The Domino Men

Chapter 21

We were waiting at the Directorate in expectation of a miracle. That was what the odious Mr. Jasper had called her — “a genuine, irrefutable, copper-bottomed miracle.”

Dedlock’s squad of killers had found nothing. Hawker and Boon were still at large and the air seemed to crackle with a perplexing combination of urgency and exhaustion.

I stood apart from the others, staring out of the pod, past the illusory tourists and toward the real world, where, beyond the mirage of camera wielders and guidebook flourishers, I could see the snake of real punters waiting patiently in line. Past them — the lights of the South Bank, the neon and halogen of real life.

A hand on my shoulder. “You look tired, Henry.”

It was Miss Morning, more battle weary than ever.

“I am,” I said. “And I’m starting to wonder whether this miracle of Jasper’s is ever going to show up.”

Mr. Jasper strolled over to us, a look of smug self-satisfaction uncurling itself across his face. “Trust me,” he said, “she’ll be worth the wait.”

In this, if in nothing else, Jasper was right. As we watched, the queue of tourists began to part in wonder and envy as a woman, a stranger, strode through the crowd and stepped smartly into the pod like she belonged there. The door hissed shut and we began to move, but with a judder, as though even the Eye itself had been thrown off kilter by the newcomer.

Straightaway we knew that she was what we’d been waiting for, that she was Jasper’s miracle.

She was tapered, statuesque, with a mane of jet-black hair, and the curves of her exquisite figure were encased in a tightly belted trench coat which flapped about her like a cape. She was flawlessly complexioned and what light make-up she had applied served only to accentuate the splendor of her cheekbones, the imperious curve of her nose, the glacial sensuality of her lips. Most striking of all were her eyes. Once they had been turned upon you, it was impossible to imagine denying her anything she might desire.

There was something terrible about this woman. Hers was the bleak beauty of nature, the desolate grandeur of an ice field, the awful grace of a tiger stalking its prey.

But the most surprising thing of all was that I thought I recognized her from somewhere.

“Barbara?” I asked.

I looked closer and I was certain. It was her. A stretched, plucked, distended parody of her, perhaps, but unquestionably the girl from the office all the same. She favored me briefly with a condescending glance but did not offer a reply.

“Gentlemen.” Jasper was wearing the look of the cardsharp who knows he can never lose a game. “This is our hunter.”

The woman did not smile or bow or in any way acknowledge the introduction but gazed at us in much the same way that the first Cro-Magnon may have surveyed a gathering of Neanderthals.

“Remarkable,” Miss Morning murmured. “Repugnantly immoral, of course, but still — remarkable.”

“Barbara?” I asked again. “It is you, isn’t it?”

She turned her head in my direction with a motion that was strangely mechanical. I noticed that she already wore the same earpiece as the rest of us and I wondered if I might not be able to hear the whir of motors, the clank of gears.

“Hello, Henry,” she said, and I could tell from her voice that it was still her. Changed, alchemized, transformed, but somehow still Barbara. Her perfect lips formed words as though they were still learning how. “Barbara’s in her somewhere. Buried very deep. She says hello.” The word ‘hello’ was spoken as though it was barely familiar to her, alien and slightly dirty, like a judge struggling with the patois of some young offender brought before him in the dock.

I turned to Jasper. “What the hell have you done to her?”

He giggled. “I’ve made her better. This is Estella come back to us. This is victory.”

“Enough,” Dedlock snapped. “I want proof.”

Barbara sashayed past and walked as close to the tank as she could. “The first Estella is inside me. And she knows you, Mr. Dedlock.” Why, at this, I was put in mind of Marilyn singing “Happy Birthday” to the president, I really couldn’t fathom.

“Estella…,” the old man stuttered. “You’ve come back to me.”

“It’s good to be back, sir,” she said, although her voice was wholly without conviction.

The man in the tank squirmed. If it had been possible for us to see, I have no doubt that Dedlock’s upper lip would have been coated in sweat, in the shifty rime of mendacity and betrayal. “How much do you remember?”

“I remember almost everything.”

“Almost everything?”

“I can recollect some of the smallest details of Estella’s life. I can remember a great deal of the existence of poor Barbara. But I am more than either of them.”

The head of the Directorate looked afraid.

