Angelmaker

IV The True Origin of Vaughn Parry; the hive; the flat at Carefor Mews.

Course of irritating stimulation in line with overall strategy,” Billy Friend says, as the train to Wistithiel rolls out of Paddington station only a little tardy, “eight letters.”

Joe Spork is tempted to think that this is not a bad description of his journey with Billy Friend. He shakes his head.

“Billy, where did it come from?”

“Blank, blank, C, et cetera. A gentleman never tells.”

“Billy, this is serious.”

“So am I, Joseph. Client confidences are sacred.” Billy gives a pompous little sniff, as if to say they’re particularly sacred among those people who habitually lie and steal. “If eleven down is ‘London,’ then it ends in ‘l’.”

“I have no idea. I’m terrible with crosswords.”

“Well, so am I, Joseph, but this is how we learn.”

“Billy, just tell me it’s not stolen.”

“It’s not stolen, Joseph.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart.”

“It’s stolen.”

“Who can ever be entirely sure, Joseph? None of us.”

“Jesus…”

“Keep working on the clue, if you please. Hm. It could be ‘lactose,’ which I believe is a form of sugar found in milk. Well, no, it couldn’t, but it had points of congruence.”

“For God’s sake,” says the woman in the opposite seat, “it’s ‘tactical.’ ‘Tack’ like on a boat, then ‘tickle.’”

“All right, all right,” Billy Friend murmurs, and then, rather waspish, “I notice you haven’t done yours, missus.”

“I set it,” she replies icily. “It’s the easy one today.”

Billy’s eyebrows climb involuntarily up his face, and his mouth turns down at the corners. He goes a bit pink on the top of his head.

“They’re putting Vaughn Parry up for parole next month,” Joe says quickly, because Billy doesn’t stay civil long when he thinks someone’s laughing at him. “Or whatever you call it when it’s medical. They say he’s cured.”

“What, seriously?” Billy looks taken aback. For nearly a year now—since the appalling security-camera footage was obtained by a red-topped newspaper, and Vaughn Parry’s effortless dance of death, liquid and horrible, was shown to a voyeuristically appalled public—he has been hinting that he knew the Fiend of Finsbury as a boy, and can offer unique insights or possibly salacious and horrid gossip about Vaughn Parry, if only someone would ask him. No one has.

“Seriously.”

“Bloody hell. I wouldn’t be on that parole board, I will say.”

“He’s hardly going to come at them across the courtroom, is he?”

“Oh, no. No, not like that. But what they’re going to see, Joseph, I mean, I’ve no idea. Except I can sort of guess, I can imagine, and I’d rather not. I think you could go mad yourself, sitting on that bench. I wonder if that ever happens.”

“Perhaps they get counselling and so on.”

“Fat lot of use that would be. Some things, once you know them, Joe, nothing’s quite the same again. Things you see and do, they make you what you are. Seeing inside Vaughn, well.”

“Did you really know him?”

“Met him, yes. Know him… no. Thank God, Joe, and I don’t believe, as you are aware, but when I think of Vaughn I thank God in the most genuine terms, that I did not know him in any real way.”

“What happened? I mean, how did you meet?”

“It’s a bit… well. It’s unpleasant, is what it is. It’s not nice stuff, Joseph.” Billy looks down at his hands. He brushes something off the palm of the left one, and fiddles with his fingernails.

“If you don’t want to, Billy, that’s fine. We can talk about something else.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s just more of a chat for the pub, you know. Cosy corner, after a couple of glasses, not in front of strangers.” He glances around, and the other occupants of the carriage studiously do whatever they are doing a bit more obviously. Joe shrugs.

“Let’s walk, then. Get a packet of crisps or something.”

The huffy woman tosses the sports section of her paper onto Billy’s chair as they leave.

Billy Friend lights a cigarette and leans out of the window, next to the sign forbidding smoking and above the one which cautions against putting your hands or head outside the train while it’s in motion. He draws hard, sucking against the wind, and turns back to Joe. It’s surprisingly dark here, at the junction between their carriage and the next, and the gloomy overhead light makes him look ancient and craggy, with deep black pouches under his eyes and lines like scars running from the corners of his mouth. He waves his hand, up and down, to get himself started.

“There’s families, Joseph, right? In the Waiting game, I mean. There’s the Ascots, been doing it since King James, and the Godrics since the Norman conquest and before. My lot started out when Victoria was new. The Alleyns reckon they’ve been at it since Caesar, and most likely they have. And each of them has his own daft way of doing it, embalming and making up and laying out, right? Secrets of the trade, and that. And the thing you have to understand is the differences are mostly crap. It all comes to the same thing. But part of the service is giving a sense that maybe it’s not too late to show some kindness or some heart, right, even if you never did give a fig for the dead while they was still alive, or if they never gave a fig for you, because let’s face it, as great a proportion of the dead are arseholes as the living. It stands to reason, although you won’t find many funerals begin with ‘he was a total pain in the neck and only half as clever as he thought, so let’s put him in the ground and have a pint, and good riddance.’ I’ve always thought that would have a certain charm, myself.

“So then there’s the new sort, all Richard Branson shiny, right? They’re different from us. Someone like Vince Alleyn, you ask him what he charges and he’ll tell you he charges what his client can afford. So Lady Farquar Froofroo Lah-Dee-Dah Fudge Follicle, right, putting her husband in the ground costs a sodding fortune. But her butler, when he buries his wife as used to turn down her ladyship’s sheets of an evening and sort out her ladyship’s wig collection, that’s dirt cheap. What you might like to think of as organic pricing, or fairness, if you’re a traditionalist like me. But then along comes some bugger in a white dinner jacket like Barry Manilow and he says he’s for transparent fees and it’s more democratic and all that. So, as my friend Daniel Levin would say—because your Jewish families have a whole different set of things they do for the dead, Joseph, and rather better in my view—so, nu. Now we do price lists and not everyone can afford the trimmings they want, and some pay in advance on the never-never, which is as macabre as you like, but here we are.

“Now the other thing about the new sort, they’re not families, right? They are companies, and they have logos and what all you like. They hire consultants. It’s bloody hilarious, I’ll tell you, watching a bunch of advertising berks try to find new ways to sell coffins. It’s just great. Buy one, get one free! and all that. These are the people who thought it would be better if the Post Office was called Consignia, so you can imagine what they do to the Waiting game. One of them tried to tell me we should rebrand as ‘AfterCare.’ I’m not making this up.

“Now, to join the Brotherhood, and set up shop in the Waiting trade, you need what we call an acquaintanceship. You want to have seen a bit of death, maybe as a nurse or a soldier or a doctor. It can be anything really, but you need to know. You can’t have your undertaker turn pale and chuck up when he sees the dearly departed, right? So Donovan Parry wants to set up shop and he’s a man in the old style. He gets onto Vince Alleyn and the others, my dad and their lot, and says he wants in. And there’s all hemming and hawing, because they don’t know him from Adam, but they call him over to the Bucket & Spade at Canonbury and they put to him the question. Why in all the world does he want to be a Waiting Man?

“‘It’s a living,’ says Donovan.

“‘There’s plenty of ways to make a living,’ says Vince, ‘and not many can do this one right.’

“‘Reckon I’d be one of them as can,’ Donovan tells him.

“‘Lot of fellows ain’t comfortable sitting up with the dead,’ Roy Godric says.

“‘Makes no never mind to me if a man’s living or he’s dead, so long as he don’t chatter on when I’m smoking a pipe or reading the Post,’ comes back Donovan Parry.

“And that’s how it goes on, and one by one they come to the conclusion that old Donovan might just have what it takes. He’s got what they call the Quiet on him, don’t fret much and don’t give out at all if he does. It’s a powerful thing on a Waiting Man, does half the job before the rabbit’s off the mark, like the Blacksmith’s Word for widows. But all the same it’s making them half mad, because he don’t talk like no doctor nor soldier, he’s more like a schoolmaster. Vince Alleyn asks him point blank if he’s a vicar lost his cassock, and if so what for, and Donovan Parry laughs and says no, he isn’t a religious sort and never has been. He believes in the laws of man, he says, and that should be enough for anybody—but the way he says it, it’s like a Bible verse, and steely cold.

“So finally Roy Godric says:

“‘All right, Mr. Parry, you’ve the Quiet on you right enough and the way about you to be a Waiting Man. So it’s just if you’ve got your acquaintanceship. If not, you work with me a year and then we’ll set you up.’

“And Donovan Parry laughs and says yes, he’s got an acquaintanceship all right.

“‘Well, what is it?’ Jack Ascot asks him.

“‘Well,’ says Donovan Parry, ‘back in the day, I sent a few the way of their final rest. More’n a few, I suppose. And spent the night before with each man, too.’ He grins at them, clear and pale and cold. ‘I was Crown’s hangman at Raftsey Jail, y’see.’

“‘How many was it?’ Jack Ascot says.

