Nick Harkaway

EDIE INVESTIGATES

For Jenn and Stephanie—

booksellers of consequence

Old Mr Caspian was the right sort, they said, the good sort from back before bankers came to see themselves as privateers. He was churchy; not in the way of sandwiches and the vicar’s sherry, but in the way of good works and alms for the poor and a brief silent grace before he ate, even or especially when he ate alone. Not that he ate alone often, the clerk Fitzgibbon added hastily, because he was not a loner. Not antisocial. Not a quiet man, not in that modern sense which meant that he had some poor girl chained up in his cellar. He was not that sort of quiet man at all, but the other sort, the sort who had plenty to say if they cared to but did not wish to boast. The sort who enjoyed wine and the company of his friends, but did not choose to advertise his wealth or intelligence to the casual passer-by. Old Mr Caspian, Fitzgibbon said, possessed the most English of virtues. He did not like to put himself forward. But there was no reason to read into his reticence any sinister motive, any untidy secret. Tom Rice could hear Fitzgibbon through the doorway to the other room, where he was giving the benefit of all this opinion to the detective in charge.

“Mr Caspian would have been most upset to be murdered,” Fitzgibbon declared defensively, and then—seeming to hear the sentence in the air—turned deservedly sheepish. “I mean, he would have been upset to die in a fashion which was so garish. I’m sure he would have wanted to go gently, as we all would, but I mean to go in such a way as to leave those behind him with as little as possible to worry about on his behalf. And he would not have wished to go at this moment in the tax year, with submissions and so on to be done. April is a difficult time for any bank. He would not have approved of… this.”

That this left a great deal to be desired was certainly true. Rice looked down at his feet and shifted his left shoe a little further away from a piece of debris, hoping against hope that it was brick and not a piece of Caspian’s skull.

“Pop down and see what the fuss is about, please, Tommy,” the man from the Legacy Board had told him in London. “Donny was our banker in some particulars, so we can’t have any fuss. I wish he’d been as bloody careful with our money as he was with everyone else’s, but that’s by the by. Draw a chalk line around the corpse, tell the coroner it was natural causes, and come home for tea and medals, all right?” And Tom Rice, recently appointed Under-Nobody in charge of sod all, had recognised in the immediate assent of his immediate superior at the Treasury the footstep of a giant, and said he’d leave without delay.

“Indeed, you will, Tommy,” the Legacy man agreed, and those were all the instructions he gave, or needed to. When Tom Rice let himself out of the briefing room, he found a stern woman awaiting him with documents.

Sheer propinquity made him quietly suspicious. He had been attending the monthly Legacy meeting as a stand-in for a colleague who had called in sick. He had been able to attend because another meeting had been cancelled. At the time, he had seen it as a chance to show some class and get noticed, but now the happy smoothness of it all had put him on alert. Granted, happy smoothness was a naturally occurring phenomenon. Coincidence was not always contrivance. But Rice had a naturally painstaking bent, and as he considered the chain of events leading to this opportunity, he found he did not absolutely believe in them.

“Sign this,” the stern woman said, but when he started to look the paper over, she tutted.

“You’re not cleared to read it,” she said, “until you’ve signed it. If you read it and then refuse to sign it, that’s an offence. And when you’ve read it, you will sign it, because that’s what everyone does. So you can read it in the car.”

“I can’t,” Rice said. “I get sick.”

She peered at him for a moment, apparently wondering why he would share this information and what on earth to do with it, and then abruptly lost interest. “Sign,” she said, tapping the paper, and Rice, seeing no alternative which did not involve dismissal, signed.

“I’m Gravesend,” the woman said. “And you’re Lizard.”

Tom Rice shook her hand and asked her what sort of lizard he might be.

“It’s a callsign, Tommy. When you get on the phone to report, you ask to speak to Gravesend and you say it’s Lizard. I’ll ask you how your wife is and you’ll say she’s got La Grippe. Not the flu, not the dreaded lurgy. La Grippe. Okay? And then we talk. We’ll supply the phone and it’s the only one you use while you’re down there. If you say she’s got food poisoning I’ll call out the cavalry and I do actually mean the cavalry and these days they have tanks, so don’t unless you mean it. Don’t tell anyone you’re with the Legacy Board, either.”

“Am I?”

“Are you what?”

“Am I with the Legacy Board? Are you?”

“No. And no. But from time to time that gentleman in there asks for the assistance of Treasury in matters pertaining to the exercise of such business as he is authorised and required to conduct in the name of Her Majesty’s Government, and that assistance is speedily rendered.”

“Why?”

She stopped walking and stared at him again. “Because otherwise we’d have to deal with whatever appalling shit it is that he deals with,” she said, “and it must be appalling because of the things he is allowed to do to stop it happening. You have no idea.”

“Would I know if I’d read that?” He pointed at the paperwork.

“Yes. So it’s probably a good thing you didn’t. You might have decided not to sign it. And then I’d have had to have you shot.”

He laughed, and then stopped because she didn’t. After a moment, she nodded.

“You’re right. I was joking.”

But he was no longer at all sure, and felt enormously relieved when she deposited him in a car with a uniformed driver and said: “Gravesend.”

“Oh, yes.” He pantomimed raising a handset to his ear. “Hullo. It’s Lizard here.”

She rolled her eyes, but nodded. “How’s your wife?”

“Not so good, actually, I’m afraid she’s coming down with something. La Grippe, you know. Nothing too bad. Certainly not food poisoning, I’m glad to say, we ate all the same things last night. In fact we shared a portion. Scampi,” he added, getting into the swing of it, “with chips. You eat it in your fingers. Anyway, she’s got La Grippe.”

“Perfect. Except don’t fucking extemporise.” She handed him a modern, ugly phone and walked away without saying goodbye.

“I’m Lizard,” Tom Rice said to the driver.

“I know you are, Tommy,” the driver said, “but we’ll just let that be your little secret, all right?”

And now here he was, and the notion of drawing a chalk outline around anything was laughable, except that actually he wasn’t sure he’d ever laugh again. He sure as hell would not be persuading the local coroner, a retired military doctor with a Liverpool accent, that this was natural causes. Tom Rice had never seen anything so blatantly unnatural in his life.

Old Man Caspian lay flat on his back. This was clear because he was wearing only a shirt, a pair of cotton boxer shorts in blue-and-white stripes, and socks and shoes. Either he had been in the habit of pulling on his trousers over his shoes or he had thrown them on in response to some external stimulus, such as the broken window at the far end of the room. His knees and hips made obvious the attitude of his body: his head was to some extent missing and for the rest distended and twisted on the neck. However this had been done, it had been done thoroughly.

Rice was congratulating himself on not throwing up when he realised abruptly that he was going to, and ran.

One hundred years after a primitive missile composed of wood and goosefeathers and capped with a metallic blade transfixed the brain of Harold Godwinson and announced the success of the Norman Conquest—but five hundred years before a young bisexual man obsessed with witches and demons acceded to the thrones of England and Scotland and commissioned a bible which (all evidence to the contrary) many still insist is the unaltered word of God—a hunter named Simon Sharrow was struck by a bolt of lightning and rendered unconscious for nine days.

Three being God’s number, symbolising the Trinity, and nine being three times three and thus a number of enormous holiness—superseded in contemporary Christian numerological significance only by twenty-seven (three times three times three) and nineteen-thousand-six-hundred-and-eighty-three (the cube of twenty-seven) and a series of numbers whose nature will already be clear but which at that time escaped the realm of most mortal mathematicians—Simon Sharrow was closely watched and well-tended in his convalescence. It may have helped that he was a youth of striking countenance, and the son of a local landowner whose decision to wed a Norman bride had closed a certain unpleasant chapter in local ethnic politics.

In whatever case, though Simon Sharrow healed and grew strong again, he did not speak. He made himself understood in signs, and gave every indication of comprehending all that was said to him, and from time to time he drew breath or cleared his throat, and his father and mother and their servants and serfs waited for him to say “Hullo,” or “I need to pee,” or even “What happened?”

But Simon Sharrow said nothing, and the whispers began: that he was made an idiot or possessed by a devil; that he had died and was a walking corpse and dared not speak lest his soul escape; that the man who returned from the hunt was not Simon Sharrow but an escaped knave from the stocks of Cirencester. The feeling was very strong that Cedric Sharrow must look to his bride for another heir. Cedric Sharrow (who greatly loved his foreign invader wife, and knew too well the chancy business of childbirth) grew frantic to provide a cure. Simon was bled, heated, chilled, exorcised, surrounded by magicians, baptised, touched with holy relics and with talismans more dubious, and even treated by an actual doctor in the modern sense whose reasoned approach was quite enlightened but who alas lacked the necessary diagnostic framework or tools to be of any concrete use. And still Simon Sharrow said nothing, until one morning a stable boy, touched by the sun and fresh with simple, unconsidered pleasure in the fine horse he was brushing and the love of a girl in the local inn, sang a song in a high, confident voice beneath the window where Simon Sharrow gazed silently out upon the world.

Simon Sharrow opened his mouth (the monks who were with him recorded that he “ope’d” it, in line with monkish grammar) and began a counterpoint. His voice rippled and frisked around the melody, dived deep into a mournful minor, and when the stable boy stopped out of sheer amazement, emerged full-throated and triumphant like a trumpet, a glorious halloo of love over all. There were no words—Simon Sharrow never spoke another actual word in all his life—but that was quite irrelevant. The music was clearer than words ever are, a statement of the moment and the soul, and the monks fell over on their faces to worship the angelic presence among them, and Simon Sharrow was deemed blessed among men. This lightning, heretofore thought a great misfortune, was now understood to be the arrival on Earth of a quintessential being, an angel of God. The seraph (which might arguably be a Prince, Potentate, Throne, Dominion, or perhaps a more lowly cherub) rightly concerned at the horrid effect of matter on its sublime personage, had taken shelter within Simon Sharrow, and in a Godly mirror of more dread possessions, made of his body a redoubt against the crass elements of the material world.

Simon Sharrow was an intelligent man, and the people of his father’s holdings were wise enough in their own right. Simon’s acclamation as the voice of justice and sacred rulership created a realm of considered fairness to which neighbouring folk wished to add themselves, and good governance broke out like a plague across the region. Simon Sharrow’s accident ushered in five centuries of prosperity for Sharrow Town and its surroundings, and his descendants grew rich and were ennobled and ultimately moved away to a grand home in London. The good fortune of the town itself was brought to a bloody close during the Civil War of 1642 when a band of Roundheads burned the place to cinders, so that all that remained of the old settlement by the time Edie Banister got off the train was the name—now shortened to Shrewton—and an ill-considered statue of a boy being struck by lightning.

Edie Banister sat in the Copper Kettle and scowled at a piece of Linzertorte. Mrs Mandel, the cheery matron who owned the Copper Kettle, insisted it was a Raspberry Almond Lattice, and that it was a traditional local recipe she had from her grandmother. Edie had decided it would be unwelcome to point out to Mrs Mandel that both the slice and its maker were almost certainly of mitteleuropäisch descent. She had bitten down, therefore, on the information that Linzertorte was a respectable Austrian delicacy and that Mandel was itself the German word for almond, and contrived instead a genial murmur of little old lady thanks.

