Angelmaker

VIII Unwanted; the type to give a girl trouble; on the river.

Mercer puts down the phone and glances at Polly, the Bold Receptionist, who shrugs. Mercer frowns.

“No arrest warrants,” he says moodily.

Joe Spork contemplates the changes in his life over the last twenty-four hours which make not being under warrant of arrest a piece of active good news, and tries to imagine a further twist in the world where it is for some reason worse rather than better.

“Does that mean I can go home?”

“It does not. Bees have been seen in the sky over Paris. And Berlin. An unseasonal swarm which baffles apiarists. There’s a quirky story about a mechanical hive in Florence, too. ‘An ornamental sculpture at Palazzo Lucrezia near Fiesole, believed to be a timepiece, has resumed its function after nearly thirty years…’ And a rumour from Mumbai. Apparently there’s been a distressing lapse in normal diplomatic practice. A deniable operation through Jammu into Gilgit-Baltistan to stir up trouble—which is normal, only this time everyone seems to know about it. Karachi isn’t taking it well at all. And remember, Joe, please, these are nuclear states. All right?

“This is still going on. In fact, it’s getting bigger.” Mercer shakes his head plaintively. “Who makes mechanical bees, for God’s sake? Who creates a superweapon or a superwhatever-it-is and makes it so bloody whimsical?”

When Joe makes no answer, Mercer picks up his cup and starts to wander. It is his habit, when he is thinking very hard, to pace and talk and sip at something which ought to be hot and is now cold. Occasionally he complains about it, as if someone should have done something. Then he fights off any attempt to remove it, and carries on. At least two of his assistants have quit after being growled at for cup theft when they were under orders to bring fresh beverages.

Joe waits for Mercer to explain. He doesn’t. He just wanders jaggedly, eyes fixed now on the middle distance, now on the surface of his gelid coffee.

“I need to go and see Joyce,” Joe says finally. “She needs to hear it from someone she knows. They won’t call her because she’s not officially family.”

Mercer sighs. “I will talk to Joyce.”

“She doesn’t know you.”

“Even so. No, Joe,” Mercer adds sharply. “I said there were no arrest warrants. That does not mean that there is nothing fishy going on. It means only that the fishiness is fishier than that.”

“What fishiness?”

Mercer sighs. “I can’t find Tess.”

Joe stares at him. “What?”

“It’s perfectly simple. The barmaid who by your own admission had the hots for you is not available for comment. I cannot find her.”

“I don’t see—”

“I sent a man down to Wistithiel to retrace your steps. It seemed like a good idea. No one can find her, Joe. She’s missing.”

“What do you mean, ‘missing’?” Joe demands, but Mercer considers this question too ridiculous to deserve an answer. Joe shakes his head. “She’s probably gone off on a trip or something. Visiting an old boyfriend.”

“Almost certainly. Her credit card was used at the railway station. All perfectly normal. But then, as well, there has apparently been a fire at Hinde’s Reach House. An old wartime agricultural facility, you’ll be pleased to know, and presently mothballed. The place seems to have been completely immolated. Brother Theodore Sholt, a hermetic monk, was rescued by firemen and taken to a medical facility for the treatment of mild smoke-inhalation. Which medical installation is a matter of some confusion. The paperwork has been misfiled. Do you not smell the fish, Joe? Honestly? Because they seem pretty ripe to me.”

“All right, I smell them.”

Mercer hesitates. “In your own right, Joe, there are people you could call on regarding the extra-legal aspects of all this. People with their ears to the ground who have connections in shady places.”

“No.”

“I realise you’re not fond of being Mathew’s son, and that you might incur liabilities as a result, but at the same time—”

“No. I’m not going down that road. I’m me, not him. Not his shadow or his remnant. Not their bloody crown prince, to bring back the glory days. Me.”

Mercer raises his hands, palms up. “Well. If you will not exert yourself to your own advantage, can I at least take it that you will not work to your detriment?”

Joe shrugs. Mercer apparently takes this as a yes. “So as I say, if you will forgive the repetition, I will talk to Joyce.”

“I can do it.”

“Of course you can. But no one is looking for me with a view to arrest and interrogation.”

“Well, no one’s looking for me, either.”

“Yes, they are.”

“But—”

“It is a ruse.”

“But—”

“Joe, listen. Please. The fact that there is no paperwork means one of two things. It could theoretically mean that you are home free. It could mean that Rodney Titwhistle has looked more closely into the matter and realised that you are a cog in someone else’s machine, and not a very interesting one. Or it could mean that he has ascertained that you are absolutely dead centre of his bullseye, and he has vanished you from the official files so as to facilitate his next officially unofficial but unofficially official move.”

“And you think it’s the latter.”

“Did he give you any reason to think he was likely to go away? Do you honestly, cross your heart, look back on last night and think it could possibly all be okay this morning?”

“… No,” Joe Spork mutters at last.

“Then I will call Joyce.” Mercer pauses, as if reviewing the conversation. “When did you get so gung-ho?”

“I’m not. I don’t want this. I want to be left alone.”

“Then keep your head down.”

Joe scowls mulishly. “What about my VAT?”

Mercer stares at him. “What?”

“My VAT. I’ve got to get my papers in order for the shop. Otherwise it all comes down. I could lose the warehouse.”

“Joe, please—”

Joe Spork hunkers down upon himself. For all the world, he looks like a human tortoise, and might remain in his shell for another fifty years, until Mercer’s arguments have dried up and blown away. “It’s my home, Mercer.”

“I will send someone for your papers. We’ll get them done and delivered through the firm. But this is not the time to worry about VAT. All right?”

“I have obligations, Mercer.”

Mercer contemplates him for a moment with an odd expression.

“Obligations.”

“Yes.”

“To yourself? To Joyce? I need to know about these obligations.”

“Why?”

“Because your obligations are germane. I need to take them into account. I thought I was only protecting you. If there’s more to it than that, I need to know.”

“He was my friend!” Joe yells abruptly. “That’s all I mean. I suppose that doesn’t really matter very much now, does it? He was annoying and loud and he got me into trouble. But I never had to be alone if I didn’t want to. There was always Billy and he’s dead. All right?” He has risen to his feet, fingers curled and palms up, legs about a shoulder width apart. A pugilist, rooting himself for a fight. He stops, glances down, sees his hands and puts them away. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I liked him, too. Infuriating little berk.” Mercer blows air through his teeth. “But that is all, isn’t it? You haven’t got some other stake in all this?”

“That’s all.”

The Bold Receptionist shifts in her chair. Something hosiery-related makes a shuddering sound which draws the eye. “What would you do if you were free to act, Mr. Spork?”

“I am free.”

“Well. Assume there is no threat. What would you do?”

