“Do you want to know what any of these things are?” said Billy.
“No no,” said Vardy thoughtfully. He approached the oarfish caught decades before. He looked at an antique alligator baby. “Ha,” he said.
He circumnavigated. “Ha!” he said again abruptly. He had reached the cabinet of Beagle specimens. He wore an unrecognisable expression.
“This is them,” he said after awhile.
“Yeah,” said Billy.
“My good God,” Vardy said softly. “Good God.” He leaned very close and read their labels a long time. When finally he rejoined Collingswood, as she ran information through the computer, he glanced back at the Beagle cabinet more than once. Collingswood followed his glance.
“Oh yeah,” she said to the jars. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Are you who I’m supposed to meet?” Billy said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m him. Come down the pub.”
“Uh …” Billy said. “I don’t think that’s in my plans …”
“Best thing for you, a drink,” Baron said. “Best thing. Coming?” he said to Vardy.
Vardy shook his head. “I’m not the persuasive one.” He waved them out.
“Nah,” said Collingswood to Billy. “Not so much. It ain’t that he’s not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He’s interested in it. Like something in a jar.”
“Come on, Billy,” Baron said. “Come and have a drink on the Metropolitan Police.”
The world was swaying when they left. Too many people speaking in too many street-corner hushes, too much foreclosure, the sky closing some deal. Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote. The pub was a dark drinkerie decorated with old London road signs and copies of antique maps. They sat in an out-of-the-way corner. Even so, the other punters, a mix of seedy geezers and office workers, were clearly unsettled by Kath Collingswood’s uniformed—if unorthodoxly—presence.
“So …” Billy said. He had no idea what to say. Collingswood seemed unbothered. She just watched him while Baron went to the bar. Collingswood offered a cigarette.
“I think it’s no smoking,” Billy said. She looked at him and lit. The smoke surrounded her in dramatic shapes. He waited.
“Here’s the thing,” Baron said, delivering the drinks. “You heard Vardy. Parnell and the toothies have eyes on you. So you aren’t necessarily in the safest of all situations.”
“But I’m nothing,” Billy said. “You know that.”
“Hardly the point,” Baron said. It surprised him how hard it jarred him to see Collingswood drink and smoke in uniform. “Let’s take stock,” Baron said. “Now, Vardy … You saw him in action. You know the sort of thing he does. For all our expertise, in this case, vis-à-vis—that is to say, what’s going on at the moment—we could do with some input. From a specialist. Like yourself. We’re dealing with fanatics. And fanatics are always experts. So we need experts of our own. And that is where you come in.”
Billy stared at him. He even laughed a bit. “I wondered if you were going to say something like this, but then I was like, don’t be mad.”
“None of us knows shit about giant squid,” Collingswood said. The animal’s name sounded absurd in her sarky London voice. “’Cause we don’t give a shit about it, granted, but, you know.”
“Fine, then, so leave me alone,” Billy said. “Not as if I’m an expert anyway.”
“Oh come on, don’t be like that.”
“Don’t just mean book-smarts, Harrow.” Baron said. “I have a healthy respect for cultists. And they think you’re something special, which says a lot, no matter what you think. Remember when you saw Dane Parnell? Remember about the bus window?”
“What?” said Billy. “That it was broken?”
“What you said to us was you saw it break. How do you suppose that happened?” Baron let the question sit. “The way we, the FSRC I mean, do things … we need a subtler approach than the rest of the force. It’s handy to have members outside of the actual service.”
“You actually are actually trying to get me to join,” Billy said, incredulous.
“There’s certain privileges,” Baron said. “A few responsibilities. Official Secrets, whatnot. Bit of dosh. Not enough to really make a big difference, to be honest, but, you know, it’s a couple of pizzas …”
“And tell me, does anyone in the FSRC,” Billy said, “ever make a blind bit of sense?” He looked at his drinking partners blearily. “I was not expecting to be recruited today.”
“Yeah, and by the filth, too,” Collingswood said. She blew gusts, gave him a little smirk. Still no one was telling her to stop smoking.
