Once we had finished chatting of trivial things, she said, apropos of nothing in particular: “I’m really worried about you.”
All I could manage in reply was a single “Oh?” distractedly delivered as I was grappling at the time with an especially elusive strip of duck.
“This new job of yours. Yesterday, when you woke me, you were gabbling, you weren’t making sense. Like you were high or something.”
“Oh,” I said again. “Sorry.”
“You’ve changed. Tell me the truth, Henry. Have you got yourself into something dangerous?”
“I’ve been given a promotion.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
Suddenly lacking the heart to go on, I balanced the chopsticks on my bowl and pushed it toward the center of the table. “Yes, there’s more. But I can’t tell you.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because I don’t want to put you in danger.”
Abbey rolled her eyes and signaled to the waitress. “Fine. Let’s just get the bill.”
I’ve never considered myself especially perceptive about women but even I could see that she was upset.
“I’m not sure where you and me are heading,” Abbey said. “But I’m telling you now that nothing’s ever going to happen unless we’re absolutely honest with one another.”
“I wish I could tell you,” I said. “I really do.”
She looked at me skeptically.
“I’m serious,” I protested. “It’d be suicide.”
“Suicide?”
“Professional suicide,” I said quickly.
The waitress drifted up to the table. “Everything OK?”
“Great,” said Abbey vaguely. “Thanks.”
“What about you?” The waitress sneered down at my half-finished bowl. “Something wrong?”
I mustered a weedy smile. “Not at all. It was lovely. I’m just full, that’s all.”
The waitress shrugged and turned back to Abbey. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”
My landlady looked embarrassed. “I’ve been busy.”
“Yeah. I can see that.” This must have been meant as a reference to me, as when she said it, the girl glanced dismissively over in my direction. “I’ll tell you something for nothing.” She leant conspiratorially close. “I prefer the other one.”
“Just get the bill,” Abbey snapped, and the waitress, chafing at the sudden gear-crunch in tone, scurried away in the direction of the till.
“You’ve been here before?” I asked.
Abbey couldn’t quite meet my eye. “Loads. It’s just round the corner from work.”
“What did that waitress mean? That she preferred the other one?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.” Embarrassed, Abbey began to gabble: “Anyway, I’m sorry about earlier. Didn’t want to come on too strong.”
“You didn’t.”
“It’s just that I’m excited about what’s happening between us and I don’t want to jeopardize it. I’ll have to learn to trust you. Just promise me one thing.”
“I’ll try.”
“What you do… It’s legal?”
“Completely,” I said, although in point of fact the legal status of the Directorate had never occurred to me. That place and its people seemed to exist in some insulating bubble of their own, a carapace of the fantastic which kept them utterly divorced from the real world.
The bill arrived and I was adamant that it should be my treat, claiming that I’d just had a pay raise. This was perfectly true. My first, very generous wage from the Directorate had appeared unheralded in my bank statement the previous day. Abbey was initially determined that we should share the expense but she quickly caved in.
We sat waiting for the waitress to return.
“If you won’t talk to me about it,” she said, “if you won’t let me help you, at least find someone who can.”
I laughed. To my ears it sounded alien, bitter and harsh. How long, I wondered, had my laughter sounded like that? “The only man who can help me is in a coma,” I said.
Her patience was beginning to fray. “There must be someone.”
The waitress came back and I was distracted by settling up.
“P’raps there is someone,” I said once we were on our feet and heading for the door. “Someone who can help.”
“Well, then. Make the call.” Abbey’s mobile trilled to announce the arrival of a new message. She glanced at it. “I have to go. We’ve got a big meeting this afternoon. Bound to be boring but I’d better be there. Take care of yourself, Henry.” She kissed me passionlessly on the cheek, turned and left the restaurant.
I idled on my own for a moment, picked up a mint on my way out and mooched onto the street just in time to see her vanish around the corner. For a second, I felt a compulsion to run after her, throw myself upon her mercy and tell her everything. Instead, I just stood there like an idiot and watched her disappear.
Once she was out of sight, I reached for my wallet and prized free a small square of card. There was a number printed on it and as I typed the digits into my mobile I felt what little lunch I’d managed to consume lurch back up.
When I spoke I had to raise my voice to be heard above the clamor of the city.
“Miss Morning?” I said. “It’s Henry Lamb. The answer is yes.”
In Ruskin Park, not five minutes’ walk from where my granddad lay in hopeless oblivion, the ducks were famished. In the short time that we were there, they managed to devour an entire loaf of wholemeal between them.
Miss Morning looked as prim and fastidious as ever in a pair of tiny black gloves and a powder-blue hat, impeccably poised even as she stooped to scatter gobbets of bread. A couple of adventurous pigeons flew down to pilfer what they could but the old lady shooed them fiercely away.
“Here,” she said, passing me a slice. “Make sure he gets some.”
I did as I was told and tossed the bread into the path of a particularly sluggish goose who was dawdling dozily by the banks of the pond.
“Why did you call me?” she asked, once the last of the crumbs had been shaken from the bag and the waterfowl, sensing that we had nothing left for them, had waddled away in search of more promising giants.
“The Prefects…,” I said heavily.
“So you’ve met them?” she asked, her expression of wrinkled benignity shifting into something calculating and shrewd. “We should walk. Since we’re almost certainly being tracked the least we can do is make our conversation difficult for the bastards to hear.”
I gazed around at the gray, deserted park, with its stark trees, its balding grass and unpromising patches of scabby earth. “How could anyone be listening to us here?”
“Eyes in the sky. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Directorate is just three men and a filing cabinet. You’ve only seen the tip of their operation.” She paused for breath. “But what was it you wanted to know?”
“Hawker and Boon… What are they? I mean, what the hell are they?”
Miss Morning flinched and for an instant I glimpsed the old steel in her, the skein of ruthlessness which must have made her fit for service in the Directorate. “They are the Domino Men, Mr. Lamb.”
“The Domino Men? Steerforth used that phrase.”
“All history is a game to them and all human lives their pieces. Their weapons are our selfishness, our greed and our cupidity. With infinite patience, over days and weeks and years, they set us up into long unknowing rows until at last, with the merest flick of their wrists, they send us toppling down, one after the other, and clap their hands at the fun of it. They were there at Maiwand, Sebastopol and Balaclava, at Kabul, Rourke’s Drift and Waterloo. And all the time — and this I can promise you, Mr. Lamb — as men died around them in the thousands, those creatures were laughing. They were doubled up at the sheer hilarity of it all.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” I said, unable, perhaps, to hide my frustration. “Who exactly are these people? What do they want?”
Miss Morning fixed her eyes on mine. “They’re mercenaries. Their services are for hire to anyone who cares to pay. At this particular moment in time they also happen to be the key to ending the war. With your grandfather gone, they’re the only ones who know the whereabouts of Estella.”