Joe was expecting, because so many people are leaving London. The radio talk shows are twittering with concerned believers and contemptuous realists. Experts have been found and trotted out: catastrophe mathematicians, lawyers and comedians are all contributing to the mix. You couldn’t call it a panic, not yet. More a sort of jitter, like the rumour of a storm.

The house is at the end of a narrow road.

Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Tam.”

With a recently pinched Mercedes and a girlfriend who looks like some sort of crime all by herself.

Tam shouts back through the door. “No, no, this is where you say ‘Oh, is it five in the bloody morning? I’m so sorry, I must be out of my fucking mind!’”

“Soot and sorrow, Tam. It’s Joe Spork.”

Uncle Tam—leaner and grizzlier, but verifiably the original—flings open the door and stares at him, meerkat eyes bright in a craggy face.

“Shit. I s’pose it was inevitable… Did I or did I not teach you, young Lochinvar—who is on the run and a plague to all men’s houses—that folk of the Market do not have names? We don’t say ‘I am,’ we say ‘I am called,’ and the reason for that is not so that fairies can’t take our teeth when we sleep with our mouths open on Midsummer’s Night, it is for perfectly simple deniability, so that old Tam does not have to fall back on ‘I am an old fart, officer, and too senile to recognise a wanted felon when I see one.’ Hullo,” he says, looking at Polly Cradle, “all right, I’ve changed my mind, you can come in. What’s my name?”

“I never heard it,” she replies smartly.

“You was raised proper,” Tam says approvingly, “not like Lochinvar. Always a troubled boy.”

“We came here in a stolen car, and he’s going to get me a bouncier one when we leave so we can screw like mink on the A303,” Polly informs him brightly.

Tam glares at her, then groans. “Christ,” he says, “I’m old.” He leaves the door open as he sinks despairingly back inside.

They follow him. Tam’s place is a bungalow, and he drags one foot. Joe, thinking of the great cat burglar of days gone by, feels a bit mournful.

The house is cramped and not very warm. It ought to have a kind of moth-eaten grandeur, but it doesn’t. It’s just lonely. There are books along the walls, old science fiction novels muddled with copies of the European Timetable and random magazines Tam hasn’t thrown away. One shelf is taken up entirely with ledgers of old shipping companies.

“I am a wanted man, Tam. And she’s a wanted woman, too, I suppose.”

Tam doesn’t answer Joe directly. He glances at Polly.

“I swear to God,” he mutters, “he does this to upset me. Oy,” he adds, turning to Joe, “if you don’t tell me I can’t know and I can’t be done for not calling the rozzers, now can I? I am assuming all this is woeful bravado from a boy with a proper job who wants to impress an old mate of his dad’s. You giant rollicking twerp. What do you want, Lochinvar? You and your girl with the naughty feet?”

“I need something, Tam. It’s not anything big.”

Tam glowers. “You’re just like him. He used to say that just before he said something like ‘Tam, old friend, it seems to me the Countess of Collywobble has too many diamonds and we have too few, so get your crampons, we’re off to scale the north face of Mount Collywobble Hall!’ and then before I knew it I was standing in front of the beak asking for clemency and pleading bloody stupid in mitigation. What are you looking for?”

“Whatever he left with you.”

Tam frowns. “Are you sure? Times have changed, Joe. No room for Mathew’s sort of living now.”

“I’m sure.”

Tam measures him, and nods. “Had to ask,” he says, “before I gave this over. Mathew left it for you. Said you’d never need it, left it anyway. He believed in planning ahead, when it suited him.” He scribbles on a piece of paper: three digits, then a letter and another three numbers. “It’s round the corner,” Tam says. “McMadden Storage. Looks all modern now, but nothing’s really changed. First number tells you which door to use. The letter’s for which floor, and the last one tells you which container it is. It’s all locked up, of course.”

“Where’s the key?” Polly Cradle asks.

Tam grins. “Oh, well…”

Joe Spork grins back, a wolf’s lolling tongue peeping out from under a sheep costume. “If you need a key, you’ve got no use for what’s in the box.”

Polly persuades Joe not to crash the car through the fence, which is his first, heady option, so he cuts the wire instead, right under a security camera. She waits for the alarm to go off, and nothing happens.

“Most of them don’t have one,” Joe murmurs, “and the ones which do, well, it’s property crime, isn’t it, not residential. Police’ll show up in the morning. Guard’s not about to come and see what’s happening if he can help it, is he? Even if the cameras work, which that one likely doesn’t because it’s not plugged into anything. Most of the world works that way. It just assumes you’re too chicken to find out.”

