Angelmaker (25 page)

She sighs, and begins to gather her belongings, not without a measure of bitterness. Here she is, a million years later, and not an older brother in all the world. No family to speak of at all, save for a foul-smelling dog clinging to life with grim determination in her handbag. And at that, he’s liable to outlast her.

Edie Banister stands—a process which takes a distressingly long, awkward time—and goes upstairs to the relative tranquillity of her
rented room. She stares around her. Oscar Wilde, she recalls, acknowledged the close of his mortal existence by remarking: “It’s me or the wallpaper. One of us has got to go.”

Looking up at the brown floral print, she feels a fleeting kinship. All the same, there’s work to be done. Her shopping expedition was not just for clothes. A kitchen shop, two supermarkets, and a garden centre have yielded ingredients for some small advantages in what she suspects will turn out to be a very unfair fight. Tupperware boxes, thermos flasks, and liquid fertiliser, a kettle for a witch’s cauldron: Edie lays it all out, and then jots down proportions from memory.

In the brown room, amid the cheap, well-intended furniture, Edie Banister makes saboteur magics, alchemies of resistance. And then she lowers herself gratefully into bed, and finds that Bastion has so far bestirred himself as to claim a space by her feet. She sleeps, and dreams of old work, unfinished.

J
oe Spork holds his telephone in his left hand and pokes at it with his right. He has lost an indeterminate amount of time and is shivering, symptoms he identifies as shock. Fortunately, he knows the number by heart. He has never used it before, but it is the rule of the House of Spork, and always was, since he was old enough to count: if in doubt; if you ever; if you are accused; if you are nearby; if you are taken hostage; if you are arrested; if you hear a rumour that someone; if you wake up and she’s dead; if, if, if, you call the magic number and you bare your soul.

At nine-twenty at night, it takes two rings for someone to pick up the phone.

“Noblewhite Cradle, Bethany speaking.” A woman’s voice, not a girl’s. This number is not answered by receptionists or temps. It rings on the desk of Noblewhite Cradle’s formidable office manager. When the actual Bethany is not in residence, there are three surrogate Bethanys who will take the call. At no time, ever, will it take more than two rings for one of them to lift the receiver. The extra Bethanys, in private life, go by the names Gwen, Rose, and Indira. It’s not important. When they answer this phone, they are Bethany.

“Good evening, Bethany, it’s Joshua Joseph Spork.” Bethany (all of her) knows the name and history of every single client with access to this number. There aren’t many—but even if there were, the name “Spork” is an absolute passport at Noblewhite Cradle.

“Good evening, Mr. Spork, how may I help you?”

“I need Mercer, please.”

“Mr. Mercer?” Even Bethany hesitates for a second. “Really, Mr. Spork? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Bethany. I’m afraid so.”

There is a brief stutter on the line. Bethany has just switched over from a standard phone to a headset, leaving both of her hands free to work. She’s ambidextrous and she has two computers in front of her, each set up for use with one hand and patched into the communications system at Noblewhite Cradle. In other words, Bethany is now able to perform three distinct actions at once. One hand is tapping out an extension number in response to Joe’s request. The other is discreetly alerting the senior partners to the fact that Mercer Cradle is now in play, and they should therefore expect the usual degree of insane fallout. In the meantime, she continues the conversation with Joe.

“I have the List here, Mr. Spork. Are there any matters arising from the last few days of which I should be aware?”

The Cradle’s List is a celebrated joke in the legal journals, the Loch Ness Monster of documents. Jonah Noblewhite in his day was occasionally cartooned as a sort of black-lettered Santa, with his List displaying the peccadilloes of the mighty and the notorious, the better to conceal them from the world. If the matter being lampooned featured the Scottish courts, Nessie herself was often the client. Joe tells Bethany that his entry is as accurate as he knows how to make it.

“Putting you through now. Will you require any subsidiary services?” Meaning, will you be needing us to bail you out, or get hold of the negatives, or arrange a poker game for you to have attended last night?

“For the present, no, thank you,” Joe says politely.

“Very well,” Bethany says, not without a measure of congratulation. Joe has never availed himself of Noblewhite Cradle’s more outré services, at least, not directly, though he suspects his father may have deployed them on his behalf when he was a child. Bethany is always glad when her charges are bystanders rather than arrestees.

“I am in the lobby of Wilton’s,” Mercer Cradle’s voice says pleasantly, “where my rack of lamb has just arrived and is even now cooling next to a glass of unimpeachable Sassicaia. Since my dinner companion threw her gin and tonic at me shortly after the fish course, you have my full attention as long as someone is dead. Is someone dead? Because otherwise—”

“It’s me, Mercer,” Joe says.

“Oh,” Mercer says. And then, “Joe, for God’s sake, you’ve got my cellphone number.” And then meditatively, “Oh, crap. What’s happened? Don’t say anything to anyone except me.”

“Billy’s dead, Mercer. I’ve just found him.”

“Billy Friend?”

“Yes.”

“Dead like slipped on a bar of soap or like Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping?”

“Very much the latter.”

“And you, you poor rube, are standing there at the crime scene up to your neck in shit.”

“Yes.”

“Bethany? Police?”

“On their way, Mr. Cradle. Someone called them five minutes ago.”

“Joe, you are a pillock. Was that you?”

Joe doesn’t know. It may have been.

