Angelmaker (6 page)

Before going to find Billy Friend wherever he is and shout at him in person, Joe makes a phone call.

Harticle’s—more properly the Boyd Harticle Foundation for Artisanal and Scientific Practice—is an endless lumber room, one hundred and fifty years old and more; a winding mass of shelved corridors and display cases punctuated with reading rooms and collections, inadequately labelled and appallingly dusty, so that to go into the Archives is to risk coughing for days. It is stuffed to bursting with odds and ends, acquired and maintained and stored away, against the day when something may be required for a restoration or a recreation. There are pieces of Charles Babbage’s unfinished machines here, and of Brunel’s steam engines. Instruments designed by Robert Hooke rub shoulders with wooden models produced to drawings by da Vinci. Everything has a story, usually more than one. Boyd Harticle’s ugly red-brick house with its unlikely turreted roof and neo-Gothic arched windows is a refuge for the disregarded children of man’s study and conquest of the natural world.

The call is answered on the second ring.

“In this house, only art,” proclaims a woman’s voice, deep and rather forceful.

“Cecily? It’s Joe.”

“Joe? Joe?
Joe?
What Joe? I know no Joe. The phenomenon known as Joe is an illusion created by my conscious mind to account for the discrepancy between the number of scones I buy and the number I eventually consume. His putative reality has been demonstrated false by empirical testing. In any case, extant or not, he no longer cares. Gone off with some harlot, no doubt, and left me to my lonesome.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And well you might be. How are you, you heartless wretch?”

“I’m fine. How’s Harticle’s?”

“Big and draughty and full of old things no one gives a fig for. Me, among them.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“And you imagine once will get you off the hook, do you? Ask Foalbury how many times he had to apologise for the fiasco with the eggnog. Then try again.” But Cecily’s voice is grudgingly mollified, and a few buttered scones will see her right. The gates of Harticle’s—as Joe well knows, and so does she—are not closed to him.

Part museum, part archive, and part club, Harticle’s occupies one of those weird niches in London’s life, both physical and social, which makes it almost invisible to the wider world and almost inevitable to those in the know. Cecily Foalbury is its librarian and in a way its library. Granted, with a following wind one might find a book or an object via the card-index system. It’s a perfectly respectable arrangement, albeit outdated and—this being Harticle’s—staunchly analogue. It’s also true that Cecily is the codex, the concordance. If you want to find anything within any reasonable time-frame, it’s best to ask her—but very, very politely, and if possible with blandishments. Cecily’s nickname—the Man-eater—is not entirely in jest, and her husband Bob freely confesses himself a serf.

“Cecily, do you know anything about the Loganfield Museum in Edinburgh?”

“Not since it closed. Why?”

Joe Spork nods to himself without surprise. “Just checking. What about dangerous books?”

“Oh! Yes, of course. There are dozens. The churches got in such an uproar after Gutenberg, Joe, because now anyone could print anything and spread it about. Popes got in a bate about all manner of things. Local barons became irate about scurrilous gossip printed in pamphlets—much of it true and I must say almost all of it good reading!” A thunderous laugh down the phone. “There’s even a couple of Bibles with printing errors which make them a bit odd. Thou Shalt Commit Adultery, and all that sort of thing. People collect them, bishops burn them. Silly sods. As if God gives a monkey’s what’s written in botched type.”

“This isn’t one of those. It’s more modern.”

“Come on, then, Joe. What sort of
tome
,” she hits the word hard, enjoying its kookiness, “what sort of
libram
are we talking about?”

“He called it the Book of the Hakote.”

There’s a brief cough from the other end of the phone, a muffled bark.

“Cecily?”

“I’m here.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Hakote, is what’s wrong.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Of course I bloody have. Drop this, Joe. Run away from it. It’s poison.”

“I can’t. I think it’s stuck to me.”

“Wash. Fast.”

“How? I don’t know what it is!”

