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.
“Still inside,” one of them said. “You know how he gets when he’s shifting that stuff…”
The other one sniggered. “Birding it up.”
After this, for a long time, there was just the sound of mastication — rhythmic chomping echoing in the prince’s ears like the approaching stamp of some still-distant army — until:
“Oi oi!” Vince Mercy wore the look of a gambler whose horse has just romped home to an easy victory.
A young couple, dressed like the others in a lascivious parody of school uniform and in the latter stages of inebriation, had tottered up to the car, leant against the bonnet and proceeded to extravagantly grope one another. The girl’s skirt rode up almost to her hips and the policeman was whooping his appreciation when the lady (who seemed to the prince to be placing herself at serious risk of hypothermia) pushed away her beau, stumbled a few steps and let fly a stream of lumpen vomit. Her companion merely laughed and hit her joshingly on the back, and as soon as she was done, the girl joined in the laughter. The pair wandered away into the night, spattered with puke yet still cackling.
In the back of Mr. Streater’s Nova, Virtue and Mercy were laughing with them.
One of them jabbed a sausagey finger in Arthur’s face. “Reminds me of your missus!”
“Way I hear it, she wouldn’t even brush her teeth afterwards. She’d just get straight back down to it.”
“Please…,” whimpered the prince. “Please don’t…” But this only made the detectives laugh all the harder, their flabby bodies shaking with hilarity, halted only when someone smacked down hard on the car roof.
A couple of middle-aged men stood outside, both grinning wildly. They too were dressed as schoolboys.
“Good Lord!” one of them was shouting. “I know that face!”
“It’s the best boy!” the other man called back. “It’s teacher’s pet.”
Desperately, Arthur turned around to his companions, but, impossibly, both Virtue and Mercy had disappeared.
Arthur quivered in his seat, wondering what fresh indignity was about to be visited upon him, when there came a righteous cry from the other side of the parking lot.
“Abominations!” A disheveled man in a brown raincoat was pointing a gun in the direction of the schoolboys. “Wretched pieces of putrescence!”
“I say, Boon,” said one of the men in a tone of mild, pleasurable surprise, like one trainspotter to another on noticing a particularly uncommon diesel chugging toward them up the track. “Do you think that’s us he’s talking about?”
“I rather think it might be, Hawker. Anyway, isn’t that old Barnaby?”
The grizzled man gestured at them with the gun. “Get on your knees!”
The schoolboys laughed. “Do you ever go back, sir?”
“Go back?” said the man they had referred to as Barnaby. “What do you mean?”
“Back to your old college, sir.”
“Back to your alma mater.”
“Don’t suppose they’d let you in now, sir. Not after what happened.”
“Cruel, wasn’t it, Mr. B? The things they said.”
“They must have really hated you, sir, to make up all those stories.”
“And they were stories, weren’t they, sir?”
“There wasn’t any truth in them?”
Barnaby shouted: “Shut up! Just shut up, you lying monstrosities!” But even as Arthur slunk down in his seat, trying his best not to be noticed, he could see that the man was severely rattled, tripping and stammering over his words.
It was no great surprise, then, that as the schoolboys ambled over to the stranger he did nothing
