Angelmaker (29 page)

“That wasn’t its creator’s interest, of course. She was an idealist. That’s a term which has come to mean someone who is foggy and naive, but back then big ideas were still very much in fashion. Better living through science, knowledge will make us gods … and here she was, with her truth machine. Deception would be a thing of the past. The Apprehension Engine would usher in a new age of prosperity, economic stability, scientific understanding, social justice … But used unwisely, as it transpired, it could do other things less wholesome. And, well, as I say—do we really want to know the truth of everything? Of everyone? All our loves, our desires, our fears uncovered at a glance? Our weaknesses and petty gripes? Our sins?

“History is a well, Mr. Spork, a deep well driven into the strata of the past, through the bones of madness and murders. When it floods, we do well to run for the high ground. This machine, this Apprehension Engine which you so cavalierly reactivated … it is a hundred days of rain. A thousand. It is a flood and I am not Noah. I am Canute.”

Rodney Titwhistle has turned in his seat and now his face is urgent and beseeching. At any moment, he will point his finger like a recruiting poster.
Join up! Your country needs YOU! To save the world
.

And Joe Spork is not unmoved. Of course he isn’t. But he has no answers, and knows that he is, if not in the belly of the beast, surely in its maw and rolling towards its throat. He does not wish to encourage it to swallow.

Mr. Titwhistle lowers his voice to convey gravitas, and issues his most earnest plea. “So let me ask you again, with all my heart: how do I switch it off? How do I control it? How did you switch it on? And what did you hope to achieve by it all?”

Joe, looking at him, knows that Mr. Titwhistle believes everything
he has just said. Yet at the same time, the whisper of the Night Market within him notes bleakly that all that truth could be assembled artfully to produce a most elegant, most deceptive lie.

“Supposing,” Joe says, to Mercer’s imagined strenuous objections, “hypothetically supposing all this is as you say: can you not just unplug it?”

Rodney Titwhistle nods. “We might try. But how would we recall the bees? And how should we know that we had succeeded absolutely? In my uninformed tampering with the machine, might I increase the power and wreak havoc, destroy my nation and my self? Or activate a dead man’s switch and bring about Armageddon? No. Better, by far, to have your help. This must be got right.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe says again, “I just don’t know anything.”

“No, Mr. Spork. You need not be sorry,” Rodney Titwhistle says. “I am. I am.”

They don’t speak again until Arvin Cummerbund turns the car into a narrow street and through a set of modern steel gates, into the front court of an anonymous, sandy-bricked block with wide swing doors.

“Well. Here we are,” Rodney Titwhistle says, in his “unpleasant necessity” voice, as he helps Joe out of the back seat. “I’m sure it will all work out for the best.”

The phrase is familiar and
pro forma
, but on his lips, here, now, it is a funeral oration. It is a prayer for the dying. As they walk towards that bleak, ugly little door and the lino’d official rooms beyond, Joe can feel his life coming to some kind of watershed. He steels himself for the kind of testing Rodney Titwhistle might unleash upon him, and wonders what he will say or do, and whether he will come out of here with all his fingers and teeth. He whimpers, deep in his chest. He wants to say “Don’t do this,” but is embarrassed, and knows, anyway, that while Mr. Titwhistle doesn’t want to do this, he will absolutely not relent, and even if he did, the time-serving Arvin Cummerbund would be there to see it through. Arvin Cummerbund the bureaucrat, who knows the value of everything, the better to take it away.

Joe glances to his left, and sees a long grey-black Mercedes bus, windows tinted very dark, and beside it three tall figures all shrouded and veiled, waiting in silence. More vampires, and that thought isn’t
half so funny or so easy to get rid of as it was in his shop, during the day. Three faceless heads turn slowly to watch him as he walks. Rodney Titwhistle does not look at them, and from this Joe realises with a nauseating jolt that it is to them that he will be given.

“Who are they?” he asks quietly.

“Ghosts, perhaps,” Rodney Titwhistle answers, uncharacteristically whimsical, or perhaps a little unnerved. Joe glances at him, and he waves the moment away. “Technically they are contractors. The interrogation techniques they deploy are a matter of commercial confidentiality, of course, and in any case beyond our competence to assess. They assure us that everything that happens to you will be compatible with the law. It is not our job to pry. In fact, we would be breaching your rights under the Data Protection Act to do so. Do you understand? No one will ask. If they did ask, no one would answer. I have the option of rendering you to them under a piece of recent legislation. Do you wish to know its name? I have it written down somewhere. Alas, much of the detail is redacted.”

Joe looks at the ghosts again, and sees that they are not alone. Behind the bus, a strange, armoured Popemobile is sitting, and in it is one more, familiar, figure: a man, sitting stooped, somehow recognisable as the first Ruskinite he ever saw, the one who came to the shop.

The man’s face is in shadow, but he has slipped the spiderweb veil back onto broad shoulders so that he can see clearly in the dark, and from him emanates a stark, rigid malice and a terrible anticipation.

“They’re called Ruskinites,” Rodney Titwhistle adds, “a benevolent order of monks. They’re just around the corner, as it happens, nice old manse. They have a vested interest in the Apprehension Engine. When we have switched it off, they will study it. They are concerned with encountering the divine. Unfashionably sincere, of course, but they have considerable expertise. Inspired by John Ruskin. Although I understand they’ve changed a lot in the last few years—so much so that the term ‘benevolent’ may no longer be entirely accurate. Still, they look after the orphans of a particular accident. That must count for something.”

