“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.”
“And that’s another thing,” I said, on a roll now. “Who on earth is this woman? Why’s she so important? Dedlock won’t tell me.”
A grim smile on the old lady’s lips. “Mr. Dedlock has always relished his secrets. He hoards them as a miser keeps banknotes under his mattress.”
“Please…”
“Very well.” The old woman cleared her throat. “Estella was one of us.”
“You mean she worked for the Directorate?”
“She was the best agent we’d ever had. Passionate, elegant, deadly. Beautiful death in a trench coat. But she’s been lost to us for many years.”
“Granddad knew where she was. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
Miss Morning nodded. “It was he who hid her from us.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he wanted to keep her safe. Because some things were more important to him even than the war.”
I sensed that Miss Morning was growing impatient and perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed her any further, but I had to know. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
The old woman spoke softly so as not to be heard by those satellites which she imagined to have turned their lidless gaze upon us, but I could tell that, if she felt that she was able, she would have screamed her answer at me. “I think he loved her,” she said. “Loved her with a burning devotion that most of the time you only ever read about in poetry.”
I thought of my grandma, whose sullen face I knew only from old photographs and a few half-remembered family stories, and wondered, not for the first time, if I’d actually known Granddad at all. Another betrayal, I suppose. A defection of the heart.
“The hospital is nearby,” said Miss Morning. “I think I should like to see him now.”
It took us a quarter of an hour to get there. Miss Morning, fatigued from our walk in the park, suddenly seemed much older than before and I wondered how much of her usual appearance was simply a facade shored up by will power and tenacity. I led her to the Machen Ward, and when she saw the old bastard laid out like he was waiting for the undertaker, she staggered into my arms as though she was winded. I found us some chairs, we sat beside him and she took his hand in hers.
The scene reminded me of another time when I’d been in the hospital. Years ago, as a child, when I’d been ill and had those operations, I’d been in Granddad’s place and he’d been in mine watching fondly from a distance as Mum grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight.
Miss Morning gazed at my grandfather, her face blank and unreadable. “You foolish old man,” she murmured. She inclined her head toward me but did not lift her eyes from the bed. “Will you see the Prefects again?”
