Cannonbridge (26 page)

“How very impressive, Matthew. I may call you ‘Matthew’, mayn’t I?”

The two men are sitting opposite one another, hunched over a stained and rickety table, in a grimy little room, barely more than a compartment that is set aside in this great and terrible prison for the infrequent and fiercely rationed conjunctions of captives and members of the public. Outside the door is a guard and beyond him can be heard the eternal prison clangour of doors and locks and boots on metal, of mocking cries and sobs of lamentation, of injustice, of despair.

Against this persistent cacophony, Cannonbridge gazes levelly at the prisoner.

“Might I ask,” says the inmate, “why you wished to see me? As you behold, I am scarcely in the best of conditions in which to play the host.”

In this, the prisoner is assuredly correct. In his old life outside these walls, a life of wealth and reputation, he had inclined to plumpness, the aesthetic ringlets which had framed his cherubic face making him resemble, it was often said, some ancient god of excess, of pleasure and carnality. In here, his hair has been cropped close and his body has become almost lean. His prison clothes have become too large and he sits rather oddly within them like a malnourished child or a very old man, shrinking and pitiful.

Sitting, visibly weakened and unsteady, upon that grim seat he might easily form the subject of some salutary oil painting entitled ‘Cast Down’ or ‘The Fallen Sensualist’ or ‘The Rewards of Vice’.

“I wanted to see you,” says Matthew Cannonbridge, “because I have grown concerned about your welfare. Tossed in this dreadful institution by a society that once revered you. Beaten and broken and forgotten. Humiliated. Brought low. Spurned. Bedevilled.”

“All these things are true,” says the prisoner, sanguine to an almost comical degree. It is not difficult for a second or so to imagine him as once he was, lolling upon a chaise longue at one soiree or another and delivering elegantly prepared
bon mots
in those soft, well-modulated tones, which contain within them the merest spicing of the accent of his homeland.

Then the illusion flees and reality is reasserted. The deposed man, the humbled poet, is returned. “And yet,” he goes on, “I do not believe that your motive for this visitation is composed even to the smallest degree of any vein of human sympathy. Indeed, from all that I know of you, Matthew, I am far from certain that you are even capable any more of that most vital of emotions.”

Cannonbridge gazes coolly at him, the charge neither accepted or rebutted.

“So I shall ask you again, Matthew, why have you come here and what is it that you want with me?”

“Very well.” Cannonbridge makes a curious, almost ritualistic gesture with his hands, palms outstretched—the closest he must come, thinks Prisoner C33, to conceding a point. “I have arranged this little consultation only because...” He pauses, places his hand carefully back upon the tabletop, “I am desirous of finding myself... on the right side of history.”

The prisoner does not stir but only breathes, slowly and carefully. He has learnt patience in this place, after all—oh, how painfully he has learnt it. “Could you trouble yourself,” he says at length, “to explain?”

Outside, a shriek, a muffled curse, the sounds of the misery of the caged.

Then, the words of Matthew Cannonbridge. “This,” he says and his manner seems to indicate that he refers to the whole of the dismal scene, “is not how you will remembered. Not in essence. Rather, in time, your captors will be cast down, your false friends vilified as Iscariots and, most glorious of all, your sins will be transmuted into virtues.”

“Indeed?” says the prisoner. “Is that what you believe?”

“This is what I know, sir,” he replies, “for I have seen it.”

C33 gazes silently at this strange trespasser. Although a good deal more must be passing through his mind, in the end all that he says is: “And so you wish to be remembered as... a visionary, then? A man ahead of his time?”

Matthew Cannonbridge nods. “Quite so. And I am understandably eager to avoid...” He pauses, searching for the best and most apposite phrase, “... reputational damage.”

“I see. Well, thank you, sir, for your candour. Now, might I be allowed to be equally candid in return?” Something of the old fire is in his voice again, a little of that passion and wit which had been feared lost forever. Not waiting for the author’s permission, the prisoner speaks on, more swiftly and with increasing fluency. “Evidently I represent to you an object of considerable interest. I feel it only just to say that you have long formed a comparable object to me. Your fame, your wealth and notoriety—the way in which, whilst rumours of your transgressions abound, you look no older than you did when first you took the public stage. I think you will comprehend why I might find such a figure... intriguing.”