Coming here had been, Edie decided, a mistake. It had seemed vital in London, when she had heard that Donny Caspian was dead, that she should come and see fair play. One of the good men and true, was Donny, and if there was even a faint aroma of old business about this, then Edie would be there to sniff it out, and make damn sure it was sniffed in turn by the powers above. It had seemed, to be honest, like a bit of a last bow, a sort of Edie Rides Again. She would arrive, spot the hidden clue and read the scene in the light of her knowledge of the secret parts of Donny’s life, and pronounce gravely that these were matters to be dealt with at the highest level. Detectives would marvel and the aforementioned highest level would be reminded that some of the old guard were still around to be thanked for years of service. Dame Edie, perhaps.

But here in the Copper Kettle, locked in combat with tea made apparently out of sump water, and with the huge Viennese mirror on the wall opposite telling her she was past eighty and ought to be in bed—alone—she was suffering from an acute sense of dissonance and shame. It was hardly fair to Donny Caspian that she hoped to find in his death the opportunity to shine. Her motives were murky, and she suspected they had much to do with the frankly alarming age she now was and a gnawing sense of—what? Abandonment? Not exactly. Say rather, bewilderment, and say it please in the fullest knowledge of the meaning of the word. Edie was not foggy in the head; she was not, in the polite language used to refer to seniors in the modern United Kingdom, confused. She was bewildered in the true Oxford English Dictionary sense of the word: lost in a pathless place. Or perhaps there was a perfectly clear path in front of her, and she just didn’t like it.

She had come here—leaving behind her one real friend still surviving on Earth, in the care of her neighbour Mrs Boyd—to try her ancient skills. To be a spy once more. She had seen herself, full of steely, silvered resolve, fixing local coppers with her old naval commander’s authority and getting the thing done right; playing the sort of retired but still forceful figure every British secret agent should eventually become. Instead, here she was reflected in the mirror as a cake-eating, gossipy Old Lady Detective, fit for the wheelchair and resolving the theft of inherited diamonds. The sort of old girl who knows the scullery maid is actually the heiress’s villainous half-sister, back from South America to steal the fortune, because of the way she positions a cruet.

A fate worse than death—at last.

Edie poked the Linzertorte with one of those three-tined objects some people insist on calling a runcible spoon, and wondered hopefully if the filling might be poisoned. She inhaled carefully, and detected a scent of almonds: the infamous tell-tale of potassium cyanide—albeit also and more commonly the tell-tale of marzipan. Putting the mouthful to the test, she established that it was not poisoned, and grudgingly acknowledged that it was in fact pretty good. Morose and unwilling, she settled down to enjoy it as little as possible, her eye drawn at each bite to the image in the mirror: an old woman slowly and painstakingly partaking of one of the few pleasures left to her. Moist, narrow lips and wattled neck working. She would not attempt to gain access to the crime scene—if that was what it was. She would not meddle. When this wretchedly acceptable bit of pastry was over, she would return to her hotel and gather her things. She would go home and do… whatever single old women did.

Between mouthfuls, memory took her, fond and merciless. Donny Caspian, not dead—not then—and superb in himself, even if not Edie’s usual cup of tea.

The boat is secure, a long line running from the stern to the reef below, the anchor lodged comfortably in a rocky outcrop rather than a piece of brittle coral. Edie Banister, not yet twenty and with her wartime commission newly minted, most secret and unconventional, checks her mask and puts a wooden clothes peg on her nose, then rides the plumb weight all the way down. It feels rough in her hands, old and pitted; although she made it a bare two weeks ago, repeated impacts with the sea floor, and the boat, and the beach, have made it look ancient. This pleases her in a small way. Her plumb looks no different from Ancient Saul’s, and he’s a thousand years old if he’s a day and has been riding the same plumb since he melted it with his daddy before the turn of the century. Like everyone in his family, Saul Caspian dives for pearls. He will die underwater, he says. One day the sea will hold him, and he will go home.

The Caspians are pirates and lechers, but for all that they are powerfully, alarmingly devout.

Saul smiled at her this morning from his chair by the pier. All right, girly, you’re ready. The Hollow’s waitin’. When she came here, he told her she’d never ride the weight to Fender’s Hollow—too small, he said, too narrow, no legs to speak of and no chest. But Saul is an old mellow tree. He says that to everyone, secure in the knowledge the good ones will prove him wrong. His nephew Donny, barrel-chested and constructed entirely from some sort of essence of youthful maleness, is the same. Divers don’t like to be talkers. The Hollow’s waitin’. Edie nearly shouted in delight. Then she nearly fled. Fender’s Hollow is a long way down, and dangerous. It’s also the brass ring: if you can dive the Hollow, you can hold your head high anywhere there are divers, anywhere in the world. And you can—if you are Edie—undertake a particular task for your country. If, if, if.

Ba-boom. Edie’s heart gives its first audible beat since she let go of the boat and started the dive. The water around her is blue, not green. Green water is shallow water, up in the first yards of the sea. It hardly counts. Blue water is the body of the ocean. When you can ride the plumb to blue water, to the place where you can’t see the green, that’s a start.

Ba-boom. She dives, white limbs and red bikini. Edie is what they call a greyhound, which is a nice way of saying a stick insect or a garden rake. She waited bravely for the bosom fairy to arrive, to bring, along with the obvious, hips and pouting lips and bedroom eyes (which latter, Edie has observed, are associated almost exclusively with women possessed of the more notable sort of bust) and has realised at last that no such beneficence will be forthcoming. But here, it’s all good. No bust means no buoyancy, no hips means no drag. And Saul, bless him for a curmudgeon and an old stoat, was wrong about one thing: Edie has lungs to spare. Her whole chest is a compression tank, storing up the air and pressing it down to take in more. Edie Banister, a white arrow with red fletching, falling into the depths.

Ba… boom. Her heart is slowing. Good. Fender’s Hollow, like a basket of diamonds, spreads out beneath her. The line from the boat brushes her leg, and Edie flinches away. She wants no part of that line, not now. No desire to be tangled here, midway between the surface and the floor. She has a knife, sure, but who wants to test their own ability to saw through a rope underwater with dwindling reserves of oxygen? And maybe drop the knife, oh, yes, see life tumble off into the depths, winking like a firefly as you grey out and the drowning takes you. Mermaids and piskies in your eyes, come to our water world, oh yes.

Ba… boom. Fender’s Hollow is a cradle in the reef, a strange cup of white leaves and orange spires, one built on another on another over a dreadful abyss which turns black within an arm’s reach. Black water is a mystery. Oh, you can dive black water with modern equipment. You can take lights. But you haven’t seen it. Black water is like a shy shark, gone when you turn around, vanished when you shine a light on it. Black water is the water where the sun cannot go, shadowed and profound. The only people who see black water truly are the drowning men, fishers sucked under by the tide, careless oystermen and sailors on big ships shattered by the gales. Black water is, by definition, water you cannot travel. Or, cannot travel and return.

And there it is, like a wicked eye, peering out of the coral. She thought it was a wall or a wreck, but no, that’s it. The deep, in person.

Ba.… boom. Edie Banister, white fish girl. Her feet touch the coral. She sets the plumb on the rock next to the anchor, and begins to look around. Down here, somewhere, Saul has left her something. She has a minute, maybe two, to find it and bring it back. Nothing. Tick-tock, no time to be absent-minded. Focus. Where’s the geegaw? She’s almost sure it will be a sparkling thing: Saul is always trying to get her to accept gifts. Wear this on your chest, girly. Let a poor old man imagine he’s touched that skin. Almost, she snorts. Bad idea.

Coral and weed, and bright, bold fish. No geegaw.

Or—yes. There. Over by the hole, the eye of the deep. In fact… through it. Something sparkles, hanging in the current. She darts for it, disturbs it, juggles it in her hand and loses it. A cheap thing, made of polished glass, shells and copper wire. It falls away from her, and she dives after it. Catches it. And cannot turn back. There’s no space to turn. She must go down another two yards into the dark, then up and around. It’s no distance at all.

It’s the most terrifying thing she has ever done.

Kick, idiot. Kick, go down or drown.

She kicks.

Ba-boom. Ba-boom. That’s fear. Ignore it. She wants to breathe to slow her heart. She wants her heart to slow so that she doesn’t have to breathe. The coral is above her back, and now she can use her arms. Below her is the abyss, bottomless and cold, and she can feel it reaching for her. Tendrils of current snag at her feet—but now she’s moving up and away, her face to the green water above. The water is filled with shadows, a school of fish? Or just spots in her eyes from the time without air? She doesn’t know. She’s breathing out, rising, grasping for the surface, bursting through the mutinous, flexible ceiling. She has her hands in the air but you can’t breathe through your fingers, can’t pull yourself up on air. Her head breaks through, and immediately she slams to one side. The sky’s in the wrong place. She’s turning over—when the Hell did the weather come up? The sky is what they call gurly, meaning bad things: a Scottish word.

A wave slams into her, fills her mouth with salt water.

White fish girl, dies in the gurly swell.

Bugger.

Donny Caspian’s corded arm catches her before she can subside into the sea again, hauls her into his boat, which is somehow lashed to hers.

“I got it,” she says to him, holding out the geegaw.

Donny Caspian grins and nods, turns the boat.

“What are you doing here?”

“Had a hankering to see you,” he says, and this explanation it seems he will stick to however hard she presses, as if he has not noticed—while he hauls on the tiller and drags the boat around—that the last of the blue sky is giving way even now to a ripe, roaring grey, and thunderheads are sweeping in over the water.

“Storm coming,” Edie observes, as if this is news. Donny nods.

“It’s La Belle Dame. She comes on that way sometimes, hides behind the cape until the last minute.”

Edie determines, there and then, to make herself his lover, but somewhere between the beach and her room above Saul Caspian’s bar she falls asleep, and when she awakes the next morning Donny has been called away. Called, in fact, from the islands to active service in diverse secret wars, and thence by routes discreet if well-travelled to the banking houses of London’s Square Mile, and finally to his own assassination.

The investigating officer’s name was Bright, and he was kind enough to pretend that he had not identified the man who brushed past him in search of a place in which to be noisily sick. He went so far as to shake hands, albeit with some caution; to repeat that he had been told to extend Rice every courtesy; and to ask earnestly for any details or impressions Rice might have formed of the scene which could be of use. He pondered aloud the significance of a man from London coming down to quiet Shrewton for what was, yes, a grisly but probably not nationally significant death. He smiled benignly when Rice said that he couldn’t really talk about that, and agreed that that was for the best, in the grand scheme of things, and with respect to the big picture, but somehow from that point cooperated in an open and helpful way which nonetheless was completely obstructive.

“Do you have any suspects?” Rice asked.

“Well, we’ve always got a few, but I think the important thing here is to establish a timeline.”

“Oh, right. Of course. So what is the timeline?”

“Pretty clear, I think, though we’re awaiting corroboration. That’ll be easier if we can track down a few witnesses.”

Rice did not ask if there were any witnesses. He just nodded, and waited. Not for nothing his years as a civil servant: he knew how to make a silence stretch.

“Yes,” Bright said at last. “I mean, there’s a lad from the butcher who delivered last night, and another fellow who cuts the trees. Some domestic staff and so on.”

Rice let his eyebrows suggest that there must be more than that, that a man of Bright’s ability would have some idea, by now, of where to look for less mundane information.