“I’d get some sleep. And a shower. Go to Harticle’s and find out about my grandfather. Get his jazz recordings from the lock-up, and the bloody golden bee! I want to know what’s going on!”

Oh.

“All right,” Mercer says. “Thank you, Polly. Joe… There are rules to your situation. All right? And these are they: do not look for new faces in your life. Be paranoid. You have been shown the stick. At some point they will show you the carrot. It is a lie. There is no carrot. Polly and I are your only friends. We are all the carrot you have. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“For twelve hours or so, we are quite possibly in hiatus. Something big is going on and you are touched by it, but unless you are actively deceiving me, which would be very bad…”—Joe shakes his head vigorously—“then you have a chance of dealing yourself out. If you can be demonstrably dense and unexciting—if after your recent brush with the very wide and alarming world of power, you dive like a mole into your hill and do not emerge—then there is a vanishingly small but pleasing possibility that you may be bothered no further. I suspect that is greatly to be desired… But for it to happen… you need to be a small person.”

Joe ponders. Then, with a reluctance he himself finds very curious, he nods. He understands the argument, understands it in fact far better than meteoric Mercer, whose own life is strewn with moments of significance, public showmanship, and occasional catastrophe. It is the chosen path of Mathew’s son: be quiet, be compliant, let the world slip over you and around you unnoticed. Bend with the wind. Because the tall tree gets hit by lightning and the high corn breaks in a gale. A child’s promise: I will have a life, not a legend.

And yet here, today, it feels like cowardice instead of prudence. Billy is dead and Joe has been assailed by myrmidons from a sort of shadow Britain where the rules do not apply. Some unacknowledged part of him is angry and combative, wants answers and confrontations, wants to be judged and found rightful, and doesn’t want to look like a small person in front of the Bold Receptionist.

“You need a shower,” Polly says. “Mercer, he’s just lost a friend and he wants to do something about it. He needs to wash and have a cup of tea and he needs to sit there and let it settle a bit.”

“That’s right,” Joe says, because Polly says it, and then realises that it may also be true. His skin is twinging at the thought of hot water.

“Actually,” Polly puts in, “a bath would be better. With a duck. And possibly toast.”

“There’s a bathroom here,” Mercer says a bit doubtfully.

“What’s it like?”

“Eerie, to be honest.”

“Then I’d prefer a hotel,” Joe says firmly. Eerie, on top of everything else, he can do without.

Polly tuts. “He can stay with me.” She glances at Joe politely. “If you’d like. You shouldn’t have to be by yourself in some hotel. I’ve got plenty of space and Mercer will know where to get me if anything happens. It’s discreet and it has Cradle’s panic buttons for emergencies. There’s a nice bed in the spare room and lots of hot water. And a rubber duck you can borrow.”

Rubber duck has somehow become the most erotic expression in the English language. Joe Spork stares at her. He looks at her mouth and wonders whether she will say it again. She doesn’t.

“You really have a rubber duck?” he says hopefully.

“Actually I have two rubber ducks,” she confirms, “but one of them is no longer seaworthy and is, as you might say, retired. I like ducks.” He sees a flash of her tongue on the D.

I like ducks. She cannot possibly have meant that to sound the way it did. Did it sound that way? Or was that only him? Mercer looks quite unaffected. Fevered imaginings. Restraint. Joe finds himself wishing he could be a duck, see the things that duck has seen, though of course he would then be unable to do anything about them. Polly smiles at him encouragingly.

“See?” she says to Mercer. “He looks less like a dead mouse just thinking about it.”

This ought to dampen Joe’s sense of acceptance, but somehow it doesn’t. Being called a dead mouse by Polly is better than being called handsome by anyone else—or so it seems to him at the moment. A shower or—amazing idea—a bubble bath might just be the beginning of life. He still has his arms crossed, but he loosens them a little to say thank you. He wonders whether he really does want to have sex with this woman as much as he thinks he does, or whether it’s just deprival and crisis. And then he wonders what it means to wonder whether you want to have sex with someone. Surely it’s a thing where you want or you don’t want. He concludes that he thinks too much. He wonders how many times in a day he thinks that, and then stops himself, because the Bold Receptionist is looking at him as if she can hear every word.

“My car’s parked at the back,” she says.

“Good, then.” Mercer puts down the cup. “We’ll all be in touch.”

Polly drives a very well-loved and stylish old Volvo, from the time before their cars were made with the intention of conveying boxy solidity, back when Volvo was a gorgeously curvaceous Continental designer with an eye to quality. The car itself is silver-grey, with chrome trim. The brown seats are extremely soft and smell of beeswax. She turns the key and the engine fuddfudds into life, then growls a little, like a sleepy cat smelling tuna. The seat belt is an actual old-fashioned racing harness, and Joe struggles to get into it, the more so because part of him is absolutely determined to watch the Bold Receptionist as she twists her upper body lithely around and about, then reaches back with both hands to catch the clips and fasten them across her breast. Muscles move under her skin, and for a moment he can actually taste her scent in his mouth. He blinks hard.

She smiles. “This car,” she says proudly, “won a road race in Monaco in 1978. Of course, I wasn’t driving. But I was alive. Just.”

So now he knows her age—a little older than he would have said, a little younger than he is. Did she mean to tell him that? To let him know they are of comparable generations?

“Have you smelled the leather?” Polly asks.

He nods. The car smells richly of old leather, cracked and polished and in one or two places stitched. It’s like a members’ club in St. James’s, or somewhere his father might have played cards with the Old Campaigners.

“Sometimes I just put my nose into it and breathe in. Mm-mm. Lovely!” Her eyes are very bright. She loves the senses, loves the world. He finds that… admirable, and a bit daunting. I am a mole. I am hiding, in the company of a woman who adores the sunlight and the rain.

Seeing that his harness is fastened, Polly puts her foot on the pedal.

The car moves as if smacked on the arse, and his head bounces slightly against the seat back. There actually is a head restraint, which must be a later modification, although not much later, because it seems to be made of clay. She snorts slightly, then looks guilty, and changes gear, which nearly does it to him again. For a machine this age, Polly’s car has some notable grunt.

The house is, in some way, very much the same. It’s elegant and a bit ramshackle and surprisingly large, tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac. A railway embankment rises up behind.

“The trains are a bit loud,” she murmurs, “which makes it affordable. But I’m used to it.”

“You just sleep through?”

She smiles again, and this time it starts at the very middle of her mouth and spreads like ripples in a pool all the way to the corners and across her face, until she has dimples on both cheeks and a glint in her eye which is unmistakably mischievious. “Something like that, yes. If you want to know, I’ll tell you later.”

Later, as in, when it’s dark and secret and we know each other better.

She opens the door and beckons him inside.