Cannonbridge is amused. “Is that so?”

“I have always been drawn to mysteries, Matthew, and there is, I fancy—no, I am sure—a dark mystery to you.”

Cannonbridge seems unruffled by the allegation though there is something—just the tiniest indication around the eyes and in the tilt of his head, that he is not wholly immune from disquiet. “And is it,” he says, the tone of droll amusement perhaps somewhat forced, “a mystery that you believe yourself to have solved?”

“Not as yet, no. And not entirely. But I do possess what I think we might call a clew.”

“How frustrating.”

“I wonder if you will recollect, Matthew, that my sorely mistreated but always beloved wife Constance once took a particular interest in matters that we may as well call the magical, the occult, the oracular?”

“I do not.”

“No? Well, perhaps it was a thing that she confided only to her intimates. Now, I remember her telling me, not long, in fact, before that chain of events which led to my own ruination were set in motion, that she had once attended a certain ceremony at the premises of the Order of the Moon-Born in which, after a great deal of theatrics, that, remarkably and, I suspect, somewhat to the surprise of all who were present on that weekday afternoon, contact was apparently made with what seemed to be a genuine spirit.”

Cannonbridge all but shrugs. “What of it? One hears many peculiar stories about the Order. I fancy that the drink that they serve there must be unusually potent or else augmented with some other substance.”

“Perhaps, sir. But my wife is hardly given to excess nor to an abundance of imagination or fancy. I should always take her word in all things. My current position affords me a good deal of time for thinking and I have thought much about the tale that she told me of that weird, blood-tinged event. Oh, it began, I am told, with a great and terrible rushing in the air, as though some mighty gale were rushing through the room although the place (no doubt they thought of it as a temple) was deep beneath the earth and the day without quite still. Then every candle was snuffed out and all was plunged into darkness. The ground seemed to shake beneath their feet although no tremor was reported in any other part of the city. And then, after all these unprecedented phenomena, a voice was heard, deep, mocking, ancient and cruel and sounding somehow, though no-one present could ever say exactly why, inhuman and issuing from some impossible, invisible mouth.”

“Remarkable indeed. If true. And did this disembodied voice impart anything of interest?”

“Oh yes, I rather think it did.”

“And what, pray, was that?”

“Now I think that you know, Mathew. Or perhaps you will know.”

“Enlighten me.”

“It said it was an aspect of something greater. Some... form of life beyond humanity. Not a demon or a devil as we would understand it. Rather, it represents what comes after man. The next stage, so to speak. It represents the most remarkable leap of... cognition.”

“And you imagine that you comprehend the words of this...
aspect
?”

“Certainly, locked up in here, I am sufficiently vain as to believe that I am beginning to see the pattern. Seeing you today has helped in that regard. Or rather... smelling you.”

“What precisely do you mean by that?”

“I mean, my dear Matthew, that you positively reek of...
money
. Always so distinctively vulgar a scent.”

His expression unchanging, Matthew Cannonbridge rises swiftly to his feet, steps to the door, knocks once upon it and shouts a command. At once, the locks are drawn back and the thing is swung open. Before he leaves, Cannonbridge turns back towards the prisoner. For an instant, all control has been lost and he presents a rictus of fury and frustration.

“You understand nothing,” he hisses. “You see no pattern. And you are in utter ignorance still. I hope that you rot here in the dark.”

The prisoner does not reply—gives no indication, in fact, that he has even heard these words save for a rare and fleeting smile which plays about his lips.

Cannonbridge snarls, steps over the threshold and is gone.

The prisoner does not stir but sits, unmoving, listening. Shortly afterwards, a guard moves into the room. It is Delaney, the best of them, in the prisoner’s opinion, by far.

“On your feet, C33! Look lively now!”

Unthinkingly, the prisoner obeys the command. As he shuffles towards the door his jailer says: “So that was Matthew Cannonbridge?”

