‘Yes, Miss Webster?’
‘I’d suggest getting rid of that awful hat. Makes you look like Jack Palance in Shane.’
The strained mood in records was spreading through HQ. Parties of armed Vigilants patrolled the operations floor as we collected Becky for the rounds, and there were more guards outside, two posted at the entrance, teams assembling in the alley, boots snapping over the cobbles.
Lu, already in position at the rickshaw, watched in bemusement.
‘What’s all the fuss?’ she said, and Mr October said, ‘I’ll explain as we go.’
When Lu took off, charging through the invisible gap into darkness, the giddiness rushed at me for the second time. A vertical slit of light at the end widened and spread as if a door were opening, and then we were in London again, veering right along Camden Passage.
‘You felt it again, didn’t you,’ Becky said. A statement, not a question. ‘Are you sure you’re up to this? If you’re coming down with something. . .’
‘I missed one shift last night. I’m not about to miss another.’
‘Is there a problem?’ Mr October said. ‘What are you two rabbiting on about?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just an odd feeling when we came out.’
‘And the same before, when we went in,’ Becky added.
‘Hmm. I see.’
He studied me for a long moment before turning to watch the street. He seemed lost in thought, perhaps preoccupied by the security breach and the state of alert back at Pandemonium House.
The dead rocker had wandered a good distance from the scene of the motorcycle smash that ended his fifty-two year innings on planet Earth. An icy patch of road and a steep wall on the Blackwall tunnel’s western bore were to blame. Prior to the accident he’d been tooling along high as a kite on prescription medicine, according to the 534227 on his card, which may have had something to do with it too. No other motorists were involved.
This newly-departed was Pat Malone, a man with a long black ponytail, a lined and puffy drinker’s face and big saucer eyes. We found him staring up in dismay at the O2 theatre, then at the ticket in his hand. His leather jacket and blue jeans were shredded and bloody.
Mr October began to change, clothes rippling about him, features skittering like bugs, but halfway through becoming the empathiser he seemed to rethink and switched back to the pirate guise.
‘I’ve a hunch he’ll be more comfortable seeing me like this,’ he said. ‘Observe his general demeanour and take note of why he’s here. See the ticket he’s holding. His disappointment is understandable – not only is he dead but he’s going to miss the concert too.’
‘The gig, man, not the concert,’ Malone said. ‘And it ain’t just a gig – it’s the Stones.’
‘Ah, the Stones.’ This meant something to Mr October, who’d been around for many a long year and heard and seen so much. ‘Yes, I used to like their particular brand of beat combo music myself back in the day.’
‘It’s rock ‘n’ roll, man. Beat combo music? Where you bin?’
‘Now what was that song of theirs I used to enjoy?’ Mr October hummed a short refrain.
Malone’s face lit up. ‘You can’t carry a tune but that’s ‘Paint It Black’ sure enough,’ he said, but he quickly became distraught again. ‘They’ll play it tonight for sure. If I could only hear it one more time. I mean, how many more chances would I have had to see ‘em again? How much time do they have left, anyway?’
Mr October removed his hat and dusted it off and combed back his hair with a hand. ‘One never knows.’
‘Couldn’t you wait?’ Malone pleaded. ‘Just until after the show. You could come for me later, couldn’t you? I swear I won’t try to run. I’d meet you here right after. What do you say?’
Mr October checked the card and became quiet for a time, considering the possibilities.
‘Come oooon,’ said Malone. ‘Just a few hours is all I’m asking. I’m dead, I ain’t disputing it. I just wanna see the Stones!’
We awaited Mr October’s decision.
Finally he turned to Lu and said, ‘Call dispatch. Ask for one – no, make that two junior agents to keep Mr Malone company until we return, in case there’s an enemy presence at the concert – gig.’ To Malone he said, ‘This is quite irregular, but I do believe it’s possible to bump you to the end of our schedule.’
Malone’s eyes filled with delight and gratitude.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Mr October said, ‘I wouldn’t mind catching a few minutes of the Stones myself if we’re back in time.’