The bathroom is bitterly cold and very blue. Cracked powder-blue tiles line the walls and the blue wooden window frame is moulting flakes of paint. The floor is silvered wood, warped by years of wet feet and splashes, at some time or other carpeted and now bare once more. Joshua Joseph lies in the chipped blue ceramic tub and lets the hum of the single bulb and the coils of steam rising from any limb he allows to surface from the water lull him into a trance.

He drowses, and for once there are no ghosts, no relevant memories clamouring for his attention. A drop of very hot water scalds the top of his foot, and he barely flinches. The foam is slowly dissipating into a silver marbling on the surface of the water, and he can see the action of plate tectonics playing out on the meniscus. He waves his hand an inch below the surface, pictures tiny marsupials suddenly separated from the rest developing into sapient kangaroos, then—when their wildly rotating island rejoins the world—finding themselves at war with angry evolved lizards from beneath the great mountain of Knee.

Joe sighs. Why at war? Why not coming together for a great celebration of lost kin, two sentient species sharing the world of Soap?

“I blame you entirely,” he tells Mathew Spork, seeing his face for a moment in the steam.

“Very wise,” Polly replies from the doorway. He jumps a bit, manages to keep the water mostly in the bath. She smiles encouragingly, then goes on. “How do you feel?”

“Fine. Great, actually. Just… talking to my father. I do that, sometimes. Talk to dead people in my head.” Oh, marvellous. I also have a collection of ears and eat puppies. Oh, by the way, would you like to have dinner sometime?

But Polly is nodding.

“Yes. I do it, too. Do you find they’re helpful?”

“Sometimes.”

“And sometimes just as infuriating as they were when they were alive.”

“God, yes.” He grins. He’s extremely nude, but even this is insufficient to alarm him. The bubbles will do as a fig leaf, and he’s in perfectly acceptable shape. She’s a grown-up. If she’s happy, so is he.

“Good bath?”

“Wonderful.” He swirls his hand again. The United Nations of Soap is convened in a mountain fastness, for the betterment of the inhabitants of the world. Good.

The Bold Receptionist walks lightly into the room. He watches her wonderful, worldly toes work their way across the wood, and idly traces the name “Polly” on the bottom of the bath. Polly polly polly. Pollyanna. Pauline. Polikwaptiwa. Appolonia. Polly.

“I brought you a towel in case you were getting wrinkly.” And she has, a giant bath-sheet in dignified brown. “It’s warm.”

Joe expects her to put it down and walk out again, but she doesn’t. Instead, she faces away from him and extends her arms so that the towel spreads behind her like a superhero’s cape. John Wayne does this for someone, he’s pretty sure, probably Katharine Hepburn, to spare her blushes. He gets out of the bath, noticing with pleasure that from his vantage point he can see the V of her robe reflected in the mirror, and that—as with the business of putting on the safety harness in the car—this awkward position shows off her arms and shoulders beautifully, and just a whisper of her chest. He leans forward to take the towel, wondering what she can see in turn in the mirror. When she turns around, though, her eyes are screwed tight shut. He could reach down and kiss her. She’s easily close enough.

He doesn’t. She opens her eyes and looks at him for a moment.

“Come with me,” she says, taking his hand, and leads him, not to the guest bedroom with its sofa bed, where he has carefully laid out his clothes, but through the door to the back, and to her own room.

The Bold Receptionist’s bedroom is almost a cave. The back of the house is dug out of the embankment, and the rear wall is bare stone—not brick, but something coarser and thicker, quarried and cut and set in place here. The carpet is deep and wine-red. There’s a small television and a nightstand piled high with books, a small Victorian railway clock, and against one wall, the most remarkable double bed Joe has ever seen.

It has an iron frame and a thick, iron bedhead, and it appears to rest on two vast metal tines or prongs driven deep into the stone wall. A cantilevered bed: heavy engineering in the bedroom. Something deep down in him grabs onto it, devours the sight. Wonderful.

Polly pokes him sharply in the flank. “Sit,” she says. “I want to talk to you eye to eye and I don’t want to stand on a chair.”

He sits on the cantilevered bed. It’s quite high. She nudges at his knees until she can stand in between them, and yes, they are on a level. This appears to please her.

“You, Joe Spork, are the sort of man to give a girl trouble. I see it in your eyes. And do you know what sort of trouble?”

“I’m not—”

“Exactly that sort of trouble. Wilfulness. Constant backchat.” She rests a finger on his nose. “Hush. Pay attention.”

He nods: yes, ma’am.

“I shall now explain my plan. You may then speak, but only to amend the detail. The broad outline is not subject to negotiation. Are you ready? Good… I propose to have sex with you. I believe it will be excellent sex. Your obedience on one particular issue of timing will be required to make it unforgettable sex. I will explain that issue as we go. At the moment, I wish to hear your inevitable objection to the general sex part of this plan.”

“I… you’re very… you don’t think we should know each other better?”

“Ah. Yes, I’m familiar with that question. Tell me, you feel we might do better to wait until we know each other so that we can ascertain whether we do, in fact, want to have sex?”

“Er… yes.”

“And if we don’t, then we won’t?”

“No.”

“And if we do, we will?”

“Yes.”

“I find your logic extremely strange. I want to have sex with you now. You—I’m reasonably certain of this, and I can…” Her finger traces down the towel. “Yes, I can, in fact, say it with some confidence owing to certain evidences now in my possession—you want to have sex with me. Yes?”

Hard to deny. So to speak. “Yes.”

“So if we follow my plan and discover tomorrow that we do not like each other, we will still have had exceptional sex. On the other hand, on your pattern, we will have rejected sex when we want it in favour of no sex now and no sex later. Alternatively, we will have missed an opportunity for sex when we could have had it if we later decide we do, in fact, want to have sex.”

“That’s true, but—”

“Your plan is a very bad plan. What is more, you know it is a very bad plan, in the first place because you want me very much and you know that I know this, and in the second because I want you very much and you now know that, too, and in the third because you do not in fact believe that we should not have sex right now, you simply believe that some people believe that you ought to believe it and although they are not here you do not wish to offend them. I say they can find their own damn entertainment.”

She kisses him, firmly, on the mouth. He does not resist, so she does it again, and makes a happy little squeak when he grabs her head and returns the kiss, then wraps one arm around her back and half lifts her against him.

“Back!” she cries, as soon as she can struggle free. “Back! We now come… hmm, mm-mmm… stop it! We now come to the issue of timing of which I spoke. Ah! Mmm. Oh, God, you awful man. You have roving hands. Mm-mmm-mmh.” She gives a lewd, throaty chuckle. “Stop! Now. The timing is to be my department. So. Up on the bed.”

Polly’s bathrobe is now in a state of considerable dishevelment, and Joe’s towel is mostly around his left thigh. He scoots up the bed to the position she indicates, then pulls her firmly to him. The bathrobe remains where it is, so that by the time she is in his arms he can feel every bit of her. She wriggles deliciously and draws back for a moment.

