Angelmaker

VI If ever; not arrested; the Bold Receptionist.

Joe Spork holds his telephone in his left hand and pokes at it with his right. He has lost an indeterminate amount of time and is shivering, symptoms he identifies as shock. Fortunately, he knows the number by heart. He has never used it before, but it is the rule of the House of Spork, and always was, since he was old enough to count: if in doubt; if you ever; if you are accused; if you are nearby; if you are taken hostage; if you are arrested; if you hear a rumour that someone; if you wake up and she’s dead; if, if, if, you call the magic number and you bare your soul.

At nine-twenty at night, it takes two rings for someone to pick up the phone.

“Noblewhite Cradle, Bethany speaking.” A woman’s voice, not a girl’s. This number is not answered by receptionists or temps. It rings on the desk of Noblewhite Cradle’s formidable office manager. When the actual Bethany is not in residence, there are three surrogate Bethanys who will take the call. At no time, ever, will it take more than two rings for one of them to lift the receiver. The extra Bethanys, in private life, go by the names Gwen, Rose, and Indira. It’s not important. When they answer this phone, they are Bethany.

“Good evening, Bethany, it’s Joshua Joseph Spork.” Bethany (all of her) knows the name and history of every single client with access to this number. There aren’t many—but even if there were, the name “Spork” is an absolute passport at Noblewhite Cradle.

“Good evening, Mr. Spork, how may I help you?”

“I need Mercer, please.”

“Mr. Mercer?” Even Bethany hesitates for a second. “Really, Mr. Spork? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Bethany. I’m afraid so.”

There is a brief stutter on the line. Bethany has just switched over from a standard phone to a headset, leaving both of her hands free to work. She’s ambidextrous and she has two computers in front of her, each set up for use with one hand and patched into the communications system at Noblewhite Cradle. In other words, Bethany is now able to perform three distinct actions at once. One hand is tapping out an extension number in response to Joe’s request. The other is discreetly alerting the senior partners to the fact that Mercer Cradle is now in play, and they should therefore expect the usual degree of insane fallout. In the meantime, she continues the conversation with Joe.

“I have the List here, Mr. Spork. Are there any matters arising from the last few days of which I should be aware?”

The Cradle’s List is a celebrated joke in the legal journals, the Loch Ness Monster of documents. Jonah Noblewhite in his day was occasionally cartooned as a sort of black-lettered Santa, with his List displaying the peccadilloes of the mighty and the notorious, the better to conceal them from the world. If the matter being lampooned featured the Scottish courts, Nessie herself was often the client. Joe tells Bethany that his entry is as accurate as he knows how to make it.

“Putting you through now. Will you require any subsidiary services?” Meaning, will you be needing us to bail you out, or get hold of the negatives, or arrange a poker game for you to have attended last night?

“For the present, no, thank you,” Joe says politely.

“Very well,” Bethany says, not without a measure of congratulation. Joe has never availed himself of Noblewhite Cradle’s more outré services, at least, not directly, though he suspects his father may have deployed them on his behalf when he was a child. Bethany is always glad when her charges are bystanders rather than arrestees.

“I am in the lobby of Wilton’s,” Mercer Cradle’s voice says pleasantly, “where my rack of lamb has just arrived and is even now cooling next to a glass of unimpeachable Sassicaia. Since my dinner companion threw her gin and tonic at me shortly after the fish course, you have my full attention as long as someone is dead. Is someone dead? Because otherwise—”

“It’s me, Mercer,” Joe says.

“Oh,” Mercer says. And then, “Joe, for God’s sake, you’ve got my cellphone number.” And then meditatively, “Oh, crap. What’s happened? Don’t say anything to anyone except me.”

“Billy’s dead, Mercer. I’ve just found him.”

“Billy Friend?”

“Yes.”

“Dead like slipped on a bar of soap or like Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping?”

“Very much the latter.”

“And you, you poor rube, are standing there at the crime scene up to your neck in shit.”

“Yes.”

“Bethany? Police?”

“On their way, Mr. Cradle. Someone called them five minutes ago.”

“Joe, you are a pillock. Was that you?”

Joe doesn’t know. It may have been.

“Never mind, then. First question: are you Colonel Mustard?”

“No.”

“You are not the Colonel in any way, shape or form?”

“No.”

“Could anyone unkindly imagine that you have the look of a military man? Have you been seen entering the library carrying plumbing supplies?”

“I came to look for Billy. I needed to talk to him. I’ve been into all the rooms but I haven’t touched much. I’ve got a poker.”

“Not one you brought with you, I trust.”

“Billy’s.”

“Fine. Quite shortly, the place will be swarming with unhappy coppers. Their first instinct will be to clap you in irons and give you the impression that you’re going to prison for ever. Stay silent until I get there. Do not speak, even to say ‘Good evening officer, the corpse is through here.’ Just point. Do not make a voluntary statement. Do not be helpful. Stay in the corridor—are you in the corridor?”

“I am. I was in the flat, before. He’s on his bed.”

“And you no doubt touched him as little as possible? You did not, in a mistaken rush of affection for the little prick, embrace the deceased and smear yourself in blood and him in fibres of your clothing?”

“He’s under a sheet. I didn’t lift it.”

“Good. Fine. What was my first instruction?”

“Say nothing. Wait for you.”

“And did I say you could in any way do anything else? Did I, for example, give you permission to reminisce about your old friend William and his little ways? About your shared history as dealers in entirely legitimate antiques?”

“No. You said to say nothing and wait.”

“Excellent. Then I shall ask the maître to stick the lamb in a bit of foil and cork the bottle for me, and we shall picnic.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You will be by the time we’re done, Joseph. This is apt to become a long and tedious soirée. Under what circumstances may you offer help and assistance to Lily Law?”

“None, until you get here.”

“So that I may translate what you say into words which will be understood by Lily and her chums Bob Magistrate and Charlie DPP as ‘I am not some tiny tit you can fit up for this heinous crime, I am a bystander and thus I shall remain.’”

“Understood.”

“I am on the way, Joseph. Bethany?”

“We’re making an incident room, Mr. Cradle. Keep us up to date.”

“I will.”

Joe Spork leans on the wall and waits.

Christ, the smell.

He breathes through his mouth, and feels he has betrayed a debt. When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossibly prim.

Billy, you’re an idiot. Were an idiot.

In exasperation, not judgement. Then ungrudging acknowledgement:

You were my idiot. My friend.

In his mind’s eye, he buries Billy, cries for him, misses him every time he sees a bit of dodgy Victorian smut, then slowly forgets him and misses him more seldom as life goes on, more lonely, and ultimately Billy really is gone, abandoned twice over to his end.

And at the same time, another part of him eschews all this love and poesy, and looks for edges, escapes, and angles. Joe reluctantly encourages it. This is bad trouble, and unless there’s more coincidence in the world today than there was yesterday, it pursues him. Here, with Billy’s repulsive mortal remains, he can feel its breath. So while he waits for Mercer, and for the predicted horde of arresting officers, Joe Spork unwillingly combs his mind for old habits and ways of thinking, and this inevitably begins, as all discussions of wrongdoing must, with Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork.

He has been so successful in discarding his father that he cannot, for a moment, recall Mathew’s face, or his voice, until he reaches for memories too old to be useful and hears it, mock-severe, coming from up above him, because he’s a child and getting ready for his day.

“Hurry it up, Joshua Joseph, please! A man is always busy, a man has affairs of state to attend to! This man must also make breakfast for his offspring before delivering him into the vile jaws of school. Booooo! to school!” Joe’s father wears a coat with a sheepskin collar and a fat-knotted, striped tie. Wide shoulders and narrow hips make him look like an isosceles triangle balanced on its point (his Italian brogues in two colours). The child Joshua Joseph pauses to consider his father as if he were, for the sake of argument, a scalene or an equilateral triangle. Both images are very odd.

On this day, Mathew Spork is playing the man of commerce rather than the gangster prince, and so he has left almost all of his guns in the box under the bed. Almost all, because a man in his profession does not generally walk abroad without something to give people pause.

He’s waiting for an answer. The boy Joshua Joseph—who has been planning in his mind the theft of the Crown Jewels by a series of tunnels and hang-gliding escapades—responds: “Boo!”

In fact, Joshua Joseph quite likes school. It’s controllable and therefore restful, and things which start out inexplicable become clear. It is in this way utterly unlike his life, which remains mysterious despite years of intense study. Also, he is by popular acclaim the hooligan-in-chief of a small band of under-tens. On the other hand, it keeps him away from his father, whom he adores for his magnificence and resents for his loudness in equal measure. He sets out two blue breakfast bowls.

“Quite right,” Mathew says. “Boo! to school and hooray for Mum and Dad and Grandad and all the rest. However, Josh, school is a necessary evil. You hungry?”

“Yes. Dad, what are affairs of state?”

“Kings and Prime Ministers; Kings and Prime Ministers. Ruling the mighty nations of the Earth, taking weighty decisions—and among those mighty nations, which one has the brightest future? The finest soldiers and the greatest leaders? And which one, Josh, has the wisest and most brilliant heir to the throne?”

“England!”

“Close, Josh. Very close. But no! The nation I speak of is the House of Spork, with its fine and splendid Prince Joshua Joseph, and blessings be upon him and all he surveys. Yes?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“All right, then. Eggs or cornflakes?”

And Joshua Joseph gives whichever answer he adjudges will satisfy his incessant parent. Papa Spork is completely unaware of how his banter sometimes compresses and confines his son. He thinks himself great fun, a Dad to end all Dads, but the sheer volume of him—the relentless effervescence, the way in which everything relates to the great, manifest destiny of the Spork family, the bone-deep conviction that success is just around the corner of his son’s young life—is, on in-between days, just too much. The Crown Jewels temporarily forgotten, Joe considers instead a recent school visit to the British Museum, during which he saw any number of interesting and enlightening things, including—when she leaned to indicate a neolithic ritual object—his form mistress’s startlingly erotic undergarments. The object he presently recalls most strongly, however, is the yoke in the farming exhibit, laid over a pair of mighty stuffed oxen.