‘Man, you don’t know how much this means.’
‘Oh, I do.’
Malone narrowed his watery eyes at Mr October. ‘Who are you anyway, mate? Haven’t I seen you before?’
‘Yes, but I’m surprised you remember. It was so long ago and you weren’t in the best of shape. Your first motorcycle accident on the road home from Brighton, where you’d been appearing as an extra in a moving picture called Quadrophobia.’
‘Quadrophenia. Sure I remember.’
‘You were in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and you opened your eyes very briefly and there I was, attending to your passenger, who sadly wasn’t as fortunate as you. The staff couldn’t save him that night, but they worked hard to bail you out.’
Malone was walking on air when we left. A lone figure standing beneath the O2, he watched the rickshaw pull away and raised a hand in a V for Victory sign.
‘It’s only rock ‘n’ roll but I like it!’ he called.
Because of the late change to our timetable, because Mr October wished to see the Rolling Stones, we were early for our next call at Canary Wharf.
Ordinarily, being early was a good thing. The Ministry encouraged punctuality. But this case turned out to be different, presenting us with what Mr October called ‘a moral dilemma’.
The 9664, Clare Turnbull, 37, stood at the edge of her office building’s roof, swaying on flimsy legs in the wind. A crowd had gathered sixteen floors below and police were ordering them across the street while calling through amplified speakers for Clare to move back from the edge and come down. At the start of all this they’d come to arrest her. Now they were here to save her. When we came up to the roof, Clare Turnbull was still very much alive.
The numbers said she was a financier accused of siphoning small funds from many different accounts into one large off-shore account of her own. She must have heard at the last minute that detectives were entering the building, too late for a clean getaway, time only for Clare to take the lift as high as it would go, then run up the last flight of stairs to the roof.
It was freezing up there. My teeth chattered and Becky hugged herself, her scarf tugged up over her nose and mouth. We kept to the far side of the roof from Clare while Mr October discreetly became the elderly man in white.
‘Looks like the old softly-softly for this one,’ he said. ‘No sudden noises or moves now.’
Becky muttered something inaudible, then tugged down her scarf and repeated it.
‘We could save her, couldn’t we? Never mind the police. We could do something right now.’
‘You misunderstand,’ Mr October said. ‘Our business can seem brutal at times, but here’s her card, her name and number. She’s on the same list as everyone else, and as you well know the telegraph doesn’t get these things wrong.’
Becky was horrified. ‘She’s still alive and breathing, though. We could bend the rules a bit, couldn’t we?’
‘I’m afraid not. Our rules never bend, they only break.’
‘But you bent them for that bloke, that rocker, twenty minutes ago.’
‘He’s a newly-departed. All I did was rejig the schedule to accommodate him. Not the same thing at all.’
‘So you mean to say whatever happens, whatever we do, she’s bound to fall?’
Mr October nodded and said gravely, ‘That’s what it says here.’
‘Then why not just push her, get it over wi
th?’ Becky demanded.
‘Now you’re being facetious. We can’t do that for the same reason we can’t save her,’ Mr October replied. ‘Regulations. We can’t intervene in the natural order of things.’
Becky found this as hard to take as I did. Her shoulders sagged and she looked away past the Gherkin at the bright full moon sitting low in the sky behind a mask of cloud. A seagull’s silhouette crossed the moon’s surface, gliding, wings unmoving.
‘Look,’ Becky said, ‘imagine we were like . . . like a film crew or something shooting by a river or a lake and we saw some kid drowning. We’d drop the camera and try to save them, wouldn’t we? We’d do what we could. We wouldn’t just stand there recording it all.’
Mr October wiped his weary face. ‘What’s written will come to pass, and in such a case you’d find that the child you manage to save is not on the list, and the child you try to save but who drowns is on the list. I don’t wish to sound callous, but that’s how it goes.’
‘In other words, we do nothing at all,’ Becky said, outraged. ‘And nothing we do makes any difference. But you still have to try. In fact, what the hell, I’m going to try. I’m going to talk her out of it. . .’
