Angelmaker

XVI Drinks at the Pablum Club; Jorge, Arvin, and the Tricoteuses; dangerous to mess around with.

The Pablum Club is not actually in St. James’s. It’s off to one side, and it isn’t nearly as ancient as the doorman’s spectacles would suggest. Founded as a place where gentlemen who retained fire in the gut could escape from the fossilised remnants at the Athenaeum and the O&C, it has all the external trappings, all the leather chairs and expensive brandies, but the patrons generally discuss their mistresses rather than their handicaps, and an iron rule of secrecy applies to all conversations great or small, on pain of disenfranchisement. If the modern establishment has a special fortress, a medal for long service at the old boys’ wheel, it is the Pablum.

The Hon Don is a major stakeholder, so Joe orders himself an obscenely ancient and expensive malt whisky and a Patrón Gold tequila (with actual gold in it) for Polly Cradle. Then he puts his two-tone brogues up on the mahogany coffee table and lets his head fall onto the backrest of his thronelike chair. After a moment, the fellows’ butler arrives to ask him not to and to inquire as to whether the lady would not prefer the Ladies’ Bar. Polly Cradle smiles and says she wouldn’t, and the fellows’ butler replies that he is almost sure she would, and Polly Cradle very gently tells him that really, she wouldn’t, whereupon the fellows’ butler appeals to Joe and Joe tells him to get the Hon Don toot suite, and shows him his gun.

The fellows’ butler runs like hell, but does not—because gentlemen with fire in the gut are prone to this sort of outburst—call the police. Polly Cradle lets Bastion out of his bag, and he selects a damasked sofa and, despite being small, occupies it entirely. Joe smiles a smile of malign anticipation, and waits.

Part of him—he’s coming to think of his hesitations as Old Joe—feels strongly that his presence here is premature. He should plan, he should husband his resources. He should, in fact, be sensible. To this injunction the inner gangster responds with a deep and flatulent raspberry. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If it gives you compromising pictures of venal bankers with a wide and varied social acquaintance in the halls of power, then you blackmail while the sun shines.

“I need the Hon Don,” he’d told Polly Cradle on the way back to London, “and I need the Night Market. Whatever I’m doing, I’m going to need them. I can feel it.” She made love to him, as promised, between junctions fifteen and seven. He closes his eyes for a moment in heady recollection.

A notedly traditionalist bishop goes to sit on the damasked sofa, leaps up as the episcopal fundament is assailed by Bastion’s one remaining tooth, and then nearly expires of sheer horror at the pink marble eyes and the halitotic sneer.

The Hon Don arrives a moment later with their drinks.

“Hello, Hon Don!” Joe carols.

“Hello, Hésus, my old friend,” the Hon Don says loudly, and nods to the shaking bishop. “ ’Lo, Your Eminence, have you met Hésus, sounds like your sort of fellow, doesn’t he, with a name like that, but of course it’s very common in Spain, where he’s from.” This with a warning glance at Joe and Polly. “Yes, indeed, Count Hésus of Santa Mirabella—and I do believe I’ve not met the countess, you must be she, how charming, utterly,” and at this point he’s put down the drinks and is close enough to snarl “What the fuck are you doing here, you little shithead?” as he goes to embrace his guest.

Joe Spork smiles a beatific smile, and produces a colour photocopy of the incriminating Polaroid snaps. “I bring closure, Don. I bring joy to all mankind. My family’s estates may lie in ruins, but I have my father’s heritance. I know you’ll be relieved to hear it’s all intact and in a safe place. There was something he always wanted you to have, but death took him”—he smiles at the bishop, who has found a dog-less and uncomfortable-looking lounger in the corner, and waves—“I should say ‘the Lord God, merciful and mighty, took him off to his just reward,’ hello, Your Eminence, most pleased to make your acquaintance, I am Hésus de la Castillia di Manchego di Rioja di Santa Mirabella, and this is my lady wife, Poli-Amora, greetings from the Most August Court of Spain! Yes, greetings, to you and your family, may they have many children within wedlock and rock the vault of Heaven with their procreations!” But when he turns back to the Hon Don sotto voce there is suddenly an absolute cold in his face, a shadow of days and nights in the tiny room at Happy Acres, “So you’re all mine, you old goat, or your life will be miserable unto the last hour, you hear me? Because your first problem will be explaining what you were doing with two girls from the chorus at The Pink Parrot and that will be as nothing—as nothing—to the fuss which will kick off when they learn whose living room you were in and who dobbed you in, namely me, namely Britain’s most wanted, and they will dig through every aspect of your life and fuck it up as they have done mine, and they will find nothing about me (which will only make them more suspicious) and doubtless a few dozen things which you would prefer were not revealed, and after that, if I am not dead, I will come into your house like a cleansing flame and I will smite you as you have never been smote before, sing hallelujah!”

He flings his hands high into the air and smiles at the bishop, who nods genially back and hides behind the Financial Times. The Hon Don glowers.

“What do you want?”

“Addresses, Donald. Names and places. I wish to know of the lives and loves of a fat man and a thin one, mandarins from the shady bit of our glorious civil service. I shall also require the use of one of your more secluded—no, let’s stretch a point and say soundproofed—properties. I believe you have a couple on the edge of Hampstead Heath which would be ideal. We shall speak of it in camera. But have we established the principle?”

“Yes,” the Hon Don mutters through gritted teeth, “we have.”

Fifteen minutes later, Joshua Joseph Spork is on his hands and knees in a tide of local papers, cutting out the small ads for a hidden message: the perfect image of paranoid schizophrenia. The scissors are a nice touch, culled from an embroidery set and blunted at the ends. A selection of pencils of various colours is scattered across the floor of the Hon Don’s office at the Pablum Club. The Hon Don is elsewhere, no doubt soothing his fevered brow with a brace of exotic dancers. Polly Cradle leans, Bacall-style, on the bar, and listens to her lover mutter.

“No, right, that’s the Advertiser. Fine. So ‘Come home Fred, all is forgiven,’ fine. That’s the Crawley Sentinel, and underneath… ha! Yes. Then… Yaxley Times, all right: ‘Be mine, Abigail, be mine!’ which is a bit desperate and I think… oh, bloody hell, it’s real, fine…” and so it goes, a litany of clippings clipped and cast aside. A moment later, Joe grins. “Find the lady!”

Polly extends her hand, then stops. “What do I do?”

