Old pictures, Polaroids, wrapped with an elastic band from the Post Office—of course. Smiling lockpickers, the very first Old Campaigners of Mathew Spork’s inner circle. Parties with women in baby-doll dresses and men in velvet suits. A candid picture of Harriet which Joe hastily pushes to the back, so lustful and alarmingly ripe does she appear.
And then, very much out of place, three more pictures in their own little group, with a smaller elastic band around them and a piece of paper with the single word “Josh” on it just to make the point, and Joe Spork finds he can read them as if they were postcards:
Uncle Tam and Mathew, looking very grave, shaking hands on a deal in the Marketman’s fashion, a double clasp. Your Uncle has something for you.
Mercer and, yes, Polly, clasped in the arms of their parents on the steps of Cradle’s. These are the people you can trust.
And Joe himself, in a sheepskin jacket, perched on Mathew’s knee and punching the sky, Mathew’s face for once quite open and joyous, gunman’s hands on his son’s narrow shoulders. That one’s almost too simple, too primal to put into words. Even I love you doesn’t really do it justice.
He can feel Mathew’s breath on his hair. His father used to inhale him from time to time, simple, honest, mammalian.
“Ireland, Joe,” Mercer says.
Joe looks over at him, genuinely surprised. “Oh, I’m not running.”
“What? Of course you are.”
“No.”
“Joe, you can’t fight this. It’s too big.”
“He’s going to kill the world, Mercer. And he’s already killed me. The old Joe is done. I won’t be doing a lot of business now, will I? Even if the bank doesn’t foreclose, which they will.”
“It will blow over. Someone else will no doubt stop him. There are people who do those things.”
“The Legacy Board. Rodney Titwhistle. Yes. He’s on top of it, all right.”
“For God’s sake, Joe! You’re a clockworker. That’s what you wanted. That’s who I’ve been trying to help!”
“And he says ‘Thank you.’ From the bottom of his heart. But he’s gone, Mercer. Now it’s me.” He glances over at Polly Cradle.
“Tell him!” Mercer demands, but Polly just smiles back at Joe and slowly claps her hands, eyes shining.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mercer shouts. “You’re not serious!”
“Yes,” Joe says. “I began to get it when I was in there. I don’t know when. Maybe after the first month.”
Mercer hesitates. “Joe, you weren’t in there a month. It wasn’t even a full week. I know it must have seemed like longer, but you escaped after five days.”
Joe Spork shakes his head, and his smile is very fey indeed.
“No, Mercer,” he says gently. “It just felt like that to you, because you were on the outside.”
There is a ghastly silence. Mercer starts to object, to correct him, and then the upside-down truth of this sinks into him and he crumples.
“I’m so sorry, Joe,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help. I’m sorry. I did my best, and it wasn’t … it wasn’t anything like enough.”
“You were superb,” Joe Spork tells him gently. “They tried to tell me you’d given up. Both of you.”
They bristle, and he smiles. “Look: this is just how it is now. My whole life I’ve been telling myself to be calm, to be reasonable, to be respectable. To toe the line. But here I am, all the same, because they cheated. They changed the game so that I couldn’t win by being an honest man. But the thing is, I wasn’t very good at being an honest man. I had to put so much of me away to do it. But being a crook, now … I’ve got the skills for that. I can be an amazing crook. I can be the greatest crook who ever lived. I can do that, and still do the right thing. I’m not bonkers, at all. I’m free.”
Polly Cradle cocks her head, and considers.
“What right thing?” she asks.
Bastion growls softly.
Joe gestures at the newspaper.
“They’re coming after me. They’re killing people and it’s only a matter of time before they get”—he looks around, and finds himself gazing at Polly, looks away—“one of you. I’m not running any more. It’s time to give them something to think about.”
He folds his arms.
Mercer opens his mouth to argue, and Bastion Banister chooses this moment to open his mouth and snap at the circling bee. To his own evident surprise, he captures it, and there’s a curious little glonking noise as he swallows it whole. Mercer cringes slightly, as if expecting the dog to explode.
