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.