“Nothing! It’s done. But help me: I was never very good at this. It’s like a crossword… Here: ‘For Sale: three matched mountain bikes. Divorce compels forced march to bank.’ That’s the date. 3 March. Right? Then here: ‘Sing-a-long-a-Sound-Of-Music, Toxley Arms, Dover Street. Tickets in advance only.’ So, Dover Street. But which Dover Street, because there are a few, and what number or what have you… oh.” Joe looks disappointed. The third clipping holds no answers, obviously. Polly Cradle peers.

“Could it be the Toxley bit?”

He stares. “Yes! I’m back to front. Toxley Arms is the entrance. A pub. A pub in…” He scans the third clipping again. “Belfast? That can’t be right.”

“The ship, maybe?”

“Yes! On the Thames. The pub closest to HMS Belfast. There’s a way down into the Beat. Yes. Exactly.” He grins again. “Get out your best frock, Mistress Cradle, and your fine dancing shoes. I’m taking you to the Night Market.”

The Market looks different and the same; today it’s in a great Henry VIII–era water cistern pumped dry for refitting and filled with wooden scaffolding, hung with glowsticks in baroque lanterns and wind-up electrical lamps, the smell of water offset by great censers streaming fresh flower scent (stolen, a sign proudly proclaims, from a chemical company in Harchester which specialises in olfactory ambience, more available on request). People glance at them, then look again: oh, fugitives. But the older ones, and the quicker, look a little longer and see Joshua Joseph Spork with a bad woman on his arm and a gangster’s hat, and know that something is afoot, so that the whisper runs from stall to stall along the winding central aisle: Is that Mathew’s boy? My God, he’s huge! And done something to upset Lily Law, but it’s not what they say, that much I do know…

A man named Achim gives them a glass of wine each and cheers. Others hurry to look the other way—no desire to learn anything which might be relevant to an ongoing inquiry. In any other place Joe would fear betrayal, but the Market is sacrosanct: it can only continue if it remains secret, and the penalties for betrayal are stark. Starker now, probably, than they were. Now that Jorge runs the place in Mathew’s stead—or, as Jorge would be the first to acknowledge, in Joe’s.

In what must be a maintenance room overlooking the cistern—a pumping station or an overflow—Jorge has established an office and is doing business, and you can be sure the whisper has reached him before they do, but Jorge is all about volume.

“Holy fucking crap, Joe Spork! Fuck! You are one most wanted fucker, you know that? There’s a reward out on me just being in a room with you. Jesus! Vadim, this is totally cut-your-own-throat-after-reading, okay? This asshole was never here.”

Jorge has no second name, no surname and no patronymic. He’s just Jorge, the messy kid with the thick arms who shared his cake and scurried along at the back of the crowd. Jorge, chief among those who have kept the Market alive after the death of its king. He trailed Mathew like a puppy, worshipped him. Joe’s father picked up followers and acolytes the way other men breathe, and Jorge carries that loyalty ridiculously forward to Mathew’s son. He was small then, for his age. He’s small now, vertically speaking, but he makes up for it with sheer volume and a Russian appetite. His breath, forcibly expelled in all directions, smells of salt fish and vodka. Joe is quite certain that Jorge plays up to his heritage, to people’s expectations. Who, after all, living in London for his entire life, still sounds like a sailor from Krasnoyarsk? Only Jorge.

Vadim, across the desk from him, is an expensively dressed character in gold-rimmed glasses, with a look of deep self-regard which might just be mistaken for poetry, or pain. His eyes rest on Polly Cradle’s cleavage, then skitter away when she favours him with a broad, challenging grin.

“Listen, Vadim,” Jorge says, throwing short arms in the air, “I got to talk to this guy. Debt of honour, okay? So, look, being honest: you are the worst erotic photographer on the face of the planet. Seriously, it’s better you point the camera away from the girls and make photos of the patio. These pictures…” He holds up a sheaf of eight-by-six-inch prints and flicks through them. “This one is like medical exam. This one is botany, maybe agriculture. Joe, Jesus, did you see this? What does this look like to you?”

“It’s… well, I’m fairly sure that’s an aubergine.”

“Thank the merciful Lamb, old friend, it is an aubergine. But also, you see how there’s fuck all else in the picture?”

“I do see that, Jorge, yes.”

“And yet this is a photograph of Vadim’s girlfriend Svetlana, who is—and I do not exaggerate here, okay?—she is the girl I most wish to see naked after Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi. In this picture she is entirely fucking naked. If it was not a close-up you would catch fire and explode looking at it. Would you like to see the wide shot?”

“All right.”

“So would we all, Joseph, but this unfortunately is impossible, because that asshole there did not take a wide shot. Go, Vadim, please. I got to cry on my friend’s shoulder, okay?”

Joe Spork waits until Vadim has removed himself, clutching the contraband aubergine porn, and then his face drops into its new, sharper lines. “Business,” he says.

“You serious? Like real business? Not fucking slot machines?”

“Real business.”

“You going to kick me out, Joe? Run the Market all of a sudden?” Jorge is joking. Kidding around. His wide face is clear of malice or alarm. Joe Spork wonders where the guns are, and the men.

“No, Jorge. The Market’s all yours. I’m getting back into the game, for sure. But I don’t want your chair. Too much hard work for an honest villain like me.”

Relief flickers across Jorge’s features. His shoulders relax a little, now that he’s no longer carrying the weight of sudden violence. “Honest villain! Yes! My God, Joe, I tell you, we should have more honest villains in this world!”

“I’m glad you say that, Jorge, because I need some help.”

Jorge looks grave. “The way I hear it, Cradle’s is gone, you’re on the run. Maybe you’re too broke for business. I can get you away. Danish ambassador got little local problem, killed his wife’s lover with lawnmower. But no favours, Joseph, not big ones. Not even for you.”

For answer, Joe removes from his pocket one of Mathew’s larger diamonds, and sets it on the table.

Jorge brightens. “Okay, Mr. Spork does business. It’s a great day! You tell me what you need.”

“Phones. Untraceable credit. Can your Danish ambassador get us identities to use today, right now?”

“Sure. I put money into accounts for you, you pay in stones. Family rate. Good for ever unless you are loud. You buy a Ferrari and crash it in Pall Mall, we got serious problem.” Jorge starts to laugh, then sees the speculation on Joe’s face as he wonders whether this might actually happen. “Oh, sheee-it. You look just like Mathew. Don’t do that, it freaks the crap out from me. Okay, what else?”

“Tell the Market I’m putting a job together.”

“Big job?”

“Biggest ever. No kidding, Jorge. Bigger than anything, ever. I need them, Jorge. And they need me. The Old Campaigners, even. All of them.”

“I don’t think they think they need you, Joe. I think maybe they think you can go to Hell.”