Nothing happens.
“All right,” Polly Cradle says, and then, pro forma, “Bastion, you’re a very naughty boy.”
“Yes,” Mercer says acidly. “The dog has consumed a possibly lethal technological device of immense sophistication, deprived us of our only piece of tangible evidence and possibly doomed us all to some sort of arcane scientific retaliative strike. By all means, chide him severely with your voice. That will solve everyone’s problems.”
There is silence, and then Joe Spork starts to sputter, and Polly Cradle snorts, and then Joe actually laughs: a small snigger which grows into a loud, open laugh, and finally a great shout of mirth, and Polly is laughing right alongside him, with relief and delight and in honour of the expression of profound affront on her brother’s face. Finally, even Mercer joins in.
When the fit is over, they regard one another with glad eyes.
“Mercer,” Polly says, “we are now going to hug. As a group. The experience will be very un-English. It will be good for you. Do not speak, at all, especially not in an attempt to diffuse the emotional intensity of the situation.”
They hug, somewhat awkwardly, but with great feeling.
“Well,” Mercer says, after a moment, “that was certainly—”
“I will hit you with a shovel,” Polly Cradle murmurs.
The clasp goes on a second longer, and then they step back.
“All right, then,” Joe Spork says. “Let’s get started.”
“This is actually not something I’ve done before,” Joe says a few moments later to the man in the pink shirt, “but I felt almost sure I would have natural talent.”
The man nods hurriedly, but very gently, because he’s worried about the Sabatier cleaver resting just under his chin. Joe liberated this gruesome item from the kitchen in the giant mint, and his face brightened significantly as he appreciated its weight and general nastiness. The owner of the house is apparently some sort of closet gourmet, because Polly was able to arm herself with a brace of short, fat-bladed items used for shucking oysters which, while small, possess a similar measure of menace and utility.
Joe smiles benignly, which in the circumstances makes him appear completely deranged. “Do you read the newspapers? No, don’t nod again, that’s not a good idea. Make a sort of squeak if you can … yes, there we are. One for yes, two for no … Good. So you are aware that I am an escaped mental patient, a sociopath, and an accused terrorist?”
The man squeaks.
“Great. So we’re clear on the absolute and incontrovertible awfulness of your situation and how very dangerous I am? Oh, by the way, this is Polly. Polly, say hello to Mr … well, perhaps we won’t ask his name, in case it makes him nervous. Say hello, anyway.” Polly Cradle smoulders.
“Now, where was I? Oh, yes. This car. It is absolutely lovely. I can almost promise you it will not be damaged. I say ‘almost’ because there’s a slight possibility that any car in which I travel will be shot at and blown up. It’s a negligible risk from my point of view in that I would be past caring, but I can see that you might take exception. Anyway, it’s a lovely car and I’ll do my best. You don’t mind, do you?”
An emphatic double-squeak: mi casa, su casa.
“Thank you. Now, can you tell me, will it get us to Portsmouth on that much petrol, do you think? No? Well, I suppose I can rob a garage. Now, can we be reasonably sure that you’ll wait an hour or so before ca
lling the police? Because otherwise I’ll have to ask you to accompany us. How is the boot, by the way? Comfy? Oh, you’re leaving? Yes, I think that might be best …”
Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.
“Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmurs, “that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?”
Joe swallows. “Yes, we can,” he says carefully.
“There will therefore be no more ‘Say hello, Polly’?”
“There will not.”
The knife disappears immediately, and she slides over to him, plants her lips on his. He feels her tongue, wide and muscular, in his mouth. Her hand puts his firmly on her arse.
“Start the engine,” she says. “I find car-theft sexy.”
“This was technically a car-jacking,” Joe says.
“Do you want extra points for that?”
“Yes, please.”
“Then don’t say ‘please.’ ”
From St. Albans they head north.