“It’s the ghost in the darkness, Joe. From the tip of Spain to the Black Forest and all the way to bloody Minsk. The Witch Queen at the Crossroads. Bloody Mary. Baba Yaga. It’s a curse.”

“Cecily! Come on!”

She doesn’t. The line is silent. Then she asks sharply: “Who’s ‘he’?”

“What?”

“You said ‘he called it’. Who is this ‘he’? Not the nefarious little lecher, please?”

“No. Someone else. He seems to think I’ve got it.”

“And have you?”

“I … no. I may have had it. Or something which could have been it.”

He hears her sigh, or maybe just breathe out hard, letting it go.

“Hakote, Joe. It’s … it’s a bogeyman. All right? It’s a leper or a … a banshee. Like Grendel’s mother. You can die of it. She’s supposed to have built a castle in a village, and one night the sea came up and swallowed the whole thing.”

Joe Spork is trying to laugh. It is, after all, rather silly. Ghost stories are absurd, here and now, under the faint but reassuring sun—but Cecily Foalbury is a tough old bird and not given to fantasy or superstition. On the other hand: this morning, the strange, birdlike man in a linen wrap—a hood? A cowl? A bandage?—which hid his face.

“Leprosy is curable,” he says firmly. Revolting, but curable and natural and not easily caught.

“Joe, they’re not just sick. It’s more than that. The lepers and the Hakote were both outcast groups, all right? So they got lumped together. People started to think of them as the same thing, but they weren’t. And the lepers, Joe, they were more scared of the Hakote than the other way around. This is modern people, not medieval peasants. And … well, I don’t know. It’s like the tomb of the Pharaohs, isn’t it? There’s a long record of people dying from being too close.”

“To what?”

“I think knowing that is what you’re supposed to die of.”

“Cecily …”

“Oh, don’t be so bloody dense, Joe! Of course it’s all hogwash, but it’s hogwash with dead people attached and I don’t want you to be one of them!”

“Nor do I. Well, fine. They’re bad. Pirates, murderers, whatever. I don’t have the book, but someone thinks I do, and that could be a problem.” He can hear her pursing her lips to argue, pushes on. “I need to know more. If it’s dangerous, that makes it more important. I’m in this somewhere. I think it might have something to do with Daniel. Can you check that, too?” He wants to get off the phone. He’s irrationally angry with Cecily for turning his day into an emergency.

“Daniel Spork? Your grandfather Daniel? Why would you think that? Who have you been talking to?”

But Joe doesn’t want to answer that one, not yet, so he mumbles something and repeats his request. Cecily, after a moment to make it clear she has noticed that she’s being fobbed off, doesn’t press.

“I’ll check the file. You’ve got most of his things there, though. What there is.”

“Just some old clothes and his jazz collection.”

There’s a brief silence, then: “His what?”

“Jazz. Music.”

“I am aware, you young pup, that jazz is music—and one of the highest forms thereof. All right, then, start with that.”

“Why?”

“Because unless I’ve gone completely mad, Joe, your grandfather hated jazz. Loathed it. Apparently there was a jazz band playing in the ship he came over from France in during the war. They came down into the hold and played for the refugees when the convoy was under attack. Bombs falling, the whole iron tub clanging and banging, and they danced their way to Blighty. Daniel couldn’t listen to it afterwards. He said all he could hear was shells falling and men screaming.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Well, no. It’s not a story for children, I dare say.”

No. Apparently his day is going to be rather dark.

“I need anything you can find out.”

“Be careful, Joe. Please.”

“I will. I am.”

“Yes. You are. All right. Give me a day or so, and bring me a pork pie.”

Joe laughs for the first time, brief respite. Cecily is strictly forbidden pork pies by her doctor, but the Rippon Pie, which she regards as the Platonic form, is her absolute favourite and she will brook no denay. For a Rippon Pie, Cecily Foalbury, at twelve stone, five foot two and seventy-one years old, would gladly walk naked through Piccadilly in winter.

