Angelmaker (9 page)

Junior Bastard A sticks out his hand when her gaze falls upon him and mutters “James.” It clearly isn’t his name, but Junior Bastard B and Mr. Biglandry stare at him as if he has taken his trousers off.
Hah! I fancy that’s an instant fail on your test, young Jimmy, and quite right too. Mr. Biglandry will want a word later, I imagine
,
about talking to the mark
. “Hello!” Edie waves daftly. “And you must be Biglandry the younger, I can see the family resemblance! Was it George?”
You’re both stone killers, there is that, but he’s a red-faced old git and you’ve something pale and Hungarian about you, Georgie-boy, I wouldn’t wonder your Dad was AVH, no, I would not, and likely a goon just like you
. She smiles even wider. “Would you mind pushing the bolt across? Sometimes the door rattles in the wind and it gives me a start.” George Biglandry looks at Dad, and Dad nods. Edie slips into the kitchen: knives, rolling pins, the microwave oven (she pictures herself jamming the door open and threatening to cook them, the thing plugged in behind her and beeping, a little picture of a chicken in blue neon on the dash),
no, no, and no
. Edie Banister knows where she is going.
Flick the switch on the kettle. Now they have to separate you from that, indeedy they do
. No gentleman wants a lap full of the hot stuff when he’s killing old ladies.
Permanent damage can occur
. Edie summons her first secret weapon.

“Bastion! Dar-ling? Bast-ion? Mummy’s got a bit of pie, yes, she has, hasn’t she, yessywessy, she has!”
And may the good Lord have mercy on your souls
.

It is not the hour for pie. Bastion knows it. He knows that Edie knows it, too. They have long ago settled between them that he is to be disturbed between three and nine only in the direst of emergencies or if there is steak. The steak should be meltingly soft and warmed over in the pan. The emergencies are more exigent: fire, earthquake, rains of frogs, the arrival of a cat in the building. Certainly, pie does not figure. Bastion’s afternoon nap is sacrosanct.

“Bastion?” She looks around. He is in her bedroom, of course, at the foot of the bed: does not stir from it except at two-ish to go out onto the balcony and pee on passing truants. Edie smiles at Mr. Biglandry, who is busy preparing to insert himself between her and the kettle. James and George are still in the living room. Edie feints for the kettle, and Biglandry jumps a bit. His eyes narrow. She grins at him, a little wolfish, pro-on-pro. He looks back, hard-faced. Edie rests her hand on the Russell Hobbs. “Would you mind?”
You think this is endgame. It is barely begun. You want this? This kettle? Shall I throw it at you? But then there are the boys, no doubt eager to help out in doing me in. You may have this round
. Except Edie knows fine well, and Mr. Biglandry almost realises, she never intended to use the kettle for anything other than this. She brushes past as he takes possession
of the boiling water. She opens the door to the bedroom, and Bastion barges out, bristling. He sees George first, and immediately charges over, yowling, and starts nipping at his ankles.
Who is this man, that comes to disturb my time of slumber? Woe unto you, that are rash enough to let your ankles within my scope. Behold! You shall not leave but that you are shorter by one foot, this much I promise you …

“Oh, Bastion, darling, no!” Edie Banister says with manifest insincerity. She smiles broadly at George, who scowls at her and glances at his boss. But Edie is in motion.
Too slow, boys, far and away
. Bastion, unwelcome playmate, apparently decides that James has better legs. He lunges for them, and his single solid tooth makes an ugly hole in James’s calf.
I should think that’s jolly painful
, Edie reflects, as James swears. He lashes out with his foot, but Bastion knows this game well, and has latched onto the other leg. James would have to kick himself, and few people … no. No, James actually is that stupid. There’s a thud, and James goes a bit white. It’s amazing how much you can hurt yourself with your own toecap. Bastion, sensing victory, spins around several times and scents Mr. Biglandry.
No, darling. He’s out of your league
. But Bastion is game, and more than game. His performance so far has made Biglandry Père nervous enough that he backs up, glancing at Edie with the outrage of non-dog owners:
’Ere, lady, control this dog or I’ll ’ave the law on you!