“‘I reckon nigh on fifty,’ says Donovan Parry, ‘but we don’t call it right to keep a tally. A good hangman does one at a time, and don’t dwell nor come prideful on the count. He meets his man the night before, and looks him in the eye and measures him for the drop, then on the day he hoods him if the man wants it—and tells ’em they should, there’s no shame in fear and no dignity in looking it in the eye for most, just a wet seat and the horrors—and gets him from the execution cell to the noose as fast as he can so there’s no time to think on what’s to come. Fastest we ever done was a minute twenty-two, and we were well pleased with that. The lad hardly knew it was happening, and he fell like a rock. Never once,’ says Donovan Parry, ‘did we have one fall and not die right off. I never had to swing on a man’s legs nor take a second pass. And that’s something a hangman can be proud of, for it’s craft and wit and mercy, all in one. Still,’ he says, ‘the hanging’s done now, years back. There’ll be no more in England and I’ve no desire to get myself to Jamaica or one of those places. So it’s the Waiting trade for me, if you’ll have it.’

“And they surely would. Well, of course they would. It’s different now, because we don’t execute felons, and I’m sure that’s the right choice. But back then, Joseph, a Crown’s hangman was like David Beckham crossed with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was death’s own coachman.

“Well, time went by and Donovan Parry himself passed on to his reward, and they say at the last he had a few qualms about the lads he might find on the other side, and what his ultimate destination might be. And his son Richard carried on the family trade, which he learned with his own dad, and in time he brought in young Vaughn, which was his son. And I’ll tell you something, Joseph, which many would consider indiscreet. I’d always had half a notion that the Honoured & Enduring Brotherhood was somewhat of a swizz. A closed shop, right? Seemed to me that any fool could do right by a corpse and pat the bereaved and say ‘He’s gone to a better place’ or ‘They look so peaceful, don’t they?’ and suchlike rubbish. I thought, it’s a Masonry, right, a dining club and a way of looking out for ourselves, and I’ve got no quarrel with that, but there’s no call for all this pendulous mystical crap about acquaintanceships and so on, that’s for the mugs, and one thing a Waiting Man doesn’t like to be considered, it’s a mug.

“Now, a fellow like Donovan Parry, they recognise his acquaintanceship and there’s an end to it, right? No test for him. But if you come up in the trade there’s a test, like a final exam, before they call you a Waiting Man proper. Lads who haven’t done it they call the twices, because they’re waiting to be Waiting. (Yes, I know, it’s weak, but doing what we do you find the laughs where you can.)

“Now each test is different, each one’s just for you. They don’t tell you it’s coming, they just do it, though of course once it starts you’ve a fair inkling this’ll be it. Richard Parry had to lay out a leper, which is actually no great horror. Mine, they locked me in a room with a whole load of corpses and told me to lay them out over one night, and of course the wicked buggers had got some lads from the building site and made them up, so I was halfway through the first one (he was the only real dead ’un, right, sodding great hole in his gut from a car crash) when number two starts to twitch and moan and then up they all get and ghastly gashed they wander around going ‘Wooooo’ and so on. For about five seconds I near peed myself, and then I nearly called out for the others to tell them I’d seen through it, and finally I just got on with the dead fellow, because while they might want me to do something else, this lad still needed his laying-out, and buggered if I was going to mess that up, even if it meant another year as a twice. Took me two hours to get the thing done, and saying never a word nor looking around, even when these ghastly bastards all crowded about me and showed me their injuries and scabs and what have you. They’d done a good job with the make-up, of course, because it’s part of the trade, only this time rather in reverse. Now I was ninety-nine per cent sure they were fake, but damn me if that lingering one per cent weren’t a real possibility when midnight came along. No joke, Joseph, it was hard.

“So I finished him off, and then I gets my saw out and turns to the nearest moaning ghost and I says ‘All right, my poor dead matey, I’ve to cut you open now, and I mean to do it, so you may as well hop up on this table and spare your grieving relatives an ugly mess!’ Hah! He near peed himself then, and of course the Waiting Men come in and gave me the nod. Said I’d shown the Quiet, you see, which of course I had, and I never knew.

“Well, that was all good fun and actually I was a fair bit proud, after, of how I carried it off, and Jack Ascot said—he was nearly a hundred by then—he said when they had Vince Alleyn’s test back in the day, they done a thing much the same called the Bloody Bride, and a woman from the local butcher’s shop wore a set of cow’s intestines around her neck and a slashed-open wedding dress. Vince damn near fainted, and then after, blow me if he didn’t walk right over and kiss her on the mouth. He passed right away, and married the girl, to boot. Anyway, Jack said he hadn’t seen much better since.

“So come the day, we had young Vaughn’s test, and Richard said we’d best find something particularly dark, because his son had a steady nerve.

“Now, in the book—there’s an actual book, can you believe, and I imagine it’s worth a ton of money now, there’s likely only the one—there’s about a dozen really awful things they used to do. About the worst is to get the corpse of a condemned blasphemer and sew it up with cats inside, then tell the lad doing the test it’s your dear old mum or someone close. As ghoulish as it comes. Modern times, of course, there’s no way you’d get away with something like that, even if you were of a mind. But they found a way for Vaughn Parry, and this is what it was: they got a dead ape, and they shaved it all over and drew on a sailor’s tattoo, and then they put it in a suit and smashed the head up some so you couldn’t immediately say it wasn’t a man, just a really ugly one. And then—well, they couldn’t use a cat, that wouldn’t be right—so they caught a fox from the rubbish tip, knocked him out with a bit of doped luncheon meat, and stitched the poor dead ape up around him. And then they put Vaughn Parry up to bat.

“So they did it in the Alleyn place, because there’s a two-way mirror so old Vince could keep an eye on his lads while they were working and be sure the thing was done respectful. And we all crowded in to see what would happen. There’s Vaughn, working away, and the belly of the ape wriggles and heaves, and Vaughn glances over at it, but it’s stopped, so he goes back to work. And then a moment later it happens again, and then there’s this appalling noise, I swear you never heard such a thing, a scream fit to make you think someone’s being crucified, right there beside you, and the nails going in through bone and gristle. I swear, Joseph, I never heard such a noise. And we all thought it must be Vaughn, seeing what was happening, but it wasn’t. It was the fox, screaming for his life. Vaughn… he reaches over like he’s passing the gravy on a Sunday, and cuts the ape open, then goes inside for the fox and lifts it out, and without barely looking he snaps its neck and goes on with the job. And my dad, who never speaks in these things, never says a word, because he’s a shy old bugger, he says ‘Ah, well,’ like that’s decided something. And everyone leaves. They don’t bother to go and get Vaughn and tell him the gag. They up and leave. And the next day, when he comes looking, they won’t none of them talk to him, or even look him in the eye, and finally he goes to Roy Godric and asks what’s the matter.

“‘Sorry, Vaughn,’ Roy says quietly, ‘but you’re out. You failed your acquaintanceship. You’re done.’

“Now, I’ve never heard of no one failing before. Not passing, yes, but you just try again. But failing, so the Brotherhood won’t ever take you, I didn’t even know that was possible.

“‘What? What do you mean?’ Vaughn wants to know.

“‘Just what I say, Vaughn, boy,’ Roy says. ‘You won’t be one of us. Not ever.’

“‘But I passed! Look what you did, and I passed. I showed Quiet. I know I did!’

“‘No, boy. You ain’t got the Quiet. And you ain’t now, nor never will be, a Waiting Man. Now, off you go.’ And he points at the door, and Vaughn Parry just goes, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

“‘I’m sorry, Richard,’ Roy Godric says to Vaughn’s dad, and Richard, instead of getting angry, he hangs his head and he says he’s sorry too.

“‘But you knew, Richard, didn’t you?’

“‘Aye,’ says Richard Parry. And then he goes off after his boy.

“Well, God, I sat there and I drank my drink and wondered if I came close to having that happen to me. And finally, after I’ve nursed that same pint for an hour or so, and more stared at it than drunk it, my dad comes and sits himself down opposite me.

“‘All right, Billy?’ he says.

“‘All right,’ I tells him, but I’m not.

“‘Poor bastard,’ he says.

“‘I suppose he’ll find another job, then, and Richard will train up one of the other lads or something.’ And my dad looks at me as if I’ve gone funny in the head, and I realise he’s not talking about the son at all. He’s talking about the father.

“‘Dad,’ I say, because I need to know, Joseph, my world’s upside down and I’m confused because there’s rules I don’t know about and penalties I hadn’t imagined for breaking them, ‘what did Vaughn do wrong?’

“‘It’s the oath,’ he says, ‘the Waiting Man’s Promise. Remember?’ Well, of course I do, but there’s nothing in it says you kick a lad out on his arse for doing well on his test. ‘Say it to me,’ Dad says, ‘and think it through.’ So this, Joseph, is the oath we all take, and I’ll thank you not to noise it about.

“‘To wait up with the dead; to take what they have no use for and set it aside, that the corpse looks lively on the day; to see the dead from bed to dirt, and no indignity more than what fate inflicts; to serve the wailing widow and the lonely man with grace, and carry the Waiting Man’s Quiet like a comforter, that is lent at need; to hear the Screaming, and let it have no voice; to preserve the silence of the dead, and keep their secrets; to take fair payment and seek no favours; and to move on, without regret.’