“Gentlemen, we’re wasting time.” Barbara paced briskly back to the center of the pod. “The Directorate had frittered away the last twenty-four hours. We should have the Prefects in custody by now.”

“Tell me,” Dedlock said in a little boy’s voice. “How do we find them?”

“The answer’s been staring you in the face. Any one of you could have worked it out for yourself.”

Most of us could no longer stand to look at her so we gazed dolefully at the floor or stared shamefacedly out of the window, like a line-up of new arrivals at the kind of penitentiary where they favor throwing away the key.

“Dedlock,” snapped Barbara. “Bring up a heat map of the city.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We don’t have time for your game playing. Just do it. Say a ten-mile circumference from Whitehall.”

Dedlock’s fingers twitched in the water and behind him, miraculously, we saw the lines of London shimmer into existence, the streets and roads form themselves out of the fluid in some impossible liquid cartography. Overlaid upon the familiar landmarks were splashes of yellow and orange.

“A heat map’s no good,” Dedlock protested. “Everything has a signature.”

Barbara raised a hand to silence him. “The Prefects are creatures of fire and sulphur. Watch the screen. They will reveal themselves.”

Amidst the blurs of oranges and yellows, there appeared two jets of red.

Others in her position might have found it hard not to sound triumphant, but Barbara’s voice held no trace of vanity or conceit. “There. We have our men.”

“Somewhere in Islington,” Dedlock muttered. “I’ll get an exact grid reference.”

Barbara turned away from the tank and started dispensing orders. “Jasper — get Barnaby to meet us. I want to drive directly to the site. Henry and I are going in together.”

“Me?” I said, my guts clenching like a fist at the prospect of another confrontation with the Domino Men. “What on earth do you want me for? You look pretty capable yourself.”

“Oh, I’m immensely capable, Mr. Lamb, but for some reason these creatures have taken a shine to you.”

For a moment, Jasper looked at his creation almost doubtfully. “I’ll organize the jackboots. Get the place surrounded. We’ll take them by force.”

“Hawker and Boon cannot be stopped by conventional weaponry,” Barbara said. “How much more blood do you want on your hands before you learn that simple lesson?”

“Then what can stop them?”

The ghost of a smile appeared on Barbara’s impossibly perfect lips. “Miss Morning. How pleasant it is to be working alongside you again.”

The old lady squinted at Barbara. “I’m not sure precisely what you are, young lady. But you’re not Estella. You’re something new.”

“You know what I need. Get me the weapon.”

“I thought it was lost.”

“Then you were misinformed. The old man hid it in the safe house.”

Miss Morning smiled faintly. “Such a clever fellow in his own way.”

“Find it and bring it to me.”

Miss Morning nodded.

Starved of attention, the man in the tank beckoned Barbara back across the room. “I have the address. It’s somewhere on Upper Street. But where on earth could a couple of grown men dressed as schoolboys hide in Islington?”

“There’s a little place I know.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s good to have you back, Estella.”

“It’s good to be back, sir.”

“And so wonderful to see that everything’s been forgiven and forgotten.”

Barbara peered into the tank and the head of the Directorate shrank from her gaze. “That’s all in the past, sir.” She bared an unnaturally bright white set of teeth. “That’s water under the bridge.”

Mercifully, at that moment, the pod’s revolution was complete, and we were pushed back out into the freezing night air.

Barnaby was waiting. Barbara had climbed into the passenger seat and Jasper was clambering in the back when Miss Morning tapped me lightly on the shoulder.

“You need to call home. Tell Abbey I’m coming round.”

Exhausted from the battering of the past few days, my brain couldn’t really compute this information. “What?”

“Just tell her I’m on my way.”

“OK… Why are you going to my flat?”

“That flat isn’t your flat. It’s a Directorate safe house.”

“What?”

“Henry, it’s where we carried out the Process. Its’ where we cut poor Estella. Don’t act so surprised. Why else do you think your granddad was so keen for you to live there?”

The window at the front of the car whirred down. “Henry,” Barbara said quietly — although this new softness in her tone made me feel more afraid of her than any shout or scream would have done. “Get in the car.”

“You have to go,” Miss Morning said. “I’ll explain later.”