Like Hell you will
.

Edie ducks into the bedroom, and lunges for her knicker drawer and Secret Weapon No. 2, amid the frills and bunting.
Yes, knickers! That’s what I shall need. And it bloody would have been, too, in fifty-nine. I could have changed into something more comfortable and they’d have carried me to the nick and handed themselves in
 … but honesty compels her to admit that even in fifty-nine it might not have been so.
Corset. Bloomers. Tights. Popsocks, how I loathe you. Woollen leggings—the shame. Edie Banister, toast of the Fighting 16th, swathed in bloody sheep’s fur and with all the allure of a toast rack. Hard times. Suspender belt, that’s more like it; garters, and stockings, and lace, oh my! And now I’ve thrown my memories on the floor, where the bloody hell is the item we came for? Because if I’ve put it in another drawer then we may assume I am about to die
. But the other belt is in her hands, cool and thick, brown leather and a strange, ancient smell. She cleans it once a month, checks it, the way most people do their accounts. And once—Edie Banister grins—once, she did actually wear this
outfit as lingerie, to the absolute abandonment and lust of her lover and, she is forced to admit, herself.

Mr. Biglandry shoves the door to Edie’s boudoir open with a very impatient hand. He has his hammer raised to crack her skull into as many pieces as he can.
Why a hammer?
Edie wonders.
Maybe because it’s so unprofessional, so thuggish. Everyone will look for a lunatic—and you can always find one, if you try hard enough
. “It’s fucking time, you crazy old bag,” Mr. Biglandry says, angry now at the delay. Perhaps he has somewhere to be. “It is fucking time.”

“Yes,” Edie Banister says. “I believe it is.” And she turns around, holding the gun in the Weaver stance.

Mr. Biglandry says “Fuck” again, but in a more impressed, appalled way. He drops the hammer and goes for his own gun (Edie guesses it will prove to be an automatic, unlike her own, which is a revolver). Edie shoots him in the head. The revolver makes an absolutely huge noise. To her relief, the back of Mr. Biglandry’s head stays on, although it’s clearly a close-run thing. She hears, in the other room, the sound of George saying “Fuck” as well, percussively, and trying to pull something from his waistband.
Idiot
. If George does not shoot himself in the penis in the next two seconds, he will get the gun out and start firing it, but anyone who sticks a gun in his jeans is probably not someone with surgical weapon skills. He will fire randomly. Edie’s neighbours might get hurt. Or Bastion. She turns, and fires three more times directly through the plasterboard wall, angling so that any misses will hit the bricks of the fireplace in the room beyond. The third shot makes a
splunch
noise, and George goes down. Edie moves, in case James is about to try the same thing, and sees him exactly where he was, next to the door, a look of absolute confusion on his young, sallow face. She points the gun near him rather than at him. Bastion, emerging from the kitchen in pursuit of Mr. Biglandry, finds his foe already fallen and clambers up on top of him to indicate his conquest.
Died of fright. I am mighty. You may now applaud
.

Edie looks sharply at James. “Get rid of it.”

James has a gun, but it’s in his pocket and, when it comes to it, not loaded. Sheepish, he puts the ammunition down on the floor next to the weapon. Edie shakes her head. He shrugs at her, surrendered.

“Who sent you?”

“Don’t know. Honestly!”

“Ever see them?”

“No! They had hats on. Or sheets. Like in Iran!”

Like in Iran
. Yes, she might know someone matching that description. She sighs.

“Have you got a mum?”

“Yes. In Doncaster.”

“Best piss off back there, ey?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She nods, then peers at him.

“This your first?”

“Oh, God, yeah. Christ.”

“Don’t hang about. Don’t go and tell anyone what happened. Best to vanish, all right? Go stay with your mum. No one cares if you didn’t die, so long as you aren’t seen again.”

“Right.”