“I think it’s wireless,” Polly Cradle says carefully. “I remember the catalogue.”

“Oh.” He looks at the little lens. It abruptly seems very alert. “Well, best we hurry, then.” He grins, unrepentant, and she laughs.

A few moments later, in the shadow of the corrugated iron wall, he uses the same bolt-cutters on the padlock of door 334. He shoulders through, then shuts the door and turns on the lights.

“Wow,” Joe Spork says after a moment.

This is almost certainly the most orange place in England. It may be the most orange place in the world. Row upon row of numbered orange boxes, and beyond them, orange doors set into orange walls. It is not a soft, sunset orange or a painter’s orange, but a bright, plastic, waxed-fruit orange which knows no compromise. It’s the kind of orange which would allow you to find your container in a blizzard or after an avalanche.

Polly Cradle assumes he will also cut the lock on container C193, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just lifts the door up and out, and it comes off quite smoothly. He uses the padlock as a hinge.

Inside, there’s a man.

He’s sitting with his back to them in a big leather armchair. He wears a hat and a pair of gloves. By his left hand is a carpet bag, and by his right, a trombone case. He doesn’t move.

Joe Spork edges forward, and breathes out. It’s just a dressmaker’s dummy. Very ha ha, he thinks. Very Mathew. A small shock, just to keep you on your toes, test your mettle. Or maybe just for fun. Mind you, Mathew himself might have shot it, and that would have ruined a perfectly decent hat. Exactly the kind of hat Joe was thinking of a few hours ago. A hat to ravish dancehall girls in, to shade a fellow’s face while he runs moonshine. He moves closer.

The zip on the carpet bag is thick and dry. It sticks. He tugs at it, back, then forward, then back. Yes. The bag opens.

Shirts. A wad of money, perhaps a thousand pounds, in useless old-style ten-pound notes. A small pouch containing what can only be diamonds. Today’s value in the straight world: a couple of hundred thousand. Walking-around money. A toothbrush, because Mathew hated to be without, and a couple of tins of preserved fruit. A bottle of Scotch, a packet of tobacco. And… oh. Another set of Polaroids, rather ribald: a rubicund fellow in a wealth of female company on the sofa at one of Mathew’s parties. Not a lot of clothing to speak of, and a number of things going on which one newspaper or another might consider a bit naughty. The Hon Don takes his pleasure, 1 of 6 in Mathew’s hand on the back. A very solid bit of blackmail, ho ho, and surely this is what the somewhat dishonourable Donald was expecting when Joe bearded him the other day.

He looks around and sees what he’s looking for, taped loosely to the trombone case: a dirty postcard from Brighton circa 1975 showing a cheeky disco girl with her dress falling down.

Joe glances at the card, praying to God the text on the back is not long, not tortured, most of all that it will not apologise or accuse, or tell him he has sisters in five counties and a brother in Scotland. Or that there’s a corpse field under the warehouse.

Joe, it says, in large, friendly letters. Oil the slide and watch the safety, it’s loose. Love, Dad.

Here, in this room, is evidence of care from Mathew Spork for his one begotten son, a gesture of love and an appeal for absolution. Not just a memento or an escape kit. A Gangster’s Parachute. Just in case the straight life doesn’t work out.

Without hesitation, Joe strips the dummy and changes his clothes. The suit is a little loose around the shoulders, but other than that, it’s a good fit. His father’s guess at his full growth, and the tailor’s. Polly Cradle watches in silence as he puts on the hat.

He turns to the trombone case.

It isn’t a trombone case, of course. It looks a bit like one, but—Arthur Sullivan notwithstanding—no one in Joe’s situation actually believes their problems can be solved with a trombone. Unless he is greatly mistaken, the case contains something louder and less musical. It is also extremely illegal, but Joe is rather a long way past the point where he cares about that. He opens the case. The not-trombone is resting in pieces in black velvet compartments. Various tools and expendables are included in the kit, so that he can maintain and furnish his not-trombone at home. There’s even a score, telling you how to play music on it, and what ingredients are necessary for the creation of further vital supplies. And on the inside of the lid is the maker’s mark: the Auto-Ordnance Corporation of New York.

Papa Spork’s beloved Thompson sub-machine gun.

He realises, suddenly, how very long he has been waiting for this moment.

He grins, and carefully slots the pieces into place, then stands in the semi-dark. He lifts the tommy gun in across his chest, and smiles a smile of wide, boyish joy.

“‘At last, my hand is whole again,’” says Crazy Joe Spork.