“And…” Bright muttered unwillingly, “there’s word of a car seen leaving late. Very fast. Probably nothing.”

“Word from whom?” Rice asked.

“A lady in the town. Bit of a busybody, to be honest. Neighbourhood-Watch sort, you know, with that picture of the meerkats on the window.”

Rice did know: an orange sticker, designed some time in the last thirty years—probably after the BBC made meerkats famous, but long before an insurance website brought them to life in little dressing gowns as some sort of bizarre celebrity. The sticker came in a variety of flavours, and was supposed to let you know you were under the eye of the community. When he had first seen them, as a student, he had thought them a little Orwellian, but that was before Britain became the most surveilled and monitored nation on Earth. What’s a granny twitching at the curtain when every bank cash machine and every traffic light has a little eye which peers out at you?

“And she saw this car?” Rice asked encouragingly.

Bright gave a nod. “But she’s not what I look for in a witness.”

“Unreliable?”

“Not as such, no.”

“Fanciful? Or short-sighted?”

“She’s an enthusiast,” Bright said shortly. “Keen. It doesn’t look well in court, keen.”

Court, Rice reflected, was a long way away. He’d settle for a few facts. Or he would, if investigating this was his job. But he wasn’t sure that it was. “Natural causes,” the man from the Legacy Board had told him.

“It’s been very helpful talking to you,” Rice said neutrally, and saw Bright flush as he registered the careful phrasing.

Yes, well. Screw you very much, he thought, as he shook Bright’s hand and departed.

“This is Lizard,” Tom Rice said into his phone, “for Gravesend.”

“Gravesend,” the familiar voice replied. “How’s your wife?”

“Fine,” Rice said vaguely, because he was finding he had to concentrate quite hard not to mention or even imply food poisoning, and had a recurrent waking nightmare of tanks rolling down the main street of Shrewton blowing up whippets. The people of Shrewton seemed to be overly fond of whippets. Rice himself could take or leave them, but he did not wish to be responsible for a kind of doggy Culodden in which hundreds of innocent sighthounds were exploded by a battalion of armoured vehicles.

Gravesend gave a sort of sigh.

“Oh,” Rice said, remembering. “Yes, I mean, when I say she’s fine, I mean she’s not really fine at all, you know, got La Grippe, I’m afraid, still ailing somewhat. How are you? How’s that charming husband of yours?”

“Still in prison,” Gravesend replied quellingly. “What about the job in hand?”

“It’s not really in hand,” Rice said. “There was a definite thrust to my instructions, if you take my meaning, a will for simple resolutions implied if not actually stated.”

“Yes, there was.”

“Well, it’s reasonably clear that this isn’t that sort of job.”

“How clear?”

Tom Rice recalled the bits of head stuck in the wall.

“Pretty clear,” he said.

Gravesend seemed to ponder this. “Are the people on the ground taking it seriously?” Meaning, Rice assumed, the police.

“Yes, they are. They’re not happy to see me, either.”

“They wouldn’t be. All right, go and find somewhere to sit. I’m going to send you something.”

“Shall I call in and tell you where I am?”

“I know where you are.”

Rice was about to clarify that he had meant to ask whether he should call her and tell her where he was after he had found somewhere to sit, but realised in time that she understood that and was telling him that she knew, all the time, exactly where he was. He held the phone out in front of him and eyed it somewhat suspiciously. When he lifted it back to his ear, the line was dead.

He considered his surroundings. He could go back to his hotel, but if she’d meant that she’d have said, so there was an implicit instruction not to. Or possibly there wasn’t, and he was reading too much into it all, but given the choice of disobeying a sort-of instruction and appearing too willing to obey an imagined instruction, he chose the latter. Which left him with a small list of possible places to sit: a municipal bench in a bus shelter; a small local library; a pub called the Witch & Frog which he suspected had recently been modernised to provide a place for the young of Shrewton to spawn; and a tea shop called the Copper Kettle. He dismissed the bench out of hand—it was starting to rain—and considered the library before deciding that he would almost certainly draw the attention of the librarian in what was supposed to be a covert handover. The pub was not the sort of pub where a youngish man in a serious suit and shoes by Ducker’s of Oxford would go unremarked, leaving the tea shop, which had the added benefits that a) he could have tea and b) it was a place so appallingly quaint he was reasonably sure any actual spy would be prevented from crossing the threshold by pure, aching shame.

He went in and ordered a cream tea, which turned out to be enormous, and was struggling with a second five-inch scone and a vast quantity of whipped cream when his anonymous driver came in and handed him an aged foolscap file with no departmental crests or Top-Secret stamps and the single word BARIKAD scrawled in black marker along the spine.

“Background, Tommy,” the driver said. “For your soonest consideration. Don’t leave it on a bus.”

Edie Banister had not been aware that she was watching the young man by the window. She had slipped into a kind of timelessness, a collision of past and present which had been occurring all too often recently, and her mind had been looking back and inwards rather than at the room. Meanwhile, though, some part of her had registered a new face in the Copper Kettle: a lanky, bilious creature who had obviously caught Mrs Mandel’s eye, because she positively covered his plate with extra goodies. Edie suspected the proprietress was something of a terror with a certain sort of male whose tastes ran to the Oedipal, but either this lad was not that sort or Mrs Mandel had accidentally overcooked the situation by giving him enough cream to choke a family of cats.

So she was surprised to find that her entire attention was focused—in a most elliptical and abruptly very professional way—upon the conversation now taking place between him and a stout, balding man with a boxer’s nose and the kind of suit which said he worked for a living: a one-time sergeant, Edie rather thought, or a chief petty officer—and now, by the keys in his closed fist, from which dangled the badge of an upmarket carmaker, driver to the bilious eater of scones.

Well, all right. A civil servant, with a driver to keep him out of trouble, though what trouble one might get into in Shrewton was hard to say. It did not necessarily mean there was anything of interest to her here. And yet, the watchful part of her had seen something already, or half seen it, and was clamouring for her to keep looking, to order another pot of sump water and persist in her cow-eyed gazing across the room as if she were a truly dotty old baggage. She reached into her handbag and fussed briefly, then tapped the lid of the pot significantly at Mrs Mandel and raised her eyebrows. Mrs Mandel, perhaps unused to people asking for refills, bustled over post-haste, just as the driver passed his master some sort of sheaf of documents whose very familiar anonymity made Edie yet more suspicious. She had seen files like that, had handled and even compiled them. She had been fired, ultimately, by a man who told her she was past her prime and signed his name to a paper held in just such a file. But there were, surely, many departments which used them, especially now, when British government ministers had developed the alarming habit of wandering around in front of the press brandishing highly confidential reports in transparent plastic envelopes. If only she had been closer, close enough to read whatever was written in black along the spine, or better yet to grab a glance over the young man’s shoulder. Child’s play, it would have been to the white fish girl. Not so now. Well, needs must.

Mrs Mandel’s heavy foot became improbably tangled in the handle of Edie’s venerable umbrella, and she staggered. She caught herself with both hands, which meant that the contents of her tray flew up into the air, and then—inevitably—down. Edie leapt backwards with a shrill bleat of “Oh, my stars and garters!” and everyone stared. Her table was a mess, a soupy muddle of torte and boiling tea. Mrs Mandel demanded loudly to know if she was all right, and Edie averred that she was, but what a shock, how terrible, and it was all her fault. Mrs Mandel became competitively stricken and abject, and Edie after a few rounds parlayed this into a new table and a new pot.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, reaching into her bag for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses she had found, broken, on the floor of a party in 1974 and never quite managed to throw away. “Would you mind if I—oh, dear, now I shalln’t be able to see anything at all, oh, my—would you mind if I sat just here? I don’t want to crowd you, of course.”

And when the young man smiled in great embarrassment and assured her that the table next to his own was exactly where she should sit, he would not dream of her going anywhere else, and the driver winced at this folly and buggered off, Edie was left able to let her perfectly good eyes wander. And understood at last what it was her subconscious had wanted her, needed her to know.

Across the back of the folder was the single word: BARIKAD.

It was the fashion in some Russian families, during the Soviet period—which Edie regrettably must acknowledge she remembers—to choose names for children which reflected their devotion to the socialist cause. A thousand young Bolsheviks were christened Revolution, Proletariat or Potemkin. But there was only one Barikad.

He had no patronymic, no other names at all. He was the iron man of Stalin’s secret research towns, out in the tundra between Moscow and the Pole. It was said he had transformed his nation’s old superstitions into a new science of the mind. In the stone white of the Russian winter, he built machines to empower his brain, ran current from hydroelectric dams through his bones and mortified his flesh, and achieved a species of transcendence. He had projected his aetheric body into the secret councils of other states. He could curse a man to death, cause sickness with his thoughts. He was the Party’s wizard, and armies and secret organisations and even parliaments went in fear of the Eye of Barikad.

Except finally it was all a lie: a brilliant, implausible, impossible campaign of disinformation to send Western scientists down blind alleys, seeking defences they would never find against attacks which did not exist. Millions of dollars, thousands of hours of research, US marines staring fixedly into the eyes of confused goats; psychic tests run on Celts in Wiltshire and Kerns in Brittany; years of divining, dowsing, spoon-bending and card-reading; Barikad was a fantasy, and he cost the West more money as a dream than he ever could have as a tangible truth. The man, yes, had been real. He had tortured himself on steel frames, drunk wormwood and spoken with spirits. And, predictably, he had died, cooked to cinders in the electric discharge of a turbine driven by the waters of a nameless river. His great engines were never built. The science outposts he supposedly constructed were just labour camps, bizarre make-work for the losers in Stalin’s games: Abkhaz and Ingush forced from the Caucuses, unwise poets, and Party members rash enough to remember yesterday’s promises. In their hundreds of thousands, the unwanted of the Soviet Union were made to disappear, spent as coin to persuade the beancounters in London and Washington of an enormous and uneconomic falsehood.

For a while, it worked.

The liner is terribly grand, and Edie’s wardrobe is made to match. She has learned in the last few weeks the fine points of fluttering, and faffing, and even—in spite of her considerable misgivings—simpering. She quite enjoys simpering. In the compass of the simper lies a vast and nuanced syntax of vapid communication which can mean anything from “Tell me more about your enormous investments” or “Not until after we’re married, Your Grace” to “Get lost, creepy, before I call a copper”. She has to acknowledge, too, that the cruise as a concept is not without charm. All the stultifying rules of sexual conduct which prevail in England seem to be left behind when the ship leaves the White Cliffs in its wake. Note to self. All the same, she’ll be glad when this mission is over and she can go back to her natural habitat.

She turns to the wall briefly as if to fuss with her hair and adjusts a part of her dress which is doing something she would generally expect only from a confident and somewhat risquée lover. These outfits have no shame.

When she looks back across the lounge, she can see the man she is meeting. Stocky to the point of tubby, he has a wide face with watery eyes which reminds her—as it did in his file—of a poached egg.

“Good evening, Lady,” he booms. “It is very fine to have such a rose of England on our wessel!”

Edie simpers, broadly, so that the room can see. And the room is watching, no question about that, two lads by the bar in sharp suits who aren’t visiting academicians for all they claim to be, but Hungarian AVH. The left one has a bulge in his pocket too small to be a gun, so she suspects it’s a billy cosh. The other, leaner and fastidious, plucks an olive from his martini and affords her a glimpse of a narrow case she identifies as holding a syringe. So.

