V 02 - Domino Men, The

by Barnes-Jonathan

  “Why?”

  “They said their consciences had too much to bear. They told me that they were ready to give themselves up.”

  “You didn’t believe them?”

  “Of course not. They’re playing some larger game. That chalk circle no more holds them than a shopping bag would restrain an ocelot.”

  I frowned slightly at the metaphor.”

  “Your granddad quit the service and took Estella with him. He went home to your grandmother and a couple of days later, Estella disappeared. He would never tell us where he hid her, even under the severest provocation. The Directorate has men who specialize in persuasion but your grandfather never spoke about it. Not once. So you see why they need to find Estella so badly. She’s not the key to the war. She is the war.”

  Miss Morning and I stared uneasily at one another across the curve of a clay tumor.

  M phone shivered in my pocket. “Excuse me,” I said as I retrieved it, terrified at what news it might bring.

  It was Mr. Dedlock. Our conversation was brief and almost entirely one-sided.

  “What did he say?” the old lady asked as soon as I was done. “Spit it out.”

  “Dedlock has agreed to their terms.” My voice was trembling despite my attempts at moderation. “The Prefects will be moved tomorrow.”

  Miss Morning looked at me sadly and turned away. “Then I think it’s time you went home and enjoyed what little time you have left, because, believe me, everything’s about got to hell.” I got the impression that, in Miss Morning’s world, this constituted fruity language indeed, reserved for use only in the very teeth of catastrophe.

  I was rummaging through my jacket pockets, trying to locate my key, when the door to our little flat in Tooting Bec was shoved open and Abbey stood before me in her dressing gown, her hair still damp from the shower, her pinkish face scrubbed clean of cosmetics, smelling all over of caramel-scented moisturizer.

  “I was worried.”

  “I’m fine.” I walked inside, shut the door, locked it, drew across the chain. “Had to work late, that’s all.” I shrugged off my coat and hung it on the hook.

  “Are you cross with me?”

  “Why would I be cross with you?” I glimpsed bare flesh beneath the dressing gown. She seemed fragile, doll-like, and I had never before felt a more irresistible compulsion to embrace her.

  “I just thought that after what happened last night…” She was chewing on her lower lip. “After what didn’t happen…”

  I took her in my arms, clasped her close and kissed her on the lips, not caring about the consequences, not worrying for once if I might make a prat of myself.

  “Henry?” she asked tremblingly once our lips had finally parted and my hand had begun to slip unthinkingly downward.

  Silently, I led her to my bedroom, where, as gently as I could, I slipped away that gown, brushed my fingers across her breasts, dropped to my knees and began to kiss every part of her.

  Lying in warm-skinned intimacy, we had just begun to drift into a doze when the grouchy buzz of the bell wrenched us back into the real world. Abbey snuffed her disapproval but I disentangled myself, pulled on T-shirt and boxers, and plodded to the door, acutely aware than the evening’s pleasures were already evaporating into history. The bell jangled again and as I reached for the handle, I wondered whether an unexpected ring at the door after midnight had ever, in the whole history of the world, been a herald of good news.

  It was Jasper, giddily energetic, like a child high on tartrazine.

  “I think it’s a mistake,” he said, stepping into my home uninvited.

  I rubbed at my eyes. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.:

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “The Prefects are being moved tonight.”

  “That can’t be right. Mr. Dedlock was quite specific.”

  “Misdirection. Either that or he’s changed his mind. You’d better get your clothes on.” Jasper was ignoring me. Abbey had emerged from the bedroom and stood blinking in the corridor’s electric light, her modesty shielded only by a set of artfully positioned towels.

  Jasper smirked. “You must be Henry’s landlady.”

  Abbey shot me a look made up in equal parts of bewilderment, irritation and accusation.

  “So sorry to barge in like this,” Mr. Jasper went on. “Though I’ve actually been interrupted myself. Just in the middle of squiring young Barbara around town. Wonderful girl. So clean…” He smiled dreamily. “I’ll give you two a moment, shall I?”

  I steered Abbey back into the bedroom, where I apologized profusely, dressed, thrust a comb through my hair and tried to prepare for a night out with Dedlock, with Hawker and with Boon.

  “Could you distract him for a minute?” I asked once I was fully clothed. “Just get him talking. I need to make a private call.”

  “Why?” Abbey asked. “Who the hell are you phoning?”

  “Please. No questions.”

  “One day, Henry, you’re going to have to tell me everything.”

  “I promise. But for now…?”

  Abbey plastered on a hostess smile and we went back together into the sitting room, where Jasper was flicking through a magazine and swigging briskly from a bottle of water. He tapped his watch.

  “Two minutes,” I said. “Just got to go to the bathroom.”

  As I left, I heard Abbey talking, trying her best to distract him. “Lovely to meet a colleague of Henry’s. Now tell me, ’cause I’ve always wondered… What is it you do exactly?”

  I flushed the toilet and crouched beside the bowl, partly to disguise the sound of my voice, partly to fox any listening devices which might have been hidden nearby. It didn’t occur to me at the time to question how naturally I’d taken to such precautions.