“Ever. And James? Get a proper job,” Edie says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now, I’m going to pick up two bags and I’m going to walk out of here and we won’t see one another ever again. You’re going to sit in that chair, facing the window, and you’re going to ignore me for the five minutes I’ll still be here, and then you’re going to contemplate your soul in silence for another ten minutes in the company of these dead men you once called friends. And then …?”

“Doncaster.”

“Good boy.”

Edie Banister waits until he sits in the chair and turns it round, and then she goes back into her bedroom and collects her flight bag (like the gun, maintained once a month to be sure it’s all ready to go at any time) and Bastion’s travel kit. She collects the dog, steps over Mr. Biglandry and George, and closes the door on James. In the hallway she wrestles briefly with her collapsible umbrella. Edie considers the name to be strictly truthful: the umbrella collapses well, but has issues with opening. Normally she wouldn’t bother, but today it looks like rain, and having sent two men to their graves to preserve her own life, she has no intention of dying of pneumonia before seeing this business through. Death is a reality for Edie Banister, and has been since she was young. All the same, no reason to invite it. Bastion would be devastated.

The umbrella conquered, she glowers up at the grumbling sky, and leaves Rallhurst Court for ever.

The same London sky, grey with a touch of orange from the street lights, unburdens itself of sheets of blinding rain as Joe Spork hurries through the streets of Soho. He has given up on the telephone and decided to make his representations to Billy Friend in person. Since he is here, and since he is very quickly getting soaked through, he is also visiting a stringy, irritating man called Fisher, a former burglar, present fence, and a full-time member of the Mathew Spork nostalgia club. Fisher, not even a member of Mathew’s outer circle, is one of the few people he can turn to on the subject of the unlawful and strange without incurring painful social obligations. Even so, Joe is troubled by a powerful sense of self-inflicted injury, and his grandfather’s voice, now doleful, is telling him
I told you so
. He hunches his shoulders and buries his chin in the collar of his coat: a big man trying to become a turtle.

A bus—last of the much-despised bendy variety, as doomed as the clockwork business and equally clever and impractical—sprays him with road water and he yells and waves furiously, then catches his reflection in a shop window and wonders, not for the first time of recent days, who this person is who has taken up residence in what ought to be his life.

Fisher’s shop is a merry little place with wind chimes and an aura of shabby hippy mercantilism, squeezed between a tailor and a mysterious bead-curtained place which conducts business entirely in Hungarian. Fisher has a lot of space because his family have lived here since before it was expensive. Customers can sit in an enclosed courtyard for a hookah and a cup of Turkish coffee. Fisher makes it himself, boiling the coffee and the sugar with his secret ingredient, which he allows particularly favoured customers—which is all of them—to learn, and which varies depending on what he’s got in the fridge. Joe has known it to be lemon peel, cocoa powder, pepper, paprika, and on one occasion even a half-spoonful of fish soup. Fisher claims that each of these represents a different member of his Turkish family on his mother’s side, but since his mother was and is from Billingsgate it probably doesn’t matter that this is a lie: no wrathful Stambul cousin is going to show up and demand to know what the Hell crap he is putting in that perfectly good coffee, to the ruination of their shared good name.

“W-hoo is a-that?” Fisher cries out as the chimes go, all Turkic gravitas, but when he pokes his weasel head around the door frame from the back, his face breaks into a wide smile. “It’s Joe! Big Joe! King of the Clockmen! The man in person and himself! ’Ullo, Maestro, what can I do you for?”

“I’m out of the loop, Fisher—” And then, holding up a forestalling finger, because Fisher’s mouth opens to issue an enthusiast’s reproach, “Yes, I know, that’s what I wanted. But now I’ve got a question and there’s only one place I can go, isn’t there? Because you know everything.”

“I do. It’s true,” Fisher preens. And in terms of the life of London’s post-legals, he really does.

“I had a visit,” Joe says, “from two men from a museum which doesn’t exist. One fat, the other thin. Cultured. My heart said police. Titwhistle and Cummerbund.”

Fisher shakes his head. “Nowt.”