Joe Spork, looking at the shadowed, alien trio waiting to take him away into the dark, can well believe it. He recalls the strange, heron steps and the featureless cotton face, and feels like a small boy being left on the steps of a very frightening school. He will tell them everything. Even though everything is not very much, and when he is dry, they will continue to wring him out. He will be crippled by their
benevolence. May die of it. He breathes the wet night air and determines he will treasure every second of his life. He promises himself that he will not cry.

And then, as he mounts the moulded concrete steps, the door opens and a yellow shaft of light from the reception hall picks them out. Three figures step through the breach, in perfect counterpoint to the trio coming up. On the right, a gnarled, angry youth in a tracksuit, and in the middle a dapper outline with a Savile Row suit. On the left is a security guard or a soldier in civvies, looking vexed and hurried. Some manner of apology is already emerging from his lips, but his protestations of innocence are utterly overwhelmed by a glad yodel which echoes off the surrounding buildings, and Mr. Titwhistle hunches as if struck with a plank.

“Joshua Joseph Spork, by all that’s holy! Good gracious, you’ve been bound, what appalling brutality! A client of mine … I’m shocked. And you’ve been so cooperative in the face of such gross provocation. In this age of chat-show rage, Joseph, I believe that makes you a paragon of virtue. Isn’t he a paragon of virtue, Mr. Titwhistle? How do we spell that, by the way, for the writ? ‘Titwhistle,’ not ‘paragon.’ Joe, congratulations, you’re rich. Rodney here is going to give you all his money, or at least, all of his organisation’s money. What organisation is that again? I suppose, ultimately, the Treasury? Well, then there’ll be plenty, won’t there? How very fortunate, although if you wouldn’t mind having a word with the Chancellor, Mr. Titwhistle, and letting him know not to buy any nuclear missiles or bail out any banks until we’ve settled, I’d be grateful, one wouldn’t want there to be a shortfall. Yes, Mr. Titwhistle, I am aware that you believe you are beyond such mundane considerations but allow me to assure you that, if we marked lawyers the way we do military aircraft, I would have painted on my fuselage the outlines of a number of untouchable government departments now defunct. I am Mercer Cradle of the old established firm of Noblewhite Cradle, and I can sue
anything
. And is this your henchman? Do you know, I’ve always wondered what that means. How exactly does one hench? Is there a degree in henching, or is it more of an apprenticeship? Good evening, Mr. Cummerbund, I declare I never saw a finer figure of a man; Mr. Spork is my client and a very respectable one at that, please desist from giving him what our forebears would have called the fishy eye. Which of you would like to be the happy recipient of this paper ordering him released immediately into my care? But where are my professional manners? You
must think less of me: do you consider Mr. Spork a suspect and how does it come about that you’re interrogating him when he specifically requested that I be present, and before you have clarified his rights and status in the investigation?”

Rodney Titwhistle looks reproachfully at Joe as if to say “This person is your friend?” and “You didn’t have to do this to me, I was only asking.”

“Good Lord,” Mercer says, with rising glee, “I happen to have my client’s shoes here. Joe, you lemon, put these back on, you’ll get muscle cramps in your toes and then where will the compensation end? Joseph! With me, please … He is often absent-minded under pressure,” Mercer Cradle avers as he helps Joe into his shoes. “Suppressed guilt relating to his father’s heinous acts, I shouldn’t wonder. Why, he once went on a date with a lady officer of the police service and proposed to her over dessert, quite extraordinary, of course she said ‘no,’ well, who wouldn’t when there was still coffee and
petits fours
to come? Tell me, Mr. Cummerbund, how long has it been since you saw your ankles …?” Mercer keeps up his barrage until they’re out of earshot and in the street, and Mercer and his mute companion are hustling Joe into the car.

The Ruskinites watch from behind their veils, silent and motionless as lizards on a wall. One of them takes two bobbing, birdish steps, then draws back. They make no sound.

“Joe, you did fine,” Mercer says. “You were great. But there is no question that we are in the shit. We are in the savage jungle. For some reason, which I do not yet apprehend, there are titans stirring in the deeps and shadows on the stairwell. As my youngest cousin Lawrence would say, we are up to our necks in
podu
. This, incidentally, is Reggie, who is one of my occasional thugs,” indicating the gnarled youth on his left. “Now retiring to become a vet, would you believe, but for the next ten minutes you can trust him with your life, only don’t, trust me instead. Anyway … good evening, and what the fuck is going on, and try the lamb, it’s excellent.”

Because Mercer, good as his word, has brought a picnic.

Below the thunders of the upper mezzanine, behind the first of three vast tungsten-alloy security doors, Noblewhite Cradle maintains
a suite too elegantly attired and well-plumbed to be called a panic room, but too well-fortified and paranoid to be anything else. Joe is a little disappointed, but also massively relieved, to find that he is not actually lodged in the fortress itself. It is on the sofa in the Raspberry Lounge—which may be thought of as the barbican of Noblewhite Cradle—amid the deep pink cushions and highlights of damask, that he falls asleep for a full hour before Mercer rouses him by placing under his nose a mug of thick coffee made in the approved Noblewhite fashion, so that it tastes the way fresh coffee actually smells. Mathew Spork, in the olden, golden days, used to say that he only ever got caught in the act when he really needed some of Jonah Noblewhite’s home-brew.
Nach dem Grossmütterart
, Jonah Noblewhite would respond in gentle remonstrance.
Not mine, Mathew. My grandmother’s
, and Joe’s father would say
Yes, Jonah, we know. In all our Earthly strivings for perfection, we shall none of us reach the greatness of the foremothers
. And whether the conversation took place in this bolt-hole or in the great mustard-yellow living room in the Mathew Spork mansion in moderately unfashionable Primrose Hill, there was Joe listening and absorbing it all, and thinking his father was a leader of men and a ruler of thousands.