Edie Investigates (6 page)

“I’ll just fucking shoot her then, won’t I?” the driver was saying as he pointed the gun, and the phrase turned into a yelp of agony as something bright and shining slapped down hard on his wrist and went “bong”. The gun fell on the ground, the driver to one
knee. The shining thing zipped and zigged and returned to the handle of Edie’s umbrella, and only in memory did Rice recognise it for a concealed weapon, a ribbon of metal perhaps eighteen-inches long.

“You just stay right there,” Edie told him.

“Wakizashi,” the little man said, seemingly
à propos
of nothing. Edie nodded, and glanced briefly over at him, then said “Fuck,” which struck Rice as rude until he realised she was now looking back at the driver, who had produced a second, smaller gun from his leg and was bringing it up.

Rice, feeling that something of the sort was called for, dragged her out of the way of the shot, and Edie squawked an exasperated yodel of “Oh, you silly sod!” The driver came to his feet and gave chase, firing again. Something plucked at Rice’s sleeve and he realised he had sustained an actual fleshwound. Edie Banister reversed course as if she had forgotten something, slipping back along the line of her footsteps, and the driver’s momentum carried him onto her. The gun went off and Edie Banister said “Fuck” again in an irritated voice and the driver said “Oh”. And everything was very still.

Rice realised he had been hiding behind his hands, and somewhat shamefacedly took them down and looked.

The bullet had caromed along the umbrella and ripped it apart, taking with it a two-inch piece of white steel which glinted in the gutter. The rest of Edie’s little sword was buried to the handle in the driver’s chest, and his eyes had a fish-on-a-slab look which Rice suspected meant he was no longer in residence.

For a moment, no one said anything. Edie looked at Rice and apparently considered giving him a bollocking, then changed her mind. She opened her mouth and Rice thought she might go with “Thank you”, but she didn’t, and shut it again. Rice looked at the body and at the alleyway and thought,
gosh, my life is over. How odd
.

The assassin said: “Give me the file.”

Rice looked at Edie, who looked at the little man and the corpse, then back at Rice. She raised her eyebrows.

“It is the same,” the little man said. “There is a dead man, and the file. They will not care. It is the same. Maybe better. I think possibly he was sent to kill Caspian also. Put the file by him. The gun was very loud.”

Rice looked at Edie, who nodded. He laid the Barikad file down on the ground. The assassin rubbed the handle of the sword with a cloth.

“We didn’t win,” Tom Rice objected. “They got everything they wanted.”

“Attacker’s advantage,” Edie replied. “You lived, which is something. And Donny doesn’t care if his name’s mud. He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“But they won.”

“Yes, they did.” She sat back in consideration of that. “They did.”

The BBC had covered the story with musty sobriety, and left the frenzy to the tabloids. There was—intentionally, she was sure, on the part of those who had contrived the scene—no clear narrative. Rumours swirled around Donny: the money, the girl, the spying. It was a rich banquet of implication and innuendo. A perfect fog to hide a cold, hard kill.

Overhead, the public-address system announced Rice’s flight. He was going to Istanbul first, and after that Edie had told him not to tell her, but it better not be Manchester. “Don’t be bloody clever,” she had said.

Rice had a vague idea of what he would do next. He had a friend from university, now a lawyer of dubious reputation, who might help. But he couldn’t tell her that he’d be all right. And to be honest, he wasn’t sure. But as she said, he was alive.

He left her sitting in the lounge, and caught his flight.

Edie watched the plane from the observation gallery. She watched it take off and disappear into the grey-orange London sky. She wondered whether she had assisted a felon. What it meant that someone had killed Donny Caspian. It was wrong, she knew that. But was it also right? An unpleasant necessity? Years ago, she might have said yes.

No. I was never cold. Never a chessplayer
.

She’d known a man who was, and she’d sworn she would never be like him.

Troubled, she stared into her own reflection. First Vaughn Parry, and now Tom Rice.

She had some thinking to do.

