Jasper swore loudly. I just stared, dumbfounded.
In an instant, the room was filled with light and sound. Until them, I had never realized how much noise fire makes, the apocalyptic roar of it. Choking from the smoke, our eyes streaming with tears, we fled the room, stumbled into the corridor and down the stairs, the cat bounding just ahead. Behind us, we heard the bedroom catch ablaze, the whinny of the floorboards, the crackle of cheap furnishings, the splintering of chipboard and plaster. From outside — shouts and screams of panic and confusion. Acrid black smoke blocked our path as I fumbled to unlock the door until, after a small eternity, I got it open, and we staggered gratefully out onto the street.
Already a crowd had gathered, morbidly gripped by the disaster. A burly, thick-necked man ran forward and tugged us from the smoke.
“You two okay?” he asked once we’d finished spluttering. In the distance, I heard the approach of sirens.
“Thank you,” I managed at last, dabbing at my streaming eyes. “I’m fine.”
“Damn it.” The thick-necked man seemed enraged. I noticed that he wore the same flesh-colored piece of plastic in his ear as Mr. Jasper. “How the devil did they know we were here?”
“No idea,” said Jasper, peevish, singed and soot stained. “Henry Lamb — meet our head or security. Steerforth — meet Henry Lamb.”
Mr. Steerforth was not exactly fat, but he had the kind of meaty, rugby-on-a-Sunday physique which makes you wonder how much of it is muscle and how much simply flab. His blond hair looked dyed and was thinning badly, which had had unsuccessfully tried to disguise by combing it forward into a widow’s peak. If he had been an American football player, he’d be a grizzled linebacker given one last chance to prove himself in the final game of his career.
“Henry?” Jasper said quietly. “Where’s the book?”
I felt like crying. “Inside. I think I dropped it.”
Steerforth needed no further encouragement. Despite the fact that Granddad’s house had smoke billowing from its door and windows, despite the six-foot tongues of flame which were clearly visible within, Steerforth bounded into the building with the enthusiasm of a puppy chasing his first stick.
I turned to Jasper. “Will he be OK?”
“Steerforth doesn’t know the meaning of fear.” I couldn’t detect whether it was admiration, envy or sarcasm I heard in Jasper’s voice — and I wonder now if it might have been something else entirely.
Five or six intolerably long minutes passed before Steerforth re-emerged, a handkerchief knotted around his face, his forehead smeared with dust and grime, holding something cradled in his arms. To raucous applause from the assembled bystanders, he jogged over to us just as a fire engine and two police cars sped into Temple Drive.
“You’ve got it?” Jasper hissed.
“The book burned.”
“What?” Jasper’s eyes seemed to swell with exaggerated despair.
“But I did save this little fella.”
Steerforth passed me a small gray bundle of fur. Clumsily, I held it in my arms, and as he looked up at me, I could have sworn that Granddad’s cat was smiling.
Steerforth suggested that we go for a pint. Various medics and police-people were fussing over us but Jasper had only to mention one word — “Directorate” — for them to dissolve obediently into the night.
Most upsettingly, the cat had done the same, squirming free of my arms and running into the darkness before I could do anything to stop him. I searched frantically but Steerforth, apparently dying for a packet of pork scratchings, told me to give it up and manhandled me in the direction of the Rose and Crown.
The others went in, despite the fact that it seemed to be hosting some sort of school disco, whilst I hung back outside to make a phone call.
It took a long time for the connection to go through, then: “Mum?”
“Darling?”
Inside, a whoop of delight as “Come on Eileen” arrived on the sound system and the volume swelled.
“Where on earth are you?”
“It’s a long story. Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but… Someone’s blown up Granddad’s house.”
Mum sounded bored. “Really?”
“It’s been completely gutted.”
“Oh.” I could hear someone talking to her. “Henry again,” she said.
“I was inside when it happened.” I was starting to feel rather put out by her lack of concern.
“Sounds thrilling. You’ll have to tell me all about it when I get back.” She giggled. “Gordy says big kiss, by the way. Big kiss from Gordy.”
“Hello, Gordy,” I said flatly.
“Look, I’d better go. This must be costing us a fortune. Bye-bye, darling.”
Not bothering to say goodbye, I jabbed angrily at the off button.
As I walked into the pub, “Livin’ la Vida Loca” had started up and Steerforth was drumming his fingers on the table in time with the music. When the chorus lurched into view, he began to make weird, bird-like motions with his head as Mr. Jasper, sipping his Baileys, looked on, appalled.
The pub itself was practically deserted. All the real action seemed to be going on in the function room next door, where dozens of teenagers were busy doing one or more of the following: dancing, drinking, snogging, smoking, passing out. The smell of hormones, the heady scent of adolescence, was almost tangible in the air.
Steerforth shoved a glass in front of me. “Lager OK? Nice pint of wife beater?”
“This is a black day,” Jasper muttered Eeyoreishly.
Ignoring the signs, prominently displayed, which exhorted us not to smoke, Steerforth pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered them in my direction.
I shook my head. Jasper looked repulsed and mumbled something which might have been “dirty.”
