Wearily, Arthur turned and peered through the door. No hall of mirrors stood on the other side — just an unassuming stub of corridor that he must have walked down countless times before.
“Streater?” The prince spoke carefully, delicately, swilling each syllable around his mouth as though to test that they were real.
The blond man was pulling on socks and shoes again, stowing away the hypodermic. “What’s the matter, mate? You look shocking.”
“I think…,” Arthur said slowly.
“Yeah?” Mr. Streater sounded impatient, like a home-care worker chivvying along a befuddled charge.
“I think I must have had a nightmare,” Arthur said at last. “Just a nightmare.”
The prince noticed that Streater had a teapot and a couple of cups. One was filled for each of them.
“I’ve had word from my mother. She tells me you’re the future.”
Streater laughed. “We’re the future, chief. You and me together.” He passed the prince his tea. “Drink up. Time we got started.”
Arthur took the proffered cup and had only just had time to raise it to his lips when Streater clapped his hands together, the lights in the old ballroom went out and the pageant began again.
His ancestor, the Empress of India, sat shimmering before him, every bit as cold and monolithic as before, although this time Arthur thought he could detect a certain satisfaction, something almost post-coital in her bearing. She was flanked by three strangers, a trio of men, all in their Sunday best, their hair shiny and slicked flat.
“Streate-” the prince began, but his mother’s creature merely waved for him to be silent, with no more respect than a parent might show a persistent child on a long car journey.
“Don’t be so impatient, chief. Just sit back and enjoy it.” He smirked in the gloom. “I gather there was a time when your missus used to give you similar advice.”
Arthur was about to protest at this distressingly accurate slur when the door swung open and the translucent figure of Dedlock strode in, coat-tails flapping, his face set in an expression of reckless determination.
The old Queen, one hundred and six years dead, turned up her lips in a gruesome approximation of a smile. “To what do we owe this most irregular pleasure?”
The man from the Directorate seemed flustered and ill at ease. “Forgive me, your majesty. Forgive me my haste and my discourteous intrusion. I had no choice but to see you.”
The Queen gazed upon her subject, impassive and unspeaking.
“Your Majesty, I do not believe that Leviathan is what he claims. Surely you know that name is written in the Bible? It is the sea beast, the great serpent, the tyrant of the seven heads.”
“Really, Dedlock.” The Queen was tutting like a ticket collector faced with a recidivist fare dodger offering up some deliriously complicated excuse. “There is no need for such theatrics. Leviathan said you might react like this. He told me last night that there will be doubters.”
“Last night, ma’am?”
“He came to me again in a dream and told me what I must do. I am to construct a chapel beneath Balmoral in his honor. He will keep our borders safe. He will maintain our empire and ensure that this country remains in the hands of my house for all time.”
“Have you never considered, ma’am, that we may achieve all of that without the aid of this Leviathan?”
The Queen did not seem to have even heard the question. “I don’t believe you’ve been introduced to my solicitors,” she said. “They have been hard at work upon the contract.” Like clockwork mannequins, the men behind the Queen stepped forward. “I’d like you to meet the firm of Wholeworm, Quillinane and Killbreath.”
The first of the men thrust out his hand. When he spoke, it was in the rich, plummy tones of the cream of England’s boarding schools. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Dedlock. I’m Giles Wholeworm.”
The next lawyer stepped forward, his hand also extended. “Jim Quillinane,” he said, in the musical lilt of the Emerald Island.
“Robbie Killbreath,” said the third of the lawyers in a thick Scots brogue. “Good tae ken you.”
“Gentlemen,” said the Queen. “You have your orders. You know where to find the boy? Has Leviathan given you directions?”
Wholeworm bowed his head. “Yes, your highness.”
“I know I can rely on your discretion. We will meet again tomorrow.”
The advocates nodded their understanding and, careful never to turn their heads upon the monarch, edged slowly, and with painful respect, from the room.”
