Angelmaker (75 page)

Not the Graeae. Worse:
“Tricoteuses!”
some part of his mind gargled in alarm. “The guillotine hags! Knitting of corpses’ hair. Flee, Arvin! Flee!”

However, a Cummerbund does not flee at his own gate. He stands. Most especially when there is the additional issue of a Webley Mk VI whose target is one’s own enormous belly, an easy mark at some remove, but at close quarters almost literally impossible to miss, even with the rather iffy Webley.

All of which is recent and regrettable history. Looking now at these three very determined women, and at the mistress of hounds with her
enormous certainty, Arvin Cummerbund feels very cold, and very small. He glances southward, to his towel.

“Oh,” Arvin Cummerbund says damply.

“Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle murmurs. “Would you be so kind as to come with us?”

Somewhere back in the flat, there’s a satellite-linked panic button which he carries in his pocket at all times. It actually has a lanyard so that he can wear it in the shower, but it gets in the way of the soap situation and is—being designed not by Apple or Sony but by the MOD—extremely ugly. It is therefore notably out of reach, even if he has remembered to replace the battery recently. He glances back at the boathook, seeing the name WATSON in large painted letters along the haft, and he chills—even further—as he tracks the message inherent in that. Abbie Watson glowers.

Arvin Cummerbund sighs, and allows them to lead him away.

“The error you have made,” Polly Cradle says in the house by Hampstead Heath, “lies, if you will forgive me, in your assessment of yourself in relation to your enemies—of whom, incidentally, your attack upon Joshua Joseph Spork makes me one. You believe, because it suits you to do so as emissaries of a great and powerful conspiracy in service to commerce and personal gain, that you and your charming friend Mr. Titwhistle have what I will call the ‘moral low ground.’ ”

Mercer Cradle sits at a kidney desk on the other side of the room, watching his sister work and leafing through a copious file. The
tricoteuses
occupy a nasty little semicircle close by, also watching. Cecily Foalbury has the largest chair, a wooden rocker, profoundly inappropriate for an interrogation, which she appears to enjoy. She is drinking tea and slurping it around her metal teeth. Leaning against a bookshelf at the back of the room is a tall, bulky figure in a long coat. He is in shadow, but Arvin Cummerbund recognises Britain’s Most Wanted by the line of his jaw. That said, there is something …
collected
 … about him. He’s come of age somehow.

Arvin’s own chair is an expensive one from Liberty, in chintz. It’s very comfortable. He has also been allowed to retain his towel and even given a blanket for warmth. He fusses with it.

Polly Cradle waits until she has his full attention, and continues.
“You think there are no depths to which you will not stoop. From this perception you draw a sense of invulnerability. You believe that you are—if I may put it crudely—the
bad guys
. You cherish the notion that you serve a great necessity, and thus your evil deeds, from which you derive a certain frisson, are legitimised. Nonetheless, though regrettably necessary they are unquestionably evil, and in some small way, so are you. You bear this burden for the nation and the world, sacrificing your own nobility in the cause of higher salvation. I’m terribly impressed.

“This construction would make us,” she indicates the room in general, “the
good guys
. Misguided, but morally clean. As a consequence of our goodness, you feel safe in this very quiet, very secluded room.”

She smiles, then tuts as the dog Arvin Cummerbund earlier observed tugs at something in a carpet bag under the table, a rubbery sort of item. Harriet Spork picks the bag up off the floor and starts absently to unpack it. A rubber apron. A length of surgical hose. Arvin Cummerbund feels a sort of rushing feeling in his stomach. Polly Cradle nods a thank-you and goes on.

“The thing is, Arvin—you don’t mind if I call you Arvin, do you?—the thing is that you and Rodney are really quite nice people. You don’t break the law if you can help it, or misuse your personal power. You don’t bear grudges. You’re probably expecting me to say I don’t hold a grudge, either, because good people don’t, but actually I rather do. You sent my lover to be tortured. I do take that personally, Arvin. May I say also,
inter alia
, that torturing someone by proxy is even more contemptible than doing it oneself?”

From the bag: a box (half full) of surgical gloves. Gauze. Lint. Tape. Distilled water. Spirit. A pair of those odd little bent scissors which look like the ones used for cutting grapes, but which are intended for a more medical purpose. Cecily Foalbury leans over and scrabbles for a piece of plastic tubing, and measures it against her arm, then bites through it and measures again. Better.

Harriet Spork sighs. Something is missing from the pile. What is it? Has the dog got it? A quite obvious, commonplace something, a trivial item, no one in their right mind would leave home without one … where is it? Abbie Watson comes to her rescue.

“Bastion! Drop!”

There it is, dratted dog.
Tourniquet
. Abbie Watson sets it on the table, and looks at Arvin Cummerbund without compassion.

“My husband,” she says distantly, “is going into surgery right about now.”

Which gives rise to the first genuine silence Arvin has heard in years. Even Cecily Foalbury stops drinking her tea.

“Yes,” Polly Cradle murmurs after a moment. “Even so, I must regretfully inform you that you and your friend Rodney are not bad men at all, not in that sense. You are driven by a perceived necessity. You are
good
. The corollary of which is that we are very much the other thing. You are fallen into the hands of villains. I would advise you to consider the implications of that for a moment.” She does not point to the items on the table. Arvin looks at them anyway. “Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle goes on gently, “you are under the delusion that your safety is assured by common decency, but it is not. We are wicked and we are angry. There is no decency in this room. You have connived in the assassination of Edie Banister. You have taken Harriet’s son and put him to the question. You have done harm to this woman’s mate. And you have deprived me of my lover.

