“Amusing, aren’t they?” said the Queen after they had left.
“Ma’am?”
“What is it, Mr. Dedlock? What do you want now?”
“I want you to think, ma’am. Please. Consider carefully before taking any action you might regret.”
“Come back tomorrow. Then you shall see. By the time we are finished, you will fall to your knees and worship with me.”
“Tomorrow, ma’am? What’s happening tomorrow?”
The Queen leant toward Dedlock, and even from his distant vantage point, Arthur Windsor thought he could see lights of madness dancing in her eyes. “Something wonderful, Mr. Dedlock. Something glorious. Tomorrow, Leviathan is coming to Earth.”
Chapter 14
Heading back to the flat, half an hour or so after saying goodbye to the old lady, I noticed that a dead ringer for my old bike, which I’d abandoned at work on the day of my initiation into the Directorate, had been roped around the exact same lamppost to which I used to lasso my own. That’s curious, I thought. What a coincidence.
Inside, I found Abbey sitting at the kitchen table and sharing a bottle of wine with the very last person I would have expected.
“Barbara?”
Unflatteringly dressed in chunky knitwear, her hair in some abortive attempt at a bob, the dumpy girl giggled in greeting. “Henry! Hello!”
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“I brought your bike back. You left it at work.” A hint of a blush suggested itself at the peripheries of her cheeks. “I’ve chained it up outside.”
I was quite touched by this. “That’s very kind of you. I’d completely forgotten about it.”
“You don’t need it for your new job?”
“Not really. They usually send a car.”
Barbara beamed in admiration.
Abbey broke in. “We’ve just been getting to know one another,” she said. “I did say that Barbara could leave the bike with me but she seemed to have set her heart on seeing you.”
Barbara flushed pink.
Abbey gave me a meaningful look. “We thought you’d be home sooner.”
“I’ve been at the hospital.”
Barbara looked sympathetically deflated at this and Abbey shot her a look of profound irritation.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Barbara. “Is there any change?”
“I’m not sure there’ll ever be.”
“Have a drink,” Abbey said quickly. “Join us.”
I sat down, poured myself a glass of wine and asked Barbara how she was getting on at the office.
“You know how it is. More files than we know what to do with. Even the Norbiton annex is running out of space now. And Peter’s been acting funny.”
“No change there, then,” I said, and Barbara laughed dutifully.
“They keep sending me down to the mail room.” The pudgy girl leant over to me. “That lady down there, the fat, sweaty one. She gives me the creeps.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “I remember. But how are you?”
As Barbara chattered on, Abbey curled back into her seat and gulped sulkily at her wine.
“I had the most wonderful evening the other night with your Mr. Jasper,” Barbara said.
A shiver of suspicion ran through me. “You did?”
“Lovely man. So attentive.”
I felt troubled by this, though I was uncertain why. “Are you seeing him again?”
“Definitely,” she said, with just a touch too much certainty. “Hopefully…,” she added.
Abbey yawned, then gaped in fake astonishment at her watch. “God. Is that the time?”
“What a tedious woman,” she said, the moment poor Barbara had gone.
I was in the kitchen, putting the kettle on. “Wouldn’t call her tedious.”
“Clearly she finds you fascinating.”
“Sorry?”
“Coming all the way here just to drop off your scrap-heap of a bike. It’s embarrassing.”
“I thought it was a nice gesture.”
“Nice gesture?” Evidently, this suggestion was absurd. “I think she’s after you.”
I could hear the kettle boiling. “What do you mean ‘after’ me?”
Abbey folded her arms. “I can see it in her eyes.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would Barbara be interested in me? Anyway, do you want a coffee or not?”
Abbey stalked from the room. “Good grief,” I muttered. “Surely you can’t be jealous?”
My only answer was the slam of her bedroom door.
I was giving serious thought to knocking on that door, to taking Abbey in my arms and confessing that I was falling for her in the most hopeless, overwhelming kind of way (and that I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in Barbara), when the doorbell began to clamor for my attention.
The driver from the Directorate slouched on the threshold. “Fetch your coat,” he grunted. “The Prefects want a word.”
I made as much noise as I possibly could in retrieving my coat and preparing to leave the flat, but Abbey didn’t emerge from her bedroom and I was too proud to tell her that I was going.
Barnaby had Radio Four playing in the car, some piece of late-night esoterica with a couple of professors spatting crustily over the early works of H.G. Wells.
“Academics,” Barnaby spat as we drove past Tooting Bec station and began the usual protracted escape from south London.
“But weren’t you one of those once?” I asked mildly.
“Yeah,” Barnaby said, his voice bristling with an even greater than usual distillation of belligerence. “Difference is — I knew what I was talking about. Still would, as a matter of fact, if those bastards hadn’t set me up. If they hadn’t concocted that farrago of-”
“Where’s Jasper tonight?” I asked, eager to avoid another venting of the Barnaby spleen. “Where’s Steerforth?”
The driver grimaced. “Too chicken. Couple of nancy boys, the pair of them.”
“I don’t believe they’re cowards,” I said quietly. “It’s just Hawker and Boon. They’ve got a way of making you feel afraid.”
A grunt from the front seat.
“Have you ever met them?”
“No,” he said, although I could tell by the way he said it that he was lying.
I was about to ask more but Barnaby turned up the volume on the radio as high as it could go and refused to answer any further questions for the duration of the journey.
The phalanx of reporters and photographers who often loiter and preen outside Number Ten in daylight hours had long since retired to bed, and those who were left — the soldiers, the guards, the plainclothes policemen — all parted before me without the slightest murmur of a challenge and I marveled again at the skeleton key effect of the words “the Directorate.”
This time I had walked into Downing Street alone. Barnaby still sat in the car outside, gloomily turning the pages of Erskine Childers and the Drama of Utopianism: (Re)Configuring Bolshevism in “The Riddle of the Sands.”
If anything, the sense of oppression, of walking blithely into the gingerbread house, felt even stronger this time. I moved through the library, stepped behind the painting and descended into the depths, past the silent gallery of freaks and ghouls, and tiptoed along the twilight corridor until I reached the final cell, the dreadful resting place of the Prefects.
The guard, his hands white knuckled around his gun, nodded brusquely and I think I was able to detect, buried somewhere deep in his mask of military indifference, a flicker of concern, the merest suggestion of compassion.
Inside, the Domino Men were waiting, their gnarled, hairy legs swinging to and fro in their deckchairs. Everything seemed identical to my last visit, the room as pitilessly stark as before — except for one peculiar addition.
There was an ancient television set in the center of the circle, cranked up far too loud. I heard the blare of canned laughter, the squeak of poorly delivered wisecracks, the silken voice of one of our most prolific character comedians, but it was only when I recognized the tremulous soprano of my nine-year-old self that I realized with a jolt exactly what it was that those creatures were watching.