“‘Aye,’ Dad says. ‘And there’s the rub. Young Vaughn, he ain’t got the Quiet, he’s got the other thing. He thinks he’s got the Quiet, Billy, and that’s as well. Because the truth is, he’s got the Screaming, and Richard knew it. He opened that poor monkey like it weren’t even a clutch purse, and he snapped that fox without a thought, and the whole thing as if he was making porridge.

“‘When you took your test, Billy,’ he says, ‘you smeared the pink on that lad’s cheeks, and gave him too much dark around the eyes. In the morning I had to redo him, he looked like a Chelsea trollop. But one thing you done perfect, and I was never so proud. In your heart, you cared about the dead man, more than you wanted to get out of that room or show you knew it was your test or anything else. You cared about a dead, gone bugger you never knew, and you laid him out, because you’re a Waiting Man. But Vaughn, he didn’t flinch because he doesn’t care one bit. And he doesn’t care about the living neither, not even a little. Vaughn Parry looks at us, and he sees corpses walking. He didn’t flinch in there because he’s always seeing dead men shudder. It’s how he lives. He was born dead himself, and that’s what the Screaming is. It’s a body walking without a heart to feel for anyone else. And if ever he realises that, Billy, you best not trust him, for the Waiting Man’s oath ain’t there for a laugh or our convenience. Them as have the Screaming, Billy, they’re empty inside, and the things they can do when they start to understand what they are, they’re black and cold and not for good fellows to dwell on. Time was the Brotherhood didn’t just test the twices, but every lad in a village, and they’d have marked a lad failed the test, and maybe a month later there’d be a coffin weighed double going in the ground and some young fellow with rot in him instead of life would be never more seen. That’s how it was.

“‘Truth, Billy,’ my dad goes on, ‘I suppose we’re better off this way. But from now on, you see Vaughn Parry, you step to the other side of the street. You don’t have him in the house, you don’t have no truck with him at all. He’s got the Screaming, and he’ll show it soon enough.’”

Billy Friend grinds his cigarette against the sole of his shoe. It’s a leather sole, grubby and stained with water, and the ball of the foot is thin and black with old burns. He tosses the butt out of the window.

“Well, he did, didn’t he?”

The Wistithiel station is made of grey stone and old, black iron. Billy Friend wonders aloud whether Wistithiel sprang up around a prison, the way towns sprout to serve whatever industry is nearby. “Or a lunatic asylum, Joseph, that would do nicely. Friends of Brother Vaughn all around. Cousins and aunts, red of tooth and long of nail, sitting in a hundred rocking chairs and making jumpers out of hair!”

In fact, the Parry family came from a town miles away up the coast, just across the county line into Devon, but Billy, unsettled, is prone to flights of trenchant fantasy.

On a hardwood bench with green paint flaking leprously from it, a sullen, beery man growls in his throat. It might be words. It could just be phlegm. Billy flinches.

“I says ‘No, it bloody wasn’t,’” the drinker bites out. “It was baskets and fishing, and now there’s no bloody fish because of the bloody Spanish and the Russians and their bloody giant factory ships, and who wants bloody straw baskets when you can have nylon or polyester or that rubbish? Eh? So it’s tourism and piss all else, and London buggers like you come in, buy the place up, don’t like the mist and fog and show up two weeks in the year. And then they act like they’re doing us a favour. So the council puts bloody plastic slides and plastic cows and plastic bloody everything to bring ’em more and they come less, and who can blame ’em? So laugh all you bloody like.”

“Good evening,” Joe says, politely.

“Is it? Where?”

“Here, I hope.”

“Well, you hope in vain, don’t you? We bloody all do.”

“I was hoping you could tell us where to find Wistithiel Rental.”

The man nods once in the direction of the car park, and when Joe thanks him, he shrugs into life.

“I’ll walk you. You’re all right. Your chum’s got a clever mouth.”

“Yes. He has.”

“I like that in a pretty girl.” Joe doesn’t know quite how to respond to that, and behind him, Billy Friend is frantically miming a banjo and rolling his eyes. “Going on far, are you?”

“Hinde’s Reach House. But we’re staying in the Gryffin overnight.”

“Gryffin’s a decent place. The House… well. I wouldn’t go up there.”

“Why not?”

“Bloody long way.”

“Oh.”

“And they were always funny round that way. Webbed feet and that.”

“Webbed feet?”

“Aye. What farmers always say about them on the coast, and city folk say about countrymen. They eat missionaries, too.” There’s a glimmer of laughter in the man’s eyes. “But the Gryffin’s all right. Decent enough. And the barmaids wear those little T-shirts.”

Billy Friend perks up, and they pass into the chilly, grey day outside.

“When I get my hands on the old trout gave me this job,” Billy Friend murmurs in the saloon of the Gryffin, “there will be an accounting, not to say that harsh words will be spoken by me into her pious little ear. ‘Lady,’ I shall say, ‘you are a troublesome old baggage, and you owe me extra,’ and she, being a clean-living old bird and of a nervous disposition, will yield up the cash and introduce me to her lissom granddaughter by way of additional compensation. Bloody hell.”

“You said I needed an adventure,” Joe reminds him.

“You do. You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you’re trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don’t, though. I’m me and I’m good at it, and I hate the country. It’s full of bumpkins and pies and godawful bloody warm beer.” Tess the barmaid snorts, and Billy recollects himself. “Though it does have some compensations, I will say.” She turns her back on him and walks away with great emphasis, but the effect is muted by the handkerchief top and low jeans she is wearing, which together afford Billy a revitalising view of her spine and sacrum. He makes an approving, canine sort of noise, and she scowls.

“I think she likes you,” Joe says. Billy eyes him over his pint.

“Yes, you actually do, don’t you?”

“She sort of wriggles when she comes over here, and so on.”

“Indeed, she does, Joseph. She sashays, is the technical term. And do you know what all that proves?”

“She likes you.”

“No, Joseph, alas. It proves that you are a prat.”

Tess reappears a moment later with the food, smiles at Joe, and pauses on her heels as she turns back to the bar. “Got everything you need?” Billy nearly swallows his tongue.

“Yes, thank you,” Joe replies. “And I don’t suppose you’ve got a map, have you? We need to get out to Hinde’s Reach House.”

She gives him a funny look, as if he has made the kind of proposition Billy frequently does make and she weren’t the kind of girl who usually hears that sort of thing.

“I’m superstitious,” she says. “So I don’t go up there.”

“Don’t want to get webbed feet, I ’spect,” Billy suggests.

She scowls. “You’ve been talking to Lenny,” she says, indicating the man from the station, now sitting at a table by the fire. “He thinks he’s a laugh. Did he tell you they burn travellers as witches, too?”

“Something like, yeah.”

“He thinks he’s funny,” Tess repeats.

“We’ve got a parcel for the house.”

“There’s no one there. And it’s not safe.”

“Not safe how?”

She shrugs. “Crumbling cliffs and holes in the ground. Tin mine back when we had tin, then a government place in the war. And if you believe in ghosts, it’s haunted, too.” She smiles, embarrassed.

“Whose ghost?”

“Hundreds of them. It used to be where Wistithiel was, but it went into the sea in nineteen fifty-nine. Most of the village. Or burned down. Or there was an epidemic. To hear my grandmother tell it, you’d think it was all three. Or Galveston. They wanted to make it a tourist attraction, but there’s still people alive who remember and lost friends, husbands and so on. So we said, bollocks to that.”

“The ghost of a whole town, then.”

“Yes. Actually, if you put your hand on your chest and your foot on the right stones, you can feel the heartbeat of the dead. Hang on—” She peers around, then reaches over to a window ledge and hefts a small, solid piece of grey granite. “This is from the bay underneath. A lad from Bristol brought it back from the fields out there, then got scared in the night and left it in his bedroom when he went home. Silly bugger.” She puts the stone on the ground. “Here. Put your foot on it.”

Feeling silly, Joe puts his foot on the stone.

“Now, you put your hand… here.” She puts his hand dead centre of his chest. Billy Friend watches, bemused. “Can you feel anything?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s been here in the Gryffin a long time, and you’re not local. Here.” She replaces his foot with her own. “That’s better. Now, give me your hand a moment.”

Joe gives her his hand, and she places his hand, palm down, on her chest and leans firmly towards him. Her skin is warm, with just a trace of perspiration.

“There,” Tess says. “Can you feel that?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Sometimes it takes a while to find the right spot. It might be more to the left. Or down.” She tugs gently on his wrist, pushes her shoulders back a bit.

“No, I’ve got it.” He nods. “Definitely a heartbeat.” He nods again.

“Oh,” she says, a bit nonplussed, “good.”

The moment lengthens.

“Yes.” With the heel of his hand Joe can feel the curve of one breast. He has absolutely no idea whether this is deliberate. It’s lovely. He tries to be polite and not notice.

And suddenly the stone is back on the shelf and Tess is busily serving someone else.

Billy Friend puts his head in his hands.

The car is a grotty old banger, the best in a very small selection. Joe tentatively believes it is younger than he is, but would not put actual money on the assessment. On his left, Billy Friend holds Tess’s map. It is drawn in frustrated ballpoint, the road following the curve of the railway line, and there’s a grudging kiss at the bottom as if to point out what might have been.