Joshua Joseph, between bouts of hero worship and merciless inadequacy, occasionally feels that his father is laid across his shoulders in much the same manner, and that he must pull him everywhere he goes, whether his father is there or not.

Papa Spork burns the eggs, which in his curious vision of the world is just further cause to believe in the inestimable genius of the House of Spork, so they have cornflakes instead. On some level or other, however, Joshua Joseph’s father must realise that this morning has gone astray from the usual perfect march to dynastic hegemony, because he makes a concession for which Joshua Joseph has been striving for weeks:

“D’you want to come to the Night Market tomorrow?”

“Yes, Dad, please!”

“I’ll ask your mother if she’s all right with it. And you look out some smart clothes.”

“I will.”

The Night Market is a dream. It is the magic heart of the city Mathew asserts confidently is the greatest and most magical on Earth. Joshua Joseph knows with an instinctual passion that it is the most secret, most remarkable, most improbable place in the entire world; the more wondrous because it moves around. It is a clearing house for everything and anything. It is beyond the reach of tax and tariffs; a shadowed, lamplit holdfast which bustles with forbidden trades and pirate’s treasure. Mathew claims it was born of the wrecker’s trade, that the Kindly Men came up the Thames from the inshore water, from Cornwall and the Channel Coast, with booty looted from sunken ships. He says it was Britain’s first landside democracy (the pirate ships themselves being the first constituted parliaments). Perhaps it was. Mathew’s occasional, unlikely erudition is startling even to his father, Daniel, who knows all things. And then, too, this Market, which Mathew has revived and of which he is anointed king (or elected president for life, if you prefer to retain your grip upon that great democratic heritage) is the one aspect of his profession to which Daniel Spork does not object, the one part of Mathew’s life, aside from Joshua Joseph and his mother, Harriet, for which Daniel will smile.

Perhaps it’s the hearthfire glimmer of the stalls. As reported, the Market is like a hanging garden of antiques and jewels, tiered and terraced or sprawling across some great space, or piled higgledy-upon-piggledy above one another in an old brewery or giant crypt. Each pitch is designed according to the owner’s likes and lights, but must run from a single three-pin plug, for power is at a premium, and therefore most often the Market is lit by gas and heated by small coal fires in Swedish stoves or Victorian grates, and chimneyed out by whatever contrivance Mathew has arranged for the occasion. Food smells, too, Harriet said once, like a huge spiced kitchen: cake and meat and fish and herbs and condiments unknown in Merry England, but common in France and Italy. There’s garlic and basil and turmeric and curry, and a kind of black fungus which smells of—but here, Harriet changed course rather abruptly. Of something exotic, anyway.

And amid all this, the trades and deals, marked by a flicker of torchlight as the buyer takes a moment to illuminate his—or her—prize, inspect it, assess or assay it, weigh it, measure it, accept or reject it. Money changing hands in purses, billfolds and bill rolls, occasionally in cases, and of that, each deal kicking back just a little to Mathew Spork himself.

But so far, all Joshua Joseph himself has witnessed—has been required to learn by rote, by heart, as one of the many curious rules of the House of Spork—is the trick with the newspapers.

Every Market culminates in the announcement of where the next one will be. The majority are small gatherings, but every month there is a grand one, the true Night Market, and that one is heralded by strange, encrypted messages in unlikely places. The clew—the thread by which the maze may be unravelled—is a lonely-hearts advertisement in a local paper: “Come home, Fred, all is forgiven!” The ad immediately beneath—by arrangement with the setters—gives a veiled time and date. A second paper yields a street or locality, and a third, a specific name or number. It is a jigsaw. From within, it’s entirely simple. From without, impenetrable.

“Can you tell me where it is, then?” Mathew Spork demands, ferocious.

“Of course, Dad.”

And indeed, that evening, with his mother’s nail scissors and a half-hour of cutting and pasting, Joe has the address.

“We have a winner! A true son of the House of Spork!” Mathew cries proudly, and Joshua Joseph repeats it happily as his father whirls him through the air.

“You like to win, don’t you?”

“Yes, Dad. I do.”

“All right, then, we’ll call this your exam: three-card monte!”

The traditional three-card monte is also known as “Find the Lady.” It is played with three cards, one of which is the queen, and the dealer moves them around face down in an effort to confuse the player. The player then picks which one he thinks it will be—which it is, the first and maybe the second time he plays, but the third time inevitably pays for all, and the dealer comes away richer. It is the first con Mathew ever learned—from his father, of all things, for which the old man daily curses himself.

The simplest trick of the monte is the knuckle cast. In the language of the sharper, the dealer has a light hand and a heavy one, the latter so-called because it carries two cards, one above the other. The dealer moves the heavy hand and deals once. The mark tends to assume that the card dealt is the bottom one, and in the early rounds it will be. In the pay round, however, the upper card is released by a slight flex of the knuckles, so that the player is reversed. It’s a magician’s force.

Mathew is not asking Joe to perform this trick with his small fingers. There’s time enough for that as he grows older. On this day it is the Gangster King’s concern only that his son know a fiddle when he sees one, and the monte is a perfect metaphor for any game or trick you can name. See the world through the monte, and you won’t be taken for a sucker. At least, not often.

Mathew rolls his wrists and flashes the cards, showing the heavy, the light, the heavy. He lays them out, exposes them face up. It is all so much distraction, hands not quicker than the eye but cleverer than the watcher. Joe grins as his father fakes a fumble, trying to get him to focus on the wrong thing, and Mathew nods appreciatively. Then abruptly Joe’s father stops, alarmingly sincere.

“Your grandfather’s told you about strictures, I suppose?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“He’s a good man, son. He tries his hardest. He believes in the game. He thinks if you play by the rules long enough, the right sort of fellow will win out. He may be right. Thing is, in my experience, the right sort run out of money or the wrong sort leave the table. The game is fixed. Always has been, always will be, and the only way out for a man is the gangster’s road. Take what you can, do what you must, and know that being a right sort never saved anyone from anything.”

Joe nods, taken aback by his father’s sudden need to explain himself.

“I did listen your grandfather when I was little, Son, just the way you listen to me. Truth is I still do, but don’t tell him I said so. So here’s a stricture of the monte—of the Market, I suppose: if you can see what’s going on around you, when other fellows walk through life blindly, then you’re a better man. And like to turn a profit, which is life’s way of letting you know your quality. All right?”

“Yes!”

Mathew’s hands move again, fast and faster, and he lays the cards down on the table. “Then find the lady.”

Joshua Joseph grins. His father has tried very, very hard to beat him. He has played a trick so stinkingly dishonest while he was talking that Joe can only read into it the deepest possible respect. He looks his father in the eye.

“It isn’t this one,” he says, and turns over the right-hand card. Mathew smiles. “And it isn’t this one.” He turns over the middle card. His father’s smile twitches up at the side. “And that means it must be this one.” He leaves the last card where it is. The queen, he well knows, is in Mathew’s coat pocket, which is why he has played the monte this way around, revealing losers rather than picking the winner. Turning the con.

Mathew wraps him in a massive hug. “We have a winner,” he says once more, into the top of Joe’s hair. “My son. A real winner.”

And that’s it. It’s really happening.

It is the best day of Joshua Joseph’s young life, ever, at all.

Going to the Night Market!

Harriet Spork fusses with his lapels and the mustard polo-neck jumper one more time, and Mathew watches with a broad grin.

“It’s scratchy,” the infant Spork objects. Mathew Spork nods. He is wearing exactly the same outfit.

“It is, Josh, at first, but after a bit you get used to it and then you miss it when it isn’t there. You want to look a fine figure of a man, don’t you? For the Market?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Well, then.”

Joshua Joseph waits patiently while his mother finishes with his hair—again—and sits quiet in the back of his father’s car, very straight, with his eyes set in what he imagines is an expression of extreme adulthood. Through the streets of London they go, first fast, then slow, then fast again, and the big car leans and rolls as Mathew Spork plays the accelerator and checks that there is no one in his rear-view mirror.

Joshua Joseph manfully feels nauseous and does not say so. Harriet leans against her husband as he takes a right-angle corner at fifty, and the tyres hold the road as if they were clamped to it. Mathew grins at her fiercely, at her flushed skin and ever so slightly open mouth.

After twenty minutes, prim residential houses give way to tall tower blocks. After another ten, the blocks dwindle into business parks and lock-ups, and then they’re driving along next to a wide pastureland. In the moonlight, Joshua Joseph catches a glimpse of an urban fox on a fence.

“All right, Josh, we’re here.”

They get out of the car. Joshua Joseph can smell January frost and the sharp scent of burning wood. All around there are high, empty buildings and the sound of creaking hulks on the river nearby. His shoes squelch in mud, find gravel. His father tells them both to hurry, and they do. Across a courtyard covered in black ice and car tyres, past the brittle corpse of a misplaced winter duck. Mathew Spork opens a strange, oval door and draws them with him.

They step through, and he closes it behind them. They walk down some steps and on along a narrow, arched tunnel. Harriet’s heels clip and tap on polished concrete.

“Where are we?”

“You know where we are, laddie. You found the way!”

“But I mean, what is it?”

“Well, at certain times and in certain seasons, those worthy persons governing great nations may disagree with one another. And in an effort to avoid any physical harm, all the lords and owners of banks and presidents construct underground places in which to take refuge.” He leads the way down a short flight of stairs. “And then there are utilities. You know what that is? Sewers and trains and water and such. This part, now, this part has belonged to Her Majesty’s Post Office since good Queen Victoria’s time. I dare say they’ve no idea they own it, profligate spenders of the public purse that they are. The Post back then was a marvel, Josh, a genuine marvel, and in the capital it must be doubly so, so they made a little railway all their own, and pneumatic pipes of brass, and vacuum pumps driven by steam. Genius. Of course, there are man-size tunnels to care for it all. All closed up now, caved in and vanished, built over, filled in, as far as Lily Law and her friends are concerned, but known to us, Josh, to men of the Market like me and you. Those fellows in Paris, Josh, they think they’ve catacombs, but that’s nothing to what treasure is under London!”