‘Becky. . .’ Mr October said, but she was already marching away on her mission. She’d only taken a half dozen paces, though, when it happened. Destiny struck.
The seagull came out of nowhere, diving out of the gloom above the rooftops. Perhaps it never saw Clare Turnbull standing on the roof in its line of flight, or perhaps it veered so close out of curiosity, attracted by her outstretched arms, which she held out for balance in the wind. For all the gull knew, she could have been offering up food from her frozen hands.
It didn’t strike her. From our vantage point it seemed to miss her by a fraction, brushing past her billowing hair. Clare flashed out a hand, sensing the movement, reacting to the rush of air from its wings as it curved east. That was all it took to unsettle her, and then she was pinwheeling her arms frantically to bring herself back.
In the last moments before she went, her instinct seemed to be telling her not to go, not to fall but hold on for dear life, because whatever came next if she lived – newspaper headlines, scandal and jail time, the end of one life and the start of another – had to be better than no life at all.
But she fell. Her name was on the list and the telegraph never lied. She fell, and screams and howls rose from the street and drifted up on the wind and across the roof as Becky turned back to us, hanging her head.
Behind Becky, in the exact spot Clare had just left, a busy constellation of dim lights danced and flickered, arranging themselves into a sequence of different shapes, a bird treading air, an angel with outstretched wings, then finally a wingless figure, Clare Turnbull herself.
Clare’s separated self sat on the edge, looking out on the glittering city. Her shoulders were shaking, not from the cold but because she was sobbing.
Mr October squeezed Becky’s hand. ‘You see? It’s hard, but there’s nothing anyone could have said to help her – not until now. But now the time for talking begins.’
He started across the roof, shuffling along on his walking stick, the city lights twinkling around him as he prepared to send Clare Turnbull to her own great gig in the sky.
14
THE SCREENING
he call came in towards the end of the shift. A rusty-sounding bell trilled at knee height in front of the passenger seat, and Mr October opened a concealed compartment, lifting out a strange-looking antique telephone. It was a black two-piece candlestick phone, the kind you see in old gangster films, with a rotary dial and a wire snaking back inside the compartment.
‘Hello?’ Mr October said, holding the earpiece to his ear. He listened for a moment with a stern expression, nodding but not speaking.
Sensing the importance of the call, Lu slowed to a trot along the Ball’s Pond Road, awaiting instructions.
‘The rickshaw phone only rings when a matter is urgent,’ Mr October said, hanging up. ‘Lu, turn this thing around! We’re to drop Miss Sanborne here and return immediately to headquarters.’
‘What’s this about? Shouldn’t I be coming too?’ Becky said. ‘We’re all on the same team, aren’t we?’
‘This doesn’t concern you,’ Mr October said. ‘Besides, you’ve done your stint for tonight. It’s better if you go home.’
‘In case you’ve forgotten, Mr October, I don’t have a home anymore.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten. My apologies. Be with your parents, then. They need you more than we do at this point.’
‘Then why take Ben? He hasn’t done anything wrong.’ Becky gave me a quizzical look. ‘Has he?’
As far as I knew, I hadn’t, but Mr October was giving nothing away.
‘I sincerely hope not,’ he said.
‘It’s OK,’ I told Becky. ‘We’ll sort it, whatever it is. Do like he says and go to your aunt’s. I’ll see you in the morning.’
She climbed reluctantly down to the curb, and while Lu doubled back on the street I twisted around to watch Becky’s forlorn figure dissolving in the lights behind us.
‘Any idea why they called us in?’ I said.
Mr October said, ‘All I know is that it’s an Infernal Enquiries matter, and they said to be sure to bring you.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘I’m sure it will be fine. You’re one of our rising stars – no one so young has ever made such an impression on the conference room – and they know not to jeopardise your education.’ Watching the traffic, he added with a sigh, ‘The Stones will be onstage about now. Ah, well.’