For a second, I hesitated. Then I heard Barbara’s cool, clear vice (“Time is of the essence, Henry”) and I climbed in beside Jasper. Miss Morning slammed shut the door and as the car drove away, she mouthed something at me. A single word. I couldn’t quite make it out, but now, looking back on it as the days of my life almost certainly dwindle into single digits, I’m certain I know what it was.

“Sorry.”

Jasper was fidgeting, interlocking his fingers, touching the end of his nose, fiddling with his chair, periodically clearing his throat and then, growing bored with the rest, poking me in the ribs.

“Isn't she wonderful?” He nodded toward the front, where Barbara was giving our driver directions in the dispassionate tones of a satellite navigation system.

“Why did it have to be Barbara?” I hissed. “Why did you have to choose her?”

“She was perfect, Mr. Lamb. Just perfect.”

Swallowing my disgust, I took out my mobile and stabbed in Abbey’s number.

Barbara swiveled around, suddenly suspicious. “Who are you calling?”

“My landlady.”

“Make it quick, then.”

As it happened, I only got her voicemail.. “Hi, Abbey,” I said, almost in a whisper, acutely aware that the others were listening. “Listen, I know this might sound a bit odd but I’ve got a friend coming round to the flat. Is there any chance you could be there for her? Help her out with anything she needs. I can’t explain. But it’s really important. Anyway, I’ll call you later. And…” I couldn’t begin to articulate what I wanted to say. “I’m thinking about you a lot.” I broke the connection.

Jasper, still buoyant from his triumph, started smirking knowingly at me, but I ignored him and took to staring moodily out of the window.

We moved into the city and were passing a department store, open late for Christmas shopping, festooned with fluorescent Santas, blinking baubles, and Day-Glo snowmen, when Barbara suddenly said: “Pull over here.”

“Why?” Barnaby asked.

A hint of a smile. Or perhaps just a trick of the light. “We’re going to need costumes.”

At the far end of Upper Street, sandwiched between the kind of newsagent that makes most of its money from the magazines on its top shelf and a place which will sell you fried chicken at four o’clock in the morning, there was a nightclub called Diabolism.

Its name was a vestigial piece of pretension from an old proprietor who had nurtured plans to take the place upmarket. Unlike him, his successors knew their market.

Once a week, every week, the club hosted an event called Skool Daze, which, with its melange of cheap alcohol, hoped for promiscuity and chemically induced good humor, seemed no different from any other evening at Diabolism — except for a single innovation. In an attempt to recapture the carefree sybaritism of their adolescence, everyone who came through the door had to be dressed in an approximation of school uniform.

So you see now why Barbara insisted that we stop to pick up costumes.

It should go without saying that she looked extraordinary. She had picked out a skirt which displayed an impressive amount of leg and a blouse which, generously unbuttoned, revealed the aerodynamics of her cleavage. She was gorgeous — ravishingly, ridiculously so — yet I felt not a flicker of desire for her. The more time I spent in her company, the less real she seemed, as though she wasn’t quite there, more like a fantasy come to strange half-life instead of a real woman. It was only when I caught occasional glimpses of the Barbara I knew, in the way that she moved or a sudden dimpling of her cheeks, that I remembered the essential tragedy of the woman.

I’m rambling, of course, doing my best to avoid having to describe how Jasper and I climbed reluctantly into our little outfits, our shirts and striped ties. I couldn’t find shorts to fit me so I had to make do with rolling my trousers up above my knees. Actually, it was a look that Jasper almost pulled off, even if he did resemble the kind of kid who always came top of the class in mental arithmetic. I just looked ridiculous.

We left Barnaby in the car, engrossed in Peril Fiction and the Yellow Movement: The Fallible Narrator in the Lives of Sexton Blake. The photograph on the back cover was a younger version of our driver, uncharacteristically clean shaven, quietly pleased with himself, full of expectation for the future.

“I might have a sniff around in a bit,” he said, glancing up from his book. “See if there’s any sign of the enemy.”

I wish now that I’d said something to him. Thanked him, perhaps, for giving us a lift. Shaken his hand or something. Told him to let the bitterness go and enjoy what little was left of his life. But how could I have guessed? How could I have known that I was never going to see him again?

We strode over to the club. There was a ridiculously weedy bouncer at the door, sporting a little spiv’s moustache like no one had bothered to tell him that the Blitz was over and we didn’t have rationing anymore. He smirked at Barbara as she walked past and nodded brusquely at me, but just as Jasper was about to strut through, he held out his arm to stop him.