And even as his father says the word, Joshua Joseph can hear music, and there’s a yellow electric gleam on the edge of the tunnel, and a flat smell of smoked sausage and nutmeg, of perfume and the flowers his mother grows on the window ledge in the kitchen.

They turn the corner, and the Night Market spreads out in front of them like the main street of a medieval town, festooned with lanterns and crank-handle generators with meagre bulbs glowing, stalls and handcarts and even shopfronts laid in rows, and up the walls on wooden walkways, so that the whole effect is of being in a great oblong bowl or the hull of a ship, the hundreds of traders and vendors bellowing their prices and offerings and clamouring for attention. And into this sea, his father leads them both, and is greeted and admired by all around.

Red velvet walls and corduroy armchairs; oil paintings, gold coins, Cornish pasties, and tea; pipe smoke and mint jellies and Turkish coffee, yellowed playing cards and chess. The Night Market is all these things, but most of all it is his father and the Uncles, sitting amid cushions and eating baklava and crumpets in the small hours of the night, telling tales and answering the questions of a small, bewildered boy, while his mother smiles and gossips with a dozen Aunts. Everyone here is “Uncle” or “Aunt,” or more unusually a cousin, like the boy and the girl seated on the next cushion along, the wards of Uncle Jonah, who is the only one wearing a suit, but whose crooked smile is like a lighthouse when it falls on the children.

Joshua Joseph asks very politely why no one has a second name. Mathew glances over at the broad-shouldered, very thin man whose barrow this is. He calls himself Tam, and in the daylight world he runs a smart shop where men of the upper classes purchase clothing and equipment for shooting and fishing. These goods, of course, he is happy to deliver by hand to the homes of his customers, so Tam is often very well informed as to the disposition of valuables in expensive houses.

“Men of the Market, Joshua,” Uncle Tam says, his big head nodding over his whisky glass. “Men like you and me, we’re bad with names. Bad with all kinds of recollections, really. We remember what’s important, oh surely, but those other things we sort of forget, so they don’t slip out when they shouldn’t. The Night Market, it’s not called that just because we hold it when the sun goes down. It’s because the whole thing takes place under cover of darkness. Shadows and fog in the mind, so we don’t see what we don’t feel like remembering, if you get my drift.”

Joshua Joseph doesn’t.

“Well, my folk are from Cornwall, right? Wreckers, in days gone by. You know what a wrecker is?”

“A kind of pirate.”

“Hm, well, yes and no. A pirate does a mighty job of work to get his booty, Joshua. He boards a ship and carries the day in battle, and he risks hanging and death in battle and all such. A wrecker is a quieter sort of fellow with an eye to business. He lets the coastline do his work, tricks the taxman—you do know what a taxman is?”

Insofar as the taxman is cursed by everyone he has ever met, a bad fairy who takes from the deserving to stuff the rich coffers of Socialists and Bankers, Joshua Joseph does indeed know, so he nods.

“So he tricks the taxman into crashing his ship full of gold and rum onto the rocks, and then all that’s good is washed up on the beach by the waves. And sometimes the taxman with it, and more than a few of those revenue fellows—that’s another word for a taxman—more than a few ended their days married to a wrecker wench and drinking rum on the beaches, for a taxman is a man like any other, ey?

“The point being that a wrecker does his work in darkness, so if the sheriff comes, no one saw his mates’ faces, not for certain, and he can swear an oath on the Holy Bible if that’s required that he has no sure knowledge of who else was there that brought the taxes onto the beach or took them away. So… what’s my name?”

Joshua Joseph thinks about it. “I don’t believe I ever heard it for definite.”

“Very good. So, then, you sit by me and learn a bit more while your dad does his business over the way.”

And learn he does, the strange skills of the Market: burglary and locks from Tam and Caro, and a dash of fisticuffs from Lars the Swede, the ways of the Tosher’s Beat from everyone. And from their boys and girls and wives and brothers and mothers: how to spot a counterfeit bill, a fake painting, a recent Louis XIV chaise; how to tell if someone is taking drugs or shorting the count or talking out of turn, and what to do about it; how to climb an old drainpipe without pulling it out of the wall; how to make a plausible disguise; how to disappear in a crowded room. The Night Market is filled with people who know these things and will explain them to Mathew Spork’s son over a fresh doughnut from the steel vat on Uncle Douggie’s counter—Uncle Douggie the boxer, strong as a Liverpool Hercules and very partial to fried foods.

To Joshua Joseph, lounging like a sultan on silk cushions with fingers covered in cinnamon and sugar, chocolate and jam, the Night Market is a place of excellent cuisine and spellbinding secrets, and all his own. He runs free through a hundred barrows, discovers that he is a terrible painter and a passable restorer of art; that he has no knack for complex locks but could comfortably earn a Boy Scout badge in helping people back into their cars; that his skills in mathematics will never lend themselves to making book (so don’t even try). He becomes a prince among the under-tens, dispenses fair justice and learns the rewards of getting caught with sugar on your hands when doughnuts are banned (and is promptly taught methods for concealing sticky paws and by inference also fingerprints). Mathew Spork is delighted, and in his jubilation, Harriet finds her happiness as well. Only Mathew’s father, Daniel, is displeased. Grandpa Spork thinks school will suffer, and does not in any case approve of the Night Market, though he will not say why.

School does not suffer. Indeed, school profits. As the practical applications of his courses become more apparent, Joshua Joseph becomes more diligent. What fraction of one hundred and twenty is two? Who cares? But: what is one point five per cent of one hundred and twenty English pounds (rounded up for ease)? And is that a suitable courier’s fee? Now that’s a far more interesting calculation.

Joshua Joseph Spork, Crown Prince of Thieves, lies that night on his back and looks up at a vaulted brick ceiling, and finally falls asleep to the soft whisper of Tam’s counting machine as it tallies stolen money.

With the lesson of the monte uppermost in his mind, Joe Spork slides his back down the wall outside Billy’s flat until he is resting on his haunches, and considers what he knows about the Book of the Hakote, and why someone might murder a man because of it. If you can see what’s going on around you…

He can’t. He has no idea. And that’s the other rule of the monte: if you can’t spot the sucker in the room, it’s you.

A woman called Bryce, dressed in a paper suit and a blue cloth mask, insists that Joe give her his shoes. She does this, not in a suspicious, inquirish sort of way, but rather with almost overwhelming boredom. Ruth Bryce spends her days hoovering up the traces of untidy murderers, and the image of the galumphing Boot of Spork clumping over her crime scene and obscuring the tiny yet vital traces clearly looms large in her mind.

Joe, not wishing to be rude or obstructive, removes his shoes and hands them over, knowing that Mercer, when he gets here, will immediately call him an idiot, and ten seconds later turn this unforgivable lapse into a huge legal advantage. As he passes over his shoes (from a shop around the corner and much scuffed despite the yellow Eva-Nu label) he realises that he is also surrendering, as a matter of practicality, any possibility of slipping away. A man might quietly wander off after half an hour or so—“Oh, I had no idea you still needed me, so sorry”—but without his shoes, he must remain and see the thing through. Some part of him, perhaps, wishes to be enmeshed. Joe Spork has few friends, and he will not disavow a dead one merely because an unkind person could construe his presence at the last as guilt. Least of all will he forsake this particular corpse, member in good standing of the Honoured & Enduring Brotherhood of Waiting Men. In time, no doubt, Billy’s fraternal order will turn up and sit vigil for him, but until that happens, Joe is all he has. Alone and—as Joe now realises—painfully lonely, that’s no reason he should be uncared-for in death.

“Spork, did you say, sir? Like ess-pee-oh-arr-kay?”

Detective Sergeant Patchkind is an elf; an affable, chirpy little man with a high voice who has already shown Joe a picture of his nieces. Just the thing, according to DS Patchkind, to settle the stomach and soothe the heart after the unpleasant experience of discovering a corpse. While Joe was considering the girls and thinking that they looked a lot like weasels and a bit like storks, DS Patchkind asked him a couple of unimportant questions for the sake of his paperwork. Joe gave a brief estimation of what it was like to come upon the dead body of an old mate, and Detective Sergeant Patchkind tutted and sucked air through his teeth and was about to go and talk to Bryce of the blue mask when something occurred to him.

“And what time was that, Mr.… sorry, what was the name again?”

At which point, briefly unmindful of Mercer’s stern injunction to reserve, he said “Spork” and immediately realised he was an idiot.

Now, with Patchkind looking up at him with an expectant face, he can do nothing but nod.

He doesn’t actually nod. He’s about to—has already sent a sort of “go” signal to his nodding muscles—when a subtle quiet ripples through the chamber. The forensics people stop chatting to one another, the coppers stop shuffling their feet. Joe, who has never been on a hunting expedition, imagines this is the silence which you hear in a large wood after the first stag has been downed. Into this silence speaks a most unctuous, most unpleasantly familiar voice, and Joe Spork recognises it for serious trouble.

“Dear me, dear me. Mr. Spork, what are you doing in such an unpleasant place? No, no, don’t answer that without a lawyer. Goodness gracious. We mustn’t infringe upon your ancient rights, that would be quite improper. Magna Carta and so on, I’m sure. Hello, Detective Sergeant Patchkind, a pleasure to see you once more, though regrettable of course that it should be in a house of death. Mind you, the exigencies of our professions, of course: we almost always meet in dark places, don’t we?”

“Yes, sir,” DS Patchkind says neutrally, “we rather do.”

“Just once, Detective Sergeant, as I was saying to my esteemed colleague Mr. Cummerbund just this morning, just once it would be nice to meet the charming Basil Patchkind in a pub and share a jar of ale. Was I not, Arvin?”

And there they are, and Joe realises in this curious moment how very binary they are: an upright, narrow one and a rotund zero, side by side.

Arvin Cummerbund nods. “You were, Mr. Titwhistle. Just this morning.”

“And alas, Basil—you don’t mind if I call you Basil? I don’t mean to be rude… thank you, my dear fellow—yes, friend Basil, I’m afraid we must take Mr. Spork from you at this time. He has a pressing appointment. It absolutely will not wait, and if he should miss it the consequences would be… well, all manner of chaos and confusion to the nation as a whole. Lest your duty to the mundane conventions of the law supravene, Basil, I did bring the necessary…”

And with this salvo, he removes from his inner pocket a long, pale document folded upon itself, and passes it to Patchkind. Patchkind unfolds it and peers, then snorts, then peers some more.