“Not for this job. I’m the only one who can do it.”

“What kind of job?”

“Security.”

“Getting around it?”

“Being it. Stopping an assassination.”

“Whose?”

“The universe.”

Jorge stares at him, then down at the diamond, then at Polly Cradle. She nods.

“The fucking universe is getting killed now?”

“Maybe.”

“Not just the world, which by the way would be completely enough.”

“The world to start with. Everyone on it.”

Jorge lets his head roll back and stares up at the ceiling as if exhausted. “This is bee-related, maybe?”

“Very much so.”

“Bee-related is not good. Word is out that anyone messing with bee situation will see the inside of some invisible shithole prison for terrorists. And you—you are very wanted, Joe. You’re maybe the bad guy. It happens that nice people go batshit sometimes. I have to think maybe I shouldn’t help you even this much, even for honour and family and shit. Even for very nice diamond.”

“You know the Ruskinites?”

“The asshole-monk-bastard-sadist-fuck Ruskinites?”

“Yes.”

“I know them to scrape off my fucking shoe.”

Joe grins. “They’re on the other side. They want me dead.”

Jorge nods. “Okay, then you’re maybe not entirely the bad guy.” He jiggles his head left and right, a man ducking punches. “Not the bad guy. But you’re playing in the fucking big leagues, even if there’s no end of the world, for sure. Dangerous shit.”

“Kings and princes, Jorge,” Joe says sonorously, in his best Mathew impression. In spite of himself, Jorge smiles.

“For sure, Joe. Kings and princes, I remember. But… seriously? The fucking universe?”

“Seems so.”

Jorge sighs. “Fuck me, Joe. You don’t come here for twenty years, now you want to save creation?”

“I am a Spork. We don’t do things small.”

“Yes. I guess you are.” Jorge rolls his huge head around his neck, and they can hear his neck clunk through the layers of flesh. “Fuck, Joe,” he says again, in a rather pensive way. And then, by way of agreement: “Fuck.”

In the daylight world, the Hon Don has left an envelope at the desk of the Pablum, along with stern instructions that the Prince is not to be allowed into the building. He has backed this order with some curiously aristocratic sort of slander such that the doorman’s eyes are both stern and admiring as he hands over the envelope. It contains some typed pages, a handwritten note with two addresses, and a set of house keys labelled as belonging to a third.

Momentum, Joe considers, is the vital thing. He has to keep moving, gathering momentum. Even a very small object, travelling at the right sort of speed, can deliver a considerable wallop.

He glances over at Polly Cradle. “You don’t have to do this one.”

She tuts. “On the contrary. This is the one you don’t have to do.”

He stares at her. Polly raises one eyebrow and continues. “I would go so far as to say that you can’t. God knows what will break loose in you. I like you crazy, Spork. I don’t want you catatonic.”

“But—”

“I will do this one, Joe. You will stand in the back and watch. Besides. It’s time you saw me at work.” She frowns. “Although… for this, I think I will want some additional muscle. No,” she adds, as he immediately opens his mouth to volunteer, “not that kind of muscle. Suasion.”

“Suasion?”

“I am an investigator, Joe Spork. Suasion is one of the things I do. Now: watch.”

He does.

Polly Cradle plays Jorge’s untraceable mobile telephone like a tin whistle. She is charming and plausible and ever so slightly needy. He remembers Mathew saying you can burgle a nice house with a ladder at noon so long as there’s a pretty girl in a ball dress holding it steady. Old ladies will approve your gallantry and coppers will stop to give you a hand. Polly has a sunny, hopeful manner and a gentle appeal which makes people want to help her out. She sets organisational structures against themselves, deftly squeezing between switchboards and departments into the gaps, and coming back with all their secrets.

Via the bored receptionist at Lambeth Palace, she gets access to an old cleric in Salisbury who handles accommodation for protected witnesses in canon law cases. The cleric has recently been asked to find a safe place for a woman of late middle age who is sought by unfriendly eyes. Polly absolutely refuses any information about that, scolding him politely for even mentioning it, and he basks in her discretion. A moment later she is talking to his assistant about some completely other matter, but somehow comes away with the name of a layman newly returned from Afghanistan and seeking to atone for his sins who has lately been charged with the protection of an old lady. A brief call to an old friend in the London Authority yields the man’s home phone number, where his wife is delighted to learn that her husband has won a substantial award for his service and concerned that he must be contacted immediately because he’s in Royston on business and can’t be reached.

This in turn yields a soldier’s pub called the Cross Keys which has rooms, and which is just across the road from where Harriet Spork is safely ensconced in a temporary apartment the Church has rented for her, guarded by lay brothers Sergeant Boyle and Corporal Jones, late of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service and now retired. Since they are Harriet’s protection and not her warders, and since while Polly may be formidable she is clearly not in Sergeant Boyle’s weight class, gaining entry is only a question of knocking.

“Mrs. Harriet Spork,” Polly Cradle says.

“Sister,” Harriet objects vaguely.

“I am Mary Angelica Cradle. We once made biscuits together. With Smarties.”

“Oh. Yes, dear. Of course.”

“I wish to confess to you, in the interests of full disclosure, that I ate about two-thirds of the Smarties during the cooking process.”

“Yes,” Harriet says again, with a slight smile. “I believe I knew that.”

“Also, I am engaged in a very satisfactory emotional and sexual relationship with your magnificent son. This relationship is not sanctioned by the ostensible rules of the Christian Communion, but falls into the category of committed partnerships tacitly approved as a modern prelude to possible marriage and procreation.”

Joe Spork tries not to swallow his tongue. One of the laymen slaps him cheerfully on the back. “You’re in serious trouble with that one, boy.”

Harriet nods. “I understand.”

“I mention all this because I wish to invite you to participate in a significantly illegal plan I have recently devised to save your son’s life and extract some measure of justice from those who have caused him and others considerable pain. I also believe that it will contribute to the process of saving the human race from a conclusion which is not only appalling but probably also blasphemous, or at the very least reduce the risk to society from a man of notable wickedness.”

“Oh,” Harriet Spork says.

“If you wish to take part, you must come with me now and do exactly as I say. I will not conceal from you that there is some risk. Say hello to your son.”

“Hello, Joshua.”

“Hello, Mum.”

“I’ll get my coat,” says Harriet Spork.

“Good,” Polly Cradle says. “That’s one.”

Abbie Watson sits on an uncomfortable bench outside the Hospital of St. Peter and St. George in Stoker Street. The wife of an anarchist who “makes time with terrorists” looks fragile and alone. She barely glances up as someone sits next to her.

“Mrs. Watson,” the other woman says.