“Amusing, aren’t they?” said the Queen after they had left.
“Ma’am?”
“What is it, Mr. Dedlock? What do you want now?”
“I want you to think, ma’am. Please. Consider carefully before taking any action you might regret.”
“Come back tomorrow. Then you shall see. By the time we are finished, you will fall to your knees and worship with me.”
“Tomorrow, ma’am? What’s happening tomorrow?”
The Queen leant toward Dedlock, and even from his distant vantage point, Arthur Windsor thought he could see lights of madness dancing in her eyes. “Something wonderful, Mr. Dedlock. Something glorious. Tomorrow, Leviathan is coming to Earth.”
Chapter 14
Heading back to the flat, half an hour or so after saying goodbye to the old lady, I noticed that a dead ringer for my old bike, which I’d abandoned at work on the day of my initiation into the Directorate, had been roped around the exact same lamppost to which I used to lasso my own. That’s curious, I thought. What a coincidence.
Inside, I found Abbey sitting at the kitchen table and sharing a bottle of wine with the very last person I would have expected.
“Barbara?”
Unflatteringly dressed in chunky knitwear, her hair in some abortive attempt at a bob, the dumpy girl giggled in greeting. “Henry! Hello!”
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“I brought your bike back. You left it at work.” A hint of a blush suggested itself at the peripheries of her cheeks. “I’ve chained it up outside.”
I was quite touched by this. “That’s very kind of you. I’d completely forgotten about it.”
“You don’t need it for your new job?”
“Not really. They usually send a car.”
Barbara beamed in admiration.
Abbey broke in. “We’ve just been getting to know one another,” she said. “I did say that Barbara could leave the bike with me but she seemed to have set her heart on seeing you.”
Barbara flushed pink.
Abbey gave me a meaningful look. “We thought you’d be home sooner.”
“I’ve been at the hospital.”
Barbara looked sympathetically deflated at this and Abbey shot her a look of profound irritation.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Barbara. “Is there any change?”
“I’m not sure there’ll ever be.”
“Have a drink,” Abbey said quickly. “Join us.”
I sat down, poured myself a glass of wine and asked Barbara how she was getting on at the office.
“You know how it is. More files than we know what to do with. Even the Norbiton annex is running out of space now. And Peter’s been acting funny.”
“No change there, then,” I said, and Barbara laughed dutifully.
“They keep sending me down to the mail room.” The pudgy girl leant over to me. “That lady down there, the fat, sweaty one. She gives me the creeps.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “I remember. But how are you?”
As Barbara chattered on, Abbey curled back into her seat and gulped sulkily at her wine.
“I had the most wonderful evening the other night with your Mr. Jasper,” Barbara said.
A shiver of suspicion ran through me. “You did?”
“Lovely man. So attentive.”
I felt troubled by this, though I was uncertain why. “Are you seeing him again?�
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“Definitely,” she said, with just a touch too much certainty. “Hopefully…,” she added.
Abbey yawned, then gaped in fake astonishment at her watch. “God. Is that the time?”
“What a tedious woman,” she said, the moment poor Barbara had gone.
I was in the kitchen, putting the kettle on. “Wouldn’t call her tedious.”
“Clearly she finds you fascinating.”
“Sorry?”
“Coming all the way here just to drop off your scrap-heap of a bike. It’s embarrassing.”
“I thought it was a nice gesture.”
“Nice gesture?” Evidently, this suggestion was absurd. “I think she’s after you.”
I could hear the kettle boiling. “What do you mean ‘after’ me?”
Abbey folded her arms. “I can see it in her eyes.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would Barbara be interested in me? Anyway, do you want a coffee or not?”
Abbey stalked from the room. “Good grief,” I muttered. “Surely you can’t be jealous?”
My only answer was the slam of her bedroom door.
