Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (25 page)

    “Give us a leg-up, and I’ll take a look,” Uptil suggested. Reluctantly, Agnew made a stirrup of his hands, and hoisted the bulky man up the wall. Uptil scrabbled at the wet brick and slippery creepers for purchase.

    “Okay,” he grunted, with his armpits and chin over the top of the wall.

    “What can you see?” whispered Agnew, beginning to shake with the effort of holding up Uptil’s weight.

    “A garden. Some fruit trees. Back door to a kitchen. Gnngg.”

    “Gnngg?” asked Agnew.

    “I was losing my grip. I don’t think there’s anyone up.”

    “Well it is five o’clock in the morning.”

    “What did you say?” asked Uptil, trying to glance back down at Agnew.

    “I didn’t,” Agnew replied.

    The support gave way, and Uptil slithered back to earth with a yelp and several handfuls of Virginia Creeper. Agnew stood with his back to the wall, facing a thick-set, balding man, who had come out of nowhere with a pair of leather breeches, and a cleaver of significant size.

“We didn’t mean to wake you, sir,” Agnew began.

The man took a step forward.

    “You CIA? Militia operatives? Or are you” he asked, before pausing, and squinting down at Uptil, and then back up at Agnew.

    “You’re Agnew. Triumff’s man. And this must be the fellow from Beach,” he said, lowering the cleaver and expelling a relieved breath. “I thought you were government agents or worse. Sorry about the cleaver. I sleep with one eye open these days.”

    “I presume you are Mr Bluett?” asked Agnew. “Your appearance is somewhat different to that which I remember.”

    “I’m known as Severino now, but you’re right,” answered Bluett, “and I can guess what you’re looking for.”

    “Any word of Master Rupert would be most appreciated,” said Agnew. “Have you seen him?”

    “Of course he has,” snapped Uptil, getting to his feet and brushing himself down. “He called me that fellow from Beach, not Australia or the Terra Incognita. How long ago did Rupert leave here, Mr Bluett?”

    “You’d better come inside,” said Drew Bluett.

Doll pinched at his shorn, bleached locks.

“It’s not really you, is it?” she ventured.

    “No. Neither is playing at sodding espial, working for Woolly or any of this cloak-and-dagger stuff,” said Rupert. “I’m really scared, Doll. I don’t think I’m in control of anything any more.”

    Daybreak was slicing open the envelope of night, in a wide tear across the City, and a clambering sun began to illuminate Doll and Rupert, who were sitting together by a puffing brazier in the litter-strewn arena of the Swan.

    There had been a certain amount of shouting and yelling and running backwards and forwards the night before, the sort of business that would have made the basis for a good Aldwych farce if anybody had been taking notes. After ten minutes of dodging the bitter salvos Doll fired at him, the stage rigging she swung at him, and the scenery flats she toppled at him, Triumff had managed to calm her down to a just-less-than-piercing shriek and impress upon her the seriousness of his disguise.

    Doll’s relief at seeing him alive overcame her fury at seeing him hiding out under a peroxide crew-cut and a promiscuous actress, and they kissed and made up, not altogether unsuccessfully. Then her rage, and the stinging realisation that she seemed to have been worrying about him whilst he had been having a whale of a time, in turn, overcame her fluttering relief, and there was a little more stomping and snarling. Luckily those in the Swan who overheard her angry attack had dismissed it at once as a creative difference and hadn’t paid it any mind, and hadn’t noticed that she was saying things like “Where have you been, Rupert?” and “Triumff, you bastard, do you know how worried I’ve been?” Gaumont, brushing wigs in the property wardrobe, had chuckled at the sound of the argument, unperturbed. He had a certain fondness for the sound of creative differences, as a parent does for the sound of his children squabbling at play. Wllm Beaver, who had slid into sleep in the gallery seat, roused briefly at the uproar, but was soon snoring again. Of de Tongfort, there had been no sign.

    The shouting had gone on for another fifteen minutes. After that, there was a truce as they carried Mary Mercer to the tiring room and dropped her on her cot. The drink and confusion had rather got the better of her, and she’d opted for the unconscious approach.

    When he had finally got her sitting down and listening quietly, it had taken rather longer for Rupert to recount his recent doings to the bewildered Doll. She listened to his tale, and took it rather well.

    “I thought it was better if you didn’t know where I was,” Rupert explained. “It kept you out of danger. Whoever’s behind this plot has made damn sure I’m the fall guy. There are people, people like Gull, who would run me through as soon as know me.”

    “Infernal Affairs, too,” said Doll. “Some lizard called Jaspers came round a couple of times yesterday. He was so creepy.”

    Triumff yawned and rubbed his eyes.

    “The worst of it is, I’ve got nothing,” said Triumff. “Not a clue. Woolly got me in here because he thought the theatres were somehow caught up in the conspiracy. But I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Maybe it was all a ruse by Woolly to get me out of the picture. Or maybe he’s playing me off somehow. Maybe I’m another pawn in his game. I wouldn’t be hugely shocked if it turned out that the CIA were behind it all anyway.”

    He threw a stick in the spitting fire.

    “I’ve been in some fixes before,” he continued, “some as deadly as this. But there’s always been an obvious plan of attack, a sensible course. There have always been facts I can marshal and details I can assess the speed of the wind, the run of the tide, the number of guns, the strength of the enemy. I take the facts on board and work out a solution, but this is a whole different thing. I don’t know who the enemy is, what he wants, what I have do to beat him, or how I will know I have, if I do. I know who’s trying to kill me, but they may not necessarily be the enemy. I know who’s keeping me alive, but they may not

necessarily be a friend. I’m stuffed.”

