“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?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“All right, then. Eggs or cornflakes?”
And Joshua Joseph gives whichever answer he adjudges will satisfy his incessant parent. Papa Spork is completely unaware of how his banter sometimes compresses and confines his son. He thinks himself great fun, a Dad to end all Dads, but the sheer volume of him—the relentless effervescence, the way in which everything relates to the great, manifest destiny of the Spork family, the bone-deep conviction that success is just around the corner of his son’s young life—is, on in-between days, just too much. The Crown Jewels temporarily forgotten, Joe considers instead a recent school visit to the British Museum, during which he saw any number of interesting and enlightening things, including—when she leaned to indicate a neolithic ritual object—his form mistress’s startlingly erotic undergarments. The object he presently recalls most strongly, however, is the yoke in the farming exhibit, laid over a pair of mighty stuffed oxen.
Joshua Joseph, between bouts of hero worship and merciless inadequacy, occasionally feels that his father is laid across his shoulders in much the same manner, and that he must pull him everywhere he goes, whether his father is there or not.
Papa Spork burns the eggs, which in his curious vision of the world is just further cause to believe in the inestimable genius of the House of Spork, so they have cornflakes instead. On some level or other, however, Joshua Joseph’s father must realise that this morning has gone astray from the usual perfect march to dynastic hegemony, because he makes a concession for which Joshua Joseph has been striving for weeks:
“D’you want to come to the Night Market tomorrow?”
“Yes, Dad, please!”
“I’ll ask your mother if she’s all right with it. And you look out some smart clothes.”
“I will.”
The Night Market is a dream. It is the magic heart of the city Mathew asse
rts confidently is the greatest and most magical on Earth. Joshua Joseph knows with an instinctual passion that it is the most secret, most remarkable, most improbable place in the entire world; the more wondrous because it moves around. It is a clearing house for everything and anything. It is beyond the reach of tax and tariffs; a shadowed, lamplit holdfast which bustles with forbidden trades and pirate’s treasure. Mathew claims it was born of the wrecker’s trade, that the Kindly Men came up the Thames from the inshore water, from Cornwall and the Channel Coast, with booty looted from sunken ships. He says it was Britain’s first landside democracy (the pirate ships themselves being the first constituted parliaments). Perhaps it was. Mathew’s occasional, unlikely erudition is startling even to his father, Daniel, who knows all things. And then, too, this Market, which Mathew has revived and of which he is anointed king (or elected president for life, if you prefer to retain your grip upon that great democratic heritage) is the one aspect of his profession to which Daniel Spork does not object, the one part of Mathew’s life, aside from Joshua Joseph and his mother, Harriet, for which Daniel will smile.
Perhaps it’s the hearthfire glimmer of the stalls. As reported, the Market is like a hanging garden of antiques and jewels, tiered and terraced or sprawling across some great space, or piled higgledy-upon-piggledy above one another in an old brewery or giant crypt. Each pitch is designed according to the owner’s likes and lights, but must run from a single three-pin plug, for power is at a premium, and therefore most often the Market is lit by gas and heated by small coal fires in Swedish stoves or Victorian grates, and chimneyed out by whatever contrivance Mathew has arranged for the occasion. Food smells, too, Harriet said once, like a huge spiced kitchen: cake and meat and fish and herbs and condiments unknown in Merry England, but common in France and Italy. There’s garlic and basil and turmeric and curry, and a kind of black fungus which smells of—but here, Harriet changed course rather abruptly. Of something exotic, anyway.
And amid all this, the trades and deals, marked by a flicker of torchlight as the buyer takes a moment to illuminate his—or her—prize, inspect it, assess or assay it, weigh it, measure it, accept or reject it. Money changing hands in purses, billfolds and bill rolls, occasionally in cases, and of that, each deal kicking back just a little to Mathew Spork himself.
But so far, all Joshua Joseph himself has witnessed—has been required to learn by rote, by heart, as one of the many curious rules of the House of Spork—is the trick with the newspapers.
Every Market culminates in the announcement of where the next one will be. The majority are small gatherings, but every month there is a grand one, the true Night Market, and that one is heralded by strange, encrypted messages in unlikely places. The clew—the thread by which the maze may be unravelled—is a lonely-hearts advertisement in a local paper: “Come home, Fred, all is forgiven!” The ad immediately beneath—by arrangement with the setters—gives a veiled time and date. A second paper yields a street or locality, and a third, a specific name or number. It is a jigsaw. From within, it’s entirely simple. From without, impenetrable.
“Can you tell me where it is, then?” Mathew Spork demands, ferocious.
“Of course, Dad.”
And indeed, that evening, with his mother’s nail scissors and a half-hour of cutting and pasting, Joe has the address.
“We have a winner! A true son of the House of Spork!” Mathew cries proudly, and Joshua Joseph repeats it happily as his father whirls him through the air.
“You like to win, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dad. I do.”
“All right, then, we’ll call this your exam: three-card monte!”
The traditional three-card monte is also known as “Find the Lady.” It is played with three cards, one of which is the queen, and the dealer moves them around face down in an effort to confuse the player. The player then picks which one he thinks it will be—which it is, the first and maybe the second time he plays, but the third time inevitably pays for all, and the dealer comes away richer. It is the first con Mathew ever learned—from his father, of all things, for which the old man daily curses himself.