“What you did to that girl ought to be illegal,” Billy Friend grumbles.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Of that we are all painfully aware. Lovely Tess is even now weeping in some kitchen corner, lamenting the waste of her heart. Not to mention her other salient attributes.”

“All right, I missed the point.”

“Yes, I would say you did.”

“We can’t all be you, Billy.”

“We can all be ourselves, though, Joseph, and who the hell can’t tell when a woman is putting his hand down her top that she’s doing more than discussing local folk tales? Are you in residence, Joseph, at all, inside your head?”

“Of course I am.”

“I should coco.”

“I just…”

“You try too hard to be a gent, Joe. It’s all going on inside you but it never gets out. You’re all buttoned up.”

“I am not!”

“All right, then: what action could young Tess have taken which you would have regarded as an unequivocal invitation?”

“Read the map.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Make an instruction out of the following three words: the, read, map.”

Billy does.

There’s no sign of witch-burning as they drive through the narrow lanes towards Hinde’s Reach. As they turn a corner, Billy Friend points out a large, rusted, black barrel which he asserts might be a cauldron used for missionaries, but the silent gloom of the sky swallows the joke. Neither of them mentions webbed feet. They’ve passed two men walking and a woman on a bicycle, and Joe found himself looking instinctively at their shoes to see whether they were larger than they should be.

They come over a hill, and there’s a small cluster of houses. It’s marked on Tess’s map as Old Town, but in truth it’s not even large enough to be a village, and made of concrete and corrugated iron. There’s a farmhouse and a single lonely petrol pump with a battered credit card box on top.

Joe slows the car and winds down the window so that he can speak to the woman sitting on a bench watching the road. She has messy hair, dyed a shocking red, but when he speaks and she turns to him, he realises she is very old. Her cheeks are purple with broken blood vessels.

“Hello,” he says, trying to be gentle and clear at the same time in case she’s deaf. “We’re looking for Hinde’s Reach House?”

She peers at him. “What was that?”

“Hinde’s Reach?”

“Ah.” She sighs. “Gone back to the grass, hasn’t it, and quite right, too.”

“We have a parcel for the house up there.”

“Do you, though?” She shrugs. “Well, I call that too late.”

A man emerges from the bungalow behind her, wearing socks and slippers. He has a mismatched face, as if one half has been shattered and reconstructed, long ago.

“Wossallthisabout, then?” He tries to smile, or perhaps he’s just twitching.

“Post office,” she tells him. “Parcel for Hinde’s Reach.”

“Parcel for the dead, then.” He spits. “Bastards, anyway.” He wanders back inside.

She sighs. “I should have said not to tell ’im. He’s still angry about all that as happened back then.”

“The town going into the sea?”

“No, no. That was natural. Awful, but natural. He’s cross about the other. His parents were taken off.”

“Killed?”

“Not exactly. Brain damage. Jerry thinks it was a plague. Thinks they were making germ bombs up there for to use against the Russians, and one of ’em went off. Maybe he’s right. Folks wrong in the head over one night, that’s not normal. And Jerry never entirely the same. Well, you see his face, don’t you? And no bugger gives a damn, either. These days everyone gets a handout. Stub a toe and you get one. But not for Jerry. Local trust says he’s faking it. Government won’t hear. The Church wanted him, ten years back. Wanted all the plague orphans and survivors and such. Said they could do wonderful things to help. But we’re chapel round here, so Jerry told them to stick it up their cassocks.” The woman sighs again. “Best you go over there, then. Close the gate after you, or the geese get out. Don’t take no nonsense from them! Have you got a stick?”

“No.”

“Kick ’em, then. Kick ’em hard, mind, you won’t harm ’em and they need to know you mean it. Otherwise they’ll have your arm.”

“If you’re sure,” Joe says.

“Not my geese,” she replies. “You want the second turning. Five minutes more.”

She goes back to staring at the road, and Joe guides the car through Old Town and along to the second turning. A huge, fanged thing made of iron looms over the road from one corner, and Billy Friend swears sharply before realising it’s a hay fork.

“I hate the fucking countryside, Joseph.”

Joe nods in acknowledgement of this truth. And then, without warning, the wind picks up and he can hear a deep, thrashing roar like a huge crowd, and they’re looking out over the sea, and Hinde’s Reach.

They go through the gate carefully, watching out for enemy geese, but the birds are clumped miserably in the far corner of the field, keeping one another warm. And there, sprawled against a grim, ugly sunset, is the place they have come to find; a shattered frame and some foundations, and a sign which reads: Hinde’s Reach House, Home Secretariat: S2.

The house is a pile of rubble perched on the edge of the cliff. A little further on there’s a rusted railway line ending in a stark iron buffer. Stiff, springy grass bends in the wind, and clumps of gorse bow and twitch. Below, the sea makes a noise so deep he can feel it in his gut.

It’s the emptiest place he has ever seen.

Joe Spork shoves his hands into his pockets and stares at the ruin, and out into the grim, blue-grey smear of sea and sky beyond the cliff edge. Spray spatters on his face. Reluctantly, he lets them extinguish this brief excitement in his life. Too late. Of course, much too late. The machine itself—the device which reads this magical book—is gone. This parcel, mysterious and beautiful and idiotic, is all that remains.

“Sod it, then,” Billy Friend says at last. He turns and huddles into his scarf, pulls his woolly hat lower on his head. “I’m sorry, Joe, it’s someone’s idea of a funny, I suppose. I was took. Or she’s mad, the old biddy. Doubtless wants to pay in fairy dust and cake as well. I got you all revved up over nothing. Still, maybe you can find young Tess and buy her a drink. No sense this being a total waste, is there?” and then again, with one last shake of the head, as he walks away: “Sod it.”

Joe looks after him, then turns back to the sea. There are white horses on the waves, hard shapes cresting blue-grey water. Back by the road, he hears Billy get into the car.

This day is the pattern of his life. He is the man who arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to the secret places, too late to be a gentleman crook, too late really to enjoy his mother’s affection before it slid away into a God-ridden gloom. And too late for whatever odd revelation was waiting here. He had allowed himself to believe that there might, at last, be a wonder in the world which was intended just for him. Foolishness.

He considers himself, the wrong side of thirty-five and no closer to being who he wanted to be, if he ever knew who that was.

The stricture of Joe Spork is indecision, a departing girlfriend once told him. He fears she was wrong. There is no stricture to him, no core. No substance. Just a dozen conflicting drives which average out, producing nothing. Be a gangster. Be an honest man. Be Daniel, be Mathew, be Joe. Make something of yourself, but don’t stand out too much. Find a girl, but avoid the wrong girl. Mend the clocks, keep the old firm going. Sell up and run, leave London and head to a beach somewhere. Be someone. Be no one. Be yourself. Be happy—but how?

He has no idea.

He is a nowhere man, caught in between.

Down in the caves, beneath the cliffs, the water surges and ebbs. A curious circle of white foam and crested water sits in the midst of the bight, where the sea swirls around a pattern of rocks. Up above him, indifferent clouds are gathering, and the rain is starting to fall. It’s not yet four, but already it feels like the onset of night. He realises there’s water running from his eyes, and is not sure if the wind is causing it.

“Damn,” he says, a bit plaintively, and then with mounting anger, “Damn, damn, damn.” The sea wind takes the words away, so that his voice sounds hollow and small, even inside his own head.

Well. To be honest, it always does.

He turns, and finds himself staring full into a fierce, angry face, inches from his own. He yells and stumbles back.

“Who the hell’re you?” The man has white stubble and opium fiend’s eyes which glare out of a sou’wester’s grimy hood. “What’re you doing here? This is my land! Private land! It’s not some bloody tourist attraction! It’s private, for me, and them! It’s a grave!” The voice is northern underneath, but the pattern of words is coloured by decades spent down here, and the vowels have acquired a rounded burr.

“A grave?”

The man pushes him, sharply, on the shoulders; a stabbing of fingers to propel him back, but there’s very little weight behind it because Joe Spork is a big man and the other may be tall, but he is not heavy.

“Full fathom, aye, grave and serious, cut in the rock, dead like winter, dead like silence, and what do you think of that, ey? The soil is bones and the sky is skin, and everything is rotting and so am I and so are you. Now go away. It’s a shame, you coming here. You ought to be sorry, but you ain’t.”

“I am. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to trespass. I have a package for the people at the house. This is the address. I didn’t realise it was gone.”

“The old house went into the sea. Ground went an’ collapsed underneath it. Gawpers come in summer, looking for a little thrill. Time to kill. The dead went out to sea, down and down and down into the dark, and isn’t that just the way it is? Ghosts like starlings, pitter-patter on my greenhouse roof. Ghosts in the ivy and the gorse. Choking the greenhouse, choking the hope, little fingers around your neck. Ivy drags you down like water… Have you ever cut ivy?” This last in a curious, conversational tone.

“No,” Joe says carefully, “I haven’t.”