“We want you onside, Billy,” Baron said. “You could help Vardy. You know the books. You’ll understand the squid stuff. Any investigation, we always start with beliefs, but the biology’s going to be part of all that.
“You know, I have to tell you …” Baron shifted as if broaching a painful subject. “You might have heard, it’s an old standard that if you’re looking for whodunit, you start with whoever finds the body. And you did have access to the tank, too.”
Billy’s eyes widened. He began to rise. Baron pulled him back down, laughing. “Sit down, you pillock,” he said. “I’m just saying that if we wanted to, we could approach this a whole other way. Where were you on the night of, et cetera and so on. But you and us can scratch each other’s backs. We want insight and you want protection. Win-win, mate.”
“So why are you threatening me?” Billy said. “And I told you, I don’t have any insight …”
“You going to tell me,” Baron interrupted, tilting his chin in a come now look, “you’ve got no sense of the bloody awesomeness of that thing?”
“… The squid?”
“The Archi-bloody-teuthis, Billy Harrow, yes. The giant squid. That thing in the jar. That. That got took. And is been and gone. Are you really surprised someone might worship it? Don’t you want a better idea why? What the stakes are? You know stuff’s going on, now. Don’t you want to know more?”
“There’s new life and new civilisations,” Collingswood said. She did her face in a hand mirror.
Billy shook his head and said, “Bloody hell.”
“Nah,” Collingswood said. “That’s a different unit.”
Billy closed his eyes, opened them at the sound of the glasses vibrating on the table. Collingswood and Baron looked at each other. “Did he just …?” Collingswood said. She looked at Billy again, with interest.
“We know you’ve been unsettled,” Baron said carefully. “Makes you a great candidate …”
“Unsettled?” Billy thought of the jarred man. “That’s one way to put it. And now you want me to, to go looking stuff up for you? That’s it?”
“For a starter.”
“I do not think so,” Billy said. “I’d rather go home and forget all about whatever’s going on.”
“Right,” said Collingswood. She took a drag. The low light glimmered on her gold trimmings. “Like you can forget about it. Like you can forget about all this.” She swayed in her chair. “Good luck with that, bruv.”
“No one doubts you’d rather,” Baron said. “But choice, alas, is not given to all of us. Even if you’re not interested in it, it’s interested in you. Let me just let that stand for a tick.
“Thing is, Billy, we should be outdated. FSRC got set up a little bit before 2000. Cobbled together from a couple of older outfits. Supposed to be temporary. It was the millennium: we were waiting for some devout nutters to set fire to the Houses of Parliament. Sacrifice Cherie Blair to their goat overlords, something.”
“No luck there,” Collingswood said. She did the French breathing thing with her smoke. Disgusting as it was, Billy couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“Sweet FA,” said Baron. “A little bit of silly buggery, but the big Y2K explosion of … well, millennialism, that we’d been expecting … didn’t happen.”
“Not then,” said C
ollingswood.
“Do you even remember the millennium?” Billy said. “Weren’t you watching Teletubbies?” She smirked.
“She’s right,” Baron said. “Stuff was delayed. It came after. Eventually we ended up busier than ever. Look, I don’t care what these groups want to do, so long as they keep to themselves. Paint yourself blue and boff cactuses, just do it indoors and don’t involve civilians. Live and let live. But that’s not what causes the trouble.” He tapped the table with each word that followed. “All these groups are all about revelations, apocrypha …”
“Always boils down to the same thing,” Collingswood said.
“It does a bit,” said Baron. “Any holy book, it’s the last chapter that gets us interested.”
“John the fucking Divine,” Collingswood said. “Bish bash fucking bosh.”
“What my colleague is getting at,” Baron said, “is we’re facing a wave of St. Johns. A bit of an epidemic of eschatologies. We live,” he said, too flatly for any humour to be audible, “in the epoch of competing ends.”
Collingswood said, “Ragnarok versus Ghost Dance versus Kali Yuga versus Qiyamah yadda yadda.”