Steerforth peeled the cellophane from the packet. “The house was our last roll of the dice. You know what we’ve got to do now.”
“Not that.” Jasper’s voice was shaky and uncertain. “Not them.”
“There’s no other choice,” Steerforth said as he produced a lighter from his pocket and applied it to the tip of his cigarette. I noticed that he had great difficulty lighting the thing since, despite his tone of brusque insouciance, his hands were shaking almost uncontrollably.
Suddenly, Jasper’s head jerked upward, as though he’d been goosed by a ghost. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “We were just discussing-” He paused. “Are you quite sure, sir? Is there no other way?” A wince. “You know my opinion on that, sir.” A chewing of the upper lip, then a reluctant nod. “Very well. We’ll tell Henry.”
“What was that all about?” I asked once Jasper had wrapped up his conversation with the invisible man and returned his attention to us. “What have you got to tell me?”
Mr. Jasper looked like he was about to cry. His glass of Baileys was stuck to the wooden table by the glutinous remnants of spilt beer. “This place is filthy,” he said. “Filthy.” A febrile kind of urgency infected his voice. “You were expected, Henry. Did you know that? They told us you’d be coming.”
“Who told you? What are you talking about?”
Jasper grimaced, as though every word was causing him pain, each syllable costing him dear. “Somewhere not very far from here, deep underground in their own private dungeon, sit two prisoners of war. They have the blood of hundreds on their hands. They’ll never be released alive.”
Behind us, the Day-Glo tom-tom of Europop.
“In the course of their sentence, these prisoners have never spoken to a soul. Not one solitary word. And yet, last week, quite casually, they told their guard two things. They gave him a name. And they gave us a warning…”
“What’s this got to do with me?” I asked.
“They told us about your grandfather before it happened. Then they told us who you are.”
“Who are these people? How do they know anything about me?”
“I can’t say. But God forgive me — we
have no choice but to introduce you.”
Steerforth wiped his lips on the back of his hand, making a slurpy smacking noise. “Tomorrow’s truth time, Henry. If I were you, I’d drink up. Enjoy your last night of freedom.” He took a drag on his cigarette before exhaling a thin gray stream of smoke. He was the kind of man, I strongly suspected, who smoked not because he particularly liked the taste but because he still thought it was cool. He winked at someone over by the bar — a skinny girl in tight black jeans. “’Scuse me, gents.” He got to his feet and swaggered over. “A-level totty.”
Jasper muttered something bitter under his breath, although I noticed that he never took his eyes off Steerforth.
Suddenly I remembered and glanced down at my watch. “Damn.”
“What’s the matter?”
“You mean apart from my grandfather’s house burning down?”
Jasper nodded distractedly like this was the kind of thing which happened to him all the time.
I bundled up my coat. “I’m late.”
“For what?”
“For a date.” It was the first time all day I’d felt like smiling.
Before I could leave, Jasper grabbed my arm and held it tight. “Come to the Eye first thing tomorrow. The war hangs in the balance.” He sank back in his seat and took a sip of his Baileys. “You’d better go. You don’t want to keep Abbey waiting.”
I dashed for the door and ran into the train station, grateful to be free. Only later did it occur to me to wonder precisely how it was that Jasper knew her name.
She was waiting for me in Clapham, a part of the city whose facade of well-monied gentility only barely papered over its dirt and degradation. When I emerged from the tube, a homeless man blundered past me, smelling strongly of feces.
Abbey stood outside the Picturehouse, traces of irritation marring her beautiful face. I must have looked a real state, as when she saw me her expression changed immediately to one of sympathy and concern. She fussed over me, smoothing my hair, brushing down my jacket, picking charred flakes from my lapels. “What’s happened to you? You stink of smoke.”
I wasn’t sure how much it was safe to tell her. “I was at Granddad’s house. There was an accident… a fire.”
“Oh, you poor thing.” She kissed me chastely on my forehead. “You have been in the wars.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Listen, we’ve missed the film. You’re knackered. Let’s go back to the flat.”
I nodded my grateful assent. “I’m so sorry about tonight.”
“It’s OK.” She grinned. “You’ll have to make it up to me.”
Three stops on the Northern line and we were home again. Abbey made beans on toast and we sat together quietly, the atmosphere between us thick with the unspoken.
“How was work?” I asked at last.
“Same as usual,” she said. “Bit boring. Just a couple more rich people getting divorced. I’m starting to think there’s got to be more to life.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Henry?”
“Hmm?”
“What’s happening to you?”
I hesitated. “I can’t say. I’d love to tell you but I really can’t.”
“If you ever need someone…”
“Thanks.”
She leant toward me and kissed me, long and lingeringly, on the lips. I surprised myself by not being too tired to respond.
“Abbey?” I said as we lay stretched out on the sofa, our hands entwined, our arms clasped together in tentative embrace. “What would you say… what your reaction be if I were to tell you that a secret civil war has been waged in this country for years? What if I said that a little department in the civil service has been fighting tooth and nail with the royal family since 1857?”
Abbey laughed. “God, Henry. You’re so different from the other blokes I’ve been out with.”