“You see the hands then, little fingers clasping. Ivy’s a slow death, years in the making. Gorse is quicker, but it’s not so cruel. I burn the gorse sometimes, but you can’t burn ivy or you lose everything. Ivy’s a metaphor. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return, and down to dust your house will come with you, down with ivy. I knew a girl called Ivy once. God knows what happened to her, down in the dark beneath the sea. Choked, I shouldn’t wonder, leaves and hands and creeping through your window. Can’t say as I hold much with God any more, though. Bugger ’im. Rigged the game and left the place to rot, hasn’t he?”

“I never thought about it.”

“She came here.”

“God?”

“She came every day, for a while, and looked down into the sea. There’s a standing wave.” He points out at the ring of water.

“What is it? The rocks?”

“More complicated. It’s a wave that never ends. Never moves, never dies. Just changes. Water hits rock, washes back, meets water… always a wave, always in a ring. It rises and falls and changes, but it never goes away. Not just a wave. The soul of an ocean. The physics is quite interesting.”

Joe looks at him again. When he isn’t furious, he seems… teacherish. A heart of books with the skin of a tramp.

The man nods to himself once, sharply. “Who are you, then?”

“Joe Spork.” He smiles uncertainly, and sees or imagines a distant flicker in the hooded eyes.

“I’m Ted Sholt,” the man says.

“Hello, Mr. Sholt.”

“Oh, call me Ted. Or Keeper.” He nods. “Ted’s better. No one calls me the other any more.” As if reassuring himself.

“Hello, Ted.”

“Joe Spork. Joe Spork. Spork, Joe. You’re out of season for a hippy and too poor for a developer. Might be a scout, though. Smuggler? Lovelorn suicide? Poet? Police?” It is unclear which of these he holds in lowest regard.

“Clockworker.”

“Spork the Clock! Yes, of course you are! Spork the Clock and Frankie, in a tree. Gone now, of course. Spork the ticktock Clock… Wait for the day, she told me. Wait for the day. The machine changes everything. The Book is the secrets, all in a row. Death has the secrets, she said. Death bangs the drum, and his carriage never stops.”

Joe stares at him. “What did you say?”

“Ticktock?” Glazed eyes wander across Joe’s face, on their way to somewhere else he can’t see.

“No, after that. ‘Wait for the day’?”

“Breakers in a cauldron, the ocean in a box. Bees make angels. Book of changes.” Sholt smiles benignly. “You know all that, don’t you, Spork the Clock?”

“No,” Joe Spork says carefully, “I don’t.”

“Oh, yes. Time is ivy and death is gorse and the turning sets us free. You look younger than you did, Spork the Clock. You were older when we met.”

“Ted?”

“Yes?”

“What does it all look like?”

“Candle, book, and bell. For the exorcism of ghosts. No Heaven, no judgement. Just the Book, and pages like for a music box.”

Joe Spork stares at him. Yes. That’s the job. This old loony is the client. The endgame. Not too late, at all. Just lost upon the road.

God, I sound like him.

“Ted, I have a package for you.”

“I don’t get packages. I live in the greenhouse with the bees, and I cut the gorse and chop the ivy and that’s all. When they say ‘postal’ these days they mean ‘mad.’ It’s cruel, I think.”

“Yes, it is. But look, here’s the destination address, see? I wrote it down.”

Ted Sholt’s eyes fix very sharply, a moment of focus in the fog. “‘Destiny’ is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what’s life? Consciousness without volition. We’d all be passengers, no more real than model trains.” He shrugs, and the sudden acuity is gone. “The enemy was transcribed, not transmigrated. Left himself lying around like an unexploded bomb. Don’t let the Khan take you! Never!” He seems ready to flee, and then relaxes. “But he’s dead, long ago. Safe enough. Did you say you had a cake?”

“No. A book.”

Ted Sholt waves his hands. “I like cake. Chocolate, with butter cocoa icing. Golden syrup. It takes time to set, of course, but a man once told me time’s a figment.”

“Ted? I have the book. The book and everything.”

Sholt peers at him, scratches his stomach. Under the sou’wester, he seems to be wearing a skirt made of sackcloth.

“Well, that would be lovely.” And then the focus comes again, so quick and so strong as to be alarming. His hand shoots out, locks around Joe’s arm. “You have it? Here? Now? How long do we have? Come on, man, they won’t be far behind!”

“Who won’t?” But Joe Spork is already moving, old instinct demands it: when someone says “they’re coming” you go out the back first and get details later.

“All of them! Sheamus, for sure. Jasmine, maybe. Others, so many others, even if you haven’t seen them! And I’m mad and useless. Not to mention bloody old. God, how did it take this long? Come on, come on!” He grabs Joe by the hand. “Did you say Joe Spork? Spork like Daniel? Spork the Clock? Yes? Where is it? Please! We have to be quick!”

“You knew Daniel? He was my grandfather—”

“No time! Reminisce later. Family stories by the fire, yes, and cake. You’re buying! But not now, not now, now is the time, before it passes! This was supposed to happen decades ago… So late. Come on!” Wiry hands grasping and clutching, hauling Joe into motion. “No time!”

Ted Sholt does not, thankfully, smell the way he looks. He gives off an odour of wax, sap, and soil. He stops a yard from the car, pointing.

“Who’s that?”

“Billy. He found me the job.”

“Billy as in William. Don’t know any Williams.”

“He’s a friend.” Unintentional, and an old joke, that one. Sholt doesn’t know, hops into the back of the car. Billy starts from a doze and shouts “Jesus!” and Ted lunges forward and shouts back that “Jesus was the mother of Mary, and Mary met Gabriel at the crossroads, and the crossroads is where the ivy meets the gorse, where we fall down into the dark, where Frankie made angels in a tree,” which does not calm the situation down at all. Billy twists around in his seat to see his enemy better and Ted lurches away from him, trapping himself in the corner of the rear windscreen and shouting at the top of his voice, “Angelmaker, angelmaker!”

Joe, for the first time in several years, is forced to shout. “Billy! Billy! Billy, it’s okay, this is Ted, he’s a bit mad but he’s our client, or our client’s representative, all right?”

“Joseph, he is mad as a coot. And he’s wearing a dress.”

“It’s a robe,” Ted Sholt replies with wounded dignity. “I’m a man of the cloth.” Which is so surprising and so weirdly plausible that none of them says anything at all for a moment. Then Ted gestures. “Further down. It was back aways from the cliff, you see. So it didn’t fall in.” He raises his arm, and for a moment his face contorts in agony, so that Joe finds himself asking whether it’s physical pain, rather than ordinary madness, which makes him wander.

Ted Sholt’s home really is a greenhouse, but it’s a greenhouse in the Victorian style, a great sprawling thing with two floors and transparent walls. There’s a light on somewhere on the upper level, and Joe can see a makeshift bed and what might be a desk. The panes are cracked and taped, and yes, the whole place is wrapped in strands of invading ivy. As they get closer, Joe leans down to look at it, and yes, now that he sees it close to, it is somehow sinister, hungry tendrils slithering over a great wounded beast to reach the innards. He steps back rather quickly, and finds Ted next to him, bright eyes quick and head nodding.

Inside, it’s warm. The glass and the ivy between them make the place airtight, or near enough, and hot-water pipes run around and about in a gasworks bundle. Ted removes his sou’wester, but not his green boots. His feet make a soft flapping noise against the wood floor. Blittblattblittblatt. Joe stares at the boots. It must be his imagination, but they do seem awfully large. He wonders why Ted doesn’t take them off now that he’s inside. Perhaps he doesn’t have other shoes. It would be ludicrous to imagine he might have webbed feet.

“Do you ever swim?” he hears himself ask as he follows Ted up the stairs. “In the sea, I mean. In the summer. I hear people do. On Boxing Day, even.” Oh, bloody Hell, if the old place did actually go into the sea, could that have been a bit more tactless? He glances at Billy: Help me, I’m drowning. Billy stares back, mouth open: You did this one to yourself, mate.

Ted doesn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t hear or perhaps he has decided to ignore the question, as a privilege of being mad. Instead he grasps Joe by the arm. “Come! Come!”

Joe and Billy follow him to the back of the house.

The back room is improbably enormous. It gives onto a set of open ironwrought doors over the sea, and Joe finds himself wondering again how this entire place doesn’t simply shatter in the winter gales. It surely ought to. Even now he can see the glass panes bowing to the wind, hear the whole structure creak and moan. An alarming image fills his mind’s eye, of all these glass walls bursting inward at once, a windstorm of razors.

Obviously, it hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps the ivy protects the glass. Perhaps it’s the gorse bushes or the short, stumpy trees in along the ridge. Perhaps the glass is some sort of legacy of the Second World War, a laminate, a pilot’s cockpit glass. Perhaps he’s never been safer in his life.

“This way,” Sholt cries, “this way, this way, yes, we must go up! Up and over!” And up they go, out of the doors and onto a spiral stair which belongs inside a stone keep rather than outside a glass house on the edge of a cliff. The wind is treacherous, plucking and pushing. Joe finds himself regretting his big overcoat: it flaps and fills like a giant batwing.

Sholt draws him up the last of the steps, and they’re on a sort of sheltered roof terrace on top of the main building, scattered with the odd detritus of decades: a handmower, two tyres, rolls of wire and fence posts. Billy Friend scowls into the biting chill, then yips as he treads on what appears to be a pile of human limbs. He stares down, and heaves a sigh as closer examination shows it to be a stack of mannequin’s arms. “What’s all this?” he demands.