He puts down the phone and leans back, staring at the warehouse ceiling and listening to the Thames.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts
.

Oh, sure. It’s easy to say that now.

“Tell you what,” Billy Friend says, three days ago and cab-driver confidential, “I’ve got something which might be useful to you in your professional capacity, not to say your artisanal practice. And a bit of actual paid work, a commission, so to speak, for a reputable client, all above board and squared away. Right? So, what say you do something for me in exchange and call it a finder’s fee? Mutual courtesy, no paperwork, no VAT, everyone’s a winner.” He waggles his eyebrows over the rim of his teacup.

Billy Friend’s eyebrows receive considerable prominence on his face because they are thick and black, and he has no other hair of any kind upon his head. Around about the time that Joe’s father was called to account by Her Majesty for being
in loco parentis
to a large quantity of imported cocaine (rather than being
in loco parentis
to, to take a random example, his son) Billy Friend acknowledged that his personal battle with male-pattern hair loss was at an end. On the day of the trial—quite coincidentally, there was no very strong connection between Joe Spork and William Friend back then—he ditched his fiancée, bought a shiny new suit, and had the last of his mortal youth removed by a Knightsbridge barber. Since which time, beyond varying the ridiculous waxes he uses to produce a manly gleam on his alarmingly sexual pate, he has changed not at all. Billy Friend, riding the coat-tails of Patrick Stewart’s supersexed telegenic baldness—though Billy would tell you he was there first.

Joe generally avoids Billy in his professional context. They go out
on the town every so often, share a meal, maybe some drinks. Billy is brash and embarrassing, and therefore exactly the kind of person who can force a moody Joe Spork to have a good time, even talk to women he finds attractive. It’s the kind of friendship which endures, despite minimal tending and no apparent central plank. Billy in mufti, ordering another bottle from a cheerily scandalised waitress, is a part of the landscape, awkward and familiar and finally indispensable.

Billy the dealer is a trickier proposition, fraught with complex questions of murky legal ownership and tax-free cash jobs—but on this occasion Joe was so unwise as to pick up the phone without checking to see who it was, got blindsided, and as a consequence is here in this greasy spoon drinking thick, orange tea. An object lesson in paranoia, but not in the end a bad result, because Joe has to confess he is having minor money issues at present, and Billy Friend, when not attempting to sell him a pup or persuade him to take part in some dubious scheme involving Latvian modelling agencies, is a good source of gainful employment as well as a genuine if barmy long-time pal.

“What sort of commission?” Joe says carefully.

“Well, Joseph,” because Billy likes to be formal when he’s conning you, “it is—and at the same time, you understand, it is
not
—for it’s an equivocal and quirky sort of object, hard to get to know and spiky about the edges, which is what made me think of you … It is a what you might call without fear of immediate contradiction though at the same time without expressing the fullest truth … a doodah. From an estate sale.”

“Estate sale” meaning, most probably, nicked. Although Billy Friend, when he is not dealing in knocked-off antiquities and seducing the daughters of provincial publicans, is a member in good standing of the Honoured & Enduring Brotherhood of Waiting Men, which is to say he is an undertaker. He is therefore well-positioned to come across estate sales before the actual sale has begun, but Joe does not automatically accept that Billy actually buys from the bereaved, because in one of his many other professional hats, Billy is a freelance spotter of thievable items for burglars in London and the Home Counties.

“I’ve got a lot of doodahs, Billy,” Joe says. “My life is in some measure awash in doodahs. How is your doodah different from everyone else’s doodah?” And he realises too late that Billy has set him up.

“Well, Joseph, one doesn’t like to brag …” Followed by a huge
laugh which turns heads all around, and most particularly the head of the young, flirtatious waitress, whose personal attention Billy Friend has been working to secure since they sat down.

“Billy …”

“It’s a book, Joseph.”

“A book.”

“Of sorts, yes.”