“Never mind, then. First question: are you Colonel Mustard?”

“No.”

“You are not the Colonel in any way, shape or form?”

“No.”

“Could anyone unkindly imagine that you have the look of a military man? Have you been seen entering the library carrying plumbing supplies?”

“I came to look for Billy. I needed to talk to him. I’ve been into all the rooms but I haven’t touched much. I’ve got a poker.”

“Not one you brought with you, I trust.”

“Billy’s.”

“Fine. Quite shortly, the place will be swarming with unhappy coppers. Their first instinct will be to clap you in irons and give you the impression that you’re going to prison for ever. Stay silent until I get there. Do not speak, even to say ‘Good evening officer, the corpse is through here.’ Just point. Do not make a voluntary statement. Do not be helpful. Stay in the corridor—are you in the corridor?”

“I am. I was in the flat, before. He’s on his bed.”

“And you no doubt touched him as little as possible? You did not, in a mistaken rush of affection for the little prick, embrace the deceased and smear yourself in blood and him in fibres of your clothing?”

“He’s under a sheet. I didn’t lift it.”

“Good. Fine. What was my first instruction?”

“Say nothing. Wait for you.”

“And did I say you could in any way do anything else? Did I, for example, give you permission to reminisce about your old friend William and his little ways? About your shared history as dealers in entirely legitimate antiques?”

“No. You said to say nothing and wait.”

“Excellent. Then I shall ask the maître to stick the lamb in a bit of foil and cork the bottle for me, and we shall picnic.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You will be by the time we’re done, Joseph. This is apt to become a long and tedious soirée. Under what circumstances may you offer help and assistance to Lily Law?”

“None, until you get here.”

“So that I may translate what you say into words which will be understood by Lily and her chums Bob Magistrate and Charlie DPP as ‘I am not some tiny tit you can fit up for this heinous crime, I am a bystander and thus I shall remain.’ ”

“Understood.”

“I am on the way, Joseph. Bethany?”

“We’re making an incident room, Mr. Cradle. Keep us up to date.”

“I will.”

Joe Spork leans on the wall and waits.

Christ, the smell
.

He breathes through his mouth, and feels he has betrayed a debt. When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossibly prim.

Billy, you’re an idiot. Were an idiot
.

In exasperation, not judgement. Then ungrudging acknowledgement:

You were my idiot. My friend
.

In his mind’s eye, he buries Billy, cries for him, misses him every time he sees a bit of dodgy Victorian smut, then slowly forgets him and misses him more seldom as life goes on, more lonely, and ultimately Billy really is gone, abandoned twice over to his end.

And at the same time, another part of him eschews all this love and poesy, and looks for edges, escapes, and angles. Joe reluctantly encourages it. This is bad trouble, and unless there’s more coincidence in the world today than there was yesterday, it pursues him. Here, with Billy’s repulsive mortal remains, he can feel its breath. So while he waits for Mercer, and for the predicted horde of arresting officers, Joe Spork unwillingly combs his mind for old habits and ways of thinking, and this inevitably begins, as all discussions of wrongdoing must, with Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork.

He has been so successful in discarding his father that he cannot, for a moment, recall Mathew’s face, or his voice, until he reaches for memories too old to be useful and hears it, mock-severe, coming from up above him, because he’s a child and getting ready for his day.

“Hurry it up, Joshua Joseph, please! A man is always busy, a man has affairs of state to attend to!
This
man must also make breakfast for his offspring before delivering him into the vile jaws of school.
Booooo!
to school!” Joe’s father wears a coat with a sheepskin collar and a fat-knotted, striped tie. Wide shoulders and narrow hips make him look like an isosceles triangle balanced on its point (his Italian brogues in two colours). The child Joshua Joseph pauses to consider his father as if he were, for the sake of argument, a scalene or an equilateral triangle. Both images are very odd.

On this day, Mathew Spork is playing the man of commerce rather than the gangster prince, and so he has left almost all of his guns in the box under the bed. Almost all, because a man in his profession does not generally walk abroad without something to give people pause.

He’s waiting for an answer. The boy Joshua Joseph—who has been planning in his mind the theft of the Crown Jewels by a series of tunnels and hang-gliding escapades—responds: “Boo!”

In fact, Joshua Joseph quite likes school. It’s controllable and therefore restful, and things which start out inexplicable become clear. It is in this way utterly unlike his life, which remains mysterious despite years of intense study. Also, he is by popular acclaim the hooligan-in-chief of a small band of under-tens. On the other hand, it keeps him away from his father, whom he adores for his magnificence
and resents for his loudness in equal measure. He sets out two blue breakfast bowls.

“Quite right,” Mathew says. “
Boo!
to school and hooray for Mum and Dad and Grandad and all the rest. However, Josh, school is a necessary evil. You hungry?”

“Yes. Dad, what are affairs of state?”

“Kings and Prime Ministers; Kings and Prime Ministers. Ruling the mighty nations of the Earth, taking weighty decisions—and among those mighty nations, which one has the brightest future? The finest soldiers and the greatest leaders? And which one, Josh, has the wisest and most brilliant heir to the throne?”

“England!”

“Close, Josh. Very close. But no! The nation I speak of is the House of Spork, with its fine and splendid Prince Joshua Joseph, and blessings be upon him and all he surveys. Yes?”