I was giving serious thought to knocking on that door, to taking Abbey in my arms and confessing that I was falling for her in the most hopeless, overwhelming kind of way (and that I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in Barbara), when the doorbell began to clamor for my attention.
The driver from the Directorate slouched on the threshold. “Fetch your coat,” he grunted. “The Prefects want a word.”
I made as much noise as I possibly could in retrieving my coat and preparing to leave the flat, but Abbey didn’t emerge from her bedroom and I was too proud to tell her that I was going.
Barnaby had Radio Four playing in the car, some piece of late-night esoterica with a couple of professors spatting crustily over the early works of H.G. Wells.
“Academics,” Barnaby spat as we drove past Tooting Bec station and began the usual protracted escape from south London.
“But weren’t you one of those once?” I asked mildly.
“Yeah,” Barnaby said, his voice bristling with an even greater than usual distillation of belligerence. “Difference is — I knew what I was talking about. Still would, as a matter of fact, if those bastards hadn’t set me up. If they hadn’t concocted that farrago of-”
“Where’s Jasper tonight?” I asked, eager to avoid another venting of the Barnaby spleen. “Where’s Steerforth?”
The driver grimaced. “Too chicken. Couple of nancy boys, the pair of them.”
“I don’t believe they’re cowards,” I said quietly. “It’s just Hawker and Boon. They’ve got a way of making you feel afraid.”
A grunt from the front seat.
“Have you ever met them?”
“No,” he said, although I could tell by the way he said it that he was lying.
I was about to ask more but Barnaby turned up the volume on the radio as high as it could go and refused to answer any further questions for the duration of the journey.
The phalanx of reporters and photographers who often loiter and preen outside Number Ten in daylight hours had long since retired to bed, and those who were left — the soldiers, the guards, the plainclothes policemen — all parted before me without the slightest murmur of a challenge and I marveled again at the skeleton key effect of the words “the Directorate.”
This time I had walked into Downing Street alone. Barnaby still sat in the car outside, gloomily turning the pages of Erskine Childers and the Drama of Utopianism: (Re)Configuring Bolshevism in “The Riddle of the Sands.”
If anything, the sense of oppression, of walking blithely into the gingerbread house, felt even stronger this time. I moved through the library, stepped behind the painting and descended into the depths, past the silent gallery of freaks and ghouls, and tiptoed along the twilight corridor until I reached the final cell, the dreadful resting place of the Prefects.
The guard, his hands white knuckled around his gun, nodded brusquely and I think I was able to detect, buried somewhere deep in his mask of military indifference, a flicker of concern, the merest suggestion of compassion.
Inside, the Domino Men were waiting, their gnarled, hairy legs swinging to and fro in their deckchairs. Everything seemed identical to my last visit, the room as pitilessly stark as before — except for one peculiar addition.
There was an ancient television set in the center of the circle, cranked up far too loud. I heard the blare of canned laughter, the squeak of poorly delivered wisecracks, the silken voice of one of our most prolific character comedians, but it was only when I recognized the tremulous soprano of my nine-year-old self that I realized with a jolt exactly what it was that those creatures were watching.
On-screen, my younger self walked onto a set which always wobbled and delivered my catchphrase to cyclones of tape-recorded mirth.
Hawker and Boon were staring sullenly at the television, like it was a lecture on photosynthesis which they were being forced to sit through in double-period science.
The smaller man groaned. “Dearie me.”
Hawker shook his head sorrowfully. “I’ve got to be honest with you, old top.”
“Got to be frank.”
“It ain’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Let’s be candid here, Mr. L. It’s about as funny as cholera.”
“It’s about as funny as…” Hawker thought for a moment, then sniggered. “A nun with leprosy.”
A dirty smirk twisted Boon’s features into something rubbery and grotesque. “And we should jolly well know.”
I moved before them, careful to keep outside the circle.
“Why are you watching that?” I asked, as I caught the familiar plonk and grind of the theme tune.
“It really is a clanger, isn’t it, sir?”