“Go away.”

“Very shortly. I haven’t much time. I am about to kidnap and interrogate one of the men ultimately responsible for your husband’s injuries. I will then give that information to my lover, Joe Spork, who will use it to thwart the machinations of the individual who hopes to gain by their actions. It is likely that that person will expire in the course of this thwarting. If he doesn’t, he will go to prison for ever. Also, those within the government who have sanctioned and even endorsed his behaviour will be held to some species of account.”

Abbie Watson looks up. The woman is small and dark and very pretty, but there is a steel in her which Abbie has encountered only rarely. Behind her, somewhat abashed, is an emaciated-looking nun. Harriet Spork smiles nervously.

“I should also tell you,” the woman goes on, “that unless you object, Griff will be moved to the care of a Swiss specialist later today. Dr. von Bergen is flying from Zürich with his team. Griff will be the recipient of an experimental treatment in which tissue and organs are seeded on a polymer matrix using a neutral stem-cell line. I understand the speed of this process is now so rapid that you can almost see them growing. Dr. von Bergen anticipates that Griff will recover quite happily, given time and care, both of which he will have in abundance. There is almost no risk involved, especially given what I understand are the somewhat limited alternatives. You may therefore wish to avoid any involvement in my activities. I would entirely understand.”

Abbie Watson scowls. “Like Hell,” she says.

Polly Cradle nods. “Then that’s two.”

“I thought you’d never bloody get here!” Cecily cries before Polly can even speak. “And then I thought you’d decided I was too old! Where is the bugger? Shut up, Foalbury, I’m going, and that’s all there is to it. Oh, Harriet, hello, thank goodness, now I feel less like a crone among babes and more like a grandmother out with her brood. Speaking of broods, where’s the boy? Never mind, never mind, let’s get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I’ve brought my most alarming teeth!”

And indeed, she has, a steel set made in 1919 for an American prospector who liked to chew rocks and taste the precious ores.

“Three,” Polly Cradle says, and then explains what they are going to do. Joe Spork, listening in the back of the minibus Polly made him steal for the occasion, feels there is altogether too much cackling.

They follow the bus’s excellent (female) satellite-navigation system to the address Polly has chosen from the two on the Hon Don’s list, and take the lift to the right floor. With Joe waiting at the end of the corridor and Harriet, Abbie, and Cecily arranged behind her, Polly rings the bell.

When the doorbell rang, Arvin Cummerbund was in the walk-in shower of his apartment in Paddington. It is a modern apartment; off-white walls and sharp-edged furniture, a glass dining table in one corner of the open-plan space and an expensive cream leather sofa in the other. Arvin Cummerbund is very keen on the sofa, because it has a clever arrangement of rails which allows the back to be moved around for convenience. He has never actually used this facility, but he feels that its presence enriches his life.

Arvin, in the shower, considered himself, and found that he looked like a glistening Aztec pyramid made in flesh, step after step after step of glorious pink fat. Luxuriantly, he soaped. His hands lifted and loo-fahed, burnishing the edifice. He slipped his fingers under each precious layer, into the crease, around, and onto the top, beginning the process again. He examined himself, and found that he shone wetly in the mellow bathroom light. His strong, conical legs and knotted knees carried the remarkable burden of his body without strain. Arvin knew himself to be light on his feet. In a couple more decades, he would have to forsake some part of this majesty, lest his heart and joints begin to complain. In any case, his skin would stretch and droop, lose the resilient elasticity which made him so remarkably erotic.

He had it from Rodney Titwhistle that morning—a collegial bit of trivia over the morning reports—that sumo wrestlers, in the course of their training, must wash one another. Specifically, the younger, less lauded must assist the others in their ablutions. Arvin could not imagine wanting help. This daily ceremony was his chance to appreciate himself in fullest glory. Each roped handful was a memory of some vast, sumptuous, indulgent feast; every pound was earned in delight, represented physical excesses and lust. He treasured the stories beneath his skin almost as much as he enjoyed having this fabulous body. Arvin Cummerbund was more than fat, and far more than obese, which was a nay-sayers’ term, a sad little epithet born of puritans and fear-mongering, and probably of jealousy. He was gigantic, and as he stood in his special wash-box, with its concrete floor and mirrored walls, and the many jets of water scoured and exfoliated him, he fancied he resembled Poseidon himself. He made a mental note to secure a trident and a fishy costume. Magnificent Arvin the water god.

Alas, all things must pass. He stepped out of the shower and considered his lotions. For Arvin, the business of getting ready to go out could take an entire day. But the rewards were equal to the effort: women—in all shapes and sizes, of all ages and from all corners of the Earth and all walks of life—once they had overcome the initial fashionable reluctance to be encompassed by a man of his measure, found in themselves a powerful fascination with his body, a need to throw themselves across him and wallow in him. His current girlfriend, Helena (by any standard utterly beautiful, also Argentinian by birth and monstrously wealthy), had declared via the electronic mail her intention to feed him caviar with her fingers and ride him like a polo pony. It was an idea which Arvin Cummerbund felt had distinct promise.

And then the doorbell rang. Helena was early, but eagerness, Arvin Cummerbund thought to himself, was a trait he could only accept gracefully. Still, she would have to learn patience as well. The business of preparing Arvin for the fight was long and splendid. Perhaps he would permit her to assist. The notion of her, dressed no doubt in some long evening gown, climbing nimbly around Mount Cummerbund, diligently and even worshipfully applying unguents, possessed a degree of appeal.

He hitched a bath towel—custom-made—around his middle, and stepped lightly to his front door. He inhaled, so as to be at his most enormous, and flung it wide.

“My booty shake brings all the girls to the yard!” sang Arvin Cummerbund, striking a heroic pose.

None of the women on his step was Helena, and one of the Not-Helenas was staring at him and smiling with what appeared to be steel teeth. There were four of them, or rather, a group of three and a ringmaster or divine huntress who stood apart, whom he recognised unhappily from surveillance photographs as Mary Angelica “Polly” Cradle.

“I find that… profoundly disturbing, if true,” she said.

Arvin Cummerbund hoped very much that his towel was well-secured, because he was conscious of shrinkage. The three women with her were, to a graduate of a good university, alarmingly familiar. The Graeae. The fates. The maiden must be (oh, Jesus!) Abbie Watson, with what appeared to be her husband’s boating hook in one hand; the mother was Harriet Spork, gangster’s moll and flagellant nun now apparently resuming her career in thuggery, and the crone—the teeth! My God, the teeth!—had to be Cecily Foalbury of Harticle’s. His eye settled hopefully on Polly Cradle. She was small, and very intent, and… resolved. Discreetly, as if not wanting to make too much of a fuss about it, she was carrying a large pistol. It was an old one, very well-kept, and it seemed to have seen recent deployment. Arvin Cummerbund thought of the two dead men in Edie Banister’s flat, and of the other piece of news Rodney had imparted to him, of Edie’s death.