A
t seven fifteen a.m., his bedroom slightly colder than the vacuum of space, Joshua Joseph Spork wears a longish leather coat and a pair of his father’s golfing socks. Papa Spork was not a natural golfer. Among other differences, natural golfers do not acquire their socks by hijacking a lorryload destined for St. Andrews. It isn’t done. Golf is a religion of patience. Socks come and socks go, and the wise golfer waits, sees the pair he wants, and buys it without fuss. The notion that he might put a Thompson sub-machine gun in the face of the burly Glaswegian driver, and tell him to quit the cab or adorn it … well. A man who does that is never going to get his handicap down below the teens.

The upside is that Joe doesn’t think of these socks as belonging to Papa Spork. They’re just one of two thousand pairs he inherited when his father passed on to the great bunker in the sky, contents of a lock-up off Brick Lane. He returned as much of the swag as he could—it was a weird, motley collection, very appropriate to Papa Spork’s somewhat eccentric life of crime—and found himself left with several suitcases of personal effects, family Bibles and albums, some bits and bobs his father apparently stole from
his
father, and a few pairs of socks the chairman of St. Andrews suggested he keep as a memento.

“I appreciate it can’t have been easy, doing this,” the chairman said over the phone. “Old wounds and so on.”

“Really, I’m just embarrassed.”

“Good Lord, don’t be. Bad enough that the sins of the fathers shall descend and all that, without feeling embarrassed about it.
My
father was in Bomber Command. Helped plan the firebombing of Dresden. Can you imagine? Pinching socks is rather benign, eh?”

“I suppose so.”

“Dresden was during the war, of course, so I suppose they thought it had to be done. Jolly heroic, no doubt. But I’ve seen photographs. Have you?”

“No.”

“Try not to, I should. They’ll stay with you. But if ever you do, for some godforsaken reason, it might make you feel better to be wearing a pair of lurid Argyles. I’m putting a few in a parcel. If it will salve your guilt, I shall choose the absolute nastiest ones.”

“Oh, yes, all right. Thank you.”

“I fly myself, you know. Civilian. I used to love it, but recently I can’t help but see firebombs falling. So I’ve sort of given up. Rather a shame, really.”

“Yes, it is.”

There’s a pause while the chairman considers the possibility that he may have revealed rather more of himself than he had intended.

“Right then. It’ll be the chartreuse. I quite fancy a pair of those myself, to wear next time I visit the old bugger up at Hawley Churchyard. ‘Look here, you frightful old sod,’ I shall tell him, ‘where you persuaded yourself it was absolutely vital that we immolate a city full of civilians, other men’s fathers restricted themselves to stealing ugly socks.’ That ought to show him, eh?”

“I suppose so.”

So on his feet now are the fruits of this curious exchange, and very welcome between his unpedicured soles and the icy floor.

The leather coat, meanwhile, is a precaution against attack. He does own a dressing gown, or rather, a towelling bathrobe, but while it’s more cosy to get into, it’s also more vulnerable. Joe Spork inhabits a warehouse space above his workshop—his late grandfather’s workshop—in a dingy, silent bit of London down by the river. The march of progress has passed it by because the views are grey and angular and the place smells strongly of riverbank, so the whole enormous building notionally belongs to him, though it is, alas, somewhat entailed to banks and lenders. Mathew—this being the name of his lamentable
dad—had a relaxed attitude to paper debt; money was something you could always steal more of.

Speaking of debts, he wonders sometimes—when he contemplates the high days and the dark days of his time as the heir of crime—whether Mathew ever killed anyone. Or, indeed, whether he killed a multitude. Mobsters, after all, are given to arguing with one another in rather bloody ways, and the outcomes of these discussions are often bodies draped like wet cloth over bar stools and behind the wheels of cars. Is there a secret graveyard somewhere, or a pig farm, where the consequences of his father’s breezy amorality are left to their final rest? And if there is, what liability does his son inherit on that score?

In reality, the ground floor is entirely given over to Joe’s workshop and saleroom. It’s high and mysterious, with things under dust sheets and—best of all—wrapped in thick black plastic and taped up in the far corner “to treat the woodworm.” Of recent days these objects are mostly nothing more than a couple of trestles or benches arranged to look significant when buyers come by, but some are the copper-bottomed real thing–timepieces, music boxes, and best of all: hand-made mechanical automata, painted and carved and cast when a computer was a fellow who could count without reference to his fingers.