“Oh, why, how very flattering! And who are you, sir?” she says aloud, letting it fall into a gap in everyone else’s conversation. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” A mild chastisement there, and some of the other men, the ones who have already tried their luck, wince a little in sympathy. The Lady Edith has proven elusive, and the beaus are growing frantic. Contests of strength are becoming something of a daily matter—shuffleboard, chess, even shooting from the top deck—they all mysteriously come to a fever when Edie chances to walk by.

“I am Dmitri. To you always I am Dima! I am from Soviet Embassy the cultural attaché,” which is true, though he doesn’t mention he’s about the eighth assistant attaché, which is naughty, or that he’s a spy, which is an open secret everyone is too polite to mention. Anyway, Lady Edith is a pinhead aristocratic wife-in-waiting, and not the sort of person to know that sort of thing at all.

“Oh, how terribly thrilling! You’re a Bolshevik! You must think me absolutely awful!”

“No! But why?”

“I’m a Lady! A terrible oppressor.”

“Is accident of birth, Lady. Also, the wretched enemy from glorious socialism bourgeois capitalism. You are feudal. A necessary part of the ascent to perfected mode. And very pretty! I am a man who does not fail to notice this, even if you must be put up against the wall sooner or later!”

The entire assembled company of kibitzing young men gapes briefly at this last suggestion, but it seems to go right over Lady Edith’s head.

“Oh, my, must I? Am I in frightful danger from you, then?”

“Of the gravest sort,” replies the tubby Soviet, with a twinkle, and Lady Edith actually flushes slightly and makes a gesture of insincere shock.

“You are incorrigible, Dima,” she flusters, “and entirely too forward!”

“I am a peasant, Lady,” Dima says quite untruthfully, “but you should not fear my rough hands. With you they will be gentle. And as for the revolution—if you have the right sort of friends anything is possible!”

“Goodness,” simpers Edie. “Then I do hope we shall be friends. I shall no doubt find use for your rough hands. And in any case,” she adds, placing a lingering index finger on his round shoulder, “I do enjoy the company of a man of substance.”

Dima goggles at her a little, obviously hoping this is the simple truth, and the thwarted suitors groan to one another. All that time practicing the exercises of Joseph Pilates when they should have been eating eggs and sitting still. A disaster. And an unfair one at that.

The boys at the bar give each other a regulation sneer. Cheap theatre!

And it is. Edie knows fine well that this charade will not persuade them, and that is not her intention. Her employer wishes devoutly, however, that they believe that is her plan, so that they will look no further, and certainly not at Dima, who is very brave and very endangered.

“I believe,” Lady Edith smoulders, “that I should like a walk on deck. Perhaps you could lend me your arm, so that I do not slip and fall on my back?” Dima swallows again, but nods. They walk out together.

Six minutes later they are in his cabin, and Edie has ditched the dress for a more practical outfit. Dima resolutely turned to the wall while she did this, which would have been very gentlemanly if Edie hadn’t caught him peeping at the vanity mirror. Gone, thank God, is the ridiculously constrictive frock, and in its place a set of trousers and a light jacket in a new fabric whose name she has forgotten. Warm, light, and above all close fitting.

“Give me the file,” she says, and when he does she slips it quickly into a waterproof wallet and into the long pocket along her thigh. “Thank you, Dima,” she says, and when he smiles shyly she belts him in the eye with everything she has. He staggers, and she follows up hard with an elbow and a knee. He falls, and she wraps a rope around his arms but does not tie it. “Okay?”

“Good,” Dima says, and once again she finds herself impressed by him. She shouldn’t be surprised. Dima’s father was sent to one of Barikad’s towns ten years ago, and the boy trekked up there and saw it for himself, fourteen and alone, using a dog sledge. He camped in the ice and cold for months, hunted and stayed alive, and came to understand what the place actually was. And when he knew his father was dead, had died before he left of cold and hunger, he went back and joined the Party and became a British agent as soon as he possibly could. The crown’s man in the Barikad con. In the wallet at her hip, proof positive, as solid as it comes, the Barikad is and has always been a fiction.

She’s still thinking this when he roars to his feet and his head takes her in the chest—not the stomach, which would have winded her and made the next bit impossible, but just a little higher. All the same, they crash through his door with a convincing bang and out onto the deck, almost at the feet of the lads from the AVH. Edie chops at him, and they separate, Dima coming up in between his supposed allies and their target, fumbles in his coat pocket and roars again. Edie takes flight. When she reaches the rail, Dima gets his gun out and fires.

Bullets whizz past, plucking at her hair. Very close indeed. Bloody hell! She waits a beat, then hurls herself back in time with his final shot, wrenches her shoulder round as if struck and falls head first from the rear of the boat into the sea. Before she hits the water, she can hear Dima demanding that they kill her, kill the blasted British witch, shoot her fucking dead, but no more shots sound and she realises he is yelling all this while still getting in the way. Good lad.

And then she’s in the body of the wave, and down, and down. She twists her bracelet hard and it lights, a gloomy greenish glow made from chemical muck. Down she goes, and pray to God the timing is right and this will work, because her ears are hurting and this water is much, much colder than the water over Fender’s Hollow. Cold and dark. Edie Banister, a falling doll in black water.

Ba-boom.

She can hear the sound of the ship, but it’s fading, no longer a roar but a sort of rattle, drawing away.

Ba-boom.

She imagines, up on deck, Dima proclaiming that he was attacked by the British agent and manfully fought his way free, and the AVH men will be trying to look suspicious, but Dima will be bellowing that they were supposed to protect him, yes, keep him safe, and they somehow allow him to leave a public space with a British spy, poor Dima all unknowing! Or were the Hungarians playing a fucking game here? Had they used him as bait? He would have them shot as traitors! And so the facts would begin to blur, an agreed version would emerge in which they were all heroes. The documents are gone, yes, and that is bad, but the main thing is that they are not in the hands of the enemy.

Ba-boom.

It’s too cold. Too dark. This was not a good plan.

Ba-boom baboom. Ba-boombaboom. Baboombaboombaboom…

And now she can see the geegaw waiting, and she is getting warmer. If she can just reach it and turn around, it will all be well. She stops swimming, stops falling, and it rises towards her. She breathes out and calms. The sea swallows her, and then something enormous swallows her again, and gravity and ice grip her and she screams.

Choking on the floor of the submarine, Edie Banister swears and shudders and says she will never, never, never again, until Donny Caspian’s hands wrap a warm towel around her and he tells her it will all be okay.

“I died, Donny,” she says, “I fucking did.”

“I hear that happens, Edie,” Donny says. “But I don’t recommend it so early in the day.”

For no good reason, this makes her laugh.

Reading the Barikad file, Tom Rice was conscious of two concurrent and conflicting responses. On the one hand, he felt he was being admitted to the room behind the curtain, to the secret councils of Europe in years gone by—and by extension, being tested and prepared for the moment, perhaps sooner than he thought, when he might be given similar access to contemporary things. Possibly his misgivings in London had been first-night nerves. Perhaps he really had just lucked into something which would take him to the heights. Promotion. Power. A knighthood, and in due course directorships, or the top job in an Oxbridge College for his retirement.

On the other, he found himself rejecting the histories in the file. It wasn’t that they were ridiculous. They were almost certainly all true—odd and alien in this new century, but true. The numbers of the dead might seem too immense, but Stalin’s time had been a horror. Russia was enormous, and she could die like almost no other country on Earth. Uncle Joe had spent her people freely, used them up to drag the nation into something like industrialism, if you didn’t look too closely. Millions had died, and tens of millions. So that was all plausible.

The notion that in modern times a government might expend serious money on something so outré as psychical research, and that somehow it might be relevant here, might seem wretchedly deluded: a tabloid story in the making. Again, though, it had happened. The Americans had verifiably had programmes which pursued these same goals. They had done stranger things, actually: experiments on wounded soldiers and radioactive material that read like the first pages of a comic book. And the Star Wars project which had ended the Cold War had been much the same idea: a gigantic boondoggle the Russians just had to chase, and could not afford. No, that part was possible too.

The idea that a British intelligence agency might indulge in a stunt as reckless as the one described in the final pages of the file he found bizarre, and if it had been today he would have assumed it was disinformation to conceal something more mundane and drab, like a blackmail plot or a well-placed bug. He knew, though, that the Special Operations Executive had done things of equal madness in its day, which was why SOE had numbered a huge proportion of dead heroes among its ranks, why the organisation had been considered wayward and annoying by serious agencies such as MI6, and why it was now defunct. All true.

But, but. The fashion in which a file is arranged, the context, structure, and manner of its presentation: Rice knew well that these things were as important in a way as the information it contained. He had himself produced reports which endorsed in every particular a given policy, while at the same time so setting them out that no elected leader would ever consider the policy’s implementation. It was one of the key skills of the British civil service, because politicians had to be forced to think of things which would happen after they were voted out, and didn’t want to.

So if he was flattered by this information, that was because he was supposed to be flattered—or so his more cautious mind declared. And if the end of the story suggested that there was more to come, that was not accidental, was not merely because life continued. It was because the narrative had been constructed to invite ideas of continuance. Frankly, on a professional level, he thought the document a little overdone. It could have been a great deal subtler. It was garish, almost prurient. It invited speculation of the wilder sort, lent itself—spuriously, so far as he knew—to connections to the present day which could not be sustained. It reminded him, in its apparently unmerited confidence, of the now-notorious dossiers which had preceded the invasion of a certain Middle-Eastern nation. There just was no clear reason why anyone involved in the Barikad project would come for Donny Caspian out of the past. Caspian’s dusty secrets were insignificant now. He could have given an interview to The Times, and it would have been cleared quite happily and read by almost no one. He had never been near a nuclear missile, hadn’t known dirty truths about the Casanova sons of foreign dignitaries now themselves ascended to the heights. That wasn’t him. Donny Caspian—odd as it might seem—had been a gunslinger and a daredevil, and for all that that was very laudable, it didn’t make you a target sixty years down the line. The file was hogwash. Throw in a bit of sex, and it would do very nicely as the worser sort of airport novel.

Tom Rice was new to the secret world, but he was not new to dirty tricks. He had been for several years charged with monitoring the trade in guano on one of Britain’s residual overseas territories, and while this was not overly glamorous, it had been massively educative. Guano might be the slimy product of the digestive systems of birds and mammals, but it was expensive and desirable, which meant people lied, cheated, and occasionally killed for it. Guano was sold in bulk at the international level, often traded on paper several times before it was ever actually shipped. And where there was paper, there was fraud. Warehouses were filled with ordinary mud and topped off with a layer of the good stuff; inspectors were bribed not to use a dipstick, and the presence of the fantasy guano was used to depress the market price so that someone could buy low, then sell high when the fraudulent guano disappeared. Sometimes you turned up to collect your product and found someone else had bribed it out from under you: the forms insisted you had taken delivery, and you’d be out your stake and your sale. And all that was before you even touched the arcane business of gaming the subsidies, which was where it got really bad and the guano trade started to dovetail with drugs and sex slaves. Tom Rice had been provided with a bodyguard of three when he was working the guano desk, and been trained in surviving a kidnapping. He’d had a hot button on a lanyard around his neck at all times, even in the bath.