“It’s not signed,” he says, at last.

“No,” Mr. Titwhistle says blandly, “these ones never are.”

Patchkind sighs.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to confess, Mr. Spork? To the murder, I mean?” He seems to be offering it as an escape.

“No. I’m afraid I wouldn’t.”

“Well, you know best, I suppose.” Patchkind sighs and folds the paper up again. “He’s all yours.”

“Indeed, he is,” Mr. Titwhistle replies. “I would say we were never here, but alas, that’s not a fiction I imagine we can maintain. So never mind. See you soon, Detective Sergeant Patchkind.”

At which, to Joe’s outrage and amazement, Arvin Cummerbund steps lightly behind him and fastens his wrists together in the small of his back with a pale nylon strip. Joe gives a startled shout of “Hey!” and turns his head to Patchkind in mute appeal. Do something!

Patchkind looks very grey, and quite deliberately turns to face the scene of the crime.

“DC Topper,” he says, as if through a mouthful of dust, “tell me about our corpse.”

“You’re not under arrest,” Arvin Cummerbund murmurs into Joe Spork’s ear, “because we don’t do that.”

The fat man drives, and Rodney Titwhistle sits next to Joe in the back. His earlier chattiness has evaporated, and Joe’s bewildered affront has lost its edge, so that a sad, nostalgic quiet settles on the car as Cummerbund guides it through London’s complex tangle, each man thinking his own thoughts in a curious kind of fellowship.

The traffic light turns red again in front of them, and Mr. Cummerbund tuts. Rodney Titwhistle sighs.

“Arvin, my apologies, I’m going to start the conversation. You’ll just have to join in from the front. You can multitask, can’t you?”

“Certainly, Rodney.”

“Thank you, Arvin.”

“Thank you, Rodney.”

“In that case, let us proceed. I wonder, Mr. Spork, if you could tell me just one thing?”

“You could tell me who the hell you are. Not the bloody Loganfield Museum, I know that.”

“Oh, dear me. No. Let us say, we are the embodiment of an unpleasant necessity of the global reality, specifically concerned with the well-being of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And let us further say, in accordance with convention, that I will be asking the questions.

“I should also remind you that you are not in the custody of the police. The usual rules, as so often referenced in popular television programmes, do not apply. Our mandate is not justice. It is survival. In that context, you will understand when I say you should not attempt to ‘take the fifth.’ The U.K. no longer recognises a right to remain silent, you know. We protect the nation’s future, rather than its conscience. I find this noble.” Mr. Titwhistle smiles apologetically, then, as the car stops at a set of traffic lights, gazes out of the window to a small horde of teenaged girls in fishnet who are whooping and bouncing up and down. After a moment, he goes on.

“Suppose I were to ask you ‘What is the Apprehension Engine?’ What would you say?”

“‘I don’t know.’”

“And if you were to speculate?”

“A device which makes people afraid.”

Rodney Titwhistle gives a soft cough. “Which you conclude from the use of the term ‘Apprehension’. Indeed. Well, Mr. Spork, in a way you are quite right. It is indeed a device, and it certainly scares the bejeezus out of me. Tell me, instead, about the Magic Beehive of Wistithiel.”

“How do you know about that?”

Rodney Titwhistle sighs. “Very shortly, Mr. Spork, everyone will know about that.”

“Why? It’s just an automaton. What’s any of this got to do with Billy, anyway?” Joe sees Billy’s corpse beneath the blanket, smells the room, and swallows bile.

“Everyone will know because everyone will see. In the beginning, the bees will fly around the world. They will awaken further hives. The device is intended to encompass the globe. There will be—shall we call them ‘outbreaks’?—during which the machine will function at its lowest level where the swarms are concentrated. Then, when they are all in position, it will activate. I would conservatively estimate that three or four million people will die shortly thereafter by ordinary human action. Murders and so forth. If the machine moves on to the second and third stages, as I understand them—and I will grant you that this certainly is not the notional purpose of the device—the fatality rate rises dramatically. In the worst case, it approaches one hundred per cent of the world’s population. So you understand why I feel a little unwilling to let this slide?

“In retrospect, it should have been dismantled years ago, but governments do so hate to throw things away, especially dangerous things. Did you know, incidentally, that ‘retrospect’ can be an adjective? One might say ‘Joshua Joseph Spork is retrospect; he’s a man who learns from his mistakes.’ In any case, Mr. Spork, the beehive is not just some clockwork toy. It is a scientific advance of ludicrous complexity, so secret that no one who knew about it could understand it and no one who would understand it could be allowed to know about it. A game-changer. And consequently in many ways we might also call it a time bomb. It is the Apprehension Engine to which I referred earlier. We are, as you see, somewhat nervous about what will happen now that it’s active. So I must ask you: how do we switch it off again?”

An opportunity to come clean—perhaps without prejudice. Very attractive. Except that, on diverse occasions, unscrupulous persons have been known to use this line of argument to lure a suspect into unwise confessions.

Deny. Hedge. Evade. Play stupid. Which, in any case, is what you are.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I just… I have no idea.”

“No, I am almost sure that you don’t.” Mr. Titwhistle sighs. “Ted Sholt’s the fellow I need to talk to, isn’t he?”

“I suppose he may be.” A pleasant vision: urbane Rodney Titwhistle in his clean car, struggling with Ted of the foul-smelling sandalled feet, the burlap smock and the sou’wester pressed against the window and the weird battle cry sounding: Angelmaker! Although… no. Ted Sholt might not fare so well in that engagement.

And that word: angelmaker. That’s much less funny, here and now. One way of making angels, in cartoons and so on, is to kill people. He should mention it. But if he does, will they keep him for ever? And will “mention” equal “confess” in the watery eyes of Rodney Titwhistle?

The moment passes. Rodney Titwhistle claps his hands, very lightly, as punctuation.

“Taking myself as the example, Mr. Spork, the problem—and it’s a common problem in this debased age—” the faintest nod of the head towards the horde, still audible over the hiss of the tyres “—is that while I am known to be mostly infallible, I have also been known, very occasionally, to be quite wrong. Do you see?”

“We’re all wrong from time to time,” Joe says nervously.

“Even on matters about which we have absolute confidence, alas.”

“Even then.”

“This is the basis of René Descartes’ famous doctrine, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Rodney Titwhistle gives vent to a polite sigh of reproach.

“Debased, as I said. Well, Descartes realised that in his lifetime there had been any number of occasions on which he was absolutely certain and yet absolutely mistaken. He had dreamed himself in front of a fire attending dinner with friends when he was in fact at home in bed. He had seen what he took to be an eagle and discovered later that it was a buzzard, much closer than it appeared. Well, silly man, he was a mathematician rather than a naturalist.”

Mr. Titwhistle’s expression does not entirely conceal his personal feelings regarding this lack of ornithological nous.

“He therefore asked himself: ‘If I were held captive by a malign fiend which deceived my senses, of what if anything could I be certain?’ He inaugurated a method of doubting everything, and was finally reduced to the simple statement that because he was conscious, and aware of his own thoughts, he could not plausibly doubt his own existence. That’s the famous ‘I think, therefore I am.’ You see? It sounds so trivial, until you see it in context. Here is René, half-convinced that his soul is a toy of demons. His sanity hanging by a thread, he finds this one, simple nugget of truth, and he stands with it in his clenched fist and he says: ‘I’m real! I exist! And upon that rock, I shall build an edifice of reason!’ It’s magnificent, really.”

“And does he?”

“What? Oh, no. No, he was worried about being burned alive by the Catholic Church. He said actually God would never allow such a terrible ruse to be perpetrated upon a human soul. I don’t know where he found evidence for that. Seems to me… well. The point is that insofar as we are anything, we are things which think. Not Homo sapiens but Res cogitans.”

This seems to warrant a confirmation, so Joe ventures a noncommittal “I see.”

“In this case, my point is that truth is a slippery item. Hm?”

“Yes, it is.” Because he can think of nothing else to say, even though there are alarm bells ringing in his head.

“And although that slipperiness is a disadvantage in some situations, it is also vital to the way we live. The wrong truth at the wrong moment causes housing markets to plummet and nations to growl at one another. We can’t have too much of it running about loose. We’d have wars all over the place. Economic crisis, certainly—well, we’ve seen that, haven’t we?”

They share a little eye-rolling. The madness of bankers.

“And to make matters more troublesome, it has even been suggested that we human beings are incapable of knowing anything at all, in the absolute sense. We believe. We theorise. But we have no direct perception of whether our belief is matched by the objective universe.”

Mr. Titwhistle sighs deeply. Epistemology is cruel.

“But… what if an engine might be constructed which functioned as a species of prosthesis? Which extended our senses into the realm of knowledge? An engine which allowed us after all to apprehend truth.”

He nods as Joe’s eyes flicker at the words. “We would behold wonders. But then… Old atrocities would come to light, old promises would be revealed as lies… And if one were of a scientific bent, one might worry ever so slightly about such a power of observation accidentally destroying life on Earth for the rest of time, or possibly changing the nature of this universe to make it inhospitable to conscious thought in perpetuity. Scientists will go on so about the precautionary principle, won’t they?” He smiles benignly: boffins and their little ways.

“I’m sorry,” Joe Spork says, his thoughts rather focused by this addendum, “what was that last part?”

Mr. Titwhistle shrugs in his seat. “Arvin, you will help me out if I go astray, won’t you?”

“Of course, Rodney.”

“I get lost among the quanta.”

“Leave ’em out.”

“This won’t compromise our strict scientific integrity at all?”

“Needs must, Rodney,” Arvin Cummerbund says, and philosophically puts his fat hand on the horn for quite a long time. A late drinker bangs on the bonnet of the car, raises two fingers, and staggers on.

