Angelmaker (66 page)

“The world is in the hands of idiots,” Edie cries, by way of exculpation, mistaking his quiet for doubt or disapprobation. “The Cold War is over and what do they do? Go looking for a new one. We’re richer than we’ve ever been. What happens? We burn the forests and borrow so much money that suddenly we’re poor. Everything’s upside down and it’s just because people don’t pay attention. It ought to be a perfect world! That’s what we wanted. That’s what I worked for. For decades! I hid Frankie’s machine for years and years. For nothing. For a bunch of charlatans to tell me I’ve never had it so good while they steal my neighbour’s pension!”

She subsides, muttering. Mercer purses his lips.

“The bees are now distributed over most of the globe,” he says. “From time to time there are outbreaks of truth, but I have to say I don’t see a new age of love and understanding being ushered in. The West Bank is in flames, but I suppose it was going that way already. A lot of Africa is looking bad. The Special Relationship is effectively finished. The nuclear states, by the way, have reciprocally pledged
to launch their weapons should it turn out that the Apprehension Engine—they’re calling it a weapon of mass destruction—has been deliberately deployed against their citizens by another nation. All of which, I gather, is before the machine is properly effective. These are just tasters. If this is a global improvement of the lot of mankind, I don’t want to know what a crisis looks like.”

Edie ducks her head. “It’ll get better. Frankie worked it out. She was never wrong. When the bees come back, the array will be complete and things will … get better.” Her certainty is fading as she says it out loud. What made sense in the twentieth century sounds odd in the twenty-first. Blockish, even, and naive.

Mercer sighs. “Possibly. Although I was never very fond of perfect, sweeping solutions. I always feel sympathy with the people who get swept. But in any case … the machine is no longer going to do what it’s supposed to, is it?”

“I don’t see what he gets out of it,” Polly Cradle interrupts. “How does all this make him godlike?” She looks over at Edie.

Edie scowls. “Chaos. Confusion. Wickedness. It’s always like this with him. Becoming God is an excuse. He says God’s alien and appalling, so that anything ghastly he does just makes him more transcendent. It’s a fiddle. Not that it is him. It can’t be.”

“Only,” Polly goes on, “from what you say, he doesn’t strike me as chaotic at all. He strikes me as the opposite. You called him a spider. You said he loves elegance. Chess and bluffing and forked strategies. Heads I win, tails you lose.”

“Well,” Edie says, waving her hands vaguely to indicate, perhaps, that evil is as evil does, and you just can’t fathom it, you have to shoot it when the opportunity arises. Mercer waits a moment, but that seems to be the extent of her response. He carries on.

“But in the meantime it would appear that the apparatus from Wistithiel is now in the hands of a monster who proposes to abuse it in some way so as to bring about the end of the world or his own elevation to godhood or possibly both. And my best friend has spent the last while in a government-sponsored torture farm being given the full works. So while I greatly sympathise with your perception, Miss Banister, I imagine you will understand when I say that I’m not sure your actions have greatly improved our lot.”

Edie looks stricken. Joe finds himself confessing in turn the days of his captivity, and his brief, strange, un-friendship with Vaughn Parry.

“I should have killed him,” he concludes. “That would have been
the professional thing to do. I told him what they wanted to know all along. I just didn’t think. I just wanted to get away. I should have finished it.”

Edie Banister sighs. “The professional thing. Yes. The tactically wise thing. You might have bought us some time, at a cost. But I have come to believe, young Joe, that it’s no bad thing to be a bit amateurish, in one’s heart. The professionals have been in charge for a while now, and it hasn’t done a blind bit of good.”

She shrugs, including herself in this damnation. Joe realises he has not touched her, this strange leftover person from his family’s life. He reaches out to shake her hand.

There is a noise like someone jointing a chicken, and the car fills with the sharp aroma of doggy regurgitate. The handshake never quite happens.

After a few minutes with the windows open, there is general agreement in the car that a brief stop for a cup of tea may be in order.

The café table is made of scratched red plastic with a metal surround. The chairs are uncomfortable, and the tea tastes mostly of sump. Joe Spork drinks his and then steals Mercer’s, too. Edie, having washed out her bag, stares into the swirling circle of her cup as if it is showing her mysteries. Mercer leans on the wall next to the till, watching the car park. Joe worries that they’re worrying about him, that he needs to say something which will make them all feel better. He can’t imagine what it would be.

Only Polly seems to be exactly who she always is. She smiles charmingly at the lovestruck teenage boy who brings the tray, tips him too much and tells him she’s a rock star and not to admit to anyone she was here, and then looks across at Edie.

“This isn’t what you had in mind,” she observes.

“No,” Edie says.

Polly waits, but Edie doesn’t continue, so she tries again. “What was supposed to happen?”

Edie waggles her hands in the air. “Good things. Frankie had the maths, you know. She actually calculated the consequences. If they’d just leave it alone, the machine would make the world better. Nine per cent better, she said. Enough to push us in the right direction over
time. Make a perfect world.” She stops. “A better one, anyway. But I didn’t imagine all this would come out of the woodwork.”