Hawker switched off the television, his lips pursed in a moue of distaste. “What a turkey, sir! What a tip-top stinker!”
Boon passed his hand to and fro in front of his nose, as though washing away an imaginary pong. “Phew!”
“Coo-ee!”
I let them finish. “I want you to tell me where Estella is,” I said as calmly as I could.
Hawker looked at me blankly, then cupped a hand to his ear. “Who?”
“Estella,” I said flatly, knowing that he’d heard me perfectly well the first time.
“Oh right! You should have said, sir! We were going to tell you the other day but you dashed out ’fore we got to it. Rather rude, I thought. Bit cheeky.”
“Dashed ungrateful,” said Boon. “Specially since we’d bent over backwards to make you feel welcome.”
“Where’s Estella?” I said again, trying my best to remain toneless.
Boon got to his feet and surveyed the little limits of his cell. “Do you miss it, sir? The old show?”
“The old routine?”
“The roar of the greasepaint?”
“The smell of the crowds?”
Though the Prefects squealed with laughter, I was careful not to let my expression alter. “Where’s Estella?”
“Pity you’re such a terrible actor, isn’t it, Mr. L?”
“S’pose you might have made a career of it if you’d been any good. But you’re nothing now, are you, sir? Is he, Boon?”
“Certainly not, my old Satsuma. He’s a real nobody.”
“Where,” I said, my voice at last betraying my impatience, “is Estella?”
“What a grump.”
“Someone’s in an awful dudgeon.”
“Young Mr. Lamb’s got up on the wrong side of the bed today.”
I glared. “I need to know where she is.”
“Yaroo!”
“You’ve got a rotten temper, Mr. L.”
I tried my best not to listen. “I want to know where Estella is.”
“And you think that’ll be it, do you, sir? You think, once you find the lady, they’ll let you trot back to your old life? Bad luck, old chum. No one
ever leaves the Directorate. You’ll croak in the harness.”
“Where’s Estella?” I said.
Boon smirked. “Even chaps who don’t sign up for Dedlock’s mob end up dying for it,” he said. “Even your daddy, for instance.”
I felt tendrils of panic begin to stir inside me. “Don’t talk about my father.”
Hawker clapped his hands in joy. “Splendid, sir! You were starting to sound like a stuck record.”
“Your pa,” said Boon, “he never signed up for the Directorate. You’re granddad didn’t tell him a thing about it.”
“He wanted him to have a normal, dull sort of life.”
“And he did, didn’t he, Mr. L? Your pa — he was the dullest man you ever knew.”
I protested. “That’s not true!”
“Goodness me, but that fellow was a dullard!”
“And yet…” Boon smirked.
Hawker rubbed his hands together. “We did your granddad a favor once. We told him about the Process.”
“The Process?” I felt myself on the edge of the precipice. What are you talking about?”
“And we didn’t ask for much in exchange, did we, Hawker?”
“Certainly not, Boon. We’re not greedy boys.”
“It was the smallest of favors. The tiniest trinket.”
“What,” I gasped, “did he promise you?”
“He promised us his flesh and blood,” said Hawker.
“And we were ready and waiting on the day of your father’s accident.”
“Accident!” Hawker crowed. “Oh, my little lambkin, now you know the truth of it.”
“We peered into the tangled wreck of his car as he lay dying and we jeered and laughed and poked him with a very big stick.”
The monsters were doubled up with laughter now, jack-knifed in hilarity.
“The look on his face,” said Boon, “as he lay there sobbing! He thought we’d come to save him!”
“Do you remember,” Hawker gasped, forcing the words out amidst eruptions of laughter, “how we poured petrol on his legs?”
I did my best this time. I didn’t holler or scream or beat my fists fruitlessly against the glass walls of the cell. Nor was I tempted to blunder into the circle. Instead, I simply walked calmly over the door and knocked for the guard to let me out.
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