A brief conversation with Cecily Foalbury via public phone at a petrol station yielded the information that the “Station Y” of Ted Sholt’s final, desperate confidence was better known as Bletchley Park. Cecily was somewhat scathing about this. “For God’s sake, it’s common knowledge, Joe. I took you there myself. They broke the Enigma code, won the war. Invented the digital computer. No?”
And yes, of course, Joe remembers Bletchley, with its mysterious Nissen huts in various stages of decay, surrounded by suspect little hills which were clearly anything but, and the sprawling red-brick house which had been home to the greatest mathematicians an embattled Britain could lay hands on. He’d been almost equally impressed by the model-train club which occupied part of the house and helped to pay the rent, and by the mothballed Harrier jump jet on the lawn. A decayed British institution, abandoned by its secrets and left to run to seed. You could hide almost anything at Bletchley. Who would ever ask?
Joe has swapped the car’s number plates with those of another of the same make, and Polly disabled the satellite tracker, so the stolen vehicle has effectively vanished unless someone looks at the engine block. There’s a strange feeling of freedom on the open road, however illusory.
“What’s at Bletchley?” Polly asks, as Milton Keynes draws closer ahead of them.
He grins at her. “A train,” he says, and sees her answering smile.
After the motorway, the road to Bletchley is flat and dull. It winds between bits of contoured landscape and modern box houses; the strange, tame outskirts of Milton Keynes, created whole and inviolate by the planners and somehow never quite human in its execution. Bletchley Park is on the outskirts, served by a spur road which opens onto what may once have been a machine-gun emplacement. Joe parks the car very neatly in a space. Even though it shouldn’t be there, the English curator-type will usually ignore something which isn’t in the way.
The dawn is coming, and with it comes a measure of risk. Joe hesitates, briefly worried that some late watchman or early modeller will catch him in the act, then remembers that he doesn’t really care about that. He clambers onto the roof of the ticket office and peers around in the twilight.
Ted Sholt’s instructions are not clear, were never exactly lucid. Joe lays them over the terrain like a pencil sketch, and adds another layer of his own, his Night Market instinct for concealment and deception. If I were hiding an unlicensed boxing ring … And sure enough, there it is, a long, low barrow which is too straight and too unexpected to be a natural rise, but too big to be easily recognised as artificial. And yes, it does indeed give onto a curve in the old railway, a suspicious valley with long grass at the bottom which he has no doubt will reveal a short stretch of track. He points. Polly nods, but when he makes for the mound directly she shakes her head.
“Over here,” she murmurs, and draws him to the small, shattered remnant of a hut away to one side. A sign reads “Officers’ Water Closet: upper ranks only.” Inside, she produces a torch from her bag—which also contains, somewhat to his surprise, Edie Banister’s dog—and illuminates a hatch in the floor which leads down into a passageway beneath ground level. She grins, and Joe nods, acknowledging her score.
Hand over hand, they climb down into the earth.
The passage smells of musty concrete and damp. At the end of it there is a door, very solid and serious. Hermetic, Joe suspects. He could have blown it, with the right gear—and where would he get that? The question of proper gangstering tools is next on the agenda, and right speedily.
But he doesn’t need to blow this one, and that’s for the best, given what may be behind it. The combination lock is old and rather pretty, rich brass dials engraved with Roman numerals. Done by hand, he thinks. Open the door with Lizzie’s birthday, Sholt said, and yes, indeed: XXI-IV-XXVI does the trick, the arrival in this world of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
When he opens the door there is a rush of air inwards. Beyond it there’s another door, forming a kind of dust trap, and hanging on the wall is a row of wind-up lanterns. He lifts one down, turns the handle a few times. Then he steps through the inner door.
The room beyond is comparatively narrow—it’s more of a tunnel—but it’s enormous. It slants gently down into the earth; the near end, the one leading out into the world, is at ground level. And there, in front of him, is what he came for. Endless scrolling patterns ripple along lines of sheer power. The boiler is taller than he is and long as a bus. The sections fade away into the distance—ten of them? Twelve? Each is as perfectly made as the last, and each one is subtly different. The name is cut into the black iron cowcatcher at the front: Lovelace.