The earlier journey from headquarters had left me with a just-bearable pulse behind my eyes all evening, but when Lu returned through the walls I thought my skull might explode. Leaving the rickshaw on doddery legs, I had to take a minute on Eventide Street while my head slowly cleared.
‘Easy,’ Lu said, taking my arm and helping me along.
Several other Ministry vehicles were parked around the alley, half a dozen SUVs, a Ford Anglia, a late 1950s Plymouth and a Mr Whippy ice cream van playing the Magic Roundabout theme. An ice cream van? I would’ve thought that odd if I didn’t spend most evenings riding in a single-seater rickshaw with two other passengers and room to spare.
There was a lockdown in place in the building, an air of confusion, and Vigilants were posted outside every office on the main operations floor. Clerical staff ran back and forth carrying files and field teams stood around muttering among themselves. Joe Mort gave us his customary nod, and Kate Stone smiled, then shyly looked away as we passed. A woman in a black and white houndstooth coat watched us with striking green eyes. Could she be the one Becky had told me about, the woman who’d held Mum’s hand in the waiting room? This wasn’t the time to ask.
‘We should be in the field now, no idea what’s cooking,’ Joe said, and further along the hall team-leader Rusty complained, ‘We’re wasting time when we could be bustin’ enemy heads. What’re we waiting for?’
The Vigilant outside receipts was one of the pair who’d brought me in on Halloween night, the less approachable of the two. He had the same fixed expression as his colleagues, and he wasn’t moving from his post for anyone, not even for Mr October.
‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘Orders is orders. You’re not allowed to pass.’
‘Ludicrous,’ Mr October said. ‘Can’t you hear the telegraph, you numbskull? Do you have the faintest idea what that means?’
‘Sir, that doesn’t concern me. It’s not my job.’
‘Well, it should concern you. And don’t give me that “sir” business, either.’
‘No, sir.’
‘You’re preventing Ministry staff from doing their duty,’ Mr October seethed. ‘Don’t think for a second it won’t be noted. I intend to report this matter to the elders.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Who’s responsible for this palaver, anyway? Who called the lockdown? Speak up, man.’
‘Th
e elders, sir,’ the Vigilant said. ‘And even you have to answer to them.’
‘Insolence,’ Mr October said, losing patience, momentarily morphing back and forth between the pirate and a personality I hadn’t seen before, a wild-eyed man of the wilderness, blond-bearded and bare-toothed, his face burning with terrible fury.
The appearance of this one, a madman at boiling point, chilled my bones even though I saw him only briefly. Kate Stone, seeing him too, clapped a hand to her mouth. The Vigilant fell back, thumping the door, and a hush descended on the hallway as if everyone, even those who hadn’t seen, could feel it.
‘Who was that?’ I asked as Mr October recomposed himself.
‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘He was, indeed is, a fearsome Norse warrior. Sometimes I almost forget he’s there, as he doesn’t often appear. I’d rather try to reason than resort to thuggery, and he’s anything but reasonable, to say the least. Shame, though, I didn’t have time to let him loose before I was struck by Synister’s fireball.’
I blinked at him. ‘Nathan Synister did that to you?’
‘Let’s just say I owe him one.’ Now he turned to the Vigilant at the door. ‘Are you letting us in or not?’
‘Sorry, sir. Ordinarily I’d follow your orders, or those of any field team leader, but as this comes directly from above. . .’
‘Mr October?’ someone called down the busy hallway. ‘Conference room, please. The elders are ready.’
‘Ben, go to the waiting room,’ he said, changing for the meeting into a well-groomed city slicker type in a midnight blue suit. ‘No point in dilly-dallying here. I’ll get to the bottom of this.’
Behind the receipts office door, the telegraph rumbled on.
Sukie was already in the waiting room, as were several other lost-looking staff. Lulling ancientspeak music played through wall-mounted speakers, a kind of bossa nova jazz featuring a singer who sounded like Astrid Gilberto, who Mum liked, but whose lyrics were indecipherable.
‘You were here when the lockdown began,’ I said, taking a seat with Sukie. ‘Didn’t anyone explain it?’
The Great and Dangerous Page 11