  I took out my mobile phone and dialed a number which must have rung a dozen times before it was answered.

  “It’s Henry,” I hissed. “Sorry to wake you.”

  Miss Morning sounded older now, as though she’d aged ten years since I’d left her. “I was not sleeping, Mr. Lamb. Just too afraid to answer.”

  “They’re moving the Prefects tonight.”

  No reply.

  “Miss Morning? I said, they’re moving the Prefects tonight.”

  A heavy sigh. “Then I assume you’ve made a will. I trust you’ve set your affairs in order I hope you’ve prepared yourself for the worst.”

  He never slept with her, of course. As guarantors for the truth, we think it our duty to make that absolutely clear. Naturally, he would have liked to have done so, but we can assure you that he never laid so much as a finger on any part of her. In fact, unless something remarkable happens in the next few days, the miserable man will die a virgin.

  At around the time that Mr. Jasper was standing on Henry’s doorstep, the heir to the throne of England awoke with a wretched headache, an urgent need to urinate and a terrible hunger gnawing at his soul.

  He had no idea how he had ended up in bed, no recollection of staggering along the corridor, of peeling off his clothes and falling onto the mattress, no memory at all, in fact, since he was last in the ballroom, taking tea with Mr. Streater.

  Streater. If the prince was certain of just one thing then it was this: he needed to see that man again. Only Streater would understand. Only Streater could make the world tolerable again. Only Streater could ease the craving, the black desire, the burning need.

  The extremities of his body tingling with pins and needles, the prince swung himself out of bed and wrapped himself in his dressing gown. Every noise seemed too loud, every light intolerably bright. He used the telephone by his bed to make two calls — the first to Mr. Silverman, the second to his wife. Both, he was told, were unavailable.

  In the end the prince had to wake an underbutler named Peter Thorogood to ask the only question which seemed to matter to him anymore.

  “Where is Mr. Streater?”

  Although Peter Thorogo
od thought that the prince appeared out of sorts, he politely pretended not to notice and simply directed him to the room which Streater had commandeered upon his arrival at Clarence House.

  However, once the prince had left (Arthur was adamant that he did not wish to be escorted), Peter Thorogood telephoned his superior, a butler called Gilbert Copplestone, to inform him that the master was acting erratically, that his speech was garbled and his gait had become eccentric. Copplestone conveyed these fears to the head of the household, Mr. Hamish Turberville, who then telephoned the prince’s permanent secretary, Galloway Pratt, who called Kingsley Stratton, his contact at the palace, who spoke to his lover, a lady-in-waiting named Eloise Clow. Four hours later, the Queen herself had heard the news about the behavior of her only son. The message which she sent back was alarmingly simple.

  Everything is proceeding according to plan.

  As Arthur weaved his way down the corridors of Clarence House, he saw what had descended outside — a thick fog, a pea-souper — and it is a measure of his increasing instability that he pondered at length whether the weather was real or a trick of his mind.

  It turned out that Mr. Streater was staying in an unusually unassuming wing of the house, halfway down a corridor of single rooms traditionally designated as quarters for chauffeurs and scullery staff. Exhaling asthmatically with relief, Arthur knocked at the door and waited.

  When the sharp-faced man opened up, he was fully dressed and beaming. “All right, chief?”

  “Let me in.”

  Streater stepped back and watched the heir to the throne totter inside. The room was almost monastic — bare white walls, cheap furniture, a single bed with its duvet rumpled and distressed. There were no books, keepsakes or mementoes, nothing to suggest any life beyond the palace, with just one exception — a framed photograph of a young woman, a pretty brunette in skinny jeans.

  Arthur all but tumbled onto the bed. “You know what I want.”

  Legs splayed, immobile but somehow still swaggering, Streater sat opposite on the only chair in the room. “Do I though, chief? Do I really?”

  “Is it true what you told me? About the deal? About my family?”

  “Come on, you gotta know the answer to that.”

  “So Leviathan is real? The war… I’m a part of it?”

  “Chief, chief, chief. I think we both know that’s not why you’re really here.”

  Windsor blinked vaguely, as though he’d forgotten what he was about to say.

  “Spit it out,” Streater said. “Tell us what you’ve come for.”

  “You know what I want.”

  “Maybe I do, chief. Maybe I do. But perhaps I’d just like to hear you say it.”

  The prince’s Adam’s apple yo-yoed in desperation. He felt salt in his mouth, the panicky taste of sweat. “I was wondering…”

  “Yeah?”

  Arthur’s eyes were pleading. “I was wondering if you happened to have any more tea?”

  Streater laughed. “Tea?”

  The prince ventured one of his unconvincing smiles. “Yes, please.”

  Mr. Streater shook his head in mock sorrow. “Oh, Arthur. You’ve got it bad, haven’t you, old son? But since you asked so nicely…” He reached into the holdall by his feet and pulled out a hypodermic loaded with pink fluid.

  “For God’s sake,” the prince muttered, “now’s not the time to be fooling around with that stuff. I need tea.”

  Streater cocked an eyebrow.