All of which had made him just a little more open to ideas of foul play. Perhaps that was why he was here, now. If all this was on the level, that experience was worthwhile in this situation. But sitting in the Copper Kettle, with that infuriating old dear behind him exchanging increasingly barbed apologies with the manageress, he could feel the dead spot between his shoulderblades lighting up, and knew that something, somewhere, was very much awry. But for the life of him, he couldn’t see what it was.

“Really, Mrs Mandel,” said the old dear, “you shouldn’t use such language, and in front of the young gentleman. He’s terribly shocked.”

“ ‘Buck up’,” the manageress said icily. “I said ‘buck up’. Not anything else, I’m sure.”

“Well, no doubt you did. You really won’t let me pay?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Banister,” Mrs Mandel replied.

“The Linzertorte was excellent,” the woman said, and Mrs Mandel huffed loudly, and marched back to her perch by the till.

Rice had ducked into what passed for an alley in Shrewton: a grim little sidestreet between a church and a post-office sorting office, lined with dustbins. He called Gravesend. “Hullo, Lizard here again.”

“Hello.”

“Is that Gravesend?”

“Yes, Lizard, it is, as you well know. How is Mrs Lizard?”

“Very much the same. I did wonder if I myself might be coming down with something.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, I did. I wondered if you happened to know whether La Grippe was contagious.”

“It can be.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Did you read the file?”

“I did.”

“You have it with you?”

“Yes. I rather—”

And the line went dead.

Tom Rice knew of a very small number of reasons why that might happen. A cellular phone might drop a connection, but this wasn’t one. It was a government thing which could use cell, satellite, or, in an emergency, a high-power multi-frequency radio signal to a local relay. The call should not have dropped—unless Gravesend had got everything she needed from the discussion and hung up. For a moment, he felt a bit panicked. In the old century, certain enemies of the industrial powers had been unwise enough to accept gifts of such phones from men they knew less well than they thought, and had used them in some cases for days before the moment was deemed right and a single missile had dropped along the line of transmission and blown them out of their shoes. He pulled himself together. It did not seem likely that he was about to be exploded just off Shrewton High Street. Really not at all.

He considered throwing the phone away, but couldn’t think of anywhere to throw it which wouldn’t be dangerous to someone. He was still wondering whether the pond in the middle of the Shrewton Green roundabout would be isolated enough, and aware that, were he the target of such a strike, the entire internal discussion would already have ended in a loud bang which he would never have heard, when he saw the familiar shape of his driver coming around the corner, accompanied by a small man he did not recognise.

Mrs Mandel had been joined at the counter by Mrs Russet and Miss Adele, and from them proceeded such a stream of gossip that Edie was momentarily struck dumb. She was aware, in theory, that old women gossiped. She had not appreciated the degree of it. Perhaps these three were especially talented, but the depth and clarity of their knowledge of the love lives and peccadillos of those around them were formidable. Secrets Edie was relatively sure had been entrusted to parents in deepest confidence had been winkled out and were now traded as scurrilous currency. She turned her face to the window and watched the bilious civil servant wander into a sidestreet. The boy, she decided, was not an idiot after all. She had seen him working his way through the Barikad file, and been impressed by the rapid flicking back and forth, the concentration. She knew the process of analysis from within, and could recognise it. Whoever had given him the file had underestimated him. He was seeing through it. Good lad.

The door chimed, and a group of people who were gigantically out of place walked into the Copper Kettle. One was fat, with a jacket which advertised his allegiance to a particular camera company. The others were younger, a little subservient, and Edie recognised them as his crew. Finally, there was a girl—no, a woman heavily made-up, and with perfect hair—in a yellow overcoat. Her eyes danced around the room, saw the gossips, and saw, to Edie’s deep discomfort, Edie seeing the gossips. Their eyes met, and the woman smiled and walked over. Edie took a moment to admire her legs.

“Hello,” the woman said. “I’m Gina Day. I’m with the BBC.”

Edie smiled. “Hello, dear.” The second word nearly stuck in her throat. Grandmotherly, she told herself firmly. I am an old local trout. Yes.

“I wondered if you knew anything about this Caspian business. I’m down here from London. I think we’re ahead of the pack, but it’s going to get awfully noisy soon.”

“What Caspian business, dear? Old Donny? I heard he was killed by a falling urn.”

“Did you know him?”

Yes. He was a friend, a really good one, a million years ago.

“Oh no, dear. I keep myself to myself, mostly.”

“I’m afraid it was murder, you see. We had a call from a lady—she wouldn’t say who she was—but apparently he was sleeping with a local girl—someone quite young, not more than twenty—and her brother took against it.”

Donny? Shacked up with some doxy? Well, yes, actually. Entirely plausible. He would be one to retain his vigour, and he was, let’s be honest, mountainously rich, which can be awfully attractive to a girl. But something in that made Edie nervous. Journalist. Sex. Anonymous call.

“I understand he was a banker, our Donny,” she said to Gina Day.

“Yes, I believe so. Kept his head in the sub-prime thing, apparently. Tried to make people listen, but they wouldn’t, so he made his clients a lot of money. We had him on Newsnight a few weeks ago. He was very good.”

Through the window, Edie watched the sergeant—no, she was sure now that he’d be Navy—amble over to a parked car and joke with the man behind the wheel. The man got out and both of them walked in the direction of the bilious civil servant in his alley.

Barikad. Sex. Journalists. Bankers. Spies. Money.

And something else. Something about the way the second man moved, a familiar fluidity.

She didn’t know what was happening, not in the main. But she had a fair guess as to the shape of it, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt what was about to happen across the street. Alas, poor bilious… She should walk away. That was the done thing, when you didn’t know the stakes. Except that Donny wouldn’t have. Donny would have jumped in, because that was what Donny did. Donny was the sort of fellow who’d sail his open boat into the teeth of La Belle Dame for a girl he barely knew. And Donny was dead, which left Edie.

Bugger.

“Well, that’s a terrible shame, then, isn’t it?” she said brightly. “I mean, all those silly sods who lost the pension money—my pension money, you know!—and they’re all fine, and here’s a nice old gentleman dead, and he was one of the good ones. Very sad. But bless me, dear, I’m most dreadfully late, would you mind if I left you to it? Mrs Mandel will know all about him, I’m sure, she knows absolutely everything that happens in Shrewton and of course she makes wonderful Austrian cakes! You must ask her…” and with this last piece of sheer vindictiveness, Edie gathered up her umbrella and ran, actually ran, for the door.

“I’m sorry about this, Tommy,” the driver said, without a hint of regret. “I really am. You seem like a nice enough fella. Could I ask you to be gentlemanly about it, and it’ll be over quite quick.”

Tom Rice stared at him. “What will?”

“This,” the driver said, and the other man stepped lightly towards Rice, like a fox investigating a dustbin.

This, Rice realised, was his death. Not by missile, but by thug. And with a secret file in his hands which connected Caspian with some mad Russians. He revised his estimates. CIVIL SERVANT BEATEN TO DEATH IN ALLEYWAY was almost enough to make up for the lack of a girl. Two bodies looked ever so much more like a conspiracy than one. He wondered if something was happening to his bank accounts right about now, something which would tie him to Caspian, and thought it probably was.

Bank accounts. Donny Caspian had been the Legacy Board’s banker. The Legacy man had let Rice know that, had made a point of saying it aloud in that bloody meeting, in front of more than a few senior people. Caspian had lost them money. Them alone, of all his clients. Or, no. No, that was the point, Rice thought. He hadn’t.

Of course, he hadn’t.

No, Donny Caspian had done well for the Legacy Board. Had made them rich, probably a hundred-times richer. And they had reported a loss. Not for peculation or personal enrichment, Rice suspected, as two men bent on his extinction moved almost politely towards him, but for an even more important goal in a department’s life: immunity. Impunity. Independence. No budget cuts, no oversight committees, no hard questions at all. Not with an unacknowledged and untaxed fund sitting somewhere, in the hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of pounds. The Legacy Board would be able to do whatever it pleased, forever. So long as Donny Caspian didn’t object. So long as he would fudge the books.

Which he wouldn’t, Rice suspected, because he was honest. He didn’t like it when people disappeared money from the economy, from the government, not now when it was needed. Didn’t like it at all. Didn’t approve, and wouldn’t help. And now he was dead. Rice had no notion of how. A special gun. A compressed-air cannon and a block of ice. Or had the whole scene been staged?

He wondered if there was any way he would ever be able to prove it, or even say it aloud, and decided: probably not.

The driver reached out gently. “Don’t look, Tommy. You don’t need to see it coming. All right?”

And a scratchy female voice said: “Atten-shun! Officer on deck!”

The driver twitched but did not actually salute. The other man swayed slightly and appeared to have changed position without actually moving. Rice would have said—to a policeman, for example, if one should happen by—that the man was partly South-East Asian, except that he had a friend from Portsmouth with a Welsh mother who looked almost exactly the same, with black hair and a broad, pale face. Guessing ethnicities was a mug’s game, and one wise civil servants didn’t play. Part Gurkha? Or something more obvious? He was the assassin, quite obviously. The driver was just there to see it through.

The old lady strode over to stand by Rice. “All right, young’un?”

“Well—”

“A man of few words, I like that. Well, boys, is this a party, or what? Shall we adjourn to the pub and talk it out? Because we can’t have witnesses and such. Messy. Unless you fancy your chances?”

The driver laughed, and gestured to the assassin, who nodded. Two for one is fine, he seemed to say. If it must be done at all. Tom Rice looked at the old woman, and then looked again, harder. Mrs Mandel had called her Banister. It was utterly ridiculous to imagine. and yet, here she was.

“Edie Banister?” he asked incredulously.

She tutted. “In the file, was it? That’s a bit of a bugger, then. Well, yes. Edith J. Banister, Commander RN, Retired. At your service. And you,” she added, pointing to the assassin with her umbrella, “stay where you are or I’ll have you.”

The little man shrugged, and took one quick step forward. Edie Banister shifted slightly at the hip and shoulder, and he stopped. He stepped very deliberately from one foot to the other, and watched her closely. To Rice’s eye, nothing happened, but the little man’s eyes widened slightly, and he stepped back, then moved his heel to a new position. Edie snorted, and settled a little where she was. Rice could not have said exactly what she did, but she seemed abruptly more solid, as if she had just now properly arrived. The man nodded confirmation to himself, breathed in and out, and he too compressed and strengthened. Rice found himself edging away, as if there was a line between them which it might be dangerous to touch. He saw the driver, startled, do the same.

Edie Banister tutted like a disappointed headmistress, and Rice expected her to get heavier still in answer to the challenge. Instead, with no diminution of the focus which glinted in her, she became an absence. From one moment to the next, the unconscious sense of her he had had, the knowledge that she was standing next to him, simply vanished. He glanced over to reassure himself.

She had not moved. She was precisely where she had been. He turned back to the little man, and saw on his face an expression of shock. Rice felt a brief flash of sympathy.

“Get on with it,” the driver said.

The little man ignored him, his attention now wholly on Edie. He cleared his throat. “I had thought,” he said, “that I knew all of my father’s students.”

Edie sighed. “You probably do,” she said. “He hadn’t even been conceived when your great aunt taught me.”