Not the Graeae. Worse: “Tricoteuses!” some part of his mind gargled in alarm. “The guillotine hags! Knitting of corpses’ hair. Flee, Arvin! Flee!”

However, a Cummerbund does not flee at his own gate. He stands. Most especially when there is the additional issue of a Webley Mk VI whose target is one’s own enormous belly, an easy mark at some remove, but at close quarters almost literally impossible to miss, even with the rather iffy Webley.

All of which is recent and regrettable history. Looking now at these three very determined women, and at the mistress of hounds with her enormous certainty, Arvin Cummerbund feels very cold, and very small. He glances southward, to his towel.

“Oh,” Arvin Cummerbund says damply.

“Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle murmurs. “Would you be so kind as to come with us?”

Somewhere back in the flat, there’s a satellite-linked panic button which he carries in his pocket at all times. It actually has a lanyard so that he can wear it in the shower, but it gets in the way of the soap situation and is—being designed not by Apple or Sony but by the MOD—extremely ugly. It is therefore notably out of reach, even if he has remembered to replace the battery recently. He glances back at the boathook, seeing the name WATSON in large painted letters along the haft, and he chills—even further—as he tracks the message inherent in that. Abbie Watson glowers.

Arvin Cummerbund sighs, and allows them to lead him away.

“The error you have made,” Polly Cradle says in the house by Hampstead Heath, “lies, if you will forgive me, in your assessment of yourself in relation to your enemies—of whom, incidentally, your attack upon Joshua Joseph Spork makes me one. You believe, because it suits you to do so as emissaries of a great and powerful conspiracy in service to commerce and personal gain, that you and your charming friend Mr. Titwhistle have what I will call the ‘moral low ground.’”

Mercer Cradle sits at a kidney desk on the other side of the room, watching his sister work and leafing through a copious file. The tricoteuses occupy a nasty little semicircle close by, also watching. Cecily Foalbury has the largest chair, a wooden rocker, profoundly inappropriate for an interrogation, which she appears to enjoy. She is drinking tea and slurping it around her metal teeth. Leaning against a bookshelf at the back of the room is a tall, bulky figure in a long coat. He is in shadow, but Arvin Cummerbund recognises Britain’s Most Wanted by the line of his jaw. That said, there is something… collected… about him. He’s come of age somehow.

Arvin’s own chair is an expensive one from Liberty, in chintz. It’s very comfortable. He has also been allowed to retain his towel and even given a blanket for warmth. He fusses with it.

Polly Cradle waits until she has his full attention, and continues. “You think there are no depths to which you will not stoop. From this perception you draw a sense of invulnerability. You believe that you are—if I may put it crudely—the bad guys. You cherish the notion that you serve a great necessity, and thus your evil deeds, from which you derive a certain frisson, are legitimised. Nonetheless, though regrettably necessary they are unquestionably evil, and in some small way, so are you. You bear this burden for the nation and the world, sacrificing your own nobility in the cause of higher salvation. I’m terribly impressed.

“This construction would make us,” she indicates the room in general, “the good guys. Misguided, but morally clean. As a consequence of our goodness, you feel safe in this very quiet, very secluded room.”

She smiles, then tuts as the dog Arvin Cummerbund earlier observed tugs at something in a carpet bag under the table, a rubbery sort of item. Harriet Spork picks the bag up off the floor and starts absently to unpack it. A rubber apron. A length of surgical hose. Arvin Cummerbund feels a sort of rushing feeling in his stomach. Polly Cradle nods a thank-you and goes on.

“The thing is, Arvin—you don’t mind if I call you Arvin, do you?—the thing is that you and Rodney are really quite nice people. You don’t break the law if you can help it, or misuse your personal power. You don’t bear grudges. You’re probably expecting me to say I don’t hold a grudge, either, because good people don’t, but actually I rather do. You sent my lover to be tortured. I do take that personally, Arvin. May I say also, inter alia, that torturing someone by proxy is even more contemptible than doing it oneself?”

From the bag: a box (half full) of surgical gloves. Gauze. Lint. Tape. Distilled water. Spirit. A pair of those odd little bent scissors which look like the ones used for cutting grapes, but which are intended for a more medical purpose. Cecily Foalbury leans over and scrabbles for a piece of plastic tubing, and measures it against her arm, then bites through it and measures again. Better.

Harriet Spork sighs. Something is missing from the pile. What is it? Has the dog got it? A quite obvious, commonplace something, a trivial item, no one in their right mind would leave home without one… where is it? Abbie Watson comes to her rescue.

“Bastion! Drop!”

There it is, dratted dog. Tourniquet. Abbie Watson sets it on the table, and looks at Arvin Cummerbund without compassion.

“My husband,” she says distantly, “is going into surgery right about now.”

Which gives rise to the first genuine silence Arvin has heard in years. Even Cecily Foalbury stops drinking her tea.

“Yes,” Polly Cradle murmurs after a moment. “Even so, I must regretfully inform you that you and your friend Rodney are not bad men at all, not in that sense. You are driven by a perceived necessity. You are good. The corollary of which is that we are very much the other thing. You are fallen into the hands of villains. I would advise you to consider the implications of that for a moment.” She does not point to the items on the table. Arvin looks at them anyway. “Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle goes on gently, “you are under the delusion that your safety is assured by common decency, but it is not. We are wicked and we are angry. There is no decency in this room. You have connived in the assassination of Edie Banister. You have taken Harriet’s son and put him to the question. You have done harm to this woman’s mate. And you have deprived me of my lover.

“I do not know, at this point, whether Joshua Joseph Spork is the man of my life. He could be. I have given it considerable thought. The jury is still out. The issue between you and me is that you wish to deprive me of the opportunity to find out. Joe Spork is not yours to give or to withhold from me, Mr. Cummerbund. He is mine, until I decide otherwise. You have caused him grief, sullied his name, and you have hurt him. If anyone is going to make him weep, or lie about him, or even do bad things to him, it is me.

“We are more angry than you can understand. And you are here, with us, in the land of do-as-you-please. It’s like wonderland, Mr. Cummerbund. Only much less good.”

She smiles sharply.

“A friend of mine would have said,” she adds, “that we are aglœc-wif. Monstrous hags. Or you could say we are ‘women of consequence.’ What happens to you here, in this room, can reflect that as little or as much as you wish.”