“Waste not, want not,” Sholt says piously, and leads them across the roof to a sort of tower.

There’s a cool draught blowing through the room, and a strange smell of dry leaves, sugar, and turpentine, and now, above the sounds of the house and the wind, and the roar and rush of the waves, he can hear another sound, a deep orchestral twang which comes from all around. Or, actually, from tall, narrow boxes in neat rows.

“My bees,” Ted Sholt says. “Live ones,” as if this were in doubt. “I rather like them. They’re simple. Uncomplex. They require care, of course. Although ironically what they mostly require is leaving alone. And the honey is good. They make heather honey, round here, and gorse. Sometimes other things in the mix. I trade it with Mrs. Tregensa. For eggs and such. I had three hives die last summer. Two the year before. The bees are not well. The Americans are having a terrible time. Some keepers have lost all of them. The bees are dying, Mr. Spork. All over the world. Do you know what percentage of the world’s food production is based on bees?” he asks.

“No.”

“About one third. If they die, the human effects will be appalling. Migration. Famine. War. Perhaps more than that.” He shakes his head. “Appalling. But we don’t see it, do we? We never see it.” He’s veering off again, into his own world, and his gaze slides from Joe’s. “Another sign, I suppose. It’s time, and past time. So…” He threads between the hives to a lump in the middle of the room, covered by a cloth. “Camouflage, you see? Where would you hide a tree? In a forest, of course. So… where to hide this? Amid a forest of bees!”

He throws back the cover, and underneath is a brassy object, three foot high and chased in silver. Sort of Art Deco. Sort of Modern. Sort of Arts and Crafts, and almost certainly handmade to order. Joe Spork stares at it.

It’s a model beehive.

The body of the hive is in the classic style, like a tower of doughnuts, each one smaller than the one below. Etched into the metal, a fine tracery of curlicues and lines, and at the top, a curious basin which speaks of an absence. There’s something missing, like a Rolls-Royce without a hood ornament. He wonders what it could be, then realises the answer is obvious.

“The Book,” Sholt says fraughtly.

Joe starts guiltily, and takes the doodah from his bag.

“Yes,” Sholt murmurs. “Read the Book, muffle the drum. Muffle the drum. Marching soldiers, someone comes.” Then, with sudden suspicion, “Will it work?”

“I think so. I did my best with it. It’s… special.”

“Yes,” Sholt murmurs. “Yes, of course. That was very good of you. Appropriate. I’m never sure whether Ruskin would approve of this. Truth and deception. Light and shadow. They used to say that Gothic architecture was about creating spaces for shadows. All that ornamentation was about what you couldn’t see. Concealment. The divine in the darkness. I’m not sure he’d approve. But we’re not Ruskin, are we?”

“No,” Joe says, after a moment. “We’re not.”

Sholt gestures to the hive, and suddenly it can’t happen soon enough, his hands are shunting Joe forward, little knobbly fingertips poking, faster, faster. Joe moves forward, and arranges the doodah and sets its various parts in place. So, and so. The armature immediately opens the cover, and starts to flick through. Flickflickflick. And back to the start. Teeth lock in the punched section of each page, rapid brass flickers like lizard tongues. Well enough.

He’s delighted, actually. A clockwork item dormant this long (and unwound? Or, is this thing powered by something more baroque?). He closes the panel, noticing on the inside the familiar weird little symbol, like an umbrella blown inside out by a storm. From within the hive, he hears a sudden quickening, flickaflackflack, and thinks “It is alive!” He manages to refrain from throwing back his hands and saying this, Frankenstein-style, to Sholt. He suspects it would be inappropriate.

Sholt embraces Joe in mute delight, and then, because Billy Friend is too slow to get his guard up, him as well. Then the roof of the hive opens.

From within, bees emerge. In single file, each on a little platform, they come into the scant daylight and bask. They flutter their wings as if stretching or drying out. Ten, twenty, thirty of them, in a gorgeous geometrical spiral around the hive. More. Joe peers at them. They must be real. They cannot possibly be what they appear to be. Mechanical bees?

He looks closer. Black iron, yes. And gold. Tiny legs jointed with hinges. He’s suddenly conscious that he doesn’t know, really, how real bees are assembled. It is possible—plausible—likely, even—that he would not be able to tell the difference between the rare Apis mechanistica, with its deceptive metallic-seeming wing-cases and chitinous body which gives the appearance of etching (assuming such an animal exists), and a bee made of actual gold. In his mind, David Attenborough discusses the rare bee in breathy, pedagogic phrases husked out as he lies on his tummy and tries to get a closer look: Dormant until the conditions are right, this is England’s rarest insect. It’s so unusual that it has no natural predators at all… Of all the inhabitants of the Earth, only man is a danger to this extraordinary bee… and it is splendid.

Joe reaches out, then hesitates. He doesn’t particularly like bugs. They are buggy, and alien. The nearest bee stops, and wriggles. He hears a whirr and imagines there might also have been a tiny clank. Breathless, he touches the bee on its back with his index finger. Ambient temperature. Dry. It does not apparently object. A machine would not. An insect… he has no idea. Probably. But bees are phlegmatic, and this one is sleepy. Perhaps Apis mechanistica likes to be stroked. He removes his hand. The bee rolls off the sculpture onto the floor, makes a very clear metallic tink and lies still.

He glances guiltily at Ted Sholt, but Sholt does not appear to be enraged. Joe reaches down to pick up the bee. Looking closely at the legs, he can see bolts, pins.

Amazing.

He puts it back onto the hive, and it pauses, then hums to life again. The others move into a new pattern. The little plates or platforms which brought them retreat into the hive to fetch more, but the original bees remain where they are, still fluttering. More magnets, Joe surmises, moving under the skin of the hive. Or—he’s not clear on physics, but it must be possible—perhaps an electrical current running through the skin itself. If this object dates from the fifties, it’s plausible.

Sholt watches, entranced.

“Breathtaking,” Joe says after a moment. It is. It’s a combination of craftsmanship and engineering beyond anything he has ever seen. And yet, it seems a bit disappointing. How much more could you do with all that effort?

But perhaps it does do more. Perhaps he’s mistaken the timescale. Victorian automata are short-lived performances, like Billy’s rutting nobility. Sholt’s hive is more recent, and at least as much a thing of science as glamour. Someone took great pains with this, and set it out here on the edge of Britain, in the wind and rain. Wind powered? Waves? Perhaps it’s a fanciful way of measuring weather: a barometer of bees. Or it could owe allegiance to an altogether different perception of art, a motile sculpture—the full cycle could last a year. With the right equations, it could be almost infinitely varied, a thing of beauty in constant flux. A mathematical proof, writ in precious stones. Cornwall is filled with the insane, brilliant products of men and women washed down from London to the farthest reach of the south-west: Fermat’s theorems sculpted in papier mâché, Heisenberg rendered as music, Beethoven as blown glass. Perhaps this is some such piece, lost for half a century and now awoken. He smiles to himself. He’s part of something.

A fragment of his mind tells him he needs to be part of things more often.

“Yes,” Sholt breathes. “It is. It still works! All this time! Oh, the world’s going to change now! Everything will change! Hah! Everything.”

Joe peers at it. Perhaps the world will change for Sholt, he concedes. Ted Sholt, owner of one of the most prestigious mechanical mobile sculptures in the world, precious metals and jewels alone worth a hundred grand, value as an artefact almost incalculable. One of Joe’s Middle Eastern clients would pay almost anything for this.

So, yes. For Sholt, the world will change. That sackcloth robe will be relegated to the greenhouse. There will be women, or men. He will have traction in the world, if he wants it. At least in a small way. Perhaps he will be on the news.

“What is it?” Joe asks. “What does it do?”

Sholt smiles. “Oh,” he says. “It makes angels out of men.” And when Joe does not immediately look as if he understands, Sholt continues. “It is an arrow, fired at the temples of Moloch and Mammon. It makes the world better, just by being. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Yes, thinks Joe Spork. That is indeed wonderful. However, it is also somewhat insane and a bit on the weird side.

The bees are still sitting on the outside of the hive, soaking up the last rays of the weakling sun. They look like tiny holidaymakers on their towels. Joe experiences a jolt of alarm when one of them flies up and circles him curiously, bumping into his forehead, before realising that it must be a real bee which alighted on the hive while he was talking to Sholt. There are real bees all around, of course, in the real hives.

And what did you make of these things? he asks the departing insect. Did you find them beautiful? Or did they frighten you? Will you declare war on the metal monsters? Or try to make love to them?

“Do you mind if I take pictures?” Joe asks.

“Go ahead,” Sholt says, almost limply. “It’s started now. The only thing to do is wait and see. But have a care, Spork the Clock. There are men who will come. Shadows and ghosts.” Sholt stoops, and grasps up the fallen bee from the hive, passes it to Joe. “For luck.”

Joe is about to object, though he very much wants to accept, when Billy Friend stands heavily on his foot.