The little man blinked, then nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I did not think. But,” his eyes flickered to her body, probing, “that would make you more than eighty.”

“Ueshiba,” Edie Banister observed blandly, “was known in late age to take on several senior students at a time, and win quite handily. No doubt his bones ached terribly the following day. Mine always do.” She extended a hand in a graceful arc, indicating her limbs. The fingers spread and regathered, like the feathers of an eagle’s wing.

The little man laughed in genuine appreciation, and stepped back. “No,” he said to the driver.

“What?”

“No. You must make another plan. I cannot help you.”

“Because she knew your bloody auntie?”

“No,” the little man said. “I would still fight her—although I think you have lied to me about what is happening here. I do not believe you are an honest man, any more. But in any case, she would win. She is better than me.” He shrugged. “I regret.”

The driver scowled and seemed about to argue, then dipped into his pocket and came out with what Rice identified with horror as an actual gun. British civilians in general have a superstitious fear of guns, because they are not part of the life of the nation. Guns are for soldiers and crooks.

“I’ll just fucking shoot her then, won’t I?” the driver was saying as he pointed the gun, and the phrase turned into a yelp of agony as something bright and shining slapped down hard on his wrist and went “bong”. The gun fell on the ground, the driver to one knee. The shining thing zipped and zigged and returned to the handle of Edie’s umbrella, and only in memory did Rice recognise it for a concealed weapon, a ribbon of metal perhaps eighteen-inches long.

“You just stay right there,” Edie told him.

“Wakizashi,” the little man said, seemingly à propos of nothing. Edie nodded, and glanced briefly over at him, then said “Fuck,” which struck Rice as rude until he realised she was now looking back at the driver, who had produced a second, smaller gun from his leg and was bringing it up.

Rice, feeling that something of the sort was called for, dragged her out of the way of the shot, and Edie squawked an exasperated yodel of “Oh, you silly sod!” The driver came to his feet and gave chase, firing again. Something plucked at Rice’s sleeve and he realised he had sustained an actual fleshwound. Edie Banister reversed course as if she had forgotten something, slipping back along the line of her footsteps, and the driver’s momentum carried him onto her. The gun went off and Edie Banister said “Fuck” again in an irritated voice and the driver said “Oh”. And everything was very still.

Rice realised he had been hiding behind his hands, and somewhat shamefacedly took them down and looked.

The bullet had caromed along the umbrella and ripped it apart, taking with it a two-inch piece of white steel which glinted in the gutter. The rest of Edie’s little sword was buried to the handle in the driver’s chest, and his eyes had a fish-on-a-slab look which Rice suspected meant he was no longer in residence.

For a moment, no one said anything. Edie looked at Rice and apparently considered giving him a bollocking, then changed her mind. She opened her mouth and Rice thought she might go with “Thank you”, but she didn’t, and shut it again. Rice looked at the body and at the alleyway and thought, gosh, my life is over. How odd.

The assassin said: “Give me the file.”

Rice looked at Edie, who looked at the little man and the corpse, then back at Rice. She raised her eyebrows.

“It is the same,” the little man said. “There is a dead man, and the file. They will not care. It is the same. Maybe better. I think possibly he was sent to kill Caspian also. Put the file by him. The gun was very loud.”

Rice looked at Edie, who nodded. He laid the Barikad file down on the ground. The assassin rubbed the handle of the sword with a cloth.

“We didn’t win,” Tom Rice objected. “They got everything they wanted.”

“Attacker’s advantage,” Edie replied. “You lived, which is something. And Donny doesn’t care if his name’s mud. He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“But they won.”

“Yes, they did.” She sat back in consideration of that. “They did.”

The BBC had covered the story with musty sobriety, and left the frenzy to the tabloids. There was—intentionally, she was sure, on the part of those who had contrived the scene—no clear narrative. Rumours swirled around Donny: the money, the girl, the spying. It was a rich banquet of implication and innuendo. A perfect fog to hide a cold, hard kill.

Overhead, the public-address system announced Rice’s flight. He was going to Istanbul first, and after that Edie had told him not to tell her, but it better not be Manchester. “Don’t be bloody clever,” she had said.

Rice had a vague idea of what he would do next. He had a friend from university, now a lawyer of dubious reputation, who might help. But he couldn’t tell her that he’d be all right. And to be honest, he wasn’t sure. But as she said, he was alive.

He left her sitting in the lounge, and caught his flight.

Edie watched the plane from the observation gallery. She watched it take off and disappear into the grey-orange London sky. She wondered whether she had assisted a felon. What it meant that someone had killed Donny Caspian. It was wrong, she knew that. But was it also right? An unpleasant necessity? Years ago, she might have said yes.

No. I was never cold. Never a chessplayer.

She’d known a man who was, and she’d sworn she would never be like him.

Troubled, she stared into her own reflection. First Vaughn Parry, and now Tom Rice.

She had some thinking to do.

^{AN EXCERPT FROM THE FORTHCOMING}

ANGELMAKER

by

Nick Harkaway

Available from Alfred A. Knopf

March 2012

I

The socks of the fathers;

mammalian supremacy;

visiting an old lady.

At seven fifteen a.m., his bedroom slightly colder than the vacuum of space, Joshua Joseph Spork wears a longish leather coat and a pair of his father’s golfing socks. Papa Spork was not a natural golfer. Among other differences, natural golfers do not acquire their socks by hijacking a lorryload destined for St. Andrews. It isn’t done. Golf is a religion of patience. Socks come and socks go, and the wise golfer waits, sees the pair he wants, and buys it without fuss. The notion that he might put a Thompson sub-machine gun in the face of the burly Glaswegian driver, and tell him to quit the cab or adorn it… well. A man who does that is never going to get his handicap down below the teens.

The upside is that Joe doesn’t think of these socks as belonging to Papa Spork. They’re just one of two thousand pairs he inherited when his father passed on to the great bunker in the sky, contents of a lock-up off Brick Lane. He returned as much of the swag as he could—it was a weird, motley collection, very appropriate to Papa Spork’s somewhat eccentric life of crime—and found himself left with several suitcases of personal effects, family Bibles and albums, some bits and bobs his father apparently stole from his father, and a few pairs of socks the chairman of St. Andrews suggested he keep as a memento.

“I appreciate it can’t have been easy, doing this,” the chairman said over the phone. “Old wounds and so on.”

“Really, I’m just embarrassed.”

“Good Lord, don’t be. Bad enough that the sins of the fathers shall descend and all that, without feeling embarrassed about it. My father was in Bomber Command. Helped plan the firebombing of Dresden. Can you imagine? Pinching socks is rather benign, eh?”

“I suppose so.”

“Dresden was during the war, of course, so I suppose they thought it had to be done. Jolly heroic, no doubt. But I’ve seen photographs. Have you?”

“No.”

“Try not to, I should. They’ll stay with you. But if ever you do, for some godforsaken reason, it might make you feel better to be wearing a pair of lurid Argyles. I’m putting a few in a parcel. If it will salve your guilt, I shall choose the absolute nastiest ones.”

“Oh, yes, all right. Thank you.”

“I fly myself, you know. Civilian. I used to love it, but recently I can’t help but see firebombs falling. So I’ve sort of given up. Rather a shame, really.”

“Yes, it is.”

There’s a pause while the chairman considers the possibility that he may have revealed rather more of himself than he had intended.

“Right then. It’ll be the chartreuse. I quite fancy a pair of those myself, to wear next time I visit the old bugger up at Hawley Churchyard. ‘Look here, you frightful old sod,’ I shall tell him, ‘where you persuaded yourself it was absolutely vital that we immolate a city full of civilians, other men’s fathers restricted themselves to stealing ugly socks.’ That ought to show him, eh?”

“I suppose so.”

So on his feet now are the fruits of this curious exchange, and very welcome between his unpedicured soles and the icy floor.

The leather coat, meanwhile, is a precaution against attack. He does own a dressing gown, or rather, a towelling bathrobe, but while it’s more cosy to get into, it’s also more vulnerable. Joe Spork inhabits a warehouse space above his workshop—his late grandfather’s workshop—in a dingy, silent bit of London down by the river. The march of progress has passed it by because the views are grey and angular and the place smells strongly of riverbank, so the whole enormous building notionally belongs to him, though it is, alas, somewhat entailed to banks and lenders. Mathew—this being the name of his lamentable dad—had a relaxed attitude to paper debt; money was something you could always steal more of.

Speaking of debts, he wonders sometimes—when he contemplates the high days and the dark days of his time as the heir of crime—whether Mathew ever killed anyone. Or, indeed, whether he killed a multitude. Mobsters, after all, are given to arguing with one another in rather bloody ways, and the outcomes of these discussions are often bodies draped like wet cloth over bar stools and behind the wheels of cars. Is there a secret graveyard somewhere, or a pig farm, where the consequences of his father’s breezy amorality are left to their final rest? And if there is, what liability does his son inherit on that score?

In reality, the ground floor is entirely given over to Joe’s workshop and saleroom. It’s high and mysterious, with things under dust sheets and—best of all—wrapped in thick black plastic and taped up in the far corner “to treat the woodworm.” Of recent days these objects are mostly nothing more than a couple of trestles or benches arranged to look significant when buyers come by, but some are the copper-bottomed real thing–timepieces, music boxes, and best of all: hand-made mechanical automata, painted and carved and cast when a computer was a fellow who could count without reference to his fingers.

It’s impossible, from within, not to know where the warehouse is. The smell of old London whispers up through the damp boards of the saleroom, carrying with it traces of river, silt and mulch, but by some fillip of design and ageing wood it never becomes obnoxious. The light from the window slots, high above ground level and glazed with that cross-wired glass for security, falls at the moment on no fewer than five Edinburgh long-case clocks, two pianolas, and one remarkable object which is either a mechanised rocking horse or something more outré for which Joe will have to find a rather racy sort of buyer. These grand prizes are surrounded by lesser ephemera and common-or-garden stock: crank-handle telephones, gramophones and curiosities. And there, on a plinth, is the Death Clock.

It’s just a piece of Victorian tat, really. A looming skeleton in a cowl drives a chariot from right to left, so that—to the Western European observer, used to reading from left to right—he is coming to meet us. He has his scythe slung conveniently across his back for easy reaping, and a scrawny steed with an evil expression pulls the thing onward, ever onward. The facing wheel is a black clock with very slender bone hands. It has no chime; the message is perhaps that time passes without punctuation, but passes all the same. Joe’s grandfather, in his will, commended it to his heir for “special consideration”—the mechanism is very clever, motivated by atmospheric fluctuation—but the infant Joe was petrified of it, and the adolescent resented its immutable, morbid promise. Even now—particularly now, when thirty years of age is visible in his rear-view mirror and forty glowers at him from down the road ahead, now that his skin heals a little more slowly than it used to from solder burns and nicks and pinks, and his stomach is less a washboard and more a comfy if solid bench—Joe avoids looking at it.