“Ah! Ah ah ah! Do as you’re told! (Typical man.) There. Now… Oh, it’s like that, is it? Very well, Mr. Spork. I can fight dirty too.” He’s too late to trap her or baulk her intention. Her head vanishes beneath the towel. He reaches for her, and her left hand slaps his away. Stop it. Busy now.

And indeed, she is.

Thirty minutes later, the 12:14 Chemical Waste Train from Chichester Paints goes past Polly’s house at ninety-one miles per hour. The vibrations from the train’s passage shudder through the embankment and into the cantilevers which hold up Polly’s bed. Polly, lying on her back, grabs hold of Joe in desperation and says “Now.” The instruction is quite redundant, and the two of them, pummelled by the energy of hundreds of tonnes of evil liquid freight passing by them and juddering them against one another, do indeed experience unforgettable sex.

Initially, Polly explains a few moments later when she can speak again, it was just a matter of opportunity. Her iron-framed bed rested on bare wooden boards, and the five-fifty-one train (it’s actually the three-eleven from the Fitzgibbon Chemical & Organics plant in Clyst Martington) sent strong, enjoyable vibrations through the whole house. Her internal erotic clock began to set its alarm for five fifty-one a.m., and she woke, ecstatic and bleary-eyed, every day at five fifty-three. (Chemical-waste trains are more regular than commuter trains. If a few people arrive half an hour late at work, it’s a normal day, but governments and safety executives get tetchy if a boatload of lethal swill goes off the map for twenty minutes.)

By the end of the first year she had arranged to be in the house for all four trains whenever possible at weekends. She obtained long-term timetabling information so as to be present on those special days when eight trains ran, at which times she would loll, exhausted, in her iron-frame bed, and eat pizza between gut-wrenching orgasms. From time to time, she would acquire a boyfriend and have actual chemical-waste sex, which was even better. But as with all addictions, she began to want more. The vibrations through the mattress were strong, but not vigorous. She looked with envy at the plates on the dresser in the kitchen, clattering and screaming in china bliss. So.

Polly moved her bed into the basement. The earth conducted the vibrations more strongly there. She removed the carpet. She bought a stiffer mattress. Eventually, she drove stout iron rods into the earthen bank behind the house, and welded the bed frame directly to these to cut out the intermediary. She fitted springs to the bed feet to cut down on destructive interference from road traffic on the other side of the house. Finally, she put more rods into the bank and suspended the bed three foot from the ground, held only by the conductor arms, and she could lie in the embrace of the shuddering rails. She knew, not being stupid, that this was unusual behaviour, but she simply did not care. As time went by, she knew more and more about the network, the trains, the engines, and the men who rode them. By degrees and in her own mind, the Bold Receptionist became the bride of the iron road.

“Again,” she says, and indeed, twenty-five minutes thereafter, a passenger express thunders by, and Joe actually growls like an animal, something he has absolutely never done before in his life.

“Mmmm…” the Bold Receptionist murmurs into his neck, and stretches her shoulders, then looks up at him through tousled hair. It changes her face, or perhaps it just frames it correctly, because he experiences a curious lurch, a sudden, powerful déjà vu. I have seen you before. But where? She’s not an enemy or an antiques dealer or a policewoman, of that much he is sure. The memory is more comfortable, and much, much older… oh.

“Oh, bloody Hell,” he says. “Not Pollyanna. Polly, like Molly. Molly like Mary. Mary like Mary Angelica…”

“See?” Polly Cradle murmurs happily. “My plan was much better than yours. Imagine all the trouble I’d have had to go to if you’d known that before we went to bed.”

“Your brother is going to kill me.”

“He’s really not.”

“But—”

“He won’t. He’ll be very pleased. Or he will hear about it from me.” She kisses him earthily and falls asleep, just like that, on his shoulder.

Mercer Cradle is not exactly an orphan, but more a reject. That is to say, his parents subcontracted his upbringing and management to the London firm of Noblewhite’s, the same firm which handled Mathew Spork’s more egregious business and went to great lengths to keep him out of prison—an effort in which they were ultimately unsuccessful.

Mercer’s parents chose this unconventional approach to the business of education and nurture so that their personal involvement in the conception of a child should not become a matter of public knowledge, the liaison being both secret and dazzlingly inappropriate for a variety of reasons. Mercer was thus afforded all the care and fiscal security a boy could want, save for any information as to his biological antecedents. His filial affection he vested in the senior partners, and in a series of nurses, tutors, fee-earners and chauffeurs. On the day of his majority, Mr. Noblewhite—very tentatively and not without regret—took his charge to Claridge’s. After an excellent venison pie, and while the waiter laboured over crêpes Suzette, Jonah Noblewhite laid upon the table a slender white envelope which, he said, contained a cheque for a very considerable amount of money, and the true and accurate history of Mercer’s parentage and the very good and sound reasons for his progenitors’ reluctance to acknowledge him.

Mr. Noblewhite was a shy person. He had a pouchy face and a prominent nose, and he secretly believed that the secretarial pool thought him sweaty. His dignity was his professional blood, and he spared no pains in his dress, and researched exhaustively, so that he would never, ever be shown to be gauche or wrong about anything. And yet, he had consented on numerous occasions, when Mercer Cradle was very small, to play horsey through the file room. Later, he had broken a lifelong abstinence and taken Mercer to a football game, where a woman from Teesside had poured tomato ketchup into his lap and called him an ugly old toff. Jonah Noblewhite was ugly, and he was not young, but he was in no sense a toff. Toffs know one another. They keep the club secure. Noblewhite, any genuine toff would have told her, was an anglicisation of Edelweiss. It was a made-up name, plucked out of the air at Dover, and anyone who has to make up a new name when he travels is no toff. But rather than say any of this, or even object to this lady from Teesside that he had done her no wrong and was only here at this match to make the birthday weekend of an unwanted child that much less awful, he concealed the mess from Mercer and cheered (albeit without comprehension or enjoyment) and parroted with such precision the cries of the men around him and the tactical theories he had committed to memory regarding the game, that Mercer Cradle thought himself the companion of the most football-savvy man in London, and bathed in glory.

Mercer looked at Jonah Noblewhite, and thanked him very much. He picked up the envelope, and, taking care not to look at the text of the missive within, he removed the cheque. He considered the amount, which was prodigious, and the cold, blank pages of the exercise book in which one of his schools had demanded he make a family tree, and came to a decision. He returned the cheque to its place, waited until the crêpes Suzette ignited, and thrust the envelope firmly into the flames. When it was burning he withdrew it, and held it calmly until his plate was filled with steaming pancakes and his nose was filled with the heady scent of orange and brandy. Then he dropped the letter and its secrets into the empty copper pan, and asked the waiter to take it away.