  “What is that muck you put in your veins anyway?”

  Mr. Streater did not smile. He seemed more serious than Arthur had ever seen him before. “The name of the drug is ampersand.”

  “Ampersand? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Ampersand is my mother.” Streater spoke slowly, intoning every word, as though this was something sacred to him. “Ampersand is my father. Ampersand is my lover, my life. Ampersand, Your very Royal Highness, is the future.”

  Arthur moaned. “Please…”

  Streater sat down on the bed and began to roll up the prince’s sleeve.

  “What are you doing?” Windsor was too enfeebled to move, too broken and pathetic to offer the least resistance.

  “I’m giving you what you want, chief. Giving you what you need.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “Surely you’ve worked it out by now? It’s in the tea. It’s always been in the tea.”

  “Streater?”

  “You’ve been taking ampersand from the day we met.” The blond man was slapping the inside of the prince’s arm, searching for a vein, brandishing his needle. “You’re one of us now.”

  After that, His Royal Highness Prince Arthur Aelfric Vortigern Windsor did not speak again but lay back, gave in and let the sharp-featured man do it to him.

  When the thing was over, he wept with gratitude, joy and a terrible sense of submission. He kissed the hands of Mr. Streater, he licked his palms and sucked his fingers. He made awful promises and horrid vows. He bartered his soul for another cup of tea.

  Chapter 17

  I stepped out of the car at the furthest end of Downing Street to find a world fallen into darkness. In open defiance of the TV’s predictions of clear skies and moonlight, an impenetrably dense, freakishly pervasive fog had descended upon the whole of London.

  Fog was everywhere. The city was steeped in it — thicker than smoke, saturating clothes, sinking insidiously into lungs. It was as though we had been dragged half a dozen generations to the era of the gas lamp and the hansom cab, the ancient queen and the advent of the war.

  I was struck by the thought that perhaps such an age was not so far away as it seemed, that it was only the short lives of human beings which gave the illusion of distance. Perhaps, from some greater vantage point, the span between the age of Victoria and our own would appear no more than a handful of seconds, a few spasms of the little hand around the clock.

  The whole of Whitehall had been sealed off and the most famous street in England was crowded with the sounds and sights of war. Arc lights blazed impotently against fog banks. Men in uniform swarmed around an armor-plated vehicle which had been backed close to the door of Number Ten and there was everywhere the glint of gunmetal, the growl of orders, the dull jangle of weaponry. These were preparations for disaster, it seemed to me. This was insurance against catastrophe.

  As I emerged from the car, Mr. Steerforth materialized by my side, flint faced and grave, in his element surrounded by military strut and bustle.

  “You’re with me,” he snapped, and strode away. As I followed him towards Downing Street, the fog closed in around us.

  We were close to the door of Number Ten and Mr. .Jasper was in sight when Steerforth passed me a pink, flesh-colored piece of plastic, shaped something like a tadpole. “Dedlock wants to speak to you. You know how to use these?”

  I started to complain, asking whether this was really necessary, when Steerforth thrust the thing hard into my left ear. A tendril groped its way into my earhole. I felt a savage poking through the doughy wetness beyond and cried out in pain and shock. Although the pain ended almost at once, I was left with an unshakeable unease, a permanent, shivery sense of intrusion. I heard a familiar voice, too loud, in my head. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  I imagined him grinning gummily, staring down across the river from his eyrie.

  “This is the form tonight will take. The Prefects have already been released from their cell. They are to be taken from Number Ten under guard and placed in the armored vehicle which I imagine you see before you now. From here, they will direct us to Estella. The end of the war is in sight. I would suggest that this is cause for jubilation.”

  Steerforth spoke up. “With respect, sir, I strongly recommend that we stand down for tonight. There are too many variables in this fog. We should wait until we’re in control of the situation.”

  “We have total control, Mr. Steerforth.”

  “We can’t see more than half a yard in front of o
ur faces, sir. I don’t think you understand the risks—”

  “It is you who does not understand, Mr. Steerforth. We cannot afford to wait. Do you think the House of Windsor is sitting idle? Do you think that they would surrender in the face of a touch of fog? They will be preparing themselves for the endgame. We cannot sit idly by and watch this city slide into chaos.”

  “I’m aware of the stakes, sir.”

  “No!” Dedlock shouted. “You are not! You have no idea what I’ve given up to make this happen!” I felt a twinge of pain in my head and pictured the old man splashing in his tank, impotent and enraged. I tugged at Jasper’s sleeve and asked if there was any way to turn down the volume.”

  Jasper tried to shush me, but it was too late, and Dedlock was growling in my ear again.”

  “Are you trying to shut me up, Mr. Lamb?”

  “No, no. Of course not.”

  “I think you’ll find me a difficult man to silence.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and mercifully, the conversation rolled on.

  I felt my mobile phone shiver in my pocket and pulled it out as discreetly as I could. There was a text message from Abbey.

  Thinking of you x

  The little X made my heart soar. It made me want to sing.

  Steerforth was still protesting. “Please, sir. Please reconsider.”