“That’s what gets converts these days,” Baron said. “It’s a buyers’ market in apocalypse. What’s hot in heresy’s Armageddon.”
“It was all chat, for ages,” Collingswood said. “But since suddenly, something’s actually going on.”
“And they’re all still insisting it’s their apocalypse that’s going to happen,” Baron said. “And that means trouble. Because they’re fighting about it.”
“What do you mean something’s going on?” Billy said, but what with his head all over the place and the blatantly actual fact of impossibilities, the scorn he tried to put in it didn’t really take. Collingswood prodded the air, rubbed her fingers together to indicate that she felt something, as if the world had left residue on her.
“You got to be worried when they’re agreeing about anything,” she said. “Prophets. That’s the last bloody thing you want prophets to do. Even if, especially if, they still don’t agree on details. Heard about them hoodies and asbos rucking in East London?” She shook her head. “Brothers of Vulpus went at it with a bunch of druids. Nasty. Them sickles are sharp. And all over how the world’s going to end.”
“We’re overstretched, Harrow,” said Baron. “’Course we do other stuff; sacrificed kiddies, animal cruelty, whatnot. But it’s ends-of-the-world where the action is. It’s harder and harder to deal with the apocalypse rumbles. We can’t cope,” he said. “I’m being frank with you. Let alone now something this big has happened. Don’t get me wrong—I got no more time for fortune cookies than you have. Still though. Little while ago, half the prophets in London began to know—know—that the world’s on its way out.” He did not sound as if he was mocking the knowledge. “And I am utterly buggered if I know what that’s about, but then it suddenly got a lot more definite. Round about when you-know-what happened.”
“Your squid went poof,” Collingswood said.
“It is not my squid.”
“Oh it is, though,” she said. “Come on, it is, though.” It felt like his, when she said that. “It happened again,” she said to Baron. “It got closer again.”
“They brought the public into it,” Baron said. “And that is not on. We go out of our way to keep civies out. But if someone like you, someone with knowledge I mean, does get his face rubbed in it, well, we take advantage.”
“Some people make better recruits’n others,” Collingswood said. She watched Billy closely. She leaned closer. “Open your gob a minute,” she said. He did not consider saying no. She peered past his teeth. “You shouldn’t have told your mates about the squid,” she said. “You shouldn’t have could.”
“Vardy doesn’t need me,” Billy said. “He can research all this himself. And I don’t need you.”
“The professor can be a touch off-putting, I know,” Baron said. He took one of Collingswood’s cigarettes.
“The way he was talking,” Billy said. “About the squid people. It was like he was one of them.”
“You’ve put your finger on it,” Baron said. “It is just like he’s one of them. He has a little revelation.”
“Takes one to know one,” said Collingswood. “Oh yeah.”
“What?” said Billy. “He was one of …?”
“Man of faith,” Baron said. “Grew up one of your ultra-born-agains. Creationist, literalist. His dad was an elder. He was in it for years. Lost his faith but not his interest, lucky for us, and not his nous, neither. Every group we look at, he gets it like a convert”—Baron thumped his chest—“because for a moment or two he is.”
“It’s more than that,” Collingswood said. “He don’t just get it,” she said. She grinned smoke at Billy. She put her hand to her lips, as if she were whispering, though she was not. “He misses it. He’s miserable. He didn’t used to have to put up with none of this random reality cack. He’s pissed off with the world for being all godless and pointless, get me? He’d go back to his old faith tomorrow if he could. But he’s too smart now.”
“That’s his cross to bear,” said Baron. “Boom-boom! I thank you.”
“He knows religion is bollocks,” Collingswood said. “He just wishes he didn’t. That’s why he understands the nutters. That’s why he hunts them. He misses pure faith. He’s jealous.”
Chapter Eight
IN LATE DRAB RAIN, BARON DROVE BILLY BACK TO HIS FLAT. “KATH’S going to take a look at your security,” he said.
“Haven’t got any.”