Part of the reason for this froideur was that Mercer Cradle had not been alone when he was abandoned. When the son of Mathew Spork ran riot in the Night Market with Mercer, and roughhoused with giant guard dogs and skipped stones on the river Thames, the two were followed dutifully by a stringy, mouse-haired infant named Mary Angelica, whose birth certificate bore the same false flag as her brother’s.

The Bold Receptionist is Mercer’s beloved sister, rather different now from when last seen at the age of eleven, but—Joe Spork has no doubt—still the apple of her brother’s eye. And that eye is apt to look with a jaundiced glower upon this latest sequence of events. Joe just hopes that this outrage which he has inadvertently perpetrated upon the innocence of the Cradle family will not offset the Service, the ancient deed of valour which bound the firm of Jonah Noblewhite—and his adopted son—to the House of Spork unto the nth generation and for ever and ever, amen.

Mathew Spork was a-courtin’, and the world was bright. This was the dawn of all good things, when Mathew for all his bluster still stepped a little cautious around the law, and when he still felt the need to impress a girl instead of just overwhelming her, and here was Harriet Gaye, the finest singer in London, with deep brown eyes and strong forearms made to grab a fellow about the neck and draw his head to her lips.

Mathew took a table at Leonardo’s, because it was expensive and they knew him, would kowtow and make a fuss of him, would tell him he had the best table in the house because he was opposite this beauty, would actually give him the best table into the bargain. And Leonardo’s was the place, the in spot. If you knew London’s miserable food and iffy wine cellars, you knew that the one place where they really could cook halibut or slice a truffle, or would give you lamb which hadn’t been cooked unto its utter destruction, was Leonardo’s. It was swish and smooth and Continental, it whispered of Monte Carlo and Rome, of champagne and casinos and sharp suits. The kitchen at Leo’s (and there was no Leo, he was an opium dream of all the best cooking in the world, a fat hallucination whose white hat was occupied by seven unemployed Shakespearean actors between ’62 and ’79) used garlic and plenty of it, traded in spices that the rest of England hadn’t heard of and wouldn’t dream of using in a Christian dish if they had.

They were five minutes from Leonardo’s when Mathew stopped the car abruptly and reversed so that he could look down a particular alleyway, then swore in terms that even Harriet, making time with musicians from the far corners of the world, had rarely heard.

“You stay here a bit,” Mathew told his future wife. “I just need to straighten my tie.”

And then he got out of the car and walked into the night.

Jonah Noblewhite—at this point, Mathew only thought of him as “the tubby bloke”—had his back to the wall and a short length of wood clutched in his hands. He looked like a cornered guinea pig. In front of him stood three men with shaven heads. One of them had a swastika tattooed on the back of his neck, which Mathew considered very thoughtful, as it gave him something to aim for with his billy club. The blackshirt went down on one knee, which was impressive, as most people just fell over unconscious. Mathew reckoned he still had the initiative, so he hit him again, with interest. The remaining two stared at him, and Jonah Noblewhite took the opportunity presented to cudgel the man closest to him with his chunk of wood.

The third man was fast. He stepped in and smashed Jonah twice with his elbow, once up, and once down. Jonah collapsed.

Mathew looked at the third man. He looked at his heavy, ugly boots and his studded denim jacket. He looked at his narrow face and almost invisible eyebrows.

He obviously didn’t see much to write home about.

The man dipped one hand into his pocket and produced a knife. Mathew looked at the knife. That didn’t seem to interest him very much, either. The man set himself in a crouch, the blade weaving. Mathew stayed exactly where he was, knees not locked, dancing shoes steady in the alley’s grime. Then he spoke.

“Mucker,” he said, “at this moment, you and I are having a little local disagreement. Your friends will shortly wake up and you can all go to the pub, although you’ll want to find one which isn’t in my manor. But if you have a go at me with that pig-sticker, I will take exception.”

He did not specify the consequences of his taking exception. He waited, with his hands at his sides. At some point, he shifted just slightly, giving the other a view of his pale silk shirt and of the snub-nosed revolver in its holster at his hip.

Twenty minutes later, Jonah Noblewhite joined Harriet and Mathew for dinner, and it emerged that he collected American baseball cards and was a fan of Joan Greenwood. Harriet had declared him the sweetest man in the world, and had fastened her grip upon Mathew’s hand and clearly did not intend ever to let him go. He was a hero and a warrior and he protected the good from the wicked. A week later, Mathew proposed, and Jonah was the first person they told. When Joshua Joseph was born, Jonah pronounced him a great scion of the British people, and shortly thereafter, finding himself by coincidence charged with the care of a newborn boy and girl, suggested that the Heir of the House of Spork might relish the company of his two castaways. The three grew up together as a matter of inevitability, though Mary Angelica was somehow aloof from the two boys, and life whisked her away to a foreign school just as she began her transformation from gosling to swan.

And now, it seems, Joshua Joseph Spork has just had steamy, athletic, back-arching, chemical-waste-train sex with Mercer’s sister.

The blissful doze recedes from him. Joe Spork lies looking at Polly Cradle’s ceiling, then gazes at her. Her face in repose is beautiful, with just a quirk of mischief around the wide mouth. She snuffles, and Joe has a profound urge to bury his nose in her neck, wake her with his lips. He contents himself with inhaling her scent, and closes his eyes for a moment.

He wakes again a little later, and finds that she has rolled over on her side. The cello sweep of her back is exposed. He pulls the blankets up over her, and she makes a small, happy squeak. Content, but now very much awake, he slips out of bed and wanders. On her bookshelves: a generous selection of crime novels, a spread of P.G. Wodehouse, and a selection of erotica notable for its breadth and gusto.

He turns on the kettle, thinking he will make her tea, and absently glances at the Nokia handset he carries reluctantly for business. A picture of an envelope is sitting in the grey corner of the display: voicemail. He nudges the retrieve button with his thumbnail, and winces as it presses back. The phone seems to have been made—actually, they all do—for an elf or a pixie. For a Polly Cradle, perhaps. He feels like a troll. Big bad troll, in a cave. He has kidnapped a maiden and wrought his wicked will upon her. Grr. Arg. Soon the villagers will come, with pitchforks, and all will be well again.

He thinks about the figures who came to visit and the ones who were waiting for him. Shadows. Inquisitors.

Ruskinites.

He listens to the message.

“Joseph? Joseph, it’s Ari, from the corner shop. You’re being burgled! Or you have been late with your rent. There are men here with a truck. They’re taking everything. Or are you moving house? You did not tell me. I don’t know whether to call the police. What should I do? My daughter is frightened. She says she saw a witch in the back of their truck, a spider witch all in black. It is very unpleasant here, I think you should come. Or call me, Joseph, please.”

“Oh, dear,” Polly Cradle says a few moments later, “I had thought we could avoid this part.”

