will reveal themselves.”
Amidst the blurs of oranges and yellows, there appeared two jets of red.
Others in her position might have found it hard not to sound triumphant, but Barbara’s voice held no trace of vanity or conceit. “There. We have our men.”
“Somewhere in Islington,” Dedlock muttered. “I’ll get an exact grid reference.”
Barbara turned away from the tank and started dispensing orders. “Jasper — get Barnaby to meet us. I want to drive directly to the site. Henry and I are going in together.”
“Me?” I said, my guts clenching like a fist at the prospect of another confrontation with the Domino Men. “What on earth do you want me for? You look pretty capable yourself.”
“Oh, I’m immensely capable, Mr. Lamb, but for some reason these creatures have taken a shine to you.”
For a moment, Jasper looked at his creation almost doubtfully. “I’ll organize the jackboots. Get the place surrounded. We’ll take them by force.”
“Hawker and Boon cannot be stopped by conventional weaponry,” Barbara said. “How much more blood do you want on your hands before you learn that simple lesson?”
“Then what can stop them?”
The ghost of a smile appeared on Barbara’s impossibly perfect lips. “Miss Morning. How pleasant it is to be working alongside you again.”
The old lady squinted at Barbara. “I’m not sure precisely what you are, young lady. But you’re not Estella. You’re something new.”
“You know what I need. Get me the weapon.”
“I thought it was lost.”
“Then you were misinformed. The old man hid it in the safe house.”
Miss Morning smiled faintly. “Such a clever fellow in his own way.”
“Find it and bring it to me.”
Miss Morning nodded.
Starved of attention, the man in the tank beckoned Barbara back across the room. “I have the address. It’s somewhere on Upper Street. But where on earth could a couple of grown men dressed as schoolboys hide in Islington?”
“There’s a little place I know.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s good to have you back, Estella.”
“It’s good to be back, sir.”
“And so wonderful to see that everything’s been forgiven and forgotten.”
Barbara peered into the tank and the head of the Directorate shrank from her gaze. “That’s all in the past, sir.” She bared an unnaturally bright white set of teeth. “That’s water under the bridge.”
Mercifully, at that moment, the pod’s revolution was complete, and we were pushed back out into the freezing night air.
Barnaby was waiting. Barbara had climbed into the passenger seat and Jasper was clambering in the back when Miss Morning tapped me lightly on the shoulder.
“You need to call home. Tell Abbey I’m coming round.”
Exhausted from the battering of the past few days, my brain couldn’t really compute this information. “What?”
“Just tell her I’m on my way.”
“OK… Why are you going to my flat?”
“That flat isn’t your flat. It’s a Directorate safe house.”
“What?”
“Henry, it’s where we carried out the Process. Its’ where we cut poor Estella. Don’t act so surprised. Why else do you think your granddad was so keen for you to live there?”
The window at the front of the car whirred down. “Henry,” Barbara said quietly — although this new softness in her tone made me feel more afraid of her than any shout or scream would have done. “Get in the car.”
“You have to go,” Miss Morning said. “I’ll explain later.”
For a second, I hesitated. Then I heard Barbara’s cool, clear vice (“Time is of the essence, Henry”) and I climbed in beside Jasper. Miss Morning slammed shut the door and as the car drove away, she mouthed something at me. A single word. I couldn’t quite make it out, but now, looking back on it as the days of my life almost certainly dwindle into single digits, I’m certain I know what it was.
“Sorry.”
Jasper was fidgeting, interlocking his fingers, touching the end of his nose, fiddling with his chair, periodically clearing his throat and then, growing bored with the rest, poking me in the ribs.
“Isn't she wonderful?” He nodded toward the front, where Barbara was giving our driver directions in the dispassionate tones of a satellite navigation system.
“Why did it have to be Barbara?” I hissed. “Why did you have to choose her?”
“She was perfect, Mr. Lamb. Just perfect.”
Swallowing my disgust, I took out my mobile and stabbed in Abbey’s number.
Barbara swiveled around, suddenly suspicious. “Who are you calling?”
“My landlady.”
“Make it quick, then.”
As it happened, I only got her voicemail.. “Hi, Abbey,” I said, almost in a whisper, acutely aware that the others were listening. “Listen, I know this might sound a bit odd but I’ve got a friend coming round to the flat. Is there any chance you could be there for her? Help her out with anything she needs. I can’t explain. But it’s really important. Anyway, I’ll call you later. And…” I couldn’t begin to articulate what I wanted to say. “I’m thinking about you a lot.” I broke the connection.
Jasper, still buoyant from his triumph, started smirking knowingly at me, but I ignored him and took to staring moodily out of the window.
We moved into the city and were passing a department store, open late for Christmas shopping, festooned with fluorescent Santas, blinking baubles, and Day-Glo snowmen, when Barbara suddenly said: “Pull over here.”
“Why?” Barnaby asked.
A hint of a smile. Or perhaps just a trick of the light. “We’re going to need costumes.”
At the far end of Upper Street, sandwiched between the kind of newsagent that makes most of its money from the magazines on its top shelf and a place which will sell you fried chicken at four o’clock in the morning, there was a nightclub called Diabolism.
Its name was a vestigial piece of pretension from an old proprietor who had nurtured plans to take the place upmarket. Unlike him, his successors knew their market.
Once a week, every week, the club hosted an event called Skool Daze, which, with its melange of cheap alcohol, hoped for promiscuity and chemically induced good humor, seemed no different from any other evening at Diabolism — except for a single innovation. In an attempt to recapture the carefree sybaritism of their adolescence, everyone who came through the door had to be dressed in an approximation of school uniform.
So you see now why Barbara insisted that we stop to pick up costumes.
It should go without saying that she looked extraordinary. She had picked out a skirt which displayed an impressive amount of leg and a blouse which, generously unbuttoned, revealed the aerodynamics of her cleavage. She was gorgeous — ravishingly, ridiculously so — yet I felt not a flicker of desire for her. The more time I spent in her company, the less real she seemed, as though she wasn’t quite there, more like a fantasy come to strange half-life instead of a real woman. It was only when I caught occasional glimpses of the Barbara I knew, in the way that she moved or a sudden dimpling of her cheeks, that I remembered the essential tragedy of the woman.
I’m rambling, of course, doing my best to avoid having to describe how Jasper and I climbed reluctantly into