“Sorry, sir. Couples only.”

Jasper looked at him in astonishment. “What did you say?”

“Couples only. That’s the rules. Makes it a level playing field, you see.”

“Just let me through,” Jasper said, and tried to push his way past. All I can say about the struggle that ensued is that the bouncer must have been very much more forceful than he appeared.

“OK.” Jasper stood back, put his hand in his pocket and produced a twenty-pound note. “Would this help change your mind?”

“Rules is rules,” the bouncer said sententiously.

“Fine.” Jasper dragged out another twenty-pound note. “How about this?”

The mustachioed man just shook his head.

“Brilliant,” Jasper snapped. “London’s only honest bouncer. Listen here,” he said, and I could see he was on the cusp of losing his temper. “Right now, inside your club, there are a couple of creatures who’d think nothing of making every woman in this city a widow just because they’re bored. Now, for God’s sake, let me pass.”

“No offense, sir. And I don’t mean to be rude. But would you mind awfully buggering off?”

I’d been watching this performance with no small amount of amusement, but when I turned to look at Barbara there was nothing but stern professionalism on her face.

“Mr. Jasper,” she said. “We can’t afford to waste time to here. See if you can gain access with another party. Henry and I must go inside.”

Jasper whined, “You could disable this man with a twitch of your wrist.”

“I don’t want to draw attention to us,” she said.

“You can’t leave me out here.” He contemplated his pale, almost hairless legs and shivered. “Not like this.”

Barbara gave him a look of sardonic dismissal, turned her back and vanished into the club. As I followed, she spoke quickly into her earpiece. “We’re at the club, sir. Near the targets. We’re going dark.”

Dedlock’s voice in both our ears. “Understood. And good luck.”

At the door, we both paid ten pounds to a woman who sat slouched on a stool chewing gum, who then grudgingly invited us inside.

Diabolism turned out the be a large concrete space packed with several hundred people swelling and roiling in an ocean of sweaty desperation. There seemed to be a vaguely festive theme, and I recognized the song which was making the floor thump and quiver as a dance remix of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland,” which had climbed alarmingly close to the top of the chart that year. There were firemen’s poles fixed around the room, about which the uninhibited could cavort. It was the kind of place that served Bacardi Breezer by the pint, and I’m afraid I hated it on sight.

Every single person was dressed the same. They were literally in uniform. Tiny skirts, ties draped suggestively around bare necks, scarves knotted round heads like bandanas. The club insisted the minimum age of entry was eighteen and I can confirm that everyone present appeared very comfortably over that limit. A good many, in fact, looked as though they had not seen eighteen for several decades, a fact unflatteringly revealed at intervals when the strobe lighting illuminated their faces, accentuating every crease and wrinkle, each pockmark and pimple. The floor sucked at my feet and for the first time in years I felt again the bilious fear of adolescence, the hideous terror of being expected to dance.

As Earth, Wind and Fire segued into Europop, Barbara took me by the hand and hoiked me through the crowd toward the bar, where she fetched me a drink in a plastic cup. When we spoke we had to shout in order to be heard.

“Eee shred shred tout!”

“What?” I yelled.

She leant close to my left ear and shouted: “We should spread out!”

I nodded in response and, clutching my drink, walked away from her, slaloming between gyrating couples.

It turned out to be easier than I could have hoped. A few minutes later I saw them, recognizing them at once from the backs of their heads, two men sipping cocktails at the bar, one burly and ginger-headed, the other slim and dark. I looked around for Barbara but she had already disappeared into the crowd, and I knew that if I were to go for back-up now I could lose the Domino Men all over again and we’d have to start from scratch. So (I think not unheroically) I did the only other thing I could. I walked up behind Boon, intending to administer a brisk tap on his shoulder, but as I was almost upon him a tubby redhead dressed for hockey practice blundered my way and I tripped forward, slapping the Prefect hard on the back of his head.

When the little man turned to face me I saw immediately that he was not Boon. Nor was his companion — a tall pugilistic-looking man with an interesting scar on his left cheek — Hawker. Both appeared incensed.