“You see,” Rodney Titwhistle resumes, “it seems that if all that extraordinary Heisenberg stuff is literally true, we as conscious beings have a sort of role in the ongoing creation of the universe. We cause tiny indecisions to go one way or another, just by looking at them. So one has to ask, if one’s a responsible person: if we learned to appreciate the universe directly and without the possibility of error, would we inaugurate a sort of cascade? What if our way of existing is contingent on these little uncertainties in the fabric of our world? And what if knowing this entails knowing that, which implies that, and so on and so on until there are no open questions any more, and every choice is made as a consequence of every other, and finally we become little… well, to employ a metaphor, little clockwork people. Pianolos, Mr. Spork, rather than pianists. And wouldn’t that rather mean the extinction of intelligence? Don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I grant,” Mr. Titwhistle says, “that it’s a little tricky. Arvin?”

Arvin Cummerbund glances in his rear-view mirror. “Let’s say what we are now is like water, Joe,” he says gently. “Our minds. All right? And this machine might—just might—be like a freezer. It’s possible that it might freeze everything, anywhere, ever. And then we wouldn’t be liquid any more, we’d be solid, and we might never notice, but we’d be following a pattern laid out in advance, feeling we were making our own decisions. Right now we have choice, you see, Joe. A man might decide one thing or another in a moment of stress. It’s not random and it’s not fixed. It’s conscious. But after the freeze… There’d be no escape, ever, from a path set from before we were born to the day we die, which takes no notice of what we do along the way, except in that we are part of the mechanism creating more inescapable paths. We’d be no different from any other chemical reaction. Salt has no choice about dissolving in water, does it? We wouldn’t be special, or conscious, we’d be so much rust. Clockwork men. See?”

“Oh,” Joe says.

“Indeed,” says Rodney Titwhistle gently. “‘Oh.’ I quite agree. And now you are wondering how such a thing was ever built, and the answer ultimately is desperation. Or a species of carelessness—something which is, I’m afraid, rather a feature of the history of weapons of mass destruction. Suffice to say it is an old project. It doesn’t really matter now.

“The Apprehension Engine is a device which would allow one to know the truth of a situation, without fear of error. You can see how that would appeal—to deceive the enemy and know that the deceit was successful; to recognise his lies infallibly. A massive strategic advantage.

“That wasn’t its creator’s interest, of course. She was an idealist. That’s a term which has come to mean someone who is foggy and naive, but back then big ideas were still very much in fashion. Better living through science, knowledge will make us gods… and here she was, with her truth machine. Deception would be a thing of the past. The Apprehension Engine would usher in a new age of prosperity, economic stability, scientific understanding, social justice… But used unwisely, as it transpired, it could do other things less wholesome. And, well, as I say—do we really want to know the truth of everything? Of everyone? All our loves, our desires, our fears uncovered at a glance? Our weaknesses and petty gripes? Our sins?

“History is a well, Mr. Spork, a deep well driven into the strata of the past, through the bones of madness and murders. When it floods, we do well to run for the high ground. This machine, this Apprehension Engine which you so cavalierly reactivated… it is a hundred days of rain. A thousand. It is a flood and I am not Noah. I am Canute.”

Rodney Titwhistle has turned in his seat and now his face is urgent and beseeching. At any moment, he will point his finger like a recruiting poster. Join up! Your country needs YOU! To save the world.

And Joe Spork is not unmoved. Of course he isn’t. But he has no answers, and knows that he is, if not in the belly of the beast, surely in its maw and rolling towards its throat. He does not wish to encourage it to swallow.

Mr. Titwhistle lowers his voice to convey gravitas, and issues his most earnest plea. “So let me ask you again, with all my heart: how do I switch it off? How do I control it? How did you switch it on? And what did you hope to achieve by it all?”

Joe, looking at him, knows that Mr. Titwhistle believes everything he has just said. Yet at the same time, the whisper of the Night Market within him notes bleakly that all that truth could be assembled artfully to produce a most elegant, most deceptive lie.

“Supposing,” Joe says, to Mercer’s imagined strenuous objections, “hypothetically supposing all this is as you say: can you not just unplug it?”

Rodney Titwhistle nods. “We might try. But how would we recall the bees? And how should we know that we had succeeded absolutely? In my uninformed tampering with the machine, might I increase the power and wreak havoc, destroy my nation and my self? Or activate a dead man’s switch and bring about Armageddon? No. Better, by far, to have your help. This must be got right.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe says again, “I just don’t know anything.”

“No, Mr. Spork. You need not be sorry,” Rodney Titwhistle says. “I am. I am.”

They don’t speak again until Arvin Cummerbund turns the car into a narrow street and through a set of modern steel gates, into the front court of an anonymous, sandy-bricked block with wide swing doors.

“Well. Here we are,” Rodney Titwhistle says, in his “unpleasant necessity” voice, as he helps Joe out of the back seat. “I’m sure it will all work out for the best.”

The phrase is familiar and pro forma, but on his lips, here, now, it is a funeral oration. It is a prayer for the dying. As they walk towards that bleak, ugly little door and the lino’d official rooms beyond, Joe can feel his life coming to some kind of watershed. He steels himself for the kind of testing Rodney Titwhistle might unleash upon him, and wonders what he will say or do, and whether he will come out of here with all his fingers and teeth. He whimpers, deep in his chest. He wants to say “Don’t do this,” but is embarrassed, and knows, anyway, that while Mr. Titwhistle doesn’t want to do this, he will absolutely not relent, and even if he did, the time-serving Arvin Cummerbund would be there to see it through. Arvin Cummerbund the bureaucrat, who knows the value of everything, the better to take it away.

Joe glances to his left, and sees a long grey-black Mercedes bus, windows tinted very dark, and beside it three tall figures all shrouded and veiled, waiting in silence. More vampires, and that thought isn’t half so funny or so easy to get rid of as it was in his shop, during the day. Three faceless heads turn slowly to watch him as he walks. Rodney Titwhistle does not look at them, and from this Joe realises with a nauseating jolt that it is to them that he will be given.

“Who are they?” he asks quietly.

“Ghosts, perhaps,” Rodney Titwhistle answers, uncharacteristically whimsical, or perhaps a little unnerved. Joe glances at him, and he waves the moment away. “Technically they are contractors. The interrogation techniques they deploy are a matter of commercial confidentiality, of course, and in any case beyond our competence to assess. They assure us that everything that happens to you will be compatible with the law. It is not our job to pry. In fact, we would be breaching your rights under the Data Protection Act to do so. Do you understand? No one will ask. If they did ask, no one would answer. I have the option of rendering you to them under a piece of recent legislation. Do you wish to know its name? I have it written down somewhere. Alas, much of the detail is redacted.”

Joe looks at the ghosts again, and sees that they are not alone. Behind the bus, a strange, armoured Popemobile is sitting, and in it is one more, familiar, figure: a man, sitting stooped, somehow recognisable as the first Ruskinite he ever saw, the one who came to the shop.

The man’s face is in shadow, but he has slipped the spiderweb veil back onto broad shoulders so that he can see clearly in the dark, and from him emanates a stark, rigid malice and a terrible anticipation.

“They’re called Ruskinites,” Rodney Titwhistle adds, “a benevolent order of monks. They’re just around the corner, as it happens, nice old manse. They have a vested interest in the Apprehension Engine. When we have switched it off, they will study it. They are concerned with encountering the divine. Unfashionably sincere, of course, but they have considerable expertise. Inspired by John Ruskin. Although I understand they’ve changed a lot in the last few years—so much so that the term ‘benevolent’ may no longer be entirely accurate. Still, they look after the orphans of a particular accident. That must count for something.”

Joe Spork, looking at the shadowed, alien trio waiting to take him away into the dark, can well believe it. He recalls the strange, heron steps and the featureless cotton face, and feels like a small boy being left on the steps of a very frightening school. He will tell them everything. Even though everything is not very much, and when he is dry, they will continue to wring him out. He will be crippled by their benevolence. May die of it. He breathes the wet night air and determines he will treasure every second of his life. He promises himself that he will not cry.

And then, as he mounts the moulded concrete steps, the door opens and a yellow shaft of light from the reception hall picks them out. Three figures step through the breach, in perfect counterpoint to the trio coming up. On the right, a gnarled, angry youth in a tracksuit, and in the middle a dapper outline with a Savile Row suit. On the left is a security guard or a soldier in civvies, looking vexed and hurried. Some manner of apology is already emerging from his lips, but his protestations of innocence are utterly overwhelmed by a glad yodel which echoes off the surrounding buildings, and Mr. Titwhistle hunches as if struck with a plank.

“Joshua Joseph Spork, by all that’s holy! Good gracious, you’ve been bound, what appalling brutality! A client of mine… I’m shocked. And you’ve been so cooperative in the face of such gross provocation. In this age of chat-show rage, Joseph, I believe that makes you a paragon of virtue. Isn’t he a paragon of virtue, Mr. Titwhistle? How do we spell that, by the way, for the writ? ‘Titwhistle,’ not ‘paragon.’ Joe, congratulations, you’re rich. Rodney here is going to give you all his money, or at least, all of his organisation’s money. What organisation is that again? I suppose, ultimately, the Treasury? Well, then there’ll be plenty, won’t there? How very fortunate, although if you wouldn’t mind having a word with the Chancellor, Mr. Titwhistle, and letting him know not to buy any nuclear missiles or bail out any banks until we’ve settled, I’d be grateful, one wouldn’t want there to be a shortfall. Yes, Mr. Titwhistle, I am aware that you believe you are beyond such mundane considerations but allow me to assure you that, if we marked lawyers the way we do military aircraft, I would have painted on my fuselage the outlines of a number of untouchable government departments now defunct. I am Mercer Cradle of the old established firm of Noblewhite Cradle, and I can sue anything. And is this your henchman? Do you know, I’ve always wondered what that means. How exactly does one hench? Is there a degree in henching, or is it more of an apprenticeship? Good evening, Mr. Cummerbund, I declare I never saw a finer figure of a man; Mr. Spork is my client and a very respectable one at that, please desist from giving him what our forebears would have called the fishy eye. Which of you would like to be the happy recipient of this paper ordering him released immediately into my care? But where are my professional manners? You must think less of me: do you consider Mr. Spork a suspect and how does it come about that you’re interrogating him when he specifically requested that I be present, and before you have clarified his rights and status in the investigation?”

