Angelmaker (47 page)

The phone is in a separate wooden booth, an elegantly carved enclosure with a special noise-reducing design. It was made, according to the handwritten label, for an Estonian noble in the late 1800s. Joe cannot remember the number, but he can remember dialling it on his father’s grey desk phone, the purr of the tone and the endless clickety-clack as he went through the digits. Back then, it was an oh-one number. Now it’s oh-two-oh-seven. He hopes the rest remains the same.

Someone answers on the second ring.

“Fucking intolerable
cow
!” cries an aggravated male voice.

“Don?”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I thought you were Erika. My lover,” the voice clarifies, in case Joe knows more than one Erika who might be an intolerable cow. “Who’s that?”

“Don? It’s Joe Spork.”

“Joe? Joe Spork? Oh, for God’s sake, little Josh?”

“Yes.”

“Little Josh, who must now be almost as old as I am, you have the pleasure of addressing the Honourable Donald Beausabreur Lyon, master of a thousand bureaucrats and Prince of Quangos! That’s Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation, for those in the audience who don’t know, such as the intolerable cow who thinks she can boss me around like a puppy dog and make me go to bloody Sheffield when I don’t bloody want to … Honestly, it’s bloody Sheffield, not Saint-Tropez … How may I be of service?”

“I’ve got a spot of bother, Don, and I thought you might be able to help out. For old times’ sake, as it were.”

“Well, I don’t know. I might. What sort of bother?”

“I’m involved in this bee thing. By accident.”

“The bee thing?”

“The crazy bees from Cornwall? The police were called out.”

“Oh, bloody hell.
That
bee thing. That’s far beyond me, old lad. Go and see that weasel at the office and confess all, is my advice. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you’d prefer not to?” This last in a strangely wheedling tone.

“I’d really prefer not to.”

The Hon Don doesn’t speak. Joe realises he’s waiting for something.
There’s a password, but I don’t know what it is
.

Finally, “Well, I’ll look into it, Josh—Joe, is it?—but I can’t promise anything. Where are you?”

“I’ll call you, Don. It’s better that way.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course. I see what you mean. But you can trust me. Mum’s the word.”

“Oh! Yes. Don, did Mathew ever mention anything to you about his mother?”

“God, no. Harriet was the only person he ever talked to about
that sort of thing. Go and see her, is my advice. Tell her I said to sing ‘Georgia Brown’ one more time for the Hon Don! All right? Then I’ll hear from you? Grand. Grand …”

And Donald Beausabreur Lyon is gone, in a flurry of false bonhomie.

Joe turns to find Cecily Foalbury watching him from the doorway. From the non-display collection in the basement her husband has retrieved a small portable gramophone known as a Piglet (Jacobs Bros. of Stroud, 1940) because of the noise it makes when you wind it. “We’re always here, Joe,” she says very seriously. “We’d go to the wall for you. Don’t ever forget it. That’s what Harticle’s is for, and it’s our trust. ‘No craftsman stands alone, nor in his darkness lacks for light, nor has no shield against his patron’s spite.’ Frightful piece of doggerel, but it’s real to me. And I love you like my own, all right?” She hugs him powerfully, then turns hurriedly away.

Subdued, Joe allows Polly to drive him back to her home. Mercer calls when they are still a few streets away with strict instructions that they remain in the house.

“I’m coming to you,” he tells her. “Something’s happening.”

“What sort of something?”

“Turn on the television when you get home,” Mercer says, “and then stay exactly where you are, which is what you’re supposed to be doing right now. Where did you go?”

Polly tells him.

“Well,” Mercer says after a moment, “that was insane. But apparently it was also a good idea. I find the combination unsettling. Please try not to have any more good ideas until I get there to measure them against the possibility that you have gone entirely off your rocker.”

Polly Cradle sits close to her old television set and waits. She has crossed her legs in a position which Joe finds almost yogic. On her right is a yellow legal pad and in her hand she has a pen. One of two pieces of up-to-date technology she owns, a digital TV recorder, is running so that she can replay the news. The other—a chunky laptop with a thick cord snaking out of it to the wall—rests on a stack of thick foreign dictionaries so that she can follow the signals chatter of the internet.

“Do you speak all those languages?” Joe wonders aloud.

“No,” Polly Cradle says. “That’s why I have dictionaries.” She wiggles and waves her arms, and by this strangely powerful method she conveys an image of herself, with a stack of documents, painstakingly working out the precise meaning of each, phrase by phrase.

“Watch!” she says abruptly, and turns up the sound. On the screen, a fishing fleet in mid-ocean, seen from a helicopter. The newsreader is playing for drama. His voice is filled with the special “keep calm” tone which suggests crisis. The shot cuts to a shot from on board one of the boats.

It is awash in perfect, golden bees.

There is no one on board.

And, as the camera pans, so it is across the entire fleet.

The news cuts away to a coastguard ship a few miles away. The sailors are here, in life jackets and blankets.

“We had to abandon ship,” one of them says.

“Why? Why did you have to abandon ship?” the reporter demands.

“Too much,” the man says obscurely.

“Too much what?”

The man doesn’t answer immediately. He looks up and off to the side, remembering. “I understood things,” he says at last.

“What sort of things?”

“Just things.”

“I see—”

“No,” the man says. “You don’t. You think you do. But you don’t.”

“I don’t think people will understand what you mean.”

“No. They won’t. Not until it happens to them.”

“Is it going to, do you think?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely. And when it does, they’ll know what I know.”

“Which is?”