“Well quite.”
“I don’t want to let nothing happen to you now,” she said. “Not now you’re precious.” He looked at her sideways. “And don’t let anyone in you don’t know for a few days, either.”
“Are you joking?”
“Look, they’re not stupid,” Baron said. “They’re going to know we’re watching. But they’ve got some questions about you, for obvious, and curiosity can be a bit of a millstone. So safety first, eh?” He turned to look at Billy in the backseat. “I don’t like it any more than you. Alright, perhaps you like it even less than me.” He laughed.
“Shouldn’t you be protecting me?” Billy said.
“Wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang,” Collingswood sang.
“Gary Glitter?” Billy said. “Really?”
“I wouldn’t say danger,” said Baron. “I’d say at the very worst it’s dangish. We’re not saying don’t have anyone over—”
“I bloody am,” said Collingswood, but Baron continued, “if it’s someone you trust, that’s all peachy. Just being cautious. You’re small fry. They’ve got what they want.”
“The squid,” said Billy.
“Collingswood’s going to install a good solid security set. You’ll be fine. And you know, if you take us up on our offer, we might upgrade it.”
Billy stared at them. “This isn’t a job offer. It’s a protection racket. Literally, protection.”
Collingswood tutted. “Little drama queen, ain’t you?” she said. She patted his cheek. “It’s benefits, innit? All jobs have them.”
Baron steered Billy toward the kitchen while Collingswood milled by the front door. She looked thoughtfully around the hallway, the cabinet on which Billy left his keys and post. She made a sight, trendily unkempt, up on tiptoe, cigarette loose between her lips as if in a French film, prodding at the upper corner of his doorway with confidence and precision Billy did not associate with someone so young.
“Understand what we’re talking about,” Baron said. He poked around without asking, looking for coffee. “You’d keep your job. Just a day off a week, something, to put in time with us. For training. Extreme theology, self-defence. And there’d be that bit of dosh.” He sipped. “I suppose this must all be a bit much.”
“Are you taking the piss?” Billy said. “A bit much? I just found a man pickled. I’m being recruited by cops who tell me the Cthulhu cult might be after me
…”
“Alright,” Baron said. He did not, Billy noticed, need any explanation as to what Cthulhu was. “Calm down. Let me tell you what I think. Someone’s watching you. As in, look-but-don’t-touch. Maybe they’re going to go for a conversion. You know how creationists are chuffed to the bollocks when they have members who are scientists or whatever? Think what it would be to this lot to have a genuine squidologist in the congregation.”
“Oh good,” said Billy. “That’s very reassuring. Unless it’s that they want to cut out my heart.”
“Vardy can get into these headspaces,” Baron said. “If he doesn’t think these cultists are out for you, they’re not.”
There was a banging, a rasp, from the other room. “What’s she doing?” said Billy.
“Focus, Harrow. In my professional opinion, and Vardy’s, the squiddoes are trying to work out what you represent.”
“I represent bugger-all!”
“Yeah, but they don’t know that. And in this world where you now are, everything represents something. Get it? It’s really important you get that. Everything represents something.”
“It ain’t going to win any prizes,” Collingswood said, entering, hands in her pockets. She shrugged. “It’ll do the necessary. Invite only. It’ll hold till Doc Octopus here makes up his mind. Don’t touch.” She wagged her finger at Billy. “Hands off.”
“You said Vardy thought I had nothing to be worried about,” Billy said. “I thought he was never wrong.”
“Never is,” she said, and shrugged. “Never know, though, know what I mean?”
“This is just basic precautions,” Baron said. “You should see my house. Stick around here a couple of days, while you chew stuff over. We’ll keep you in the loop. We’ve got feelers out, we know what we’re looking for. The offer’s on the table. Get back to us soon, eh?”
Billy shook his head hopelessly. “Jesus, give me a chance …”
“Think all you want,” Baron said, “but think to yourself, alright? Kath?” Collingswood lightly touched his Adam’s apple. He recoiled.
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