And then they sit there without speaking, listening to the muffled sound of traffic, and the wind in the trees, and Cecily Foalbury working a piece of bourbon biscuit out of her heirloom dentures. The dog Bastion pads across the room to Joe Spork and burbles mournfully until he is lifted up and held.

Abbie Watson sorts through the sinister apparatus on the table as if wondering where she will begin. Arvin Cummerbund dimly remembers that she is a qualified nurse. He wonders who is watching her children, and whether she wanted to bring them along. Even Mercer Cradle looks a little windy about what will happen next, and this is truly alarming because, as far as Arvin Cummerbund has been able to ascertain, Mercer is absolutely devoid of compunction of any kind where those who interfere with his family’s happiness are concerned.

A shadow falls across Arvin; a shadow which fills him with a measure of guilt. He inhales slightly, and winces at the odour of dog breath. Bastion snuffles at him curiously, and then yawns, displaying tooth stumps and slime.

“Mercer,” Polly Cradle says, “if you wouldn’t mind.”

Mercer gets to his feet and goes outside, returning with a heavy glass jar or demijohn filled with reddish ooze.

“Excellent,” Polly Cradle says. “Now that Mr. Titwhistle is here, you need have no scruples about speaking behind his back.” She indicates the ooze. “Although I fear it’s rather difficult to say in which direction he is facing.”

Arvin Cummerbund stares at the jar. It cannot possibly be Rodney Titwhistle. These people would not do something so vile. He is almost certain of it. Yet Polly Cradle’s analysis was compelling. As are the instruments on the table before him.

The silence is very thick as he thinks about that.

“No,” Joe Spork says abruptly. “This isn’t me. It isn’t us.”

Polly Cradle looks over at him.

“This—” He gestures at the room. “This is them. Not us.”

Polly Cradle nods. “Okay.”

Joe puts down the dog and looks Arvin in the eye.

“Arvin,” Joe Spork says, “the jar is full of giblets. I think that’s a grape. We’re not going to bleed you to death or put you through a woodchipper.”

“Nor am I going to eat you,” Cecily Foalbury interjects, somewhat unreassuringly.

“Quite,” Joe Spork continues, “although Abbie has put in a very strong bid that I should beat the shit out of you with a plank with salt on it for what happened to Griff.”

“And I said I’d buy the plank,” adds Sister Harriet primly.

“But Arvin, listen, seriously. You have to know that what’s going on is a disaster. I mean, a bloody nightmare. Look what you’ve got. The Ruskinites are monsters. They scare professional crooks, which sounds oh-so-clever until you remember that you’re supposed to be on the side of the angels. You’ve got torture camps in the shires; you’ve got imprisonment without trial. Vaughn Parry works for you! And don’t tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn’t. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That’s what we live with.

“Unless Edie Banister was right and Shem Shem Tsien wants to bring the world to an end, in which case, see point one.”

Arvin Cummerbund breathes deeply, in, out, in, out, and contemplates his soul. It occurs to him that Rodney Titwhistle’s search for truth, for knowing, is a curious thing when a man may hear truth spoken and recognise it, by any human measure, quite without doubt.

“Could I have some of that tea?” he asks.

“I’ll make some fresh,” Harriet Spork says. “Start talking.”

Well. It would not be entirely inappropriate, in this situation, to bargain for his release with unimportant information. More than that, however, Arvin Cummerbund is finding it increasingly difficult to suppress a nagging unease that these people know more about what is actually going on than he does. Rodney has been taking the lead on the Angelmaker situation. Rodney is very astute and very ruthless. But if he has a failing, it is that he is so astute, and so ruthless, that he occasionally misses things which are muddled and human. So Arvin Cummerbund says:

“What do you want to know?”

“Who killed Billy Friend?” Polly Cradle says.

Arvin had sort of forgotten about irritating, brash Billy in the interim, what with the business of trying to reclaim Britain’s supremacy in the world and collaborating with an insane cultist. Curious, now that he thinks about it, that those two should go together.

“That was Sheamus,” he says, “or maybe one of the… Automata.” He sighs. “It was stupid, sending him. We just weren’t thinking properly. We thought he’d be more careful. More circumspect, because this is his focus. But it went the other way. He’s genuinely obsessed, you see, with truth and God and all that. Or I suppose you could be generous and say he believes. I think he had a moment of passion. Your friend was… shattered.” He remembers the panic when he heard, and Rodney Titwhistle’s calm acceptance: Our amanuensis has murdered, and that is bad, but we are protecting the nation. These things must be seen in their proper context.

Joe peers at Arvin Cummerbund and wonders. “Sheamus,” the fat man keeps saying. Not “Shem Shem Tsien.” “Do you know what Sheamus plans to do with the Apprehension Engine, now that he has the calibration drum?”

Arvin Cummerbund shakes his head. “He doesn’t have it. He’s very upset about that. He says he can’t switch the machine off unless he finds it.”

Joe Spork glances at Polly Cradle. She meets his eyes: Yes, Joe. Follow that. Joe raises one index finger: point of information. “He does. The escape con worked and I bubbled. I told him outright where to find it.” He searches Arvin Cummerbund’s wide face. “But he hasn’t passed that information on to you.”

“No.”

“I believe I know why. Do you know who—what—he is?”

“A monk. Obviously. A believer.”

“No. Or, not exactly.” And to Arvin Cummerbund’s growing alarm, Joe outlines the history of Sheamus, Shem Shem Tsien and Vaughn Parry so far as he knows it, from Edie’s time to the fake escape from Happy Acres, and the more he speaks, the more sallow and sick Arvin Cummerbund appears.

“I told Parry,” Joe says. “I worked it out, in that place. At the last minute, actually. I told him and then I realised he… wasn’t my friend. Because there was a moment when I thought the most wanted murderer in the country was my friend, or wanted to think so, because I was alone.”

He laughs.

Cummerbunds do not mist up. They are not in touch with their feminine sides. They do not emote. Nor do they yield to the sudden fear that they’ve been stitched up like a kipper and induced to conspire against the existence of mankind. They do not change allegiances or defect. On certain occasions, however, it may be as well to consider one’s position vis-à-vis the established lines of battle.

Joe Spork opens his hands, palms up. Big hands. Thug’s hands, perhaps. Craftsman’s hands. Not liar’s hands. “So there you have it,” he says.

Arvin swallows. “That’s… not ideal.”

“No.”

“No, I mean it’s very bad. They have a… an apparatus, at Sharrow House. We supplied the necessary materials and so on. It is supposed to control the bees. Bring them into line.”