I tried a weak smile and mouthed a “sorry” but neither of these improbable clubbers seemed swayed by my contrition. The smaller one grabbed my shirt and yanked me close enough to smell the beer on his breath.

“Sorry!” I shouted again. “Thought you were someone else.”

The ginger-haired man pinched my nose between his forefinger and thumb and forced me up on tiptoe. I squeezed shut my eyes in expectation of a thorough pummeling when my nose was suddenly released and I was able to place both feet flat on the ground. The men were pointing at me and laughing. I couldn’t quite hear what they were saying but I could guess.

Don’t blame me… Blame Grandpa!

Not for the first time, I felt a warm surge of gratitude for Worse Things Happen at Sea.

Somebody else seized my hand and I was dragged away from my admirers. Barbara’s face was close to mine and she was shouting. “Henry! Stop clowning about!”

She gave me a look which, if not actually outright contemptuous, at least bedded down somewhere in the lower reaches of derision. She strode back into the crowd and I was about to do the same when I felt an angry buzzing in my left pocket. I pulled out my phone and tried to answer, but conversation proved hopeless and I was forced in the end to retreat to a stall in the gents’, where the music at least subsided to a tectonic rumble.

“Hello?” I said for what must have been the sixth or seventh time in a row.”

“It’s Abbey.” She sounded infuriated.

“Sorry. Couldn’t hear you out there.”

“Henry, your friend’s turning the flat upside down. She’s been in our bedrooms. She’s chucked half the fridge out onto the floor. She’s in the corridor right now, tapping on the walls to see if they’re hollow. What the hell’s going on?”

I swallowed hard. “I know it must seem strange. But, please, let Miss Morning do whatever she needs. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

Abbey still sounded profoundly irritated but I thought I could detect at least the beginnings of a thaw. “Listen, about our conversation earlier. About Joe. I want you to know that I don’t have any feelings for him anymore.” It was obvious that this wasn’t easy for her to say. “I’m not on the rebound.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you for saying that.” Someone blundered into the toilet, bringing the antic roar of the dance floor with him.

“Where are you anyway? I thought you were working late.”

“I’m at a club.”

“You’re where?” The thaw was retreating now and a new ice age had begun.

“In a club,” I repeated. “Diabolism.” Adding quickly: “It’s for work.”

“Well, who are you there with?”

“Just a colleague,” I said, trying to sound meek and innocent.

Abbey’s voice seethed with barely suppressed fury. “And what’s her name?”

“It’s complicated… But I suppose you could say I’m with Barbara.”

“Unbelievable! We have one tiny disagreement and you’re out with another woman.”

“Abbey, please. It’s not really like that.”

“You’d better hope you’ve got a really, really good explanation for this.” There was a strange shattering sound from the other end of the line. “Christ.”

“What was that? What’s happened?”

“Your friend. She’s just put her foot through our TV.”

“What?”

“Goodbye, Henry.”

I suppose she just have put the phone down then.

I left the stall and stepped over to the sink. There was a man there, a Diabolism employee who squirted soap at my palms before guilt-tripping me into paying him a pound for the privilege.

“You chatting to your lady?” he asked, and I realized that he must have overheard the whole of my conversation. “You talking to your woman?”

“Yes,” I said stiffly. “I suppose I was.”

“Giving you grief, was she?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You want my advice?”

“Not particularly,” I said, but the man didn’t seem to hear me.

“Forget her. Have a good time. What your lady don’t know won’t hurt her. What happens in Diabolism stays in Diabolism.”

“Thanks for that,” I said, and, just about resisting the urge to snatch back my pound, strode back out into the heart of the club.

The hours which followed were amongst the longest of my life. I patrolled every inch of the dance floor. I scrutinized the faces of lip-locked couples. I stepped over pools of vomit, drank three cocktails, two bottles of beer and a pint of tap water into which I’m certain I saw the barman spit. I tried to blend in by dancing.

It was late, well into the small hours of the morning, when I saw them. After the inaugural chords of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” were greeted by whoops of delight from the regulars, I’d retreated to the bar, where I stood half-watching a couple overenthusiastic young men whirl themselves around the firemen’s poles. Then, caught in a lightning flash of strobe, I saw their faces and my insides turned to water. I started to move across the floor and searched around desperately for Barbara but she seemed to have disappeared. When I looked again at the pole, the Prefects had vanished, their places taken by a couple of paunchy men who I’d never seen before in my life. I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t imagined it when someone slapped me hard on the back.