The exterior looks like metal, but it could be something else—resin, ceramic … Joe runs his hand over it. The surface is cool and a little damp, because there’s a layer of protective oil. He smells coal and a cosy, storage-space scent of leather and wood. As he moves the beam of the lantern up and around, he begins to get a sense of the thing, its scale. Trains are familiar things, clattering drones which rush by or wander through the countryside; passenger trains have windows through which one can see harried parents or commuters squeezed like chattels. Goods trains, these days, are rare. You have to watch for them on local lines or sidings, or sit in Polly Cradle’s bedroom and feel them go by. Joe Spork glances at Polly. She is walking along behind him, silent, one hand tracing a single finger along the skin of the Lovelace. He can see a tiny rim of dust and rubble building up where she’s touching the carriage. She’s smiling as if he’s given her diamonds.
The next door has the goose-foot symbol on it. The dog Bastion barks suddenly, and yearns towards it from his bag. Polly shrugs.
“This one, then,” she says.
They open the door and climb aboard. There’s a faint hiss as the door unseals, and a whisper of motion as a ventilation system starts working. At least, Joe hopes it’s a ventilation system and not, for example, a deadly gas attack. He sniffs, then feels like an idiot, but since he doesn’t fall over and die he assumes this is not poison, and steps forward.
Inside, the lantern picks out two workbenches. One of them is cluttered and covered in a now-familiar scrawl, rows of mathematical notations and scraps of metal and other substances more obscure. The other is perfectly neat, almost prim. A vise, a selection of tools … Daniel.
Yes, boy. This one was mine. We sat back to back and worked, and I listened to her frustration and her triumph and I never told her how much I wanted her back, because I knew she had no room for me any more. For Mathew. For you. She was just desperate to make things right.
Joe reaches out and touches the bench. It is a caress, a gesture of fellowship.
Then he hears a voice, and turning, sees a woman made of light.
“Hello,” the woman says. She walks forward. Her body is a
n outline, like a shadow in reverse. Looking around, Joe realises that she is composed of bright beams from a hundred tiny lenses around the compartment, reflecting off a column of moisture in the air. Her face is indistinct. Just barely, he can see her profile when she turns to one side, and the outline of her mouth when she speaks. Her voice is a recording, much better than the ones in Daniel’s record collection—and with that realisation he names her, of course. Frankie Fossoyeur.
He studies her features, or tries to, feels fleeting recognition as the image turns and moves, though whether it is from old memories of Frankie or her reflection in Daniel and Mathew he does not know.
The whole numinous vision is … well. Not otherworldly. It’s quite simple, just brilliantly executed. A three-dimensional magic-lantern show. Holograms without lasers. Exactly what you’d expect from the kind of genius who builds a truth machine in the shape of a beehive.
Frankie cocks her head to one side. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are. I hope Edie is there, somewhere. Or Daniel. Or both of you, perhaps. Maybe you are in love. That would be tidy … Mais non. I am cruel. I am sorry, both of you.
“So sorry …” She waves her hand, brushing all this away.
“You realise that this is just a recording. A clever one. But no doubt by now this sort of thing is commonplace and I look hopelessly old-fashioned … Bien. And perhaps the entire conversation is out of date, and everything is well. But in case it is not, and since you’re here, I’m going to ask you to save the world for me. I hope that isn’t too much trouble.” She laughs, and then coughs. The cough is the bad kind, the kind which doesn’t get better. “Nom de chien …”
The ghost leans on something off camera, and sighs. The invisible face is slightly at an angle to them, the projection out of sync with the real world. It gives Joe the curious sense that she is looking at someone behind him. “This is where you say ‘Yes’,” Frankie adds. “And then I’ll tell you what you need to know.”