It’s impossible, from within, not to know where the warehouse is. The smell of old London whispers up through the damp boards of the saleroom, carrying with it traces of river, silt and mulch, but by some fillip of design and ageing wood it never becomes obnoxious. The light from the window slots, high above ground level and glazed with that cross-wired glass for security, falls at the moment on no fewer than five Edinburgh long-case clocks, two pianolas, and one remarkable object which is either a mechanised rocking horse or something more outré for which Joe will have to find a rather racy sort of buyer. These grand prizes are surrounded by lesser ephemera and common-or-garden stock: crank-handle telephones, gramophones and curiosities. And there, on a plinth, is the Death Clock.

It’s just a piece of Victorian tat, really. A looming skeleton in a cowl drives a chariot from right to left, so that—to the Western European observer, used to reading from left to right—he is coming to meet us. He has his scythe slung conveniently across his back for easy reaping, and a scrawny steed with an evil expression pulls the thing onward,
ever onward. The facing wheel is a black clock with very slender bone hands. It has no chime; the message is perhaps that time passes without punctuation, but passes all the same. Joe’s grandfather, in his will, commended it to his heir for “special consideration”—the mechanism is very clever, motivated by atmospheric fluctuation—but the infant Joe was petrified of it, and the adolescent resented its immutable, morbid promise. Even now—particularly now, when thirty years of age is visible in his rear-view mirror and forty glowers at him from down the road ahead, now that his skin heals a little more slowly than it used to from solder burns and nicks and pinks, and his stomach is less a washboard and more a comfy if solid bench—Joe avoids looking at it.

The Death Clock also guards his only shameful secret, a minor, practical concession to the past and the financial necessities. In the deepest shadows of the warehouse, next to the leaky part of the wall and covered in a grimy dust sheet, are six old slot machines—genuine one-armed bandits—which he is refurbishing for an old acquaintance named Jorge. Jorge (“Yooorrr-geh! With passion like Pasternak!” he tells new acquaintances) runs a number of low dives which feature gambling and other vices as their main attractions, and Joe’s job is to maintain these traditional machines—which now dispense tokens for high-value amounts and intimate services rather than mere pennies—and to bugger them systematically so that they pay out only on rare occasions or according to Jorge’s personal instruction. The price of continuity in the clockworking business is minor compromise.

The floor above—the living area, where Joe has a bed and some old wooden wardrobes big enough to conceal a battleship—is a beautiful space. It has broad, arched windows and mellowed red-brick walls which look out onto the river on one side, and on the other an urban landscape of stores and markets, depots and back offices, lock-ups, car dealerships, Customs pounds, and one vile square of green-grey grass which is protected by some indelible ordinance and thus must be allowed to fester where it lies.

All very fine, but the warehouse has recently acquired one serious irritant: a cat. At sometime, one mooring two hundred yards up was allowed to go to a houseboat, on which lives a very sweet, very poor family called Watson. Griff and Abbie are a brace of mildly paranoid anarchists, deeply allergic to paperwork and employment on conscientious grounds. There’s a curious courage to them both: they believe
in a political reality which is utterly terrifying, and they’re fighting it. Joe is never sure whether they’re mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

In any case, he gives any spare clockwork toys he has to the Watsons, and eats dinner with them once in a while to make sure they’re still alive. They in their turn share with him vegetables from their allotment and keep an eye on the warehouse if he goes away for the weekend. The cat (Joe thinks of it as “the Parasite”) adopted them some months ago and now rules the houseboat by a combination of adept political and emotional pressure brought to bear through the delighted Watson children and a psychotic approach to the rodent population, which earns the approval of Mr. and Mrs. W. Sadly, the Parasite has identified the warehouse as its next home, if once it can destroy or evict the present owner, of whom it does not approve.

Joe peers into the piece of burnished brass he uses as a shaving mirror. He found it here when he took possession, a riveted panel from something bigger, and he likes the warmth of it. Glass mirrors are green, and make your image look sick and sad. He doesn’t want to be the person he sees reflected in a glass mirror. Instead, here’s this warm, genial bloke, a little unkempt, but—if not wealthy—at least healthy and fairly wise.