Joshua Joseph Spork, caught red-handed—or rather red-footed—fully dressed at three p.m. and about to go out of the door of her house, blushes from crown to chin.

“The whole point of that conversation we had was to assure you that—” She peers at him. Her hair hangs a little over her face, but he can see genuine alarm in the portion of it which is visible. Whatever irritation she feels on finding him sneaking out is failing to bite, finding no purchase in her heart. It is already too full with something which is almost worse—a kind of confusion which comes from the contemplation of things which are very strange and very new. Polly Cradle, at this moment, is struggling to understand a world she had thought she knew. Joe Spork, by comparison, is an open book. A moment later, she snaps her fingers and glowers at him.

“Oh, bloody Hell!” she says. “I’m an idiot! You weren’t sneaking out on me, at all. You were sneaking out on Mercer. You were going to do all the things he told you not to.” And to his amazement, the look on her face now is relief. Then she frowns again.

It had not, in fact, occurred to Joe Spork that his vanishing might be attributed to moral cowardice regarding sex. Only five heartbeats ago—and his heart is beating very fast—when he saw Polly Cradle’s lower lip between her (delicious) teeth, did he suddenly consider what hurt she might take from his clandestine departure, and on the heels of this realisation came an urge to repentance and explanation which was still in fullest flood when she short-circuited that part of the argument—he is fairly sure this is about to be an argument—by divining in a flash his true purpose.

“You are a putz,” Polly says. “You are a lemon. Also a blockhead, a dimwit, a dunce, a ninny, a nitwit, and a nincompoop.” She pauses. “Nin-com-poop! You have one of the best lawyers in London looking after you and you propose to ignore him. You have a safe place to be and you want to go into danger. And you propose to do all this and leave me behind?” She punches him, not gently, on the shoulder. “You…” she can’t find the right word “… fool!” It’s considered a mild description, these days, but it comes out of her mouth with real weight, and Joe hangs his head. “Well, never mind. Let’s go.”

“What?”

“You think you need to go there. We shall go. We shall do so wisely, and by that I mean that we shall do it my way.”

“What?”

“Please stop saying ‘what.’ It makes me doubt your intelligence. I am taking you to do whatever it is you think is important. You can explain on the way. When we do it, however, we will do it according to the Polly rules, not the Joe rules, because my rules are sophisticated and practical and yours are very strange and confused. I will make this happen for you, but not at the expense of your freedom or mine. Are we clear?”

“Yes.”

“You are going to sit very low in the back of my car and wear a very large, disgusting hat I bought for a wedding, which has fruit on it, and you are going to wrap yourself in a lace blanket and hunker down so that anyone looking will see a short, fat old besom being driven around by an attractive daughter-in-law.”

“Oh. Right.”

“This is where you say, for the sake of your own interior peace, ‘But why are you helping me?’”

“Why are you?”

“Because I am considering investing heavily in J. Joseph Spork stock, and I do not care to have the opportunity taken away. Also, this fidelity to the right thing over the clever thing speaks well of you as a romantic lead. It seems unlikely I will have to detach you from an Estonian fashion student or some similar harpy at any point down our mutual road together, if there should be one. This is a quality which a girl should value over and above common sense, although in doing so she must take on the burden of keeping you alive in the face of your own considerable nincompoopery. Thus. My way, or the highway.”

“Oh. Oh! Your way. Absolutely.”

“Yes. Now wait here. Because I swear if you run away on me, I will hunt you down and do terrible things to you.”

“Oh.”

“And later, Joe, be advised, you are going to do terrible things to me by way of compensation for missing the four fifty-one from Finch Chemicals.”

“Oh, right, yes! Of course.”

Polly Cradle favours him with a brain-melting smile.

“Then we can go.”

From the back of Polly Cradle’s car and disguised like Mr. Toad escaping from the clink, Joe Spork stares at his home.

Quoyle Street is a foreign land, overrun with blue lights and bailiffs’ vans and private security. A lone plain-clothes officer is there to see fair play and supervise the ruckus, and in case the homeowner (known to have shady connections and presently a person of interest in an ongoing murder inquiry) should return and kick up a fuss. Three large fellows are lifting a long-case clock, Alexander of Edinburgh, 1810, and they have left the workings loose, so even as Joe watches the weights roll up inside the case and smash the face through the glass front. He wonders if they have been instructed to be as brutal as possible with his stock. That bit there, in the light: that’s the pendulum, and those are the pieces of a very fine hand-painted dial. Now it’s kindling, and the pendulum could as well be a divining rod. He watches another man carry the Death Clock in a bear hug, more gentle. Typical. The one thing he really wouldn’t mind seeing smashed.

“They’re fitting you up,” Polly Cradle says.

“What?”

“This is a frame. All this mess and confusion. They’re leaving room in the thing for planting evidence later. When they want the truth, they’re tidy.” She glances at him. “Don’t look surprised. I am a Cradle.”

“That clock,” he murmurs, “is two hundred and fifty-nine years old. It has never done anyone any harm.”

“I’m sorry, Joe,” Polly says. A sharp-eyed policeman peers at the car. Polly Cradle ignores him.

“It’s not mine, really. I mean, I own it, but I never meant to keep it.” He shrugs. “I got it to sell on. But it’s… It’s a real thing. You could spend a lifetime just understanding what’s happened in front of it, how it got all those little nicks. I think it went to America and India. I’ve got provenances. That clock saw the rise and fall of the Empire. It outlasted Queen Victoria. My grand-father would have said the stricture of that clock was endurance. Or craftsmanship, maybe.”

“I don’t think they care.”

“No. I suppose they don’t.”

Joe stares through the car window into the broken doorway of his home. He can see things, scattered and strewn on the ground, which are his. He makes a noise he can’t classify, and hopes it sounds like an old lady if anyone’s listening. He fears they may think she’s dying and come to help. One of the bailiffs glances over and snorts. The old dear’s having a blub. Probably coming in to buy back Daddy’s watch.

The car glides on. Ari’s shop is just around the bend.

“Stop here, please,” Joe says.

“Not a good idea.” Polly glances over her shoulder. The policeman is looking away. She wonders if he is talking to someone. He seems very relaxed.

“Please, Polly.”

Ari stands outside his shop, hands clasped behind his head. Joe winds down the window and squeaks at him.

“Young man?”

Ari comes to the car in a series of half steps, then frowns. “Who’s that?”

“Ari, it’s me. Joe.”

“Joseph? You should not be here.”

“Yes. No, I shouldn’t. I know.”

“What is going on?”

“It’s a fix, Ari. I’m being screwed. Feel free to deny me to all comers. Thrice, if necessary.”

Ari sighs: a long-drawn-out noise of self-reproach and appreciation of tragedy. “Well. I should have seen it. I thought it was burglars and I rang you. Then there were the others, and then the police, so many of them. Are you a terrorist, Joseph?”