Rodney Titwhistle looks reproachfully at Joe as if to say “This person is your friend?” and “You didn’t have to do this to me, I was only asking.”

“Good Lord,” Mercer says, with rising glee, “I happen to have my client’s shoes here. Joe, you lemon, put these back on, you’ll get muscle cramps in your toes and then where will the compensation end? Joseph! With me, please… He is often absent-minded under pressure,” Mercer Cradle avers as he helps Joe into his shoes. “Suppressed guilt relating to his father’s heinous acts, I shouldn’t wonder. Why, he once went on a date with a lady officer of the police service and proposed to her over dessert, quite extraordinary, of course she said ‘no,’ well, who wouldn’t when there was still coffee and petits fours to come? Tell me, Mr. Cummerbund, how long has it been since you saw your ankles…?” Mercer keeps up his barrage until they’re out of earshot and in the street, and Mercer and his mute companion are hustling Joe into the car.

The Ruskinites watch from behind their veils, silent and motionless as lizards on a wall. One of them takes two bobbing, birdish steps, then draws back. They make no sound.

“Joe, you did fine,” Mercer says. “You were great. But there is no question that we are in the shit. We are in the savage jungle. For some reason, which I do not yet apprehend, there are titans stirring in the deeps and shadows on the stairwell. As my youngest cousin Lawrence would say, we are up to our necks in podu. This, incidentally, is Reggie, who is one of my occasional thugs,” indicating the gnarled youth on his left. “Now retiring to become a vet, would you believe, but for the next ten minutes you can trust him with your life, only don’t, trust me instead. Anyway… good evening, and what the fuck is going on, and try the lamb, it’s excellent.”

Because Mercer, good as his word, has brought a picnic.

Below the thunders of the upper mezzanine, behind the first of three vast tungsten-alloy security doors, Noblewhite Cradle maintains a suite too elegantly attired and well-plumbed to be called a panic room, but too well-fortified and paranoid to be anything else. Joe is a little disappointed, but also massively relieved, to find that he is not actually lodged in the fortress itself. It is on the sofa in the Raspberry Lounge—which may be thought of as the barbican of Noblewhite Cradle—amid the deep pink cushions and highlights of damask, that he falls asleep for a full hour before Mercer rouses him by placing under his nose a mug of thick coffee made in the approved Noblewhite fashion, so that it tastes the way fresh coffee actually smells. Mathew Spork, in the olden, golden days, used to say that he only ever got caught in the act when he really needed some of Jonah Noblewhite’s home-brew. Nach dem Grossmütterart, Jonah Noblewhite would respond in gentle remonstrance. Not mine, Mathew. My grandmother’s, and Joe’s father would say Yes, Jonah, we know. In all our Earthly strivings for perfection, we shall none of us reach the greatness of the foremothers. And whether the conversation took place in this bolt-hole or in the great mustard-yellow living room in the Mathew Spork mansion in moderately unfashionable Primrose Hill, there was Joe listening and absorbing it all, and thinking his father was a leader of men and a ruler of thousands.

“Hail, the conquering hero! All hail!” Mathew Spork cries, five foot eight and lean as a river trout, his arms thrown up as if to display the trophy, then snapping down to receive, not a great silver chalice, but Harriet Spork in a great fluster.

Mathew wraps himself around her and lifts her up and murmurs horsewhispers in her ear, and kisses her soundly on the mouth until she stops speaking (which is quite some time) and strokes her like a much-unsettled cat. She soothes, and slows the stream of questions and remonstrance, and remembers to include in their embrace the boy they made.

Joshua Joseph scrambles up his father’s suit and perches between his parents, much delighted by this position, and presses their heads together with infant muscle, so that their noses squash, and this causes a great volcano of laughter from all three.

The source of Harriet’s alarm is never precisely stated, but earlier this same day some enterprising scoundrel concealed himself in a purloined armoured truck and managed to gain access to the Bridlington Fisheries & Farming Mutual Lending Society, from whence—with the aid of three further gangsters, identities unknown—he secured some two and a quarter million pounds and diverse objects of value totalling yet more.

The tommy gun was not in its box this morning when Joshua Joseph sneaked into his father’s study, and there was a smell of oil on the workbench. Imagining what great works must be afoot, Joshua Joseph laid his hand across the velvet dips and forms of the case and tried to imagine the heft of the thing, the coolness of it, before his mother found him and chased him out. Now, though, he understands that another blow has been struck by the grand House of Spork against the iniquitous forces of the financial community.

So tonight is the victory bash, in the shag-pile carpeted, chromed and bear-skinned lower floors of the Primrose Hill house, there on the corner of Chalcot Square. Everyone who is anyone is here. Over by the bar with an oyster in each fist is Umberto Andreotti the tenor, talking dog-racing with Big Douggie who is out on bail and thinking he may need to spend some time abroad. Eyeing them both with speculation is Alice Rebeck, until recently a geisha and still dressed like one. But something in her face says to be careful; Alice has given up the oldest profession. She has business in hand with clients around the world. “Retrievals,” she tells Mathew politely, and “people, darling, not objects” when he asks if there’s anything he might have run across that she’s needing returned (ho ho, huge wink: the gentleman thief returning his stolen goods as a gesture to a lady). Smoothly stepping in to occupy her time is Rolf McCain of the Glasgow McCains, the best family of housebreakers in the business, the cleanest, the fastest, and the most loyal. Rolf was party to one of Mathew’s more splendid crimes, that business with the brontosaurus. He was nearly sent down for it and never breathed a word. The McCains never turn on a friend, not ever, not in two hundred years and more of solid crookery, but that doesn’t mean Rolf will let Mathew monopolise Alice. Even a generous Scotsman must draw the line at that.

On a sofa of his own for obvious reasons is the Honourable Donald (known as Hon Don), unfavoured son of the grand banking house of Lyon & Quintock, indentured into the civil service and utterly desperate to get his rocks off as many times as possible before the inevitable blue-blood bride. Swaddled in Savile Row and primped by experts, noted habitué of brothels from Bangor to Bangalore, the Hon Don is a redhead in the vein of Peter the Great, a wet-eyed sex maniac with thin arms and enormous hands, each of which is presently occupied with the exploration of a different doxy of the day: the curvaceous Anna and the sagacious—if lewd—Dizzy.

“ ’Lo, Hon Don!” bellows Mathew, and “ ’Lo, Dizzy, ’lo Anna!”

“Hullo, Mathew, hullo indeed,” carols back the amorous octopus, and then there is a shriek of outrage, because Anna has goosed him. They fall en groupe over the back of the sofa into the mess of cushions, and it is revealed that all three are wearing suspenders, although (for which relief, much thanks) the Hon Don’s are of the respectable sock variety. For sheer devilment, Mathew snaps off a picture, and there’s another cry of outrage from Donald, “Spork, you bastard, you’ll ruin me! Wait! Wait! Wait! Did you get Anna’s calves? Well, did you get Dizzy’s? Bloody hell, I want that picture! Can you get me a copy? Wey-hey, Spork’s the lad, he bloody is! Ho ho, me young lovelies, now I can take you with me wheresoe’er I go!” And more, but it’s muffled in lace and laughter.

All around, lounging aristocrats and whipcord sportsmen, singers and entertainers including—to Joe’s vast retrospective embarrassment—a noted cabaret act in which a white man from Torquay paints his face and sings Louis Armstrong numbers. But this is the seventies, remember, and no one bats an eye, least of all the three West Indian Cricketers or the Sudanese princeling who turn up at midnight to demand a dance with the great Harriet after she’s sung her set. If Mathew has one redeeming feature, it is an absolute lack of prejudice.

Joshua Joseph loves them all. In miniature flares and a cowhide double-breasted jacket from Tickton’s, he dogs his father’s footsteps as Mathew congratulates a new MP on his win and steals a kiss from the man’s overspilling wife, then dives behind the bar at the urging of Dave Tregale—the casino boss who’s making his way in the world with a few favours from the House of Spork. To the delight of the multitude, Dave pours absinthe and sugar into a shot glass and sets it on fire, and Mathew drops the lot into his mouth and closes his lips on the flames. Joe waits for steam to come out of his father’s ears, and so, it seems, does everyone else. Mathew tosses the glass in the air with a flourish, rolls it down his arm onto the table and grins. “That’s a man’s drink, David, and not a word of a lie!”

After which nothing will answer but that Dave do the trick for a Soviet Cultural Attaché, third class, lately arrived after the opera and gasping for a snifter. Very shortly the bespectacled Russian is singing and dancing and the whole crowd is thumping on the floor, faster and faster, and beside Tovarich Boris (whose name is not Boris) is Mathew Spork, matching him kick for kick and spin for spin. Hoy hoy HOY!

Yet all these are just appetisers for the young Joe. His favourite thing comes later, when the guests are mostly gone, and he is admitted to an even more select company of adults. When everyone has shimmied and twisted and the conga line is played out; when the Funkin’ Walrus and Lady Goodvibe have gone home, and the respectable, florid faces have departed, Mathew is left with his close court—and the real party begins.

The great treat of robbing a bank—really robbing it, not just grabbing the cash from the registers like a piker and running headlong into twenty coppers when you get home—is looking in the safety deposit boxes and seeing who had what squirrelled away, then arguing over whether to hang on to it or sell it on, and very occasionally uncovering something truly special or bizarre. Mathew once found, in a box from a bank on the Essex coast, a human jawbone wrapped in crumbling cloth, together with a card identifying it as a holy relic of Saint Jerome. In the same box was a collection of erotic icons detailing a very unconventional version of the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Spirit which a second card asserted had been painted by Michelangelo. Even as forgeries, they were unique. If real…

Mathew donated them anonymously to the British Museum, and by coincidence was invited to a string of glamorous parties by the directors. The icons were not widely seen, though the Museum retains them for very special visitors.