Granite-faced, I gazed back at her.
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Of course,” I said, despising myself for my cowardice and fear. “Of course I am. Just joking.”
Chapter 10
Floating in amniotic fluid with only his trunks to protect his wrinkled modesty, Dedlock glowered at me from within his glass sarcophagus. “You failed to retrieve anything of value from the house of your grandfather. The old man’s journal is lost to the flames.”
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
As Dedlock paddled over to me, I was put in mind of a shark I had once seen at the aquarium on a half-term trip with Granddad. Toothless and gray, it can’t have killed its own food for years and must have spent half a lifetime chewing on stale meat tossed into the water by its keepers, yet despite all this, it still had murder blazing in its eyes. Looking at it through the glass, I knew that one chance was all it needed, one momentary slip on the part of its owners — and it would grab the opportunity to kill again, seize it with its withered gums and swallow it whole.
“Unacceptable, Henry. You’re not filing paper anymore. Every secret in that house is in ashes. The only man who can help us is in a coma. And now the House of Windsor is marshaling its forces against us. It is only a matter of time before they make their move.”
I was flanked by Steerforth and Jasper, both of whom had remained strategically silent in the course of my thorough dressing-down. Steerforth looked as though he hadn’t shaved that morning and appeared to be nursing a more than usually persistent hangover. A volcanic pimple protruded from his chin.
“We’ve no other choice, sir,” he said. “We all know it.”
When Dedlock turned to me, his eyes were glittering with a horrible facsimile of geniality. “Henry Lamb?”
“Yes?”
“The time has come to tell you precisely why we are prosecuting this war — why the House of Windsor is the sworn enemy of this city. The time has come to tell you the secret.”
Jasper touched my shoulder. “Sorry. I always liked your innocence.”
“You might want to sit down,” Dedlock said. “People often find they lose the use of their legs when they hear the truth. I would ask you also not to scream. This is the city’s most profitable attraction and I’m loathe to scare our visitors away.” He grinned again in that same ghastly parody of good humor. “Now then,” he said, with what he probably thought of as an avuncular twinkle. “Are we sitting comfortably?”
Stepping out of the pod, I walked swiftly through the mirage, past the queue of sightseers and toward the scrap of grass which backs onto the Eye. There, I found myself an isolated corner and proceeded to be copiously sick. When I was done, I straightened up, dabbed at my mouth with a tissue and began to worry about my breath. A seagull landed at my feet and pecked inquisitively at the vomit.
Trying desperately not to consider the ramifications of what I’d been told, I stumbled to the river and stared dully down into its murky waters.
Someone strolled up beside me. “They’ve told you, then?”
The speaker was an elderly woman, fragile with age but in possession of a certain geriatric poise which suggested that there was little she would not be willing to face down.
“I suppose you’ve come to sell me some double glazing?” I said.
A hint of a smile. “Could I tempt you to a stroll? We don’t have long.”
Wearily, I agreed, and together we walked along the riverbank, past tourists, buskers, tramps, office workers on an early lunch and truculent-looking kids on skateboards — all of them oblivious to the secret I had just been told, the truth that made a perverted joke of every one of their lives.
“Hits you rather hard, doesn’t it?” the old lady said, as though she was discussing nothing more alarming than a national shortage of buttered scones. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Are you going to tell me who you are?”
“Unlike the rest of them, Henry, I’m going to do you the courtesy of telling you the name I was born with.” She smiled. “I am Miss Jane Morning.”
�
�Are you… Did he…” I gesticulated inarticulately toward the Eye.
“Before his defection to the BBC, your grandfather and I worked together at the Directorate for many years.”
“I never knew any of this.”
“There are less than two dozen men in all of England who know of the Directorate’s true purpose. Your grandfather loved you dearly but, come now, he was hardly likely to entrust you with one of the best-kept secrets of British intelligence.”
“That’s why they need me, isn’t it? Because of Granddad.”
Miss Morning nodded. “The whereabouts of Estella is keeping the war in stalemate. That was always your grandfather’s secret. And with him gone” — she looked as though she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry — “well, as I believe the saying goes — all bets are off.”
“You’re not making a great deal of sense. Not that anything seems to lately.”
“Concentrate, young man. The hunt is on for Estella now. Your grandfather knew this day would come and he planned for it. But something’s gone wrong. Certain forces have taken an interest in us and it is most unlikely that we shall survive their attention.” She broke off. “You seem frightened.”
“Of course I’m frightened. I’m extremely frightened. Probably close to terrified if I’m being honest.”
“That’s eminently sane of you. But things are about to get a good deal worse. If I know how Dedlock thinks — and I’m very much afraid that I do — then he’ll take you to see the prisoners tonight.”
“Who are these prisoners?” I asked. “How do they know who I am?”
“You don’t want me to say their names. Not out loud. Not in public.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Names have power. Theirs more than most. I warn you, Henry. They’ll lie to you. If they ever tell the truth, it will be to twist it to their own purposes. Don’t take a single wicked word they say on trust. They are chaos incarnate. They delight in destruction for its own sake. And nothing is sweeter to them than the corruption of an innocent soul.”
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