As I turned to face them the incessant music of the place seemed to recede into the background and I could hear them both perfectly, like voices in my head.

“Crikey! If it isn’t old lamb chop,” said Hawker.

“Hello, old man,” said Boon.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “You promised you’d lead us to Estella.”

“And we will, sir.”

“Keep following, sir. We’ll see you right.”

“We’re just having a bit of fun first.”

“Only larks, sir.”

“We’re stretching our legs, sir.”

“Getting a breath of fresh air.”

“Going the scenic route, sir. Taking the dog for a walk and getting a dashed good yomp in the bargain.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’d get out now, sir, if I was you.”

“I’d cut.”

“Why? What are you planning?”

“We’ve just time for one more prank before the end, sir.”

“Just time for a damned good bibbling.”

“Don’t look so worried, old man.”

“Trust the Process, Mr. L.”

“No!” I shouted. “Please-”

I was interrupted by a drunken quartet of middle-aged men in nylon skirts and sweat-soaked blouses dancing past me in an inebriated attempt at a conga line. By the time they’d staggered past, the Prefects had vanished again.

I struggled through the crowd, looking for Barbara, but it was already too late.

A minute later, all the lights in the building went out.

And a minute after that, the sneezing began.

Blissed out on the contents of another syringe and succeeding in holding back the tides of his suspicion, there were times, as he hunkered down in the passenger seat of Mr. Streater’s Nova, that the Prince of Wales felt almost content. Then, a moment later, everything would crowd back around him, he would remember the appalling details of the past few days and life became bleak and impossible again. This was the rhythm to which he was already growing accustomed, this awful see-saw of emotions, the heaven and hell of the drug called ampersand.

For a few minutes, he drifted into an uneasy sleep and had the dream again. When he woke, the man behind the wheel was swearing noisily at a passing motorist.

“Mr. Streater?”

“What?”

“Why is his grandfather to blame?”

“What are you on about?”

“I keep having this dream-”

“Christ.” Streater tugged an Evening Standard from the car floor and tossed it over to him. “Do the crossword or something.”

Arthur shuffled in his seat and stared blankly at the print but the words swam persistently away from him.

“How long will it be?” he asked.

One of Streater’s hands was on the steering wheel, the other was engaged in teasing his hair back into its usual spikes. “What’s that, chief?”

“How long before Leviathan is let loose?”

“Not long now. It’s all going according to plan. The beauty of it is we hardly need to lift a finger. The enemy is doing all the hard stuff for us.”

Arthur seemed to be having great difficulty forcing out his words. “And what will happen once it’s freed?”

“Things are gonna get a lot more interesting around here. Take it from me, everything’s gonna change for the better.”

The prince groaned, flailed in his chair and gave in to despair again, sinking gratefully into darkness.

When he opened his eyes there were two men sitting in the back of Streater’s car. One of them leant forward.

“Remember us, guv? DCI Virtue and DS Mercy?”

Both were eating kebabs and they held aloft their supper in congealed greeting. They smelt, as before, of grease and animal fat.

When the prince glanced up into the rearview mirror, he was somehow not completely surprised to see that Virtue and Mercy were not reflected there, that the spotty glass showed only empty seats.

“What’s happening?” he asked numbly. “Where are we heading?”

“Nearly there,” said Mr. Streater.

As Arthur peered out of the window, the lights of a tube station slithered by and the prince reflected sadly that he had ridden only twice on the city’s underground system, both occasions engineered by his squad of experts in public relations. This seemed to him to be a pity since these places had always felt so welcoming and full of cheer.

Streater drove away from the main road and down a couple of side streets, eventually emerging in a small patch of concrete dappled with junk and debris, round the back of what appeared to be some kind of pub or nightclub. There were a couple of cars already there, a motorbike, an abandoned shopping trolley and a stack of soggy boxes. There was also the faint, disagreeable rumble of popular music.

“What are we doing?” Arthur asked plaintively. “What is this place?”

Virtue and Mercy rolled out the back of the car, short of breath even at this mild exertion, their exhalations fogging the air, their boulder bellies swaying in sweaty sympathy.