“I do not know, at this point, whether Joshua Joseph Spork is the man of my life. He could be. I have given it considerable thought. The jury is still out. The issue between you and me is that you wish to deprive me of the opportunity to find out. Joe Spork is not yours to give or to withhold from me, Mr. Cummerbund. He is
mine
, until I decide otherwise. You have caused him grief, sullied his name, and you have hurt him. If anyone is going to make him weep, or lie about him, or even do bad things to him, it is
me
.

“We are more angry than you can understand. And you are here, with us, in the land of do-as-you-please. It’s like wonderland, Mr. Cummerbund. Only much less good.”

She smiles sharply.

“A friend of mine would have said,” she adds, “that we are
aglœc-wif
. Monstrous hags. Or you could say we are ‘women of consequence.’ What happens to you here, in this room, can reflect that as little or as much as you wish.”

And then they sit there without speaking, listening to the muffled sound of traffic, and the wind in the trees, and Cecily Foalbury working a piece of bourbon biscuit out of her heirloom dentures. The dog Bastion pads across the room to Joe Spork and burbles mournfully until he is lifted up and held.

Abbie Watson sorts through the sinister apparatus on the table as if
wondering where she will begin. Arvin Cummerbund dimly remembers that she is a qualified nurse. He wonders who is watching her children, and whether she wanted to bring them along. Even Mercer Cradle looks a little windy about what will happen next, and this is truly alarming because, as far as Arvin Cummerbund has been able to ascertain, Mercer is absolutely devoid of compunction of any kind where those who interfere with his family’s happiness are concerned.

A shadow falls across Arvin; a shadow which fills him with a measure of guilt. He inhales slightly, and winces at the odour of dog breath. Bastion snuffles at him curiously, and then yawns, displaying tooth stumps and slime.

“Mercer,” Polly Cradle says, “if you wouldn’t mind.”

Mercer gets to his feet and goes outside, returning with a heavy glass jar or demijohn filled with reddish ooze.

“Excellent,” Polly Cradle says. “Now that Mr. Titwhistle is here, you need have no scruples about speaking behind his back.” She indicates the ooze. “Although I fear it’s rather difficult to say in which direction he is facing.”

Arvin Cummerbund stares at the jar. It cannot possibly be Rodney Titwhistle. These people would not do something so vile. He is almost certain of it. Yet Polly Cradle’s analysis was compelling. As are the instruments on the table before him.

The silence is very thick as he thinks about that.

“No,” Joe Spork says abruptly. “This isn’t me. It isn’t us.”

Polly Cradle looks over at him.

“This—” He gestures at the room. “This is them. Not us.”

Polly Cradle nods. “Okay.”

Joe puts down the dog and looks Arvin in the eye.

“Arvin,” Joe Spork says, “the jar is full of giblets. I think that’s a grape. We’re not going to bleed you to death or put you through a woodchipper.”

“Nor am I going to eat you,” Cecily Foalbury interjects, somewhat unreassuringly.

“Quite,” Joe Spork continues, “although Abbie has put in a very strong bid that I should beat the shit out of you with a plank with salt on it for what happened to Griff.”

“And I said I’d buy the plank,” adds Sister Harriet primly.

“But Arvin, listen, seriously. You have to know that what’s going on is a disaster. I mean, a bloody nightmare. Look what you’ve got. The Ruskinites are monsters. They scare professional crooks, which
sounds oh-so-clever until you remember that you’re supposed to be on the side of the angels. You’ve got torture camps in the shires; you’ve got imprisonment without trial.
Vaughn Parry
works for you! And don’t tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn’t. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That’s what we live with.

“Unless Edie Banister was right and Shem Shem Tsien wants to bring the world to an end, in which case, see point one.”

Arvin Cummerbund breathes deeply, in, out, in, out, and contemplates his soul. It occurs to him that Rodney Titwhistle’s search for truth, for knowing, is a curious thing when a man may hear truth spoken and recognise it, by any human measure, quite without doubt.

“Could I have some of that tea?” he asks.

“I’ll make some fresh,” Harriet Spork says. “Start talking.”

Well. It would not be entirely inappropriate, in this situation, to bargain for his release with unimportant information. More than that, however, Arvin Cummerbund is finding it increasingly difficult to suppress a nagging unease that these people know more about what is actually going on than he does. Rodney has been taking the lead on the Angelmaker situation. Rodney is very astute and very ruthless. But if he has a failing, it is that he is so astute, and so ruthless, that he occasionally misses things which are muddled and human. So Arvin Cummerbund says:

“What do you want to know?”

“Who killed Billy Friend?” Polly Cradle says.

Arvin had sort of forgotten about irritating, brash Billy in the interim, what with the business of trying to reclaim Britain’s supremacy in the world and collaborating with an insane cultist. Curious, now that he thinks about it, that those two should go together.

“That was Sheamus,” he says, “or maybe one of the … Automata.” He sighs. “It was stupid, sending him. We just weren’t thinking properly. We thought he’d be more careful. More circumspect, because this is his focus. But it went the other way. He’s genuinely obsessed, you see, with truth and God and all that. Or I suppose you could be generous and say he believes. I think he had a moment of passion. Your friend was … shattered.” He remembers the panic when he heard, and Rodney Titwhistle’s calm acceptance:
Our amanuensis has murdered, and that is bad, but we are protecting the nation. These things must be seen in their proper context
.