The simplest trick of the monte is the knuckle cast. In the language of the sharper, the dealer has a light hand and a heavy one, the latter so-called because it carries two cards, one above the other. The dealer moves the heavy hand and deals once. The mark tends to assume that the card dealt is the bottom one, and in the early rounds it will be. In the pay round, however, the upper card is released by a slight flex of the knuckles, so that the player is reversed. It’s a magician’s force.
Mathew is not asking Joe to perform this trick with his small fingers. There’s time enough for that as he grows older. On this day it is the Gangster King’s concern only that his son know a fiddle when he sees one, and the monte is a perfect metaphor for any game or trick you can name. See the world through the monte, and you won’t be taken for a sucker. At least, not often.
Mathew rolls his wrists and flashes the cards, showing the heavy, the light, the heavy. He lays them out, exposes them face up. It is all so much distraction, hands not quicker than the eye but cleverer than the watcher. Joe grins as his father fakes a fumble, trying to get him to focus on the wrong thing, and Mathew nods appreciatively. Then abruptly Joe’s father stops, alarmingly sincere.
“Your grandfather’s told you about strictures, I suppose?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“He’s a good man, son. He tries his hardest. He believes in the game. He thinks if you play by the rules long enough, the right sort of fellow will win out. He may be right. Thing is, in my experience, the right sort run out of money or the wrong sort leave the table. The game is fixed. Always has been, always will be, and the only way out for a man is the gangster’s road. Take what you can, do what you must, and know that being a right sort never saved anyone from anything.”
Joe nods, taken aback by his father’s sudden need to explain himself.
“I did listen your grandfather when I was little, Son, just the way you listen to me. Truth is I still do, but don’t tell him I said so. So here’s a stricture of the monte—of the Market, I suppose: if you can see what’s going on around you, when other fellows walk through life blindly, then you’re a better man. And like to turn a profit, which is life’s way of letting you know your quality. All right?”
“Yes!”
Mathew’s hands move again, fast and faster, and he lays the cards down on the table. “Then find the lady.”
Joshua Joseph grins. His father has tried very, very hard to beat him. He has played a trick so stinkingly dishonest while he was talking that Joe can only read into it the deepest possible respect. He looks his father in the eye.
“It isn’t this one,” he says, and turns over the right-hand card. Mathew smiles. “And it isn’t this one.” He turns over the middle card. His father’s smile twitches up at the side. “And that means it must be this one.” He leaves the last card where it is. The queen, he well knows, is in Mathew’s coat pocket, which is why he has played the monte this way around, revealing losers rather than picking the winner. Turning the con.
Mathew wraps him in a massive hug. “We have a winner,” he says once more, into the top of Joe’s hair. “My son. A real winner.”
And that’s it. It’s really happening.
It is the best day of Joshua Joseph’s young life, ever, at all.
Going to the Night Market!
Harriet Spork fusses with his lapels and the mustard polo-neck jumper one more time, and Mathew watches with a broad grin.
“It’s scratchy,” the infant Spork objects. Mathew Spork nods. He is wearing exactly the same outfit.
“It is, Josh, at first, but after a bit you get used to it and then you miss it when it isn’t there. You want to look a fine figure of a man, don’t you? For the Market?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Well, then.”
Joshua Joseph waits patiently while his mother finishes with his hair
—again—and sits quiet in the back of his father’s car, very straight, with his eyes set in what he imagines is an expression of extreme adulthood. Through the streets of London they go, first fast, then slow, then fast again, and the big car leans and rolls as Mathew Spork plays the accelerator and checks that there is no one in his rear-view mirror.
Joshua Joseph manfully feels nauseous and does not say so. Harriet leans against her husband as he takes a right-angle corner at fifty, and the tyres hold the road as if they were clamped to it. Mathew grins at her fiercely, at her flushed skin and ever so slightly open mouth.
After twenty minutes, prim residential houses give way to tall tower blocks. After another ten, the blocks dwindle into business parks and lock-ups, and then they’re driving along next to a wide pastureland. In the moonlight, Joshua Joseph catches a glimpse of an urban fox on a fence.
“All right, Josh, we’re here.”
They get out of the car. Joshua Joseph can smell January frost and the sharp scent of burning wood. All around there are high, empty buildings and the sound of creaking hulks on the river nearby. His shoes squelch in mud, find gravel. His father tells them both to hurry, and they do. Across a courtyard covered in black ice and car tyres, past the brittle corpse of a misplaced winter duck. Mathew Spork opens a strange, oval door and draws them with him.
They step through, and he closes it behind them. They walk down some steps and on along a narrow, arched tunnel. Harriet’s heels clip and tap on polished concrete.
“Where are we?”
“You know where we are, laddie. You found the way!”
“But I mean, what is it?”
“Well, at certain times and in certain seasons, those worthy persons governing great nations may disagree with one another. And in an effort to avoid any physical harm, all the lords and owners of banks and presidents construct underground places in which to take refuge.” He leads the way down a short flight of stairs. “And then there are utilities. You know what that is? Sewers and trains and water and such. This part, now, this part has belonged to Her Majesty’s Post Office since good Queen Victoria’s time. I dare say they’ve no idea they own it, profligate spenders of the public purse that they are. The Post back then was a marvel, Josh, a genuine marvel, and in the capital it must be doubly so, so they made a little railway all their own, and pneumatic pipes of brass, and vacuum pumps driven by steam. Genius. Of course, there are man-size tunnels to care for it all. All closed up now, caved in and vanished, built over, filled in, as far as Lily Law and her friends are concerned, but known to us, Josh, to men of the Market like me and you. Those fellows in Paris, Josh, they think they’ve catacombs, but that’s nothing to what treasure is under London!”