“I’m going into the club for a bit,” Streater said. “Gonna do a bit of business. Gotta shift the last of the ampersand.”

“The last of it?” Arthur despised himself for not being able to keep the panic from his voice. “Surely it hasn’t run out?”

“Don’t worry, chief. Not long now and everyone’s gonna have more of the stuff than they know what to do with. That sound good to you?”

Poleaxed by another surge of pain and self-pity, the prince was unable even to gasp out a reply before the door was slammed in his face. Mr. Streater took out his key ring and pointed it at the car. All the locks on all the doors slammed down. Arthur struggled with the handles to no effect.

His window was open a little and he called out to his tormentor: “Let me out.”

Streater strode away but one of the fat men turned back.

“Stay here, son!”

The other one growled. “Keep an eye on the motor.”

The next few hours passed like a fever dream, in a whirl of lucid hallucinations, fantasies of sexual envy and sporadic, doomed assaults a the Standard crossword.

The prince was interrupted twice — first by a gaggle of revelers teetering past, all of them dressed, improbably, in some strange parody of school dress. This Arthur shrugged off merely as ampersand phantasmagoria and returned to his descent.

The second time he was disturbed by the car being noisily unlocked. Virtue and Mercy clambered in the back, settled into their seats, greeted Arthur with a belch and began to munch anew of the remnants of their kebabs.

“Where’s Streater?” Arthur asked.

The fat men gave their answer through mouths full of pita bread.

“Still inside,” one of them said. “You know how he gets when he’s shifting that stuff…”

The other one sniggered. “Birding it up.”

After this, for a long time, there was just the sound of mastication — rhythmic chomping echoing in the prince’s ears like the approaching stamp of some still-distant army — until:

“Oi oi!” Vince Mercy wore the look of a gambler whose horse has just romped home to an easy victory.

A young couple, dressed like the others in a lascivious parody of school uniform and in the latter stages of inebriation, had tottered up to the car, leant against the bonnet and proceeded to extravagantly grope one another. The girl’s skirt rode up almost to her hips and the policeman was whooping his appreciation when the lady (who seemed to the prince to be placing herself at serious risk of hypothermia) pushed away her beau, stumbled a few steps and let fly a stream of lumpen vomit. Her companion merely laughed and hit her joshingly on the back, and as soon as she was done, the girl joined in the laughter. The pair wandered away into the night, spattered with puke yet still cackling.

In the back of Mr. Streater’s Nova, Virtue and Mercy were laughing with them.

One of them jabbed a sausagey finger in Arthur’s face. “Reminds me of your missus!”

“Way I hear it, she wouldn’t even brush her teeth afterwards. She’d just get straight back down to it.”

“Please…,” whimpered the prince. “Please don’t…” But this only made the detectives laugh all the harder, their flabby bodies shaking with hilarity, halted only when someone smacked down hard on the car roof.

A couple of middle-aged men stood outside, both grinning wildly. They too were dressed as schoolboys.

“Good Lord!” one of them was shouting. “I know that face!”

“It’s the best boy!” the other man called back. “It’s teacher’s pet.”

Desperately, Arthur turned around to his companions, but, impossibly, both Virtue and Mercy had disappeared.

Arthur quivered in his seat, wondering what fresh indignity was about to be visited upon him, when there came a righteous cry from the other side of the parking lot.

“Abominations!” A disheveled man in a brown raincoat was pointing a gun in the direction of the schoolboys. “Wretched pieces of putrescence!”

“I say, Boon,” said one of the men in a tone of mild, pleasurable surprise, like one trainspotter to another on noticing a particularly uncommon diesel chugging toward them up the track. “Do you think that’s us he’s talking about?”

“I rather think it might be, Hawker. Anyway, isn’t that old Barnaby?”

The grizzled man gestured at them with the gun. “Get on your knees!”

The schoolboys laughed. “Do you ever go back, sir?”

“Go back?” said the man they had referred to as Barnaby. “What do you mean?”

“Back to your old college, sir.”

“Back to your alma mater.”

“Don’t suppose they’d let you in now, sir. Not after what happened.”

“Cruel, wasn’t it, Mr. B? The things they said.”

“They must have really hated you, sir, to make up all those stories.”

“And they were stories, weren’t they, sir?”

“There wasn’t any truth in them?”

