His mobile rang then – the jingling factory-set tune – and he pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and grimaced.
‘Sorry,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’ve got to take this. Back in a mo.’
I waited until I was certain he was out of the room before asking for a cup of tea.
‘Later,’ she said. ‘If you’re good.’
‘You know he’s a plastic toy short of a happy meal – right?’
‘What?’ she said. ‘Because he believes in magic?’
‘Because he plans to bring back King Arthur. The Once and Future King. You know, the one that was totally made up by a bunch of Welsh Nationalists and romantic Frenchmen.’
I heard Lesley laugh behind me.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve done a bit of reading on the subject.’
‘I bet that helped you with your PIP2 qualifications.’
‘Still passed,’ I said, because Lesley always did know how to sidetrack me.
‘Not Arthur,’ she said suddenly. ‘We don’t need a man with a sword, do we?’
‘What do we need?’
‘We need the power behind the legend. The brains, the magic. You should like this. This is your kind of stuff.’
Oh shit, I thought. And suddenly I could see it. Chorley was a man who liked to walk in the shadows and stand beside the throne – not Arthur. Never Arthur. Not the king of Camelot.
But its architect,
‘Do me a favour,’ I said wearily.
‘That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do from the start.’
‘There never was a Merlin,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’ said Lesley. ‘And you know that because?’
‘Because people have spent the last hundred years looking for him,’ I said. ‘And he’s nowhere to be found.’
I heard the scrape of chair legs on cement and Lesley walked out in front of me. She was carrying a silver and black metal button box of the kind used to operate heavy industrial equipment, which trailed a braided blue cable behind it. I didn’t need to ask where that went.
Still, my chair didn’t seem to be fastened down. And with Lesley now in front of me I reckoned that if her attention wavered I could yank myself free of the clips before she could react. That’s why the operator is supposed to stay behind the prisoner.
Lesley must have caught my attitude, because she frowned and wiggled the button box at me.
‘Regarding Merlin,’ she said, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’
‘And children’s books are not evidence of shit,’ I said. ‘Or both of us would have gone to Hogwarts.’
‘I don’t get it, Peter. We’ve both met people . . .’ she put a deliberately alien stress on the word people, ‘who are thousands of years old. People hidden beneath the streets. And you’re shagging a river, for Christ’s sake. We do spells. I mean, what do you find intrinsically unlikely about Merlin being a real person?’
‘What if he’s Welsh?’
‘What if he is?’
‘Then he’s hardly likely to give you back the England you want, is he?’
‘He’s not going to give us anything,’ she said. ‘He’s going to help us make Britain a better place.’
‘Better how?’
‘Just better,’ she said, the corners of her mouth drawing downwards. ‘Nicer, cleaner, better!’ She shouted the last word and then paused to get control. ‘Not the shithole it is now.’
‘Something we can all be proud of,’ said Chorley, coming back into the room.
He nodded at Lesley, who retreated back out of my sight – the button box cable swishing behind her like an angry tail.
Chorley beckoned to someone else behind me.
‘Come over here, Foxglove,’ he said. ‘I want to introduce you properly.’
I twisted my head to track a pale white woman stepping hesitantly into view.
I’d never met a more obvious fae who wasn’t riding a unicorn. She was impossibly tall and slender, with elongated arms that emerged from a loose brown sleeveless smock and ended in long-fingered hands. She had supermodel legs in black leggings that ended at the ankles to expose dainty pink feet. Her face was long and oval, with a small mouth and chin, prominent cheekbones and big hazel eyes. Her hair was a cascade of gleaming black down her back.
She shyly stopped beside Chorley and did a little nod and dip in my direction.
‘Foxglove,’ said Chorley. ‘This is Peter Grant, who will be staying with you for a while.’
‘Hi,’ I said, as brightly as a man tied to a chair can.
I might have gone for a bit of charm, except Foxglove stepped forward and, with no real discernible effort, lifted me up and threw me over her shoulder. This explained the painfully thin shoulder from earlier, I thought – where was this one when I was carrying ten tons of shopping back from Ridley Road market?
She carried me quickly out of the room and, I think, down a corridor and into another room. I was hoping I’d become detached from the pain-making machine but Lesley was nippily following us and kept giving me low-level shocks every fifteen seconds or so to keep me off balance. Mostly, all I could see was Foxglove’s hair but I caught glimpses of more cream coloured 1930s brick, a corridor, a double door and then we were out into an echoing space full of natural light.
Finally Foxglove plonked me down, seized my shoulders and turned me to face forward. We were in a large room – a workshop with high walls and a dirty glass skylight roof. The floor was bare cement with no visible furniture and at my feet lay an ominous dark round hole three metres across.
‘I made this especially for you, Peter,’ said Martin Chorley. So he’d followed us, too. ‘To keep you safe and sound until the work is finished.’
I looked down the hole – all I could see was a circular stretch of vinyl matting at least five metres down. It didn’t look very safe to me.
‘And afterwards, when we’re all eating dung for dinner,’ I said, ‘you don’t think I’m going to come looking for payback?’
I felt strong fingers break the ties on my feet and then my wrists.
‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘I know your type, Peter. You believe in law and order, and soon there will be a new order.’
‘And I’ll just knuckle under, is that it?’
I yelped as Lesley gave me a final shock before disconnecting the crocodile clips. I turned to find Foxglove blocking any attack on Chorley. Beside him Lesley was methodically wrapping the control cable around the button box.
‘Knuckle under?’ he said. ‘I expect you to be my champion – a paladin for justice. We’ll get you a suit of armour and you can wear Lesley’s favour on your lance.’
‘It’s all a lie,’ I said. ‘There never was a King Arthur or a Camelot – Geoffrey of Monmouth made him up out of old stories.’
I reckoned a dive to the side to get away from the hole and then I’d worry about what happened next.
‘We shall see,’ said Chorley, and Foxglove pushed me into the hole.
26
Of the Captivity of Peter
Five metres is a leg-breaking drop. And that’s the good option. You’re supposed to relax and roll on impact – which is easier said than done when you’re screaming for your mum. Not that I was screaming for my mum – didn’t have time. My landing was fast and surprisingly soft, followed by a bounce that almost pitched me on my head and killed me that way. I managed to get my hands out in front of my face and ended up lying across a low padded wall like something from a children’s playground. I rolled over, spotted Chorley’s face staring down at me and threw a fireball at it.
Nothing happened.
I gave it another couple of goes, but for some reason I couldn’t get a grasp on the formae – they kept slipping away like a common word you know you know but can’t remember.