The Death Clock also guards his only shameful secret, a minor, practical concession to the past and the financial necessities. In the deepest shadows of the warehouse, next to the leaky part of the wall and covered in a grimy dust sheet, are six old slot machines—genuine one-armed bandits—which he is refurbishing for an old acquaintance named Jorge. Jorge (“Yooorrr-geh! With passion like Pasternak!” he tells new acquaintances) runs a number of low dives which feature gambling and other vices as their main attractions, and Joe’s job is to maintain these traditional machines—which now dispense tokens for high-value amounts and intimate services rather than mere pennies—and to bugger them systematically so that they pay out only on rare occasions or according to Jorge’s personal instruction. The price of continuity in the clockworking business is minor compromise.

The floor above—the living area, where Joe has a bed and some old wooden wardrobes big enough to conceal a battleship—is a beautiful space. It has broad, arched windows and mellowed red-brick walls which look out onto the river on one side, and on the other an urban landscape of stores and markets, depots and back offices, lock-ups, car dealerships, Customs pounds, and one vile square of green-grey grass which is protected by some indelible ordinance and thus must be allowed to fester where it lies.

All very fine, but the warehouse has recently acquired one serious irritant: a cat. At sometime, one mooring two hundred yards up was allowed to go to a houseboat, on which lives a very sweet, very poor family called Watson. Griff and Abbie are a brace of mildly paranoid anarchists, deeply allergic to paperwork and employment on conscientious grounds. There’s a curious courage to them both: they believe in a political reality which is utterly terrifying, and they’re fighting it. Joe is never sure whether they’re mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

In any case, he gives any spare clockwork toys he has to the Watsons, and eats dinner with them once in a while to make sure they’re still alive. They in their turn share with him vegetables from their allotment and keep an eye on the warehouse if he goes away for the weekend. The cat (Joe thinks of it as “the Parasite”) adopted them some months ago and now rules the houseboat by a combination of adept political and emotional pressure brought to bear through the delighted Watson children and a psychotic approach to the rodent population, which earns the approval of Mr. and Mrs. W. Sadly, the Parasite has identified the warehouse as its next home, if once it can destroy or evict the present owner, of whom it does not approve.

Joe peers into the piece of burnished brass he uses as a shaving mirror. He found it here when he took possession, a riveted panel from something bigger, and he likes the warmth of it. Glass mirrors are green, and make your image look sick and sad. He doesn’t want to be the person he sees reflected in a glass mirror. Instead, here’s this warm, genial bloke, a little unkempt, but—if not wealthy—at least healthy and fairly wise.

Joe is a big man, with wide shoulders and hips. His bones are heavy. He has a strong face, and his skull is proud beneath the skin. Passably handsome, perhaps, but not delicate. Unlike Papa Spork, who had his father’s genes, and looked like a flamenco dancer, Joe is most unfairly designed by nature to resemble a guy who works the door at the rougher kind of bar. He gets it from his mother’s side: Harriet Spork is a narrow creature, but that owes more to religion and meals high in fibre than it does to genetics. Her bones are the bones of a Cumbrian meat-packer and his Dorset yeoman wife. Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats. That she chose instead to be a singer and more latterly a nun is evidence of a certain submerged cussedness, or possibly a consequence of the strange upheavals of the twentieth century, which made rural motherhood look, at least for a while, like an admission of defeat.

From somewhere in the warehouse, there’s a curiously suffused silence. A hunting silence: the Parasite, having declared war almost immediately upon making his acquaintance, enters each morning via the window that Joe props open to stop the place getting stuffy when the central heating comes on, and ascends to balance on the white moulded frame around the kitchen door. When Joe passes underneath, it drops onto his shoulders, extends its claws, and slides down his back in an attempt to peel him like an apple. The leather coat and, alas, the skin beneath—because the first time this happened he was wearing only a pyjama shirt—carry the scars.

Today, tiring of a.m. guerrilla war—and sensitive to the possibility that while he is presently single, he may one day bring an actual woman to this place, and she may wish not to be scalped by an irate feline when she sashays off to make tea, perhaps with one of his shirts thrown around her shoulders and the hem brushing the tops of her elegant legs and revealing the narrowest sliver of buttock—Joe has chosen to escalate the situation. Late last night, he applied a thin layer of Vaseline to the coping. He tries not to reflect on the nature of a life whose high point is an adversarial relationship with an entity possessing the same approximate reasoning and emotional alertness as a milk bottle.

Ah. That whisper is a silken tail brushing the mug tree with its friendly, mismatched china. That creak means the floorboard by the wall, that pitter-patter is the animal jumping from the dresser… and that remarkable, outraged sound must be the noise it makes bouncing off the far wall after sliding all along the coping, followed by… yes. An undignified thump as it hits the floor. Joe wanders into his kitchen. The Parasite stares at him from the corner, eyes spilling over with mutiny and hate.

“Primate,” Joe tells it, waggling his hands. “Tool user. Opposable thumbs.”

The Parasite glowers, and stalks out.

Having thus inaugurated Victory Over The Cat Day, it is in the nature of his world that he should immediately be overtaken on the ladder of mammalian supremacy by a dog.

To get to his first appointment, Joe Spork elects to take a shortcut through the Tosher’s Beat. This is in general very much against his personal policy. He resolutely travels by bus or train, or even occasionally drives, because taking the Tosher’s Beat is an admission of parts of his life for which he no longer has any use. However, the discovery of another garden full of Vaughn Parry’s victims has brought a great deal of discussion in broadsheets and free papers regarding the nature of human criminality, and this is a conversation he devoutly wishes to ignore.

At the same time, certain recent events have given Joe a mild but undeniable case of the willies, and the Tosher’s Beat has a feeling of security and familiarity which the streets above never really achieve. Blame his childhood, but shady alleys and smoke-filled rooms are more reassuring than shopping centres and sunlit streets. Although, even if Joe himself were not determined to be someone new, those days are over. Most of the Old Campaigners died early. The roly-poly court of crooks he grew up with is just a memory. There are a few still around, retired or changed and hardened, but the genial knees of crime on which the young Joe Spork sat, and from whose vantage he was initiated into the secrets of a hundred scandalous deeds, are all withered and gone.

Meanwhile, Vaughn Parry is England’s present nightmare. Above and beyond Islamic extremists with rucksacks and policemen who shoot plumbers nine times in the head for being diffusely non-white, the great fear of every right-thinking person these days is that Parry was not unique, that there lurk amid the wide wheat fields and bowling greens of the Home Counties yet more bloody-handed killers who can unlock your window catches and sneak into your room at night, the better to tear you apart. Parry is in custody for the moment, held in some high-security hospital under the scrutiny of doctors, but something in him has cut the nation deep.

The upshot of this has been a scurrying of the middle classes for shelter, and a less-than-learned discussion of historical villains and in particular of Joe Spork’s safe-cracking, train-robbing, art-thieving father, the Dandy of the Hoosegow, Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork. Joe has a greater horror of this chatter than he does of the Tosher’s Beat. Under normal circumstances he shies away from the idea that he is what a certain class of crime novel calls an habitué of the demi-monde, by which it is implied that he knows gamblers and crooks and the men and women who love them. For the moment, he is prepared to acknowledge that he still lives somewhat on the fringes of the demi-monde in exchange for not having to talk about it.

Inevitably, in crafting a thumbnail sketch of himself, he finds that it has turned into an obituary, to be held in readiness. Joshua Joseph Spork, son of Harriet Peters and Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork the noted gangster, died childless before the age of 40. He is survived by his mother, now a nun, and by a small number of respectable ex-girlfriends. It must be acknowledged that his greatest achievement in life lay in avoiding becoming his father, though some might assert that in doing so he went too far towards his grandfather’s more sedentary mode of being. There will be a memorial service on Friday; guests are requested to bring no firearms or stolen goods.

He shakes his head to clear it, and hurries over the railway bridge.

Between Clighton Street and Blackfriars there is a cul-de-sac which actually isn’t a cul-de-sac. At the very end is a narrow gap and a pathway which leads to the railway line, and immediately on the left as you face the tracks there’s a doorway into the underworld. Through this little door goes Joseph Spork like the White Rabbit, and down a spiral stair into the narrow red-brick tunnels of the Tosher’s Beat. The corridor is absolutely black, and he scrabbles in his pocket for his working keyfob, from which depends a small selection of keys and passcards, and a torch roughly the shape and size of a pen lid.

The blue-white light shows him walls covered in grime, occasionally scarred with someone’s only immortality: Dave luvs Lisa and always will, at least down here. Joe breathes a sort of blessing and passes by, stepping carefully around knots of slime. One more door, and for this he wraps a handkerchief around his mouth and smears some wintergreen ointment under his nose (“Addam’s Traditional Warming Balsam!,” and who knows why a balsam is exciting enough to merit that exclamation mark, but it is to Mr. Addam). This one requires a key; the toshers have installed a simple lock, not as a serious barrier to entry, but as a polite statement of territoriality. They’re quite content that people should use the road, but want you to know you do so by their grace. The Tosher’s Beat is a webwork, but you can’t just go where you will. You need permissions and goodwills, and sometimes a subscription. Joe’s keyfob will grant him passage through perhaps twenty per cent of the safe tunnels; the others are held aggressively by official and unofficial groupings with a desire for privacy—including the toshers themselves, who guard the heart of their strange kingdom with polite but effective sentries.

Ten minutes later he meets a group of them, bent double over the noxious ooze and combing through it in their rubberised suits.

Back in the day—when London was pocked with workhouses and smothered in a green smog which could choke you dead on a bad night, or before that, even, when open sewers ran down the middle of the streets—the toshers were the outcasts and opportunists who picked over the ghastly mix and retrieved the coins and jewels lost by chance. Even now, it’s amazing what people throw away: grandma’s diamonds, fallen down inside their box, and Auntie Brenda taken for a thief; rings of all descriptions, cast off in a passion or slipped from icy fingers on a cold day; money, of course; gold teeth; and on one occasion, Queen Tosh told the infant Joe at one of Mathew’s parties, a bundle of bearer bonds with a combined value of nearly ten million pounds.

These days, toshers wear gear made for deep-sea divers—well, the filth itself is bad enough, but there’s worse: hypodermics and other gruesomenesses, not to mention the chemicals which are changing the world’s male fish into females and killing all the toads. The average corpse lasts a fortnight longer than it used to, pickled in supermarket preservatives. The work gang look like astronauts from another world, landed badly and picking through what they take to be primordial muck.

Joe waves to them as he hurries by on the raised pavement, and they wave back. Don’t get many visitors, and still fewer give them a thumbs-up in the approved Night Market style, knuckles to the roof and thumb-up pointed at forty-five degrees. The leader returns the gesture, hesitantly.

“Hi,” Joe Spork says loudly, because the helmets don’t make for easy comprehension. “How’s the Cathedral?”

“Clear,” the man says. “Tide gate’s shut. Hang on, I know you, don’t I?”

Yes, he does: they played together as children in the velvet-hung torchlit corridors of the Night Market. The Tosher Family and the Market are cautious allies, tiny states existing within and beneath the greater one that is Britain. Gangster nations, however much diminished now from what they were when Joe was young. The Night Market, in particular, has suffered, its regents unable to inspire the kind of rambunctious, cheeky criminality which was the hallmark of Mathew Spork and his friends: a court without a king. But let’s don’t talk about those days, I’m in disguise as someone with a real life.

“I’ve just got one of those faces,” Joe mutters, and hurries on.