“Well, that’s marvellous,” Billy says cheerfully, to cover Joe’s muted cry of agony. “Top notch. This is quite some place you have here, Ted. Do give us a call.” He presents his card with both hands, Japanese style, and Ted takes it the same way and bows over it. “If you should need any more work done, Friend & Company will be pleased to advise you and assist, subject to the normal fees and suchlike, of course. And there we are, all good.” Billy backs away a little nervously, as if Sholt may leap on him again.

“Yes,” Sholt says. “It is good. Perhaps we can save the real bees. We really should. The truth will be known.” And then the fog comes down over his face again, abruptly, as if he has been holding it at bay all this time and suddenly it has slipped past him. “You should go,” he says. “It’s not safe here. Not now. Not any more. They’ll come. They will. This will be the first place. Go quickly. Use the back stairs.” He hustles them over to the far door by the open windows, and Billy Friend makes a noise like a dog swallowing a whole squirrel as Sholt throws open the door and the sound of the sea comes not inward but upward.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Billy says, going very pale, and when Joe looks down, he understands immediately why.

The greenhouse is perched on the very edge of the cliff, the land beneath eaten away by the waves. The entire back half of the room protrudes over the abyss. This gallery, with its weathered planks and rusted rail, is more than twenty feet out above a thrashing, white-capped sea.

“Go!” Sholt yells. “It’s not safe!” And Billy tells him no, it fucking isn’t, and bolts for the rear stairs and down to the car.

As they drive away, Billy’s lead foot firmly on the pedal and a stream of furious invective pouring from him, Joe glances back, and sees Ted Sholt outlined against the sky, arms flung wide in a gesture to part the waters. Answering his prayer, a great cloud of bees rises up from the greenhouse and into the air, a swarming, gyrating fog which wraps him and wheels around him, then arrows up and out over the sea. Joe has a brief, mad notion that the tiny clockwork robots have taken flight, and wonders if this means he has committed some sort of robbery or been an artificial midwife.

“I have no idea, Joseph,” Billy Friend says, and Joe realises he must have spoken aloud, “but one point on which I am very clear is that we should retire to the bloody pub and never speak of this day again.”

Sholt is still watching the bees—perhaps fearing that they will never come back, insulted by their metal siblings—when Billy grinds the gears and takes the car down into a dip, and the greenhouse is lost from view.

Tess has gone home when they return to the Gryffin, but the landlord gives Joe a pitying look which says the story of his ineptitude has not been kept entirely out of the public domain.

“Would you give her my best?”

“Could do. Better idea might be if you came back at the weekend. Gave it to her yourself. There’s a place in town does a decent bite.”

“You think she’d like that?”

“I think you’ll never find out if you don’t come back and see.”

Joe Spork sulks at himself. Of all the things he cannot do, the one he perhaps most despises in himself is his inability to flirt, and to move from flirting to more serious things. It is one reason he always ends up with impatient women, which is, in turn, why he is rarely in a relationship for very long and why the ones which last are usually rather sterile.

He shrugs off his gloom and reviews the day, flicking through pictures on his camera and contemplating in his mind his small treasures: the bee and the whojimmy. Amazing.

“Where did you come from?” he asks the collection, a little surprised by the loudness of his own voice. “Who made that thing back there?”

As if in answer, his fingers find an irregularity on the pommel, a dimple. He pokes at it with a thumbnail. A piece of silvered wax falls away—a jeweller’s trick, metalled wax to conceal a flaw. He picks off another and then another, and another, until a shiny metal crest is revealed: the same sketchy angular symbol like an inside-out umbrella or a trident.

“Billy?”

Billy Friend, who immediately upon arriving back at the pub began the process of seducing a bubbly, bounteous American woman who is on a walking tour of the British Isles, is being taught how to say “You are very attractive” the way they do it in Idaho.

“Billy, come and look at this.”

“I’m looking at something else here, Joseph. Two somethings, in fact.”

“Billy…”

“My darling, would you excuse me? My boring friend over there needs the benefit of my enormous brain.”

His inamorata makes some sort of off-colour comment of which Billy greatly approves, but releases him. Billy ambles over.

“Billy, do you know what this is?”

Billy Friend produces a jeweller’s glass and pops it majestically into his right eye. This evidence of his prowess and wisdom does not go unnoticed.

“Hello, hello… yes, all right, yes, very good… fine. Didn’t expect to see that here.”

“You know what it is?”

“No need to sound so surprised, Joseph.”

“It’s on the book as well. I’m right? I have seen it around somewhere?”

“As to that, I’ve no idea. But I do know what it means.”

“Well?”

“Hah! Don’t let young Tess see you with it. She’ll never look at you the same way. It’s a webbed foot, isn’t it? It means someone unclean.”

“Unclean?”

“In a nutshell. Look, my lot have been in the Waiting game only so long, right? Matter of economic necessity with us, and then it turned out we was good at it. But others, like I told you, they’ve been around a while. And back in the old, old days, right, some people were considered unclean by birth. They weren’t allowed to be around proper folks and they had to wear a goose leg when they were in public so people’d know not to touch ’em. Lepers, maybe. Or redheads. Maybe they really did have webbed feet. Who knows? So they ended up gravediggers and coffin-makers and all that. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take that young lady over there to Heaven and back, and I don’t want any discussion of sewers. All right?”

“All right. Have fun.”

“One of us has to. Be a shame to die grumpy, wouldn’t it?”

And now, as Joe emerges from the Tosher’s Beat and turns sharp left through a narrow gateway and into a maze of little streets, he is biting his lip and trying not to run. The logic of his worry is very simple and very clear. There are three ways in which Mr. Rodney Titwhistle and Mr. Arvin Cummerbund, not of the Loganfield Museum because it is entirely defunct, could have knowledge of the object Mr. Titwhistle so absently sketched in the air. They might know of it already. They might know of it from a third party. Or they might know of it from Billy.

That putative third party, of course, might be the irritated former owner of the Book, who paid a visit to the saleroom and whose merest mention gave Fisher the screaming heebie-jeebies. By inference, Brother Sheamus, or his successor.

There is, however, a limited number of ways in which any of them could know of Joe Spork’s own connection with the item, and top of that list is Billy Friend.

Carefor Mews is a curious mix of old and new which the developer has in defiance of reason painted white, and which is now predictably grey-yellow with grime. Billy loves Soho. The ready availability of smut, late-night drinking, and intoxicated female tourists is part of the appeal, of course, but Billy confessed to Joe long ago that the place is his heart. Visiting Soho when it’s thronging and celebrating is one thing, but if you live there you see the morning after, the grimy, mournful streets and plastered revellers staggering home after five, the irritable shop-owners starting work and the exhausted tarts knocking off. Soho is a perpetual carnival celebrating how beautiful it is even as the wrinkles set in and the make-up runs. It’s always a last gasp, a last drink, one more fling before you die.

Billy Friend, the hardened realist, sees Soho as one long, sad poem or dirge, and he lives in the middle of it. Joe is unsure whether that makes him deeper than he appears, or just a little bit pathetic.

The street smells of urine and beer. The last of someone’s chicken dinner sits in an open box. How it has survived the night, Joe cannot imagine. Carefor Mews has rats and urban foxes and human denizens who’d be more than glad to take a bite of such an obvious gift. Well. Perhaps it’s recent.

The front door of the building has a combination lock, a new, electronic one. Joe knows the code—Billy gives it out quite freely, because anything which is stolen from him he can almost certainly steal back again, and he has no enemies. His neighbours find this habit infuriating, but Billy has a way of smoothing things over with people. It’s hard to stay angry with him.

First flight of stairs—no carpet. That strange, silver-specked blue linoleum, with a sandpaper texture so you don’t slip. His shoes make a noise like someone stepping on grit. Scritch. Why is that sound so familiar? Well, he’s been here before. But that’s not why. Hm.

Second flight—wood boards, the edges painted white, still no carpet. Mr. Bradley the building manager intends to put some down, but never quite has. There are drizzles of white paint across the boards, and dents and scratches in the bare wood from stiletto heels and heavy boots. Once, when Joe came here, the whole staircase was one enormous party, a weird stew of low-end toughs, party girls and party boys, and not a few film types with mournful faces complaining about tax equity over pisco sours in plastic cups. Each step goes donk, and some of them creak, too.

Third flight—hard plastic. The whole third floor is owned by one person, a cheerful Romanian named Basil who made some kind of once-in-a-lifetime deal and retired at the age of thirty-two. He bought this place to live in, installed some friends and family, then realised they were exploiting him and threw them all out. Now he lives alone, and paints very, very bad landscapes from his balcony. Basil is under no illusions about the quality of his work, but he likes to paint. Billy finds him infuriating. Joe can talk to Basil for hours about not very much, because Basil feels no need to control, prove, or even examine anything. He just floats, and paints, and occasionally gets very drunk and dances in clogs on the ultramodern floor of his enormous home. His bit of the staircase is a curious translucent block which looks as if it comes from an aquarium.

Fourth flight—rich, luxuriant carpet. “Deep shag,” Billy always says knowingly. The top floor of the building is quite small, because much of Basil’s place is double-height. Still, there’s that strong feeling of James Bond about a Soho penthouse, and Billy plays it all the way to the hilt. The door has another combination lock, this one more serious and more closely guarded.