Scotch and hot coffee have replaced absinthe. Harriet is smoking a cigarette in a long holder, others have cigars and pipes. The cash money is being counted elsewhere, there’s nothing so dull as watching two accountants tally and cross-check one another, licking their thumbs and getting paper cuts on their fingers, riffling and complaining and trying to enlarge, without appearing to, their one per cent cut, rising on the far side of the table in proportion to the main stack. All the same, Mathew’s working bag is at his feet, clanking when he puts his foot on it, and Joshua Joseph knows the tommy gun is within; it is his father’s iron rule that he does not put it back into the case until the count is done and the tally split.

So here are the safety deposit boxes, all in rows, and warming up to a box each are the best and most dishonest locksmiths in the country: Aunt Caro with a pipe in her yellow buck teeth and a low gown which reveals, as she leans forward, remarkably conical white breasts; Uncle Bellamy in his sheepskin, even here, indoors and hot as a greenhouse, and sweat coming down his red face from his comb-over; and Uncle Freemont, born in Bermuda and possessed of spiderlong hands, with his half-moon specs on the end of his nose and a hat in Haile Selassie’s colours to remind everyone to show some respect.

“Are you ready?” Mathew Spork demands from the sofa, where Harriet has her stockinged legs across his lap and is shuffling closer to snuggle against him.

They nod. Of course they are. Tensioners and picks in little glimmering lines, rakes in different sizes. Each pouch also contains a few bump keys, not for the competition, but for later, when it’s just about getting through the haul.

“Three, two, one… get ’em open!” Because this is a race, of great seriousness and intensity. How many boxes can each locksmith open in ten minutes? The outer locks are all the same, of course, but the boxes have a second, inner layer to which each customer must affix a lock of his own. And while they struggle and work the tough inner locks, the neophytes and apprentices whisper to one another about what’s being done. The young Joe learns the secrets of the vise and pin, the shunt and the bump key, the tension and the torsion, all wrapped up in laughter and delight, so that another curious skill is added to his repertoire and to his inner list of tasks whose execution is a joy and a matter for laughter and celebration.

Aunt Caro was the fastest, Joe remembers, muzzy and partway asleep on the Raspberry Room sofa. One might argue that she cheated. On the third round she complained that she was hot, and stripped off her top half altogether, letting everything hang out. Broad, muscular shoulders beaded with sweat, strong hands twisting, she carried on. The two men just watched and then Uncle Freemont asked her outright to marry him, to which she replied she’d never marry a man without credentials. She made the word sound so dirty even the infant Joe understood vaguely that this was about sex. Aunt Caro, with a mouth full of bad dentition and roomy about the bust and flank, was all the same a woman with a direct line to the male libido. They left together to pursue the formalities in private.

That merry evening marked the beginning of the end for Mathew Spork. Mathew had come to believe he should shift his game, build a power base and join—at least to some degree—the legitimate economy. The mob had Frank Sinatra, Mathew said. They had movie stars and casinos. Why couldn’t Mathew Spork do the same?

He bought into a chain of newsagents, Post Office concessions, car dealerships, and a pier by the seaside, joined a club called Hawkley’s, and tried without great enthusiasm to restrict himself to low-risk jobs and show thefts. He stole underwear from the bedrooms of visiting starlets and worked very hard to get caught in his domino mask going out of the door. He replaced a set of paste diamonds used in a stage detective story with real ones lifted from the owner’s wife. He lounged and sprawled and took meetings with American businessmen who wanted to touch a genuine English gangster.

And then the eighties came; just-for-fun heisting and games of tag with the coppers were out, and shoulder pads and cocaine were in. Mathew Spork was on a list of people that Lily Law proposed to take down, one way or another.

“I’m sorry, mucker,” Mercer says, “but there’s no help for it.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s five, Joe.”

“I slept the whole day? Fuck! What’s happening?”

“No. It’s five in the morning. You’ve slept an hour. We need to talk about all this. There’s no time, Joe, I’m sorry.”

“Fuck,” says Joshua Joseph Spork again, through the haze, and drinks his coffee. The f-word has become devalued. It doesn’t remotely express how he feels. He remembers his mother, very upset the first time she heard it from his lips, despite the fact she used it on a regular basis to Mathew. These days he can say what he likes unless it’s blasphemy. If he says “Christ” she prays, then weeps. And (Christ) what am I going to tell her?

Mercer lays a small digital recorder on the table.

“From the beginning, Joseph, please.”

“Mercer, I’m tired—”

“You can sleep later. I’m sorry, Joe. Splash some water on your face. If you need more coffee, or some other stimulant, it can be had for you, but we cannot wait for you to nap. It is not nap time. It is talk-with-your-lawyer time, because at this moment I do not know enough to keep you safe.”

Joe scowls. “Just make it go away. Don’t get into it. I’m nothing. I didn’t do anything. I never do. It’s a bad rap.”

“Joseph, I have done several things since you went to sleep. I have initiated all manner of false-arrest proceedings and discovery petitions which will create a paper trail and cause dismay and gnashing of teeth in the House of Titwhistle. I have started researches into the dealings of Billy Friend and his acquaintances unto many generations so that shortly I shall no doubt know more about cadavers and the theft of antiques than I ever dreamed I should. However, these are sideshows, and you know it, and I very much suspect that this is about to get political. If that is the case—if this is national-level statecraft—then the efficacy of Cradle’s to get between you and the villains of the piece will be vastly reduced, because they have recently acquired a nasty habit of ignoring the law. So please, for your own good and the sake of my sanity, tell me what has passed and what is going on. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, I have stepped in the path of Behemoth on your behalf and I must know more if we are to avoid being squished by his horny-toed feet!”

Joe Spork shrugs yes, and Mercer tuts.

“Billy called you. You went to meet him.”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“He had a job. Clean up and install. I cleaned it, I looked at it, and it was… different.”

“Define ‘different,’ please. For those of us who weren’t there.”

“Unique. Special. Skilled. Complex. Unfathomable.”

“All right.”

“We went down to Cornwall. The book—Billy called it a doodah—was part of a big mobile sculpture thing. There was a mad bloke who looked after it. I plugged it in. Bees came out.”

“Does the mad bloke have a name?”

“Ted. Ted Sholt. Or he called himself Keeper, like a title.”

Mercer nods. “And bees came out of the sculpture?”

“Mechanical simulacra of bees. There were actual bees as well. Ted keeps them. For company, I think.”

“Did they strike you as in any way remarkable?”

“They existed, that was pretty remarkable. They were expensive. I mean Cartier-bespoke expensive, all right? You remember the Woven Gold?”

“Your grandfather’s thing.”

“They were like that. Stunning. But they didn’t speak in tongues or turn water into wine or fly off into the sunset. They just…” Joe stops talking.

“What?”

“There was a moment when I thought they had. Obviously, they hadn’t.”

“Turned water into wine?”

“Flown away. They’re too heavy. It was the real ones.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“… They were clockwork. Made of gold!”

“So, in fact, you assume.”

“Mercer…”

“Joe, much as I am loath to believe anything I hear through men like Rodney Titwhistle, there is some very significant ordure hitting the fan here. If this really is an old government science project, we have to acknowledge your bees may be more than they appear. Maybe they are nuclear bees or plague bees or some other bloody thing. Certainly, they could be magnetic or rocket-propelled bees. We don’t know.”

Joe shudders. He will have nightmares about French philosophers and Ruskinites—whatever they are, with their alarming birdlike walk—but most of all about not knowing, about not ever knowing anything for sure. And to be honest, he supposes it could have been the metal bees, after all. He would just prefer very much that it wasn’t.

Mercer nods. “Yes. I refer you to the usual pithy folk wisdom regarding assuming anything. So what do we know about your machine?”

“Titwhistle said it was a sort of evil lie-detector.” Joe tries to make this sound risible, but Mercer isn’t in a laughing mood.

“Don’t parse, Joe, please. Don’t paraphrase. His words, as far as you can remember them.”

“He said that it might be a way for the human mind to recognise truth, perfectly. That someone built a machine to make it possible.”

Mercer makes an uncertain gesture with his hand, this way, that way. “Hm.”

“What ‘hm’? What does ‘hm’ mean?”

“Well, I can see why he’s worried. I’m amazed they let you go, after telling you that.”

Joe Spork smiles a feral smile, out of nowhere; a savage, biting grin. For a moment, he looks dangerous. “You mean the nice man lied to me?”

Mercer stares at him. “Maybe,” he says watchfully, “or maybe he told you something because he didn’t expect you to see the light of day again. It was touch and go, there, when we came to pick you.” He studies his friend’s face for signs of… something. But the unnerving smile has vanished as swiftly as it came. Joe continues.

“Sholt said—”

“Sholt? Oh, this ‘Keeper.’”

“A sort of a hermit. I liked him.”

“You would.”

“He said the world would change. He said it was…”

“He said it was what? Come on, Joe!”

“He called it ‘Angelmaker’. I nearly told them everything, when I realised what that could mean.”

Mercer Cradle stares at him, then picks up the phone and speaks very clearly and rapidly. “Bethany? Would you please be so kind as to add the following to your researches: ‘Ted Sholt’—I don’t know whether that’s Edward or Theodore or what, so do them all, and try ‘Keeper’ as well, could be a name or a title; Wistithiel; and the word ‘angelmaker’ and all related terms. And cross-reference with Daniel, Mathew, and J. Joseph Spork and everything we have on whatever Rodney Titwhistle does when he isn’t incubating a brood of vipers or eating his own young. Thank you.”

“Mercer, he was crazy.”

“Which makes it all the more imperative to recall things he said which might imply that this item you have resurrected for him is some kind of weapon of mass destruction.”

“For God’s sake, it’s a clockwork toy in a greenhouse!”

“Joe. You are neck-deep in denial. All right? Here is the news. You switched on a machine, and you have no real notion of what it is. You are now pursued by the earthbound fiend who goes in the mortal realm by the name of Rodney Titwhistle, and the homunculus Cummerbund, men who are most probably employed—and let us be very clear about this, because hilarious though they are to look upon they are less funny than Typhoid Mary and more serious than the whole of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs—at the shadiest end of the non-deniable civil service. By the looks of things, they are the interface between the world which draws a pay cheque openly and the one which holds the key to the barn in Suffolk where they hide the corpses of people murdered by members of the royal family. These men do not have any notion at all of gadding about. They do not grab people for a lark. They have absolutely no sense of fun. So when I find that they are involved, and you tell me it’s all a ghastly mistake but you have no real notion of what’s going on, what I take away from that is that we are in even more trouble than it might at first appear. So please, go on.”