He slips through a door into the old Post Office pneumatic railway (at one stage, Mathew Spork owned a string of Post Office concessions around the United Kingdom, and used them to distribute and conceal all manner of unconventional wares), then down a side tunnel and a flight of stairs and into Cathedral Cave. Dug as the foundation of a medieval palace which was never finished, subsided now into the mud of London’s basin, it’s wet and very dark. The arched stone has been washed in mineral rain over so many hundreds of years that it’s covered now in a glutinous alabaster, as if this place were a natural cavern. When London’s Victorian sewers overflow, as they do more and more in these climate-change days, the whole thing is under water. Joe suppresses a shudder of claustrophobia at the thought.

A rickety metal gantry leads through the room and through into the lower reaches of the railway, and then abruptly to an ancient goods lift which comes up near the riverbank: a highway for smugglers, ancient and modern.

The whole journey takes less than half an hour. You could barely do it faster in a car with an open road.

The dog’s name is Bastion, and it is without shame or mercy. Any dog worth the name will sniff your crotch on arrival, but Bastion has buried his carbuncled nose in the angle of Joe’s trousers and shows no inclination to retreat. Joe shifts slightly, and the dog rewards him with a warning mutter, deep in the chest: I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals, oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee. Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners. Behold my jaws, upper and lower in righteous, symmetrical poverty. Move not, man of clocks, and heed my mistress, for she cherishes me, even in my foul old age.

It’s a tiny animal, the shrunken remains of a pug, and as if poor dentition is not enough, it has absolutely no natural eyeballs. Both have been replaced with substitutes made in pale pink glass which appear to refract and reflect the interior view of Bastion’s empty sockets. This ghastly decision lends considerable sincerity to the growling, and Joe elects to allow the animal to continue drooling on his groin.

Bastion’s owner is called Edie Banister, and she is very small, and very wiry, and apparently goes back slightly further than the British Museum. She has a tight cap of silver hair through which, in places, the freckled skin of her scalp is visible. Her face—proud eyes and strong mouth suggesting powerful good looks in her day—is so pale that Joe imagines he can actually see the bone through her cheeks, and the wrinkles on her arms are folded around one another like melted plastic, all scrunched up in unpredictable directions. Edie Banister is old.

And yet she is profoundly alive. Over the past few months, she has found reason to call upon the services of Spork & Co. on several occasions. Joe has come to know her a little, and in this respect she reminds him of his grandfather, Daniel: she is almost vibrating with rich, distilled energy, as if the process of living all those decades has made a reduction of her spirit which is thick and slow in her chest, but sweeter and stronger for it.

Bastion wears his age less well. He is uglier than anything Joe has seen outside a deep-sea aquarium. He seems an unlikely companion for a woman like Edie Banister, but the world, Daniel once observed, is a great honeycombed thing composed of separated mysteries.

Joe has cause to know this for the truth. When a child, he inhabited a variety of secret places, courtesy of his bad dad, and though he has very firmly left those places behind, with their daring characters and picturesque names—the Old Campaigners, the Sinkhole, Kings Forget—he has discovered that every aspect of life is a strange gravitational system of people-planets, all orbiting unlikely suns such as golf clubs, theatres, and basket-weaving classes, falling prey to black holes like infidelity and penury. Or just fading away into space, alone.

And now they come to him in their droves. Dotty, aged, and absent-minded, they file through his doors clutching little pieces of broken memory: music boxes, clocks, fob watches and mechanical toys they once played with or inherited from their mothers, uncles and spouses, now gone to dust and ash.

Edie Banister offers him some more coffee. Joe declines. They smile at one another, nervously. They’re flirting; the elephant in the room—apart from Bastion’s unremarked grip on Joe’s nether parts—is a laburnum-wood box about the size of a portable record player, inlaid with paler wood around the edges. It is the reason for this latest visit to Edie Banister’s home, the reason he has locked up early and come out to Hendon, with its endless rows of almost-pretty, boring houses decorated in little-old-lady chic. Coquettish, she has drawn him here repeatedly and disappointed him, with bits of spavined gramophone and an unlikely steampunkish Teasmade. They have played out a species of seduction, in which she has offered her secrets day by day and he has responded with quick, strong hands and elegant solutions to the intractable problems of broken machinery. All the while, he has known she was testing him for something, weighing him up. Somewhere in this tiny set of rooms there is something much more interesting, something which sweet, ancient Edie clearly believes is going to knock his socks off, but which she is not quite ready to reveal.

He trusts devoutly that what she has in mind is clockwork rather than flesh.

She wets her lips, not with her tongue, but by turning them briefly inward and rubbing them together. Edie Banister comes from a time when ladies were not really supposed to admit to having tongues at all; mouths and saliva and the oral cavity proposed the possibility of other damp, fleshy places which were absolutely not to be thought of, most particularly by anybody who had one.

Joe reaches down to the box. Touches the wood. Lifts it, weighs the burden in his hands. He can feel… moment. A thing of importance. This sweet, dotty old bird has something stupendous, and she knows it. She’s been leading up to showing it to him. He wonders if today’s the day.

He opens the box. A Golgotha of armatures and sprockets. In his mind, he assembles them quickly: that’s the spine, yes, the main spring goes here, that’s part of the housing and so is that… dearie me. Much of this is just so much dross, extra gears and the like. Very untidy. But all together, the useful parts… Oh! Yes, good: early twentieth century by the style and materials, but quite refined in its making. An artisan piece, a one-off, and they always get more, especially if you can link them to a known craftsman. All the same, it’s not… well. Not what he was expecting, though he has no idea what that was.

Joe laughs, but quietly, so as not to waken the canine volcano burbling between his thighs.

“This is very fine. You realise it could be worth quite a bit of money?”

“Oh, dear,” Edie Banister says. “Do I need to insure it?”

“Well, perhaps. These automata can go for a few thousand on a good day.” He nods decisively. On a bad day, they can sit like a dead fish on the auctioneer’s pallet, but never mind that for now.

“Can you fix it?” Edie Banister says, and Joe brushes aside his disappointment and tells her that of course, yes, he can.

“Now?” she asks, and yes, again, because he has his kit, never leaves home without it. Soft-arm clamp to hold the housing. Another as a third hand. Tensioners. There’s no damage, actually, it looks as if someone took it apart on purpose. Quite carefully. Snickersnack, as it were, the thing is assembled, except… hmph. There’s a bit missing—ain’t it always so? It would crosslink the legs… hah! With a piece like that, this would have a veritable walking motion, almost human. Very impressive, very much ahead of its time. He’s seen a robot on the television which works the same way, and is considered a brilliant advance. This could almost be a prototype. No doubt somewhere the ghost of a dead artisan is fuming.

He glances at Edie for permission, ignites a tiny blowtorch, heats a strip of metal and twists, crimps, folds. Snickersnack again. He blows on it. Crimps once more. Yes. Like that, around there, and… so. Consumatum est, as his mother would have it.

Joe looks up, and Edie Banister is watching him, or perhaps she is watching her own life from a great distance. Her face is still, and for one ghastly moment he imagines she has expired right there. Then she shudders and smiles a little fey smile, and says thank you, and he winds the toy and sets it marching, a wee soldier trump-trump-trumping around the table and rucking up the cloth with miniature hobnail boots.

The dog peers back at him: eerie blind hound, stubby ears alert, straining to look through glass eyes. Not perfect, horologist. It drags one foot. But it will suffice. Behold: my mistress is much moved. This, for your pains. And now—begone.

Joe Spork hurries away, suddenly quite certain she wanted something else from him; she has some other secret, a grander one which requires this endless testing of J.J. Spork before it can be unveiled. He wonders a bit wistfully how he failed, considers going back. But perhaps she’s just lonely, and recognises in him a fellow isolate.

Not that he’s alone the way she is.

And not that he’s alone now, not entirely. In the corner of his eye something flickers, a dark shape reflected in the windows of a passing bus. A shadow in a doorway. He turns and looks both ways before crossing the road, very alert as he sweeps the street to his left. Almost, he misses it completely. It’s so still, it’s hard to make out; his eyes are seeking joints and movements where there are none. But there, in the shadowed porch of a boarded-up bakery, it seems that someone watches: a bundled figure in a dress or a heavy overcoat, with a veil like a mourner’s. A beekeeper or a widow, or a tall, thin child playing at being a ghost. Or most likely an old burlap sack hanging on a rack, deceiving the eye.

A moment later a long green estate car nearly runs him over. The angry maternal face behind the wheel glowers at him resentfully for being in the world, and the watcher—if there really was one—goes right out of his head.

Moody and unsettled, Joe stops in at the corner shop to see whether Ari will sell him some cat poison.

When Ari arrived in London, he called the shop Bhred nba’a. He had come to the conclusion from watching English television that the people of London were fond of both puns and corner shops, and he reasoned that a combination must inevitably be a big success. Bread and butter became Bhred nba’a, and it emerged almost immediately that although Londoners do indeed admire both puns and convenience, they’re not keen on shop owners who appear to be taking the piss out of them while looking foreign. Correct use of the apostrophe to denote a glottal stop was not a defence.

Ari learned fast, and shortly painted over the offending sign. It’s not clear to Joe whether his name actually is anything like Ari, or whether he has just selected a comfortably foreign-yet-English noise which doesn’t startle the natives with complexity or suggestions of undue education.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ari is reticent on the poison issue. Ari regards cats as lessons in the journey through life. Cats, he explains, are divine messengers of patience. Joe, one shoulder still sore from a near miss two weeks ago, says they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus. Ari says this is possible, but by the workings of the ineffable divinity, even if they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus, they are also tutors sent by the Cosmic All.

“They are of themselves,” Ari says, clutching this morning’s consignment of organic milk, some of which is leaking through the plastic, “an opportunity for self-education.”

“In first aid and disease,” mutters Joe Spork.

“And in more spiritual things. The universe teaches us about God, Joseph.”

“Not cats. Or, not that cat.”

“All things are lessons.”

And this is so close to something Grandpa Spork once said that Joe Spork, even after a sleepless night and a bad cat morning, finds himself nodding.

“Thanks, Ari.”

“You are welcome.”

“I still want cat poison.”

“Good! Then we have much to teach one another!”

“Goodbye, Ari.”

“Au revoir, Joseph.”

About the Author

Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall in 1972. He studied philosophy, sociology and politics and Clare College, Cambridge, and then worked in the film industry. His fiction debut was The Gone-Away World. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

ALSO BY NICK HARKAWAY

The Gone-Away World

Angelmaker

EDIE’S ADVENTURES CONTINUE IN NICK HARKAWAY’S NEW NOVEL, ANGELMAKER, COMING MARCH 20, 2012, FROM KNOPF

Joe Spork spends his days fixing antique clocks. The son of infamous London criminal Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, he has turned his back on his family’s mobster history and aims to live a quiet life. That orderly existence is suddenly upended when Joe activates a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism. His client, Edie Banister, is more than the kindly old lady she appears to be—she’s a retired international secret agent. And the device? It’s a 1950s doomsday machine. Having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the British government and a diabolical South Asian dictator who is also Edie’s old arch-nemesis. On the upside, Joe’s got a girl: a bold receptionist named Polly whose smarts, savvy and sex appeal may be just what he needs. With Joe’s once-quiet world suddenly overrun by mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago and pick up his father’s old gun…

Copyright

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2012 Nick Harkaway

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-96167-9

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Jason Booher

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