Angelmaker (19 page)

Focus, old cow
.

The gun is extremely heavy in her bag. She has reloaded, out of habit; she does not honestly expect to be assailed in the street, and all that mystical jabber about expecting the unexpected is just so much toffee. Expect the unexpected, Edie was told by a sour veteran sergeant in Burma, and the expected will walk up to you and blow your expectations out through the back of your head. Expect the expected, just don’t forget the rest.

The expected, then, is for her enemy to imagine that Mr. Biglandry has squished her like a bug. The assassin won’t be missed for at least another half-hour, perhaps as much as a day, depending on how long
his leash was. Edie has exactly that long to disappear. First step: a change of clothes.

She takes a taxi to a nondescript street in Camden Town, and tells the driver a story about her great-grandchildren so asinine that even she feels slightly sick. After a couple of minutes, he cannot actually look at her in the mirror, and Edie can feel her face sliding in his memory until it is generic: little old lady, average height, average dress. Lawdamercy, but the old baggage can talk.

Still twittering banalities, Edie pays the man, then fishes in her purse for an old-style penny, dated 1959. A proper tip back then, worth nothing at all today. She has a small trove for convincing people she’s dotty.

“Here you are, driver, and God bless!”

He takes it hurriedly, eyes everywhere but on her. He just wants to forget that she was ever in his cab. The feel of round, cold metal, the wrong size and the wrong weight, makes him freeze for a moment. Then he looks down.

“Oh,” he says automatically, “thanks very much.”
You poor lamb
. She almost feels guilty, but hasn’t the time.

She leaves him staring at the coin. He will recall the sense of aggravation she has engendered, but not much else. In an hour, he will remember her if at all as an amalgam of every fare he has ever disliked.

And then she goes shopping.

Four hours later, in the snug of the Pig & Poet: Edie has tied her hair up in not one but three separate knots, and she is wearing a T-shirt purchased from a barrow trader, a black skirt, and heavy leggings and boots. Camden Town has been good to her. She begged some safety pins from the respectable peeping Tom who runs a dry-cleaner’s at the end of the road, and put the whole thing together to make a formidable new identity: mad old lady punk.

The Pig & Poet isn’t much of a pub. It’s a couple of tables and a miserable jukebox which didn’t work even before Edie took one of her safety pins and shoved it across the two bottom bars of the plug and stuck it back in the wall, thereby causing a short circuit and a strong smell of melted plastic. The snug is now in partial darkness, which just about conceals how mournful it is, and how cheap.

The Irishman who used to run this place managed to get some joy into it just by being who he was, a kind of punchy, endlessly profane little man with a liking for large women. He went off to Exeter, apparently, and has nevermore been seen. Since his departure, the poetry has ebbed from the saloon bar, and the remainder is decidedly piggy. In consequence, it wasn’t hard to get the attic room on cash deposit, no questions asked.

Edie is doing her accounts. By rule of long-ago decision, she does not allow herself unconsidered killings. For all that her recent shooting spree was in the heat, no death should go unnoticed, least of all if she had a hand in it. The power of knowing how to extinguish life in so many ways—and the power which stems from having done it—must be balanced with a respect for what it means to bring someone else’s narrative to a close.

Edie, as she sips on her rum and Coke, takes a moment to wonder if she might have done things differently, and to appreciate the significance of
Biglandry et fils
, and the appallingness of having snuffed them out. For all that they were grotty, wicked, venal men, they were extraordinary things, both of them ravishing, complex creatures. Perhaps they were loving, too, in their own way. Soldiers for hire, certainly, and rough-hewn. That doesn’t mean they weren’t also dads or sons. Will Mrs. Biglandry curse and wail? Of course she will. Her horror at this circumstance will not be diminished by her husband’s profession—if she ever finds it out. Her son will not be less orphaned, nor her daughter less broken, if she tries to explain that Biglandry’s end was just.

If I were younger
, Edie thinks.
Or if I had allies. Or if I’d thought a bit longer and planned a bit better
. She goes through it in her head, one more time. Killed two, spared one. Bad mathematics, but better than it might have been.
Less good than it could have been, too, old cow
.

So here’s to the bungled dead, expired of their own incompetence and my experience. Here’s to the long habit of survival. I’m sorry, Mrs. B and all the little Bs. I truly am. If I could bring them back—at a safe distance and possibly with a summary kick in the testes for justice’s sake—I would do it. No one is so wicked as to deserve extinction.

Long ago and far away, Edie Banister was told that a human soul infallibly knew its own value when it was reflected in the eye of an elephant. She wonders what she would see if she went to London Zoo and somehow got close enough to check. The question of value has
been very much on her mind of recent months. She can feel a coldness reaching for her, a chill she knows all too well, though these days it possesses a terrible finality. Mrs. Crabbe (whom she does not like) recently suggested on this basis that Edie must be a little bit psychic. Edie privately thought that anyone who didn’t feel death approaching after nine decades on Earth was probably some sort of idiot.

Last dance. Best make it a good one
.

She raises her glass in recognition of the recent dead, and, to everyone’s vast embarrassment, not least her own, collapses into tears in the corner of the Pig & Poet. And then, little by little and aided above all by the damp, halitotic nose which settles on her chest as Bastion emerges from her shopping bag to give succour, she pulls herself together again, and very soon she is the woman she was, has always been—just a little older, and reddish about the eyes.

All those years.
Bloody hell
.