“No. I blame the cat for this. If you’d just let me kill it when I wanted to…”

“That would be a sin against the great ultimate, Joseph, for which I could never forgive myself.”

“The great ultimate likes demon cats but not antiques dealers?”

“It is not known. The universe is ineffable. Ineluctable. Sometimes intolerable.”

Ari smiles gently, forgiven, empathising. Then:

“I am so sorry, Joseph. Truly… I have something for you. They left a bag in the rubbish. My daughter went and fetched it. I tried to stop her, because I was afraid. But now I am glad…” He reaches into his shop and comes back with a pale plastic sack containing some fragments of wood, some cogs, and the broken remnants of two blue ceramic bowls. “It’s not much, and I don’t know what… well, there are pieces of springs and so on here…”

“Thanks, Ari.”

Ari nods again, and turns to go. Then he stops and turns, hesitantly. Joe sees guilt in his eyes, and shame.

“Joseph, I’d consider it a favour, if you wouldn’t speak to me for a while. Until all this is over. I don’t want my shop to burn down. I’m not proud to ask you, but you offered.”

Joe nods under his ridiculous hat. “Of course, Ari. I quite understand.”

“It’s not that we’re not friends.”

“Ari. I understand. I’d do the same.”

“I wanted to see where you live,” Polly says angrily.

“I’m sorry.”

“God, it’s not your fault.”

This seems like such an astoundingly astute and important observation that he nearly starts to cry. Instead, he swallows bile. There is a sharp determination in him where he expected to be desolate. It’s as if she turns him inside out, and things which should destroy him make him stronger instead.

The policeman is looking over again. Polly Cradle edges the car around the corner. “Where now?”

He can’t get to the riverside store by his usual route. The image of an old lady, six foot tall and wearing a Carmen fruit hat, pegging it along an alleyway in the company of a dark-haired bombshell with erotic toes would almost certainly attract some attention.

“Down here, then right,” he tells her, then guides her onward through the maze of almost-dead ends and derelict warehouses. Twice, he actually takes her through one of the buildings, cavernous spaces with the river wind blowing through them and rags hanging on the broken glass of the windows. He hopes nothing cuts up the tyres.

A few moments later, they’re standing on a long wooden pier. A thick snake of electrical cable runs along the edge out over the water, and at the far end dives into the hatch of a top-heavy old riverboat. Aboard the riverboat, towards the prow, is a sandy-haired man with a pony tattooed on one arm. He holds a grubby life-jacketed toddler on a sort of lead, and over some manner of infant rebellion is trying to read aloud from a dog-eared copy of Winnie The Pooh. Griff Watson is an anarchist and the husband of an anarchist, not to mention the notional owner of that evil cat known only as the Parasite, but he looks more like the sort of person who would write a book on professional fly-fishing.

“Hullo, Joe!” cries Griff. “Where away?” Because it is his fantasy that the houseboat is a vessel under weigh, and not moored for ever on the muddy bank of the Thames.

“Hullo, Griff! This is Polly. Polly, this is Griff.”

“Hullo, Polly! Come aboard. It’s not too choppy today.”

Polly Cradle looks at Joe, and he nods. “Yes, Cap’n,” she says gamely, but Griff Watson corrects her gently. To an order from the captain, he explains, the only proper response is “aye aye.”

Joe Spork has shed his hat disguise, but is still wearing a rather unbecoming floral wrap. If Griff Watson sees anything odd in this, he doesn’t say. Before he can get too cosy, though, or start to discuss conditions in the German Bight, Joe raises a hand.

“Griff, I need a favour. But you have to think about it—you can’t just say yes.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Is for me. You’re one of the good ’uns.”

“I need to borrow the dinghy and go up to the riverside store. You remember?” Griff once kept an ancient harpsichord there, found in pieces and reassambled in Joe’s workshop, a present for his wife. It’s in the top cabin even now. On summer nights, you can sometimes hear her picking out a tune, hesitant, arrhythmic plinking rattling over the water. The harpsichord needs tuning, but even if it didn’t, Abbie Watson has a tin ear.

“ ’Course I remember. Shall we go now?”

“That’s the easy part. The hard part is that I may be in some trouble. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I’m mixed up in a mess, and you could get some stick for it.”

“Will this help you get out of the trouble?”

“It might.”

“So do you want to go now?”

“You don’t want to ask Abbie?”

“She’d want to know why I hadn’t done it already. You’re a good neighbour, Joe. Decent man. One day the scales will fall from your eyes. There’s not many like you round here. Or anywhere in the world, come to it.” He glances at Polly. “He’s awfully stubborn about taking help, isn’t he?”

“He thinks everything that happens anywhere on Earth is in some way his fault,” she replies. “My brother says it’s some sort of inverted egotism.”

“What sort of trouble is it, then?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Government?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Griff spits very precisely into the river. The gesture doesn’t suit him, which makes it oddly powerful. This is not a spitting man. This is a mild fellow, but that’s how strongly he feels.

“Got a name?” Griff has an encyclopaedic knowledge of conspiracy theories. He can summon information about everything from black helicopters and the arms trade to drug cartels to MJ-12 and the Freemasons and a curious body called the Ark Mariners.

Joe glances at Polly Cradle. “Titwhistle,” she says.

Griff growls. “Bastard.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“ ’Course I have. He’s on the Legacy Board. Is the bloody Legacy Board, most likely.”

“What’s that, when it’s at home?”

“Tidies up the government’s messes, doesn’t it? All the odds and ends. All the secrets they kept so long they don’t know what they mean any more. When one hand mustn’t know what the other one’s up to, the one doing the whatever-it-is is the Legacy Board. Started in Henry the Eighth’s time, killing bastards. Illegitimates, not bastards like Titwhistle. You watch your back, Joe.”

“If you’d rather not be involved…”

“Piss off. You’re in the war now, mate. Brother in arms. Just don’t know it yet.” And with this alarming endorsement, Griff leans down into the boat. “Jen! Come up and look after your brother. I’m sorting out the whaler.”

Polly glances at Joe.

“The correct term for Griff’s dinghy,” Joe Spork explains, because he doesn’t wish to talk about whether the Legacy Board is a fantasy on fringe websites or a serious problem, “is technically a ‘whaler’. These things are very important.”

“Are they?”

“They are if you’re Griff.”

Griff hands the toddler on a leash to a smudged, whey-faced girl with coloured cotton wrapped into her hair and purple dungarees. In one hand, she clutches a cracked china doll on a wooden base.

“How’s Rowena?” Joe asks her, indicating the doll. Jen smiles and touches the base. A pleasing musical tinkle strikes up, and the base rotates. If one were to stand the toy up, the doll would now be turning in a slow circle to the music. One of the small bits of bric-a-brac Joe Spork passed to the Watsons in calmer days. “Good,” Joe says. Jen nods.