Barnaby shouted: “Shut up! Just shut up, you lying monstrosities!” But even as Arthur slunk down in his seat, trying his best not to be noticed, he could see that the man was severely rattled, tripping and stammering over his words.

It was no great surprise, then, that as the schoolboys ambled over to the stranger he did nothing to halt their progress. They walked so close to him that they were almost touching, as though, under different circumstances, they might be on the precipice of a kiss, a tender and mutually respectful exchange of saliva.

“Still collecting stamps?” the little man shouted, and stamped brutally down on Barnaby’s foot. This shouldn’t have hurt all that much but Barnaby winced, gasped and staggered backward, his arms windmilling uselessly in the air. Boon stamped down again whilst Hawker shouted out encouragement.

“Still collecting stamps, sir?”

“Still collecting stamps?”

The bigger of the two schoolboys grabbed the man by the ears and stretched them out. “Haven’t seen you for ears and ears!” He cackled and the ginger-haired one joined in.

“Ears and ears and ears!”

Pinioned to his seat in terrified fascination, the prince nonetheless found time to ensure the doors were really locked.

Outside, as Barnaby fell to his knees, the schoolboys were laughing.

One of them thrust his hand into his blazer pocket, tugged out a fistful of black, faintly volcanic-looking powder and flung the lot of it in Barnaby’s face. The man looked up in bafflement. His nose twitched cartoonishly for a second or so before he unleashed a gargantuan sneeze. Then another. Then, inevitably, another.

Barnaby mewled. “What have you done?”

The ginger-haired man released him, gave him a hearty slap on the back and bellowed: “Keep up, sir! It’s sneezy powder.

The other one snickered in complicity. “Wizard Wheeze!”

Barnaby was still sneezing. One of the schoolboys produced a grimy handkerchief and passed it to him. He clamped it to his face and sneezed and sneezed and sneezed. When the rag was taken from his face it was splattered with red.

“Please…,” he stammered. “Stop this…”

Blood had started to streak its way like lava from his nose, flowing across his lips, down his chin, dribbling onto the ground.

Hawker sniggered. “Why would we stop, sir, when we’re having such fun?”

Barnaby’s body had passed the point of total exhaustion and was barreling toward total shutdown. When he sneezed again, a pink strip of gristle was borne out on a sea of snot. “What’s your plan?” he gasped, with helpless pleading in his eyes. “What is this leading toward?”

The schoolboys laughed. “Plan, sir?”

“Gosh, whatever makes you think we’ve got anything so hoity-toity as a plan?”

“This is our glory, sir!”

“Our bally glory!”

Then, with the Prefects cheering him on, Barnaby gave a final nasal eruption and toppled face-first onto the tarmac. He landed with the same crack a hardcover book makes when one bends it back too far and snaps the spine.

“Well, that sneezy powder certainly works, doesn’t it, Boon?”

“Jolly well does, old chum. Most efficacious.”

Boon turned toward the car. Arthur tried to slide further down into his seat but it was too late. The schoolboy grinned.

“Good evening to you, sir!”

Hawker looked across and raised his hand in salute. “What ho, Arthur!”

“Sorry we can’t stay for a powwow but we’re already running late.”

“’Fraid we’ve got to cut, old man.”

“See you anon, sir!”

“Tinkety-tonk!”

The schoolboys ran into the building and Arthur was left alone in the car with only a dead body cooling on the tarmac for company.

Seconds later, the door to the warehouse clanked open and Mr. Streater emerged, accompanied by the opening chords of some pop track or other.

“School’s out for summer…”

He stepped adroitly over the corpse and got into the car. “All right, chief?”

The prince wasn’t listening. “They killed him…,” he murmured.

Streater shrugged. “Looks like.”

“Your friends were useless. They vanished. They disappeared.”

“Who are you talking about. What friends?”

“The detectives. Virtue and Mercy.”

Streater smirked as he twisted the key in the ignition. “Never heard of them. I expect that’ll be the ampersand, squire. Hallucinations come as standard. They’re often personifications of whatever parts of yourself you keep repressed. I saw ballerinas, believe it or not. But I wouldn’t worry about it if I was you.” He reversed the car quickly on the tarmac, turned and headed swiftly out of Islington, toward home. “Whichever way you slice it — it’s all going according to plan.”