“Girls wishing to serve their country will need flat shoes and modest underwear.”

It is the word “underwear” which wakes Edie Banister from the contented slumber into which she has fallen during Miss Thomas’s morning notices. The teachers at Lady Gravely School very rarely speak of underwear, and the reference to flat shoes is astonishing, because all other kinds are most strictly forbidden. As for the implied existence of
immodest
underwear—Edie can barely believe her tender young ears. This much is clear: Miss Thomas did not write the notice she is reading, and the matter is considered very serious—sufficiently so that this informational contraband is all the same being given a place here, between duty roster and closing prayers.

“Underwear,” she murmurs, as everyone else says “Amen,” and duly presents herself at the appointed time in the headmistress’s study, wearing her most unimpeachable shoes.

Three other girls have been bitten by the patriotic bug; presumably either the other sixty or so are not as mind-numbingly bored as Edie, or they fear they may be asked by their government to do something unladylike, a suspicion which was raised in Edie’s mind by the mention of underwear and to which she clings like a drowning woman to a spar. Prostitutes were sent to assassinate Napoleon, she recalls, and
in a racy novel of which she read two-thirds before being betrayed by a prim little cow called Clemency Brown (and consequently slapped thrice with a ruler across the palm), the heroine had given herself regretfully but unswervingly into the lustful embraces of Skullcap Roy the pirate in order to deflect his wrath from her younger brother. Not, Edie suspected, without a certain measure of anticipation. In time of war, she reasons, one must be prepared to sacrifice oneself. She imagines herself lying back and thinking of England in the arms of a brutishly delicious enemy. The horror is very nearly too much for her.

“Plant, good. Dixon, good. Clements, no, I don’t think so, girl, you’re in the Christmas play. Where shall we find another Magdalene who can sing? No, no. And … hmph.” Which is all the approbation Edie is likely to see, but no denay, and that will do.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Thomas, I didn’t catch that last?”

The little man is long-faced and pomaded. A pimp, Edie decides, like Quick Jack Duggan or Herb the Knife. On the other hand, he wears a blue suit of the most conservative kind, with a longish waistcoat and a fob watch. The fob has a small gold flower on the far end. Not worth pinching, or not yet, but a chunk of stuff all the same and very fine. Not Masonic, which is disappointing. The Masons, she has heard, perform depraved rites.

“Banister,” Miss Thomas mutters. “A lost child.”

“My, my. How so, lost?”

“In every sense, I’m afraid. Lost, because orphaned. Lost, because she must ask every question in her head and then another and another, and lost because she is stepped in spiritual grime and even in my most blessed and hopeful dreams I cannot see her ever casting out sin and admitting the Lord of Hosts.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, I shall certainly pray for her.”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Is there a particular prayer one offers up for young girls adrift on a sea of dreadful temptation? Something in the line of ‘Oh hear us, when we cry to thee’?”

“No,” Miss Thomas says, displaying some exhaustion with the topic. “Just whatever you can manage.”

“I shall manage what I can, then.”

Miss Thomas nods, and proceeds to vaunt the other two girls and
ignore Edie entirely. No surprise, and in any case Edie is not concerned. She has seen the spark in the gentleman’s eye, and knows that he has seen her seeing it. And she knows, too, by the flat-faced sincerity of his mien and his bland, unamused expression, that this man is a most unmitigated crook. Crooks do not go looking in distant corners for virtue. They can find that anywhere. Kindred wickedness, on the other hand, is a thing which must be sought out, and the seeking is the more difficult because it naturally masquerades, where virtue is drably ostentatious.

“My name,” the little gentleman says, “is Abel Jasmine. I am in the employ of the Treasury of His Majesty George VI, who is, of course, our king. At least, I assume he is. Is there anyone here who isn’t a subject of His Majesty?”

Tittering. Even Miss Thomas titters. Edie does not. It’s a perfectly valid question. There might be an Irish person, or an American, or even a French citizen in the room. Mr. Jasmine smiles and leans forward, hands clasped.

“Excellent. All Brits together, eh? So, ladies. I’m afraid we come to a most difficult question. Which of you has recently told an absolutely egregious lie? Miss Thomas?”

“No,” Miss Thomas says sniffily. More tittering. Never, Jessica Plant says, has she even embroidered the truth. (Which is, of course, an egregious lie, but a very stupid one.) Holly Dixon admits to having lied about having a stomach upset to avoid kitchen duty. Miss Thomas makes a note. Edie smiles and says nothing, and sees Mr. Jasmine’s eye settle immediately on her face.

“No deceptions in your life, Miss Banister?” Mr. Jasmine asks at last.

“It’s frightfully embarrassing,” Edie says breathlessly. “There must have been some, I’m sure. But for the life of me,” she offers him a broad, empty-headed smile, “I can’t think what they might have been, sir. Is that terribly bad?” She cancels the smile and the fluttery panic, and meets his gaze as hard as she can. “Is that what you had in mind, sir? Or more in the way of outrage at the very notion?”

Miss Thomas makes an outraged little noise in preparation for a scolding, but the little man holds up his hand and smiles.

“I believe you hit it on the head, Miss Banister,” Abel Jasmine says. He shrugs. “Well. Welcome to Science 2. You best go and pack. Thank you, Miss Thomas.”

Edie keeps her face absolutely even, as if she had expected nothing less, and sees Abel Jasmine notice that, too.