From the water side of the houseboat, a dull gurgle announces that the whaler has been woken from its slumber. The smell of cheap fuel burning in a mistimed engine washes over the boat. The toddler makes a face.

“Flow tide,” Griff calls. “Time to go!” He hesitates. “Do you need me to come with you?”

“No, Griff,” Joe says firmly. There are limits to the gifts of trust he will accept. “I can handle an outboard. You took me fishing, remember? We’ll just be ten minutes.” And nearly crashed us into a coastguard ship, insisting we had right of way. Which no doubt we did, but we were very tiny and those things have no brakes.

“All right, then! Godspeed.” He casts them off.

The whaler whickers out across the oily Thames, and along the wood-buttressed banks. It’s perhaps a mile to the warehouse, a little less to the store. Are they watching the river? Are there faces pressed against the glass? A thin man and a fat man, perhaps? But there’s no direct access to the river unless you count the Victorian flood run-off pipe under the basement, which goes into the Thames itself, and he doesn’t see them as desperate enough to swim in the Thames on the off chance. Besides, as far as they know, he’s hiding in the Raspberry Room at Noblewhite Cradle, like a good, sensible boy. And why isn’t he?

Joe cuts the engine and the whaler drifts in towards the shore. He hands the tiller to Polly Cradle. “You know how to do this?”

“Yes.”

“Let the whaler run back with the tide. Give me about two minutes, then start the engine again—red button there, I know you know—and come and get me. If we keep it running, someone might hear.”

Talking to his girl. His confederate. His co-conspirator. His accomplice. Jesus. I’m on the lam. I’m running from the Law.

A moment later, Joe steps onto the slimy lower step of the store, and opens the door. He scoops up the record bag, along with the golden bee and the mysterious tools, wishing he’d thought to add a portable gramophone to the trove, and turns to go. He sees something drop from above onto the narrow ledge. His first thought is a dead crow or a rubbish sack falling from the ledges above. Then it seems to expand out of itself, straighten and stiffen.

In the doorway stands a faceless figure swathed in black linen.

Witch. Vampire. Leper.

He opens his mouth to speak. The Ruskinite steps through the door and peers at him. At least, he assumes it is peering at him. It tilts its head slowly, one way, then the other. Then it ignores him, and goes around him to the shelves.

Jesus. It’s blind.

But no, that’s not true. It steps smoothly around him, around the clutter on the floor, seasick steps.

It’s not interested in him.

He stands in the middle of the tiny storeroom, very still, wondering what to do. Then, very slowly, he moves towards the door.

The Ruskinite lunges forward, hands shooting out in a straight line towards him. The linen makes a sharp crack as it whips against itself. Joe jerks his face and neck out of danger, but the hands—gloved hands swaddled in cloth, bony hands, fleshless under the linen—are reaching for his arms to pin him, and they are ludicrously strong. Narrow fingers like handcuffs and immovable muscles lock him in place. The featureless face seeking his own, but under the cowl there must be a mask; the head pressed against his as they struggle is hard. He tries to punch: no give. He tries to separate his arms. The cloth-covered face snakes towards him again, very fast. He moves his head and hears a mouth snap shut like a beak. There’s a solidity to the bite, like the door of an expensive car closing. Sharp teeth. Jesus. He hears a rasping sound he hopes is breathing. There is a fear growing in him, deep in the gut and powerfully strange, that this is not a man at all.

Flee. Fight. Survive.

His entire life has been about flight for so long that his instincts for fight are rusty, but here, in this tight little space with the river on one side and the dark passages of London’s past on the other, there is nowhere to run to. The monster has come, and the retreat is closed off. Clumsily, he gathers his legs and surges upwards. It’s… oddly easy. He’s strong. Stronger than he usually thinks about. At the same time, he has a sense that the Ruskinite is trying to restrain him rather than kill him. Perhaps they have orders regarding Joe Spork.

Not reassuring, actually.

He lifts the Ruskinite into the air and slams him against a wall, using his enemy as a cushion. No response. Not even a gasp. He does it again, and feels the grip on his right hand loosen slightly. He lifts and surges again. And again. They grapple, winding around one another. Joe moves closer, forearm braced under the other’s chin so it doesn’t bite, his shoulder grinding into the enemy’s armpit to take that hand out of the fight. All the time, the head is reaching for him, a constant, jerking, snake-strike motion which is somehow very wrong, and very frightening. Joe yells something wordless which means get off! and shoves his enemy back, hard. It’s an explosion from the heels, through the hips, into the hands: the whole of his weight and muscle going into the other’s chest.

The Ruskinite flies back into the old, metal-braced shelves, and hangs there, jerking sharply and rasping as if stuck on something. Joe edges around him, and peers.

One of the struts has come away from the wall and the shelf. The sharp, pointed metal end comes to a halt in the shoulder of Joe’s enemy, and he hangs there, pinned like a butterfly. From his mouth emerges a low, rasping hiss. After a moment, he begins to inch his way forward off the spike.

Joe Spork turns and runs for the door, slamming it behind him. Polly Cradle is just bringing the whaler into the dock.

“Get us the fuck out of here!” he shouts, then, rather embarrassed, appends a more Joe-ish “please,” but Polly has already spun the whaler in a tight arc and twisted the throttle, and the little boat is virtually standing on its end.

“Are you okay?” she yells back.

“Yes.” And then on sober reflection, because it seems in retrospect that he has just impaled a man on a shelving unit, “No. I hurt someone. I don’t know what that means.”

“It means he didn’t hurt you,” she says firmly, and reaches out to poke him, making sure he’s all still there.

They leave the whaler with Griff Watson and tell him to take his family to France for a long holiday. When Griff opens his mouth to explain that he can’t, Polly Cradle assures him money will appear in his account to cover the cost. It’s just to be on the safe side, she says, and she knows a hotel where they’ll spoil them rotten. There will also be work for him and Abbie when they return, to whatever extent they want it. Positions will be found, educational bursaries made available for the children. Things will be arranged so that none of these blessings place the Watsons in the clutches of the system. The Cradle umbrella has opened over their heads as of this moment.

Joe Spork watches her tread the narrow line between charity and bribery without ruffling Griff’s feathers. He says nothing, admiring her skill and fearful that his big, clumping feet in the conversation will ruin what she has done. Then they get back in the car and head off, away from the warehouse and into the wilds of Hackney, on a road running along the side of a bizarrely rural scene of cows and a purple sunset.

“I couldn’t have done that,” he tells her, watching the cows. “I couldn’t have found the words.”

But when Polly proposes that one adventure is enough, Joe becomes obstinate, and persuades her—she is afterwards absolutely unable to say how—to make one more stop before they go home.