    “You look stupid too,” said Doll. Triumff looked up with a hurt expression, but found her smile. It was a brave smile, one that fought through tiredness to make it onto her face. He savoured it.

    “I live in hope of Drew coming up with something,” he said, dredging his weary mind for reassurances. “Trouble is, though I trust him, I have no idea how much else of the Intelligence Service I can trust.”

    “The cardinal, the CIA” she ventured.

    “I think if they really cared about me they wouldn’t have buried me in this pantomime. It would have been far safer for me if they’d kept me under house arrest somewhere rural and quiet. No, this” - and by “this” he seemed to mean his bleached hairdo - “this marks me out as nothing more than a fall guy. It’s hardly the greatest ever disguise. By keeping me in circulation, Woolly wants to draw the conspiracy out. If I get a knife through the ribs in the process then that’s just hard knocks, as long as I’ve pointed out the traitor, or at least writ his name in my blood on the cobbles of whatever back-alley I die in.”

    “Is pessimism part of your cover too?” Doll asked.

    Triumff growled a no.

    “Then what happened to the hero of the high seas, the valiant sail-dog who was the talk of London, and the Queen’s favourite, the man who’d laugh in the Devil’s face, slap his cheek and leave him to pay the bill?”

    “He retired hurt,” said Triumff, sourly.

    “And what happened to the man who used to hum that daft song about the Guinea Coast in the dark?” she asked more softly.

    Triumff smiled, despite himself, and leaned slowly towards her.

    “Oh, you know he’s not far away,” he murmured hoarsely. Their lips closed to a distance of about an inch. Pheromonal boarding parties prepared to cast across mooring lines.

    “Did you find him?” asked a bleary voice from nearby.

    Triumff and Doll pulled away from each other, and looked around.

    Your loyal servant, I, Wllm Beaver, stood on the other side of the brazier, yawning and trying to flatten my ruff. I looked, all told, like a circus troop had used me as a mattress for a week or two.

    “Excusez-moi?” asked Louis Cedarn.

    I tried to stifle my yawns.

    “The man. Did you find him? He was knocking on the stage door just now. Bloody woke me up. He was looking for you,” I said, my facial bruises even more livid after a night’s rest. I believe I resembled a mandrill.

    “What man?” Cedarn asked, rising to his feet.

    “The man. The man.” I wasn’t fully awake. I coughed and yawned some more.

    “What man?” Cedarn asked more forcefully than before.

    “The man at the door,” I snapped. Really, I thought, how much more explaining did I need to do? A man. A door. The former knocking on the latter.

    “Did you let him in?” asked Doll.

    “Of course,” I said.

    “Where is he now?”

    I stopped yawning and looked at Cedarn as flatly as my traumatised cheeks would allow.

    “I don’t know,” I said. “I assumed he would find you. He was looking for you.”

    Cedarn scanned the empty, silent structure of the theatre around us. The only things moving were the pigeons in the rafters and the racing clouds in the mauve sky.

“What did he look like? Shortish heavy-set Italian?”

    “No,” I replied confidently, gazing down into the brazier and warming my hands. “Great big bastard. Built like a brick uh privy.”

    “The guy that smacked you yesterday?” asked Cedarn.

    I looked up, and said, “Oh no. Bigger than him. Really big. He had a scar on his face.”

    “A scar on his face,” Cedarn echoed.

    “Well, it was more like his face was a scar. Right mess, in fact. Urgghh!” I said, shuddering at the thought. Then some slow realisation crossed my fuddled brain. “I say He was pretty unwholesome altogether, in point of fact. And rude. I I suppose I ought not to have let him in at all.”

    “Stay here,” Cedarn instructed.

    “What is it? Do you know who he’s talking about?” asked Doll. There was worry in her voice.

    “I hope not. Stay here.” He turned to me, Wllm Beaver. “Stay with her.”

    “Right ho,” I said, nodding, and immediately occupying Triumff’s seat by the brazier and beginning to warm my hands for real.

    “Be careful, Rupert,” said Doll, gazing after Cedarn as he stalked towards the stage.

    “My middle name,” Cedarn called back bravely, though his heart wasn’t in it. He climbed up onto the apron and disappeared into the left wing.

    “So, you’re an actress?” I asked brightly, turning to Doll.

    “Not now,” she hissed.

    The wings were gloomy and unfriendly, and there was a pungent, pervading stench of tallow. Triumff edged forward, feeling his way along flats and over rope-coils as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness. His heart felt as if it was beating up into his throat. He drew the poniard weapon that old man Kew had given him.

    In London, scars were two-a-penny. Indeed, you might be hard-pressed in certain streets to find someone without one. Triumff knew for a fact that the Militia didn’t class a scar as a “distinguishing feature”.

    The way Beaver had described the man, however, rang unpleasant bells in Triumff’s mind. He could think of six or more ruffians whose faces were a mess of scar-tissue, and over a dozen who were bigger than the undoubtedly impressive Eastwoodho. Only one man fulfilled both criteria: O’Bow.

    Triumff had met O’Bow once, face to scar-face, and had seen him at work four times across crowded taverns. The face-to-face meeting had been eight years previously, when he had been called as a character witness at the inquest of Midshipman Pyker, slain in a tavern brawl in Deptford. Pyker had served on the
Blameless
, and the prosecution had been trying to prove that the midshipman was of sound mind and wouldn’t therefore “throw himself into a fireplace and flagellate himself unnecessarily with a poker” as the defence contested. Unnerved by the feral blue eyes that gazed at him out of a puckered, fleshy face, from the dock, Triumff had done his best to commemorate Pyker as a bright, stable young man.