“They came to my shop this morning. They said they were from a museum. They wanted to buy everything. And then later, one of those monks was in my shop. A Ruskinite. He wanted… I don’t know. Whatever they wanted.”

“Which would be?”

“He said he wanted the Book of the Hakote. And everything which went with it.”

“Presumably the book brought to you by Billy.”

Joe nods his head. “And the tools, I suppose.”

Mercer picks up the phone again, and adds “Ruskinite” and “Hakote” to Bethany’s list. Then he turns back to Joe.

“Small mercies. Your uncharming callers wanted this Book et alii. Which you don’t have, though you were briefly in possession of a book which might have been it. I don’t like the capital letter, do you? Well. It’s not too much to assume that he wanted it because of what was happening in Cornwall. In which case—” The phone buzzes sharply. Mercer scoops it up and sighs. “Thank you. I’m afraid I anticipated… yes. Well, only just, to be honest. Thank you, Bethany.” He puts down the handset. “There’s been a massive police deployment in the West Country. I imagine when the smoke clears we’ll find someone’s paid a visit to your friend Ted. They’re very fast, Joe. They worried about the machine first and you second. I did the opposite, which is why you’re here. I suspect an hour later I wouldn’t have found you.”

“I know.”

“But if they had the book already, they didn’t really need your tools.”

“It would make things easier.”

“But not more than that.”

“No.”

“Is there anything else? More parts? An instruction manual?”

“No. I don’t know. Not that I ever saw.”

Mercer paces. “All right, go on.”

“I asked Fisher about the Ruskinites.”

“Fisher? Not the Fisher I’m thinking of who is a Night Market irregular?”

“Yes. I was worried.”

“I should think so, talking to a twerp like Fisher. What did he say?”

“That they’re a heavy mob. They scare the crap out of him. And something weird. He said one of them asked him something once about Napoleon. Some sort of riddle.”

“‘If I have the memories of Napoleon, but the body of Wellington, who am I?’”

“Yes! What does it mean?”

“It’s a philosophical puzzle. An unsolved one. The question is what constitutes identity. Is it the memory, the body, or some combination of the two? Very donnish. You seem to have fallen into a well-educated personal crisis.”

“How reassuring.”

Mercer bares his teeth. “Quite so. To finish… you found yourself in Billy Friend’s flat in Soho, where you discovered the body of your dear chum of many years, childhood mentor and fornicator, in a state of extremely dead. You are uncertain, at this point, whether you called for the myrmidons of the law in the person of the wheedler Patchkind—who is, by the way, a liar of the first class and has no nieces of any stripe. You gathered your resources, however, and summoned the font of wisdom which is Cradle’s to take charge of the emergency.”

“Yes.”

“Always assuming that one can be said to summon a font, which, on sober consideration, I find unlikely.”

At this attempt to lift the mood, Joe Spork has somehow had enough. He loves Mercer like a brother, but sometimes the plummy, playful verbiage is obnoxious. It conceals emotion. Actually, it mocks emotion, the better to pretend to be above it. Joe Spork jackknifes to his feet and grabs his coat. He has no clear idea of where he will go, but he wants out, out of this ludicrous mayhem and back to his old cosy life. Perhaps he will take a ship to India and open a shop in Mumbai. Perhaps he will shave his head and make clocks in a monastery, or marry a Muslim girl and move to Dubai, where they have a decent respect for clockwork and automata and the men who produce them. Perhaps he will just run through the wet, uncaring streets of London until this furious confusion abates. He doesn’t know what he will do, but being locked up in this cellar is no answer to what rides him, that much he is certain of. He wants Ari to sell him cat poison. He needs to call Joyce and tell her Billy Friend is dead. He needs to see his mother. He needs to sleep.

It would be very nice if someone would hug him, just for a minute.

He piles through the door into the front offices, with every intention of letting himself out and continuing in an approximate straight line until he can come to some arrangement with himself about what to do next. He is prevented from doing this by a toe.

The toe catches him in the upper-thigh region, quite hard, so that he jolts to a stop. In other circumstances, the presence of a toe in this area might well be erotic, even sexual, and indeed, it’s a very sexual toe. It is pale, and round; of perfect size—if one were so inclined—to slip into one’s mouth and suck. It is smooth and buffed, with the nail polished in a bright, glossy red, except for a slender strip of tiny black fishnet which has been set into the polish at the tip. It is a toe which knows the world, which has done the wicked, secret things other toes only fantasise about.

The toe is accompanied by four others in a bright patent-leather mule. The whole segment is then attached to a muscular but quite slender calf. Around the ankle is an item which briefly arrests his attention: a stylish women’s watch threaded on a narrow gold chain. It is pricey but not extortionate, with a single glinting crystal set at the top. He doubts that the designer ever intended it to be worn around the leg, but is reasonably certain that he or she would approve mightily of the effect. He also considers, briefly, that this woman either does not need to know the time or is able and willing to read the watch where it is, which implies a supple and frankly sexual movement of her body.

Above the calf is a strong but not offensive knee, and an upper leg which vanishes almost immediately into a grey pencil skirt. Joe adjudges this is technically a knee-length item, but the act of sitting has raised it to a more intriguing status. The leg has, as is customary, a mirror image on the other side, making a total of two, the matched pair belonging to a bold-eyed woman resting in the receptionist’s chair. She speaks.

“Sit, please.”

She smiles up at him, then, when he does not smile back, she scowls, and repeats the instruction. Joe, not really knowing why, perches himself on the edge of a modern red cloth stool, and wobbles. The woman in front of him gives an encouraging smile.

“Mercer asked me to wait around in case I was needed. This almost certainly isn’t what he had in mind, but that’s the thing with Mercer. His genius is extremely obscure, even to himself. Perhaps particularly.”

“Bethany?”

Her mouth quirks for a moment, whether in annoyance or approbation he cannot tell. “Not me. Bethany is still in the control room arranging a night of intense confusion at the London traffic-management centre, which will alas preclude the charming Mr. Titwhistle from locating you by speed-enforcement camera. Tomorrow will not be a good day to drive in London. No, I do some investigative work. However, at present I am here for menial tasks. I have, for example, more coffee. And sandwiches. Would you like a sandwich?”

It’s a perfectly innocent question. It must be the faint sound of her stocking as she removes her toe from his thigh and puts her feet neatly together which makes the word “sandwich” sound rude. Joe has never found it so before. He tries it now, in his mouth.

“Sandwich.” No. Nothing rude about that. He tries again. “Saaan-d-witt-cha.” Yes, that’s more like it. He gives it a couple more goes.

“Yes,” the bold receptionist says, “a sandwich. In this case, avocado and bacon between two slices of granary bread. I can also arrange for other,” she smiles at him, “sandwiches.”

“Anything goes,” Joe says, and watches the words spiral out of his mouth and settle. I am a berk.

“Yes,” she says brightly, “it often does, with sandwiches. I, however, hold very clear beliefs on this subject. I do not believe in allowing tomato to soak into the bread, for example. Tomato, in a sandwich, should be applied latest of all ingredients and sealed between pieces of lettuce or salami, to prevent,” and here she purses her lips, “leakage.”

There it is again. A perfectly ordinary word, but she’s done something to it. A shiver passes down Joe’s spine. Leakage.

It ought to be a disgusting expression, but actually, as it passes her front teeth, which are briefly exposed as she enunciates the second syllable, it becomes a vibrant, enticing notion. This is not slurry from a rusted pipe, this is the beads of honey emerging languorously from a slice of baklava. Joe shuts his eyes for a second to stop himself from staring at her mouth. Red lips. Pale, sharp teeth. Very precise diction. The tip of her tongue. What a woman. For the second time tonight, he is rescued by Mercer.

“I see you’ve found Polly.”

“Oh, um, yes.”

“Polly, were you listening in?”

Polly nods at a notepad on her desk, covered in scribbles and question marks. “Of course.”

“Any thoughts?”

“What’s a book?”

“I had hoped for something a bit more—”

“Mercer. Seriously. What is a book? Is it a collection of papers bound like something by Dickens? Or is it a gathering of information, an archive? In this context, particularly, it seems to me it’s the latter. Joe’s book wasn’t just paper, it was an ignition key. The book gives control of the machine—except, somehow, it doesn’t. There’s a missing page or a cog or another volume. I don’t know. The point is, they thought they’d have it all by now and they don’t. So they need Joe.”

Joe finds himself thinking of the Recorded Man again. The book of someone’s life, of their every waking sense. He shivers.

Mercer nods, conceding Polly’s point. “Well, they need Joe for something. By the way, did I hear you mention more coffee?”

“Indeed you did.”

“Is it the particularly aggressive kind?”

“It has potential in that direction.”

“You could coach it?”

“I believe so.”

“And then we can get to the business of seriously examining what’s going on while Joe catches another forty winks.”

“Ideal.”

“Then by all means, Polly, please do.”

“I shall.”

And off she goes, leaving Joe to wonder whether she is Mercer’s girlfriend, and when his tongue will cease to adhere to the roof of his mouth, and whether it is obvious that he finds this woman frantically attractive, albeit for no doubt complex and inappropriate reasons owed in part to his state of fight-flight agitation.

“You still want to leave?” Mercer demands.

“No.”

“Good. Then come back in here and let’s go through it in detail, please.” He pauses. “Joe? I can almost certainly get you out of this. It’s going to be okay. But it’s going to get harder from here and you have to do what I say and live very, very small for a while. Maybe even take a holiday. All right?”

Holiday. He has an image of Polly in the shade of a beach umbrella. “All right.”

It is all right. Mercer always gets him out of it. Mercer always can. And with the bold receptionist somewhere around, Joe Spork feels suddenly very content in the Raspberry Room of Noblewhite Cradle.