“Billy!” Joe says, banging on the door. “What the fuck is going on? Are you okay?”

Billy Friend doesn’t answer. Not unusual. He’s a heavy sleeper, and not often alone up here. He’s probably putting on his silk dressing gown.

“Hoy! William Friend! This is Joshua Joseph Spork here, and before you bugger off to warmer climes I need a word in your earhole! Billy! Open up!” Joe bangs again on the door, and his heart gives a single, sickening lurch as the latch clicks, and the door opens just a crack.

Oh, shit.

On the one hand, Joe has never been in this situation before. On the other, he has been to the movies, and he knows that doors which swing open when you touch them are a bad sign. And somewhere in the back of his mind, Night Market voices are speaking in his head: old second-hand instincts are telling him to run.

Melodrama. Most likely is that Billy is downstairs trying to persuade Basil to lend him a Mercedes for his escape from his annoyed clients. And anyway, Joe Spork is a paragon of lawful behaviour, made his old dad an unlikely promise and stuck to it evermore. The world he lives in does not include gunfire or dirty deeds done dirt cheap. And this is London, after all.

He opens the door.

Billy Friend is a fastidious person. He likes to appear louche, but for all that the knot of his tie is forever resting against the second or even third button of his shirt, he is a very tidy man. Joe suspects this very tidiness is partly responsible for his decision to shave his head. The asymmetry, the unpredictability, the messiness of his half-covered head offended him at least as much as it decreased his chances with the ladies. Billy’s only real girlfriend of the last ten years—a bubbly forty-something called Joyce, whose considerable cleavage was matched by a splendidly unpredictable wit—was eventually rejected not because she wanted to marry him or because nature’s depredations on her body became too marked, but because she genuinely did not care where she left her socks. Joyce would roll in from a night at the Lab or Fioridita and throw underwear, overwear, and shoes into separate corners of the room. She’d drag Billy to bed and hurl his cherished Italian brogues into the sink, or blindfold herself with his best silk tie.

“I love that woman, Joe,” Billy moaned shortly before the separation, “but she’s death to a man’s wardrobe and hell on his sense of place.” For Billy, above the hubbub of Soho, his penthouse is a chapel of calm.

Which is why Joe’s sense of alarm is growing. The penthouse is a mess. Is this a sign of Billy’s urgent need to be elsewhere? Did he pack, unpack, discard and start again, leaving a trail of silk boxers and lycra briefs? (And oh, my God, the image that evokes!) Or has he been burgled? And if so, was it done, perhaps, by person or persons in the employ of a fat man with kidneyed sweat and a thin one with a surgeon’s placid face? Or by shadowmen draped in black?

Or is it unrelated? Billy has plenty of irons in the fire. Perhaps he slept with a Russian mobster’s daughter or a boxer’s wife. Perhaps he sold to the wrong person (for the second time this year) a painting “possibly by van Gogh” which quite definitely is not.

Two of Billy’s suits are laid out over the back of the leather sofa. There’s a bottle of milk, half empty (and where does he get bottles any more?) resting on the bar. But still no cheerful bald erotomane, no glad halloo of greeting.

The floor is done up in more of the thick carpet so that Billy can have sex on it without grazing his knees or back. Joe’s shoes make no noise as he walks. He is acutely conscious that a housebreaker, discovered in his profession and armed, might likewise make no sound as he prepared to strike. On the other hand… Joe Spork is a big man. His profile does not invite casual assault. It suggests rather that discretion is the better part of valour. He scoops up the poker from the fireplace.

Billy’s penthouse is in three parts. The outer ring—you might almost think of it as the moat—is where he does his entertaining. It is furnished with glitzy scatter cushions and fertility idols from non-existent indigenous peoples, and a collection of somewhat risqué paintings by an eighties artist whose name no one now remembers.

The middle ring is made up of Billy’s bedroom, in which resides his pride and joy, a great bed with four stone columns looted from a defunct museum in Croatia. The canopy is a driftwood panel carved by a girl in the Maldives whom Billy espoused as the greatest natural talent he had ever met. He brought this thing back as proof of concept and secured her a deal with a gallery in Holborn, only to find, on his return, that she had died in a road accident.

He wasn’t even sleeping with her. He just saw beauty and loved it. On the frequent occasions when Joe asks himself why he remains in touch with Billy, this sad little story is one of the things which persuades him that Billy is more than he appears to be.

Joe stares at the bed. Clean sheets. Billy had time to change them after his most recent lover departed. But unravelled and hauled about the place. So. Billy packed, and then he was burgled.

Something crunches underfoot. Joe looks down. Corn? Wheat? Something like, anyway. Not a sexual fetish he can identify. Packing material? He’s seen, recently, objects packed in popcorn as an environmentally friendly alternative to those pernicious foam nuggets which cling to everything and, if they once escape their box, take refuge all over his workspace. But popcorn is soft and fluffy, and this stuff is notably unpuffed. Gravel, probably, from whichever grand home Billy is presently selling to.

He peers into the bathroom. The same unkind hand has tossed all the shampoo bottles and colognes into the tub. The shower curtain is pulled halfway across, and Joe experiences another frisson of unease. He reaches out with the poker.

The most horrible thing behind the curtain is a bar of soap in the shape of a naked female torso. It’s a fair likeness, but it’s green, and smells of artificial apple.

On, then, to the innermost ring: Billy’s study. It’s a small, cosy little room at the back, with a view of the rooftops. There’s just room beside the desk for a single bed and a bookshelf. After saying goodbye to Joyce, Billy took to sleeping in here so that the size of the double bed wouldn’t remind him she was gone. Joe has a sad, never-uttered conviction that Billy, when alone, sleeps in here a great deal, that this room and this room alone is the truth about his life. Like Soho, the truth about Billy Friend is seen in the quiet times as much as in the loud. In this study, the lonely, almost scholastic little man takes stock, and looks into his mirror, and wonders who is looking back. He reads first editions (the only thing Billy will not chop and recondition, steal, or counterfeit is books) and eats cheese sandwiches made with granary bread from a local baker. He drinks tea. He wears jeans and a jumper and very occasionally calls his distant, disapproving family in Wiltshire to check on the progress of his nephew and two nieces through the horrors of school. University, by now—for the older ones, at least.

Joe pushes open the door. His breath catches a bit. There’s a picture of Joyce in a frame on the desk; she’s smiling a broad, hearty smile, the one she reserved for Billy and shared with him whenever she could. Billy, you’re an idiot. You loved her. You still do. Call her up, get her back. She’ll come. Tidy is a habit, to make or break. Love is more than tidy.

Perhaps he has. Perhaps, in extremis, he’s fled to Joyce. Maybe that’s what this is all about; not Mr. Titwhistle and Mr. Cummerbund and their facile deceptions, but Billy having a minor nervous collapse and junking his old life for a new one with Joyce, puppies, and a messy place in the country. That would be strange, but very nice. Joe could go and visit. He could bring a girlfriend, a serious one, and not worry that Billy would offend her by making a pass (or not offend her by making a pass).

Maybe this isn’t burglary, but commitment. Make a mess. Let go the little streak of mean precision. Let it all hang out.

There’s something on the picture frame. Jam, apparently. That almost settles it. Billy has been sitting here, eating jam (on granary, with too much butter) and realised the futility of his urban party lifestyle. He has tossed back the last mouthful of Mrs. Harrington’s Finest Strawberry Preserve, snuffled up the crusts, and thrown his life into disarray in the name of love. Bravo!

The jam is odourless. Joe sniffs at it again. No. Very strange. It smells of nothing at all. Underfoot, another crunch. More gravel? Yes, but also… something white and bulgy. Popcorn. He prods it with his foot. Not popcorn. Hard. A plastic rawlplug, a picture hook, a binder. He leans down.

A tooth.

He picks it up. Wet. Cold. A tooth. He holds it in his hand. Nicotine-stained, just a little. Polished. Billy takes good care of his dentition. Joe stares at it. How does a perfectly healthy man lose a tooth all of a sudden?

The smell hits him all at once, as if it’s been lurking around the edges of the room and now sweeps down and rushes into his nose and mouth. Flat, metallic, raw and vile, it makes him gag. The tooth. Oh, shit. Shit, oh, shit. The room is going round and up and down, and now there’s an enormous amount of noise in his ears, a rushing static like a radio between channels. He leans on the desk, goes to sit on the bed, and realises just before he does so that it is the source of everything, the ghastly, misshapen lump beneath the sheet which he has been ignoring, somehow, since he came in: a huge, dead, butchered hog’s carcass, except that it is not a hog at all, but a lonely, bald lecher with a monkish heart, and someone has done bad things to him, bloody things which have dripped and stained the carpet, and sprayed the walls in the dark, private corner above the bed.

Beneath the sheet, Billy Friend has been murdered, most awfully, most deliberately, most pointedly, and that is the world now, newborn and hard.

He must have died looking at Joyce’s picture, and Joe cannot decide if that was mercy or a most appalling cruelty.

He shudders.

Billy Friend is dead.