“ ‘All this’ meaning Sheamus. The Ruskinites.”

“Sheamus is dead. The one I knew, the Opium Khan. He must be. He was years older than me.”

“You’re here.”

Edie snorts. “Barely.”

The roads are empty and the night is very dark. Inside the car, the only light is from the instrument panel and the street lights as they zip past. Joe knew a man once who made a career out of chopping them down and stealing them for the aluminium. It’s an expensive material. He counts, in his head, reckoning weight and value, and London draws closer, green motorway signs displaying the distance to the statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square. It occurs to him that he has no idea where the car is going.

“Can’t go to the shop,” Mercer replies, meaning Noblewhite Cradle rather than Joe’s shattered warehouse. “It’s being watched. Bethany’s gone in a few different directions to lead them off. I told her it was dangerous, and she said—they all said—‘Bring it on.’ They’re a doughty bunch, my Bethanys. And good lawyers in their own right, of course.

“But we don’t have a lot of options. The firm is under a ton of pressure from the forces of illiberal and irresponsible government; writs and control orders and demands for our account numbers. We’re fighting back, but it’s hard to win anything when the other fellow changes the rules under you. I did persuade a local magistrate to grant me an Antisocial Behaviour Order in respect of Detective Sergeant Patchkind, which I must say was very satisfying …” He flashes a grin, then sobers.

“But we couldn’t risk using any of our regular London places. We set it up as if we were heading for our out-of-town offices, which are frankly a sort of fortress. I suspect they’d be delighted with that: all the rats in one sack … We’re going somewhere a little more out of the way. Blood over law. Or friendship will do, in the pinch.”

Joe doesn’t bother to point out that this is not an answer to his question. He’s too tired to fret, and the aches in his body are burning
everywhere except where he rests against Polly Cradle’s shoulder. “Ted said we need to go to Station Y,” he murmurs, but the sounds of the car smother the words and only Polly hears them. He lolls, and mercifully does not dream.

When he wakes, he finds himself on familiar ground. The car turns a final corner, through a private drive—the Cradle slush fund has been at work—and over someone’s front garden and onto the road again, and there is Harticle’s, its great fortress doors open to receive them.

Joe glances at Polly. She shrugs. “Mercer’s better at this part than I am. I get very cross when he tells me how to investigate, so I do as he says for things like this. We can’t get you out of the country tonight. And if we could, I’m not sure where you’d go. So you have to go where people care about you and hope for the best.” She glances at Edie, who nods.

Joe Spork contemplates a world on the brink of chaos and disaster which still finds time to hunt for a bewildered clockworker.

He wonders whether they should call ahead, then thinks of all those movies where the fugitive briefly activates a cellphone and is immediately traced. He realises Mercer has been without his this entire time. It’s practically like seeing him nude.

They get out into the damp of the small hours. The car flashes its lights twice, orange lamps illuminating the gutter and the curtained windows of Guildholt Street, and wait.

After a moment, Mercer growls. “There should be thugs. I asked for thugs.”

“Stay or go?” Polly says.

When he hesitates, Edie intervenes. “We stay. If we’re buggered, we’re already buggered. If we’re not, we run from a safe place. Maybe your thugs had to take care of a scout.”

Mercer nods: possible. Joe the habitué leads the way up the steps, smelling the wet oak and iron. The door, unlatched, slides silently back at his touch. The corridor is discreetly dark, welcoming. He breathes in old carpet and lubricating oils. For a moment his nose tingles at a scent like pepper and he stops, but the flavour is gone and he cannot recapture it. Edie dawdles, peering at the pictures and the glass cases, and at an ornate waste basket (cut iron and laburnum wood, circa
1920). After a moment, she drops a lunch box into the bin, and carries on. It seems an odd moment to be cleaning out your handbag, but Joe supposes that when you’re old, the time is always now.

“Bob?” he murmurs into the dark.

From within, the sound of voices, a sense of a presence, but no reply. Edie shuffles forward, Bastion snuffling alertly from her bag.

“Cecily?” Joe calls.

“In here,” the gruff voice answers. Joe Spork smiles and half-runs to the reading room.

Cecily Foalbury sits in her usual chair at the long central table, surrounded by papers in a great pile of chaos and consilience. Two sets of false teeth lie discarded among the debris, along with the container for a third set and a plate of chewy caramels. Cecily looks tired and worn, and she smiles wanly at Joe and then looks away to the great, friendly log fire in the grate. The smell of woodsmoke wafts back, and the crackling flames give the hall a kind of medieval vitality. Joe grins at her, at the place, so far from the white room at Happy Acres.

The door is barely closed behind them before the dog Bastion starts to howl.

“I’m sorry, Sporklet,” Cecily says brokenly, looking up. “He got here five minutes ago.” Bob Foalbury takes her hand, but cannot raise his head at all, so great is his shame.