“Put the genie back in the bottle.”

“Exactly. And give us access to the power source, possibly control the… truth aspect… of the whole thing. Not to mention keep a lid on our authorship of what has been a rather strained international incident. It’s rather hard to argue that the Russians can’t control their post-Soviet nuclear deterrent well enough if we… well. You see.”

“Yes.”

“But now,” Arvin Cummerbund admits, “I think maybe that isn’t quite what it will do. If Sheamus is Parry. If Parry is Shem Shem Tsien. If he has the calibration drum. If he has other plans, then… well, it’s… it’s not an area where other plans are a good idea.”

A moment later, it is apparent that Arvin Cummerbund has turned his coat entirely. The prospect of the Opium Khan in charge of the Apprehension Engine is so ghastly that it frees his better nature from the grip of professional habit, in a transformation which Polly suspects is the fast version of what Edie Banister went through months before. Very shortly, Arvin is enthusiastically offering his testimony on the various crimes of the Legacy Board, somewhat disappointed to find that the Spork party is not considering a suit for damages in the foreseeable future. He is able to command via the telephone blueprints for Sharrow House itself, delivered by courier to the Pablum Club, and declares himself willing to get hold of anything else which might be of service. Arvin explains that a Cummerbund, having made up his mind to do something, does it whole.

In earnest of which, appallingly, he abases himself before Abbie Watson and offers swathes of his own skin in replacement for Griff’s. Only the swift intervention of Polly Cradle prevents him from displaying a section of stomach he believes is particularly well-moisturised for her consideration, and Abbie, wide-eyed, assures him that this grisly act of contrition is unnecessary. Dr. von Bergen has pronounced all things good and Griff has no need of donor dermis.

From the name “Sharrow House” and the address in a rather rich bit of south-west London, Joe Spork had concluded that the headquarters of the Ruskinites must be a cool, grey-white neoclassical effort with the air of a Dickensian legal firm and a brass plaque. In his mind, he had conceded—indeed, had looked forward to—a significant police presence, some reinforced glass, and all manner of interior security precautions like unto a foreign embassy in a hostile land. In other words, a building fundamentally intended as a dwelling which had been substantially adapted for use as a lair or secret base. Keyword: adapted—and in that adaptation, he had envisaged finding weaknesses. Gaps between the skirting board and the wall where a person of low moral fibre might reasonably pry open a board. Even holding the plans which Arvin Cummerbund provided and seeing that he was dealing with something rather different, Joe had cherished a dream of incompetence in his enemy’s precautions. He had with some confidence anticipated being able to gain entry via an unregarded loft space, to bribe a disaffected copper or blackmail an official, or, in extremis, simply blow the bloody doors off and make hay. Somewhere in the gamut of crime, from sneakthievery to bullion heisting, he had reckoned to find a technique of entry against which the Opium Khan and his minions had failed to guard. This is very much not that sort of house.

Sharrow House is—and has always been—a castle, or a keep.

On the open upper deck of a London tourist bus making a loop around London’s grand gardens, Joe Spork wears a Gore-Tex coat with a waterproof rain-cape, and across his back is a rucksack in the pattern of the Danish flag. He has fended off a gregarious Dutch couple intent on sharing their bag of sunflower seeds and pine kernels (the husband addressed him with a generous bellow of “Would you like to eat my nuts?”) and leaned on Polly’s shoulder through the interminable lecture on King Edward and Mrs. Simpson. They have seen Hampton Court and Kew, and now the bus, in the grey rain and orange-purple twilight, is crawling past Sharrow House.

“On our left,” the woman with the yellow umbrella says, “we see the Sharrow estate. Normally we like to go in there and feed the ducks and admire the remarkable blend of architectural styles”—this last as if announcing a death—“which is the result of the various changes in ownership of Sharrow House over the centuries. As you may know, Sharrow is one of London’s defensive structures, dating from the time of Henry VIII. During the Cromwellian period, it was besieged twice, but never captured.” Murmurs of approval from the bus. That’s the sort of behaviour one looks for in a castle—unless, of course, one wants to break into it.

Through Joe’s field glasses, Sharrow House is high and strange, with a single very tall spire in the centre, an abrupt Romantic fancy leaping from a sixteenth-century hall. On the plans, this looks like a bullseye. From here it has the feel of a spear, or a warning sign.

All around the main house, the later additions spread out, Victorian red brick and white stucco, even something a little Frank Lloyd Wright on one side of the roof, a floating wood-and-glass observatory—but all of them are sealed and solid, and Joe recognises the ethos of the Ruskinites, the real ones. Sharrow House has the same integrity and integration of design he saw in the Lovelace, the same strength. It has real defence in depth, too—a surrounding wall, guard posts, even a proper moat: a slick, greenish expanse clear two hundred feet wide, with a single narrow causeway leading to the main gate. Towards the back, there’s an ancient fortified box—consequence of a brief incarnation as an ack-ack command post during the Blitz—and a short stretch of rail leading to a blank wall; what used to be the castle’s ammunition dump. The lecture burbles on. “The House is presently the headquarters of a monastic order who specialise in church architecture and the care of orphans and the mentally ill, but these days those functions take place in purpose-built facilities elsewhere.”

Joe keeps his face carefully blank, recalling the white room. Yes. Purpose-built indeed. He watches a pair of shrouded figures shuffle across the grass, their steps slow and just a little wrong. Polly Cradle’s hand tightens on his shoulder, and he realises he has hissed, not a music-hall hiss, but an expulsion of air through clenched teeth. Everyone looks at him.

“Sorry,” he says, as Danish as he knows how, “I have windiness.”

The guide smiles flatly and gets back to her script. “Unlike so many of Henry’s buildings it was never used to house inconvenient wives or desired mistresses, but it remains one of the capital’s most interesting undiscovered buildings. I do advise you to come back some time when it isn’t closed and take the tour.”

“Why is it closed?” the dapper little man in the second row of the bus says, from beneath one of those rather surgical-looking plastic macs.

“Cleaning,” the umbrella woman says briefly.

“Cleaning?”

“Yes. You’d think we could just go in anyway, wouldn’t you, but apparently… Health and Safety.” Even the Japanese party at the back are familiar with this so-British obsession. Everyone laughs.

As Joe watches, a woman, likely a housekeeper, leans from a window to throw something tubular and offal-ish into the moat; oily ripples abruptly transform into boiling, frothing spume.

Joe Spork takes the binoculars from his face and stares at Polly Cradle.

“Yes,” she says, “I saw it, too.”

“Piranhas? In London?”