“Too much,” he says again. “Questions I ask myself in my head, and don’t really want the answers to. I knew them, I couldn’t not know. I have to go home and apologise to my wife. I screamed at her before we left. And my kids. I was wrong and I need to be better. I need to eat right, too. And my uncle, he’s a monster. I’ve told the police: he beats my aunt. I don’t know why I never said it before. That’s all right, I suppose, but it’s hard feeling it all at once. But then there’s more and more. There’s too much of it. You do what you can and there’s never an end, just more things wrong that don’t have to be.” He shudders, and starts to cry.

A moment later, the bees depart skyward in a great rush, and the
show cuts back to the studio where people with no notion of what is going on speculate on what it all means. There is a note of panic, and fear.

Mercer comes through the door about ten seconds later.

He looks at his sister, and then at Joe. His eyes open very wide.

“Oh, God,” he murmurs. “As if there wasn’t enough trouble in the world, you two have had sex.”

“We made speculative love,” Polly replies airily.

“What?”

“Honestly, you sound just like him. Well, no. That sounds wrong … I mean that he also asks an enormous number of questions about perfectly obvious things. We made speculative love, Mercer. We had sex pre-emptively, in case we fall in love later. I think of it as an investment in satisfaction.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then you’re right. We had really great sex.”

Mercer appears to consider this for a moment.

“Suddenly,” he says, “I find that my present line of questioning has lost its appeal.” He glances at Joe. “Well. Not before time. The rest of the picture, as you see, is not so bonny. So … Fasten your seat belts, my lad and lass. This could get rocky.”

A moment later the doorbell rings, and one of the Bethanys is standing on the stoop with a concerned-looking man in his forties.

“Mr. Cradle? Mr. Long is here to see you.”

“How does he even—” Mercer breaks off as Polly drums her fingers on the desk. “Fine. Mr. Long, who he?”

“A curator.”

“Is he relevant?”

“No. He has a kind face and he keeps cats and I thought … yes, Mercer, of course he is. This is what I do.”

Mercer waves his hands vaguely, as if already wanting his teacup.

“Sorry.”

Bethany—it’s number two, Joe Spork is fairly sure—follows this exchange with a suffused expression of concealed but potent delight.

Mr. Long is a damp sort of specimen with a jowly neck and a large, square head. Joe thinks of him immediately as a nervous local darts champion.

“Mr. Long,” Polly murmurs, bringing him inside, “would you like some coffee?”

“Oh!” Mr. Long says, his balloonish nose pointing briefly at the ceiling as he tosses his head to indicate enthusiasm. “Oh, yes, that would be marvellous. Only not too much.” He makes an apnoeac clunking noise in his sinuses which is apparently indicative of humour. “Ahaha
knuu
haha, because it makes me extremely jumpy! Aha ha hnn.”

Polly favours him with a devastating smile.

“Mr. Long,” she murmurs as she lounges out, “is the director of the Alternative Paradigms Institute at Brae Hampton. I believe he may also be the victim of some sort of confidence trick.”

“Oh, I am!” Mr. Long nods again. “I am. A rather wicked trick has been played upon us. At least, I trust it’s a trick. I do hope it’s nothing more serious.”

Mercer looks at Joe.
This one’s yours. I do coppers and spies and lairs and monsters. I don’t do curators
.

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your organisation,” Joe murmurs invitingly.

“Oh, no one is. We’re very quiet. Although recently we’ve been getting some tourism for the tank exhibit.”

“Tank? Like …” Joe mimes a vague armoured vehicle, machine gun firing.

“Oh, not like Panzers, oh no!
Knuu-knuu
haha! We have the largest freshwater tank in Great Britain, and the largest enclosed one in the world, for the exclusive use of model-boat enthusiasts, you see. Just a sideline, of course.”

“A sideline?”

“Oh, yes. The purpose of the Institute is to preserve lines of research science and technology which are presently unfashionable. So, for example, we carry the translated notes of Akunin, the eighteenth-century Russian specialist in bacteriophage medicine.” Mr. Long smiles as if this should make things perfectly clear; a wide, millennialist’s grin filled with genial crazy. “Treasures which
one day
, when they are
retrieved from obscurity
, may greatly benefit mankind … although between you and me some of them should probably stay hidden, they’re a bit daft. Ahah
knuu!
Ahahah.”

“And you also have …”

“Oh, yes, a collection of … well. I say ‘a collection’ … in fact it’s several collections, classified together by the Institute. They’re all Second War, you see. There’s the Pyke Papers. There’s a very small set on
Tesla’s work, donated by an American gentleman, and some Russian documents regarding psychical research which I personally regard as
disinformation
, like the SDI programme in reverse …”

“Perhaps you should ask Mr. Long about his present problem,” Polly Cradle says, re-entering with a tray.

“Oh, indeed!” cries Mr. Long, “Indeed! The item we had was linked with a rather special woman, a scientist … Gave Pyke himself a run for his money, though if I’m honest he was more an innovator and an engineer than a pure scientist, of course …” It’s as if he’s telling a very dirty joke. All of us over the age of consent here, eh? Don’t mind a bit of
engineering
, do we? Nudge, nudge.

Joe abruptly misses Billy Friend very much.

“I understand the Americans were working on some of her early research when they had that rather unfortunate accident with the USS
Eldridge
 … That’s another one most people think is a myth, but of course
we know better
, don’t we?
Aknuu-knuuu!
” Mr. Long is nodding so hard now that it seems possible he will strain himself. Mercer stares fixedly at the ceiling.