“So it would appear.”

“You are absolutely fucking kidding me,” says Joshua Joseph Spork.

Polly Cradle dials a number on her phone. “Yes, hello, it’s Linda here at Sharrow House? Yes, we’re ready now, could you—thank you.”

A moment later, a London taxi chugs towards the gates. Joe looks on with a slightly guilty frown. Before the cab is even on the causeway, it is surrounded by black-clad monks and soldiers, and the driver is on his knees in the gravel, and then flat on his face.

“Oh,” says the umbrella lady hurriedly. “Well, there we are: British armed forces are using the maintenance work for training. A round of applause, please.”

Everyone claps. The taxi driver lies in the dirt.

Joe winces. “We’re not getting in that way.”

A conversation with Arvin Cummerbund does not produce any better news: Arvin is painfully eager to continue his atonement, but has never been inside Sharrow House. The Legacy Board has a hands-off relationship with its religious subcontractor; a laissez-faire, light-touch management ethos. In other words, Arvin now acknowledges, Rodney Titwhistle and his political masters prefer not to know what the Ruskinites do. Sharrow House is like a giant blind spot in the vision of British officialdom, and the Legacy Board is specifically charged with making sure it does not become obnoxiously obvious—or, if it ever should, that it be absolutely clear that any crimes were committed without the knowledge of the government: a sad lack of oversight, but not actual complicity. Lessons will be learned, of course.

In an old brewery basement under the Thames, declared unsafe in 1975 by a surveyor on Mathew’s payroll and hence forever vacant, Joe Spork sits on a three-legged stool and stares at the blueprints as if by sheer intensity he can force them to reveal what he needs. He inhales copier solvent and warm paper, and scowls, shifting his legs.

At his feet is the Thompson gun in its trombone case. He does not look at it, but the heavy metal haunts him. He can see himself firing it, riding the percussive blasts, but he cannot see what good it will do. He cannot shoot down the Opium Khan’s gates. He cannot kill the Apprehension Engine, or erase the calibration drum, from three miles away. Before he can do anything, he needs to get inside.

Joe kicks back and stands in the semi-darkness, swinging his arms in a circle like a sportsman working out a cramp. Casting around, he finds the tube the blueprints came in, a plastic thing like a length of pipe, and, rolling them back into it, slings it over his shoulder. The lamp above the table makes a circle of light and warmth. Reluctantly, he turns his face away from it, and walks into the darkness of the Tosher’s Beat.

Joe Spork loves the Beat. He loves the toshers themselves, weird, dry-suited moonmen that they are. He loves the whole place for its cosy closeness and its quiet, for the soaring majesty of the cisterns and vaults. And most of the time he does not think about what it is: a vast, subterranean webwork mostly below the water table, bits of which flood from floor to ceiling in winter and spring. The toshers wear those suits for a reason.

He crawls on his stomach along a dry clay pipe, and tries to ignore the high-tide mark seven inches above his head. He can smell it all around: water which has been and gone, and water which is in the adjoining pipes, water welling up through the floor. He tries to forget, as well, that he will have to do this journey again in reverse, including the tight corner five minutes back which nearly snagged him for ever. He just pushes on towards Sharrow House, glancing from time to time at the compass which was in the side pocket of Mathew’s gangster kit.

This is the last easy way into Sharrow House: up through the floors and the pipes, catch Shem Shem Tsien in his bath and blow his machine to slag before anyone even knows what’s happening. Home in time for tea and medals and a speedy exit to a non-extradition-treaty nation with nice views.

He isn’t doing this entirely blind: the toshers have marked the pipe as traversable: long yellow streaks of enamel paint along the entryway to indicate that you can do it and it will take you somewhere but it’s not a great deal of fun. Green paint is better, blue better still. Red paint means no-go.

The pipe opens out into a shallow basin with a low roof. It’s like being on the inside of a sandwich. All around the walls are other pipes, some large, some small, emptying into this same room. He’s about to cross into the next section when he hears a shout. He turns, and sees three toshers waving. He waves back, Night Market style.

“It’s no-go,” the nearest one says as they reach him. “We’re changing the tag now.”

“What’s happened?” Joe asks.

The tosher scowls. He’s big and grey and has the face for it, his nose wrinkling like a bulldog’s. “Some muckety muck has happened,” he says, “gone and put bloody electric fences and all that in the bloody tunnel. Infrared cameras and the like. My mate’s in the hospital with taser burns and a wonky ticker. They say he’s lucky to be alive, the amount of juice it put through him. Sodding embassy or something, I should think. They’re always trouble.”

Joe nods. “Is there another way in?”

The man stares at him. “I know you.”

“I doubt it, I’m not—”

“You’re that Spork, you are. Crazy Joe.” He turns, calls over his shoulder. “Oy, lads, it’s Crazy Joe!” He looks back. “Come on, then, what’d you really do? Pinch the Queen’s knickers, was it? Rob the Bank of England?”

“Nothing like that—”

“Bet it was. I knew your dad, back in the day. Well, you’re a right ’un, I can see that. Anyone can see that. You a killer? Bollocks, is what it is. He’s took the bullion from the vault, I reckon,” he opines to the man behind him.

The other man nods. “Likely.”

“So this house, you want in?” The first tosher gestures vaguely up and back.

“Yes, very much.”

“Well, not from down here. It’s all the same, all the way round. The Tosh Herself is hopping mad, I will say.”

Joe ponders this for a moment, and looks around at the nexus of pipes in which they stand.

“You know,” he says, carefully, “that Sharrow House has a moat?”

“A moat?”

“Seriously.”

“Well, la-di-dah.”

“And it occurs to me that Herself might want to do something about that. ‘Block the Beat, the Beat blocks you,’ isn’t that what they say?”

“They do.”

“Well, suppose somehow the pipes got all messed up and the supply for the pipe were to rupture… or maybe some high-pressure mains were diverted at just the right moment…”

“Oh,” the tosher says, “I see. Yes. Do you think that would be upsetting for the muckety muck?”

“I do.”

“That amount of water could pack quite a wallop, you know. Dangerous to mess around with. You could get the moat sort of spreading itself all over the place.”

Everyone’s grinning now.

“That would be,” one of the other toshers says neutrally, “really distracting. If some bloke were thinking of robbing the place.”

“That’s true,” the first man agrees. “Is there a particular moment, Mr. Spork, when you might think, with your unique understanding of the criminal mind, that such a heinous act might be perpetrated?”

“I wouldn’t want to speculate,” Joe says. “But roughly, if I had to guess, 2 a.m. the day after tomorrow, and then run like hell.”