The prisoner nods. “Perhaps,” he murmurs as, with hideous inevitability, he trudges to his cell. “Or perhaps it was something else entirely... Something inhuman. Just wearing that man’s skin.”

“I don’t understand what you mean by that,” says the guard.

“No, my dear fellow,” murmurs the prisoner as he allows himself to be casually manhandled. “Neither do I. At least... not entirely. Not yet.”

NOW

T
HEY HAVE PASSED
into London’s outer edge. Once caught in the gravity of the metropolis they head east, towards what half a century past had been the area of docks and shipping but which is now given over to the generation of money from money.

It is with little surprise that Toby realises their destination: Canary Wharf, the new financial district, its steel spires and gleaming corporate minarets a jagged statement of intent against the horizon. He has been here a few times before and always found it a strange sort of place, all too new somehow, too clean and well-ordered, seeing in the driverless electric railway which connects the place to the centre, in its expensive chain restaurants, its soaring yet somehow chilling architecture and, above all, its utter lack of the unsuited, the non-professional, the poor, some dishonesty, a particular view of the world with all naysayers and rebels swept politely out of sight. Not so very different then, he thinks, with bitter recollection, to the University.

Until today, however, he has never found the district to be so sinister. The shadows are lengthening and the streets—wide and brash and somehow, in their fit-for-purpose design, unEnglish—are oddly empty, lending the scene a minatory air, as if, faced with some pending disaster, an evacuation had happened here.

Neither Toby nor Mr Keen has said anything for hours. Judd nurses in silence his ruined hand. Somehow the pain, the grim monotony of the journey and the quiet surreality of the region bring about in him an oddly meditative state. As the Saab goes on he finds himself turning over and over in his mind the disparate pieces of this demented puzzle—the glimpses that he has been afforded, the scraps of evidence, the island, the Collection, the words of Spicer and Angeyo and the Blessborough sisters, those fragmented, contradictory testimonies from history—until, very dimly, the outline of a terrible picture begins to emerge.

At last—mercifully in a way for it has begun to seem to Toby as if they might go on and on indefinitely, into the night and the day beyond and the night again, prowling the streets of the city or pounding the motorway, on endlessly into darkness, with only Mr Keen for company and roadside food for sustenance and the promise of some inventive beating to provide variety—the car comes to a halt.

Toby, waking from his bleak reverie, sees that they have come to rest in an executive bay at the base of a skyscraper, no rarity in this region but an example of the form which seems to convey to a remarkable degree, the geometry of pure power.

Keen speaks then. “This is it, doctor. Now we’re going to get out of this car and we’re going to walk into that building and we’re going to ride the elevator to the penultimate floor. And what are we going to have from you?”

Toby blinks. His hand aches.

“Well?”

“No trouble,” Judd says. “No trouble at all.”

Keen nods briskly, a teacher genuinely pleased by some slow pupil’s belated progress. “Good,” he says. “You’re learning.” He touches a button and, with a solemn clunk, unlocks the passenger door. “Now. Shall we?”

Feeling as though he has never truly understood before now the meaning of the old cliché about the lamb being led to the slaughter, Toby steps out of the car and breathes in a lungful of gritty London air.

“With me,” says Mr Keen, steering Toby towards the huge sliding glass doors which provide the chief entrance to the tower.

“And what is this place?”

“It’s a bank, Dr Judd. Rather, it’s
the
bank.”

And it is with a horrible sense of inevitability that Toby reads the legend inscribed upon the doors.

One word.

Reynolds.

I
NSIDE THE LOBBY
is vast and cool and effortless in its demonstration of wealth. Two beautiful young women, a blonde and a brunette, stand efficiently behind the reception. Keen nods in their direction.

“Mr Keen,” chirrups the blonde.

“Right on time,” sighs the brunette.

He looks back, unspeaking. Both women ignore Toby utterly. This, however, he scarcely notices, his attention being arrested both by the name of the institution, written again in gigantic letters behind the front desk, and also, beneath it, what, he realises now, is surely the corporation’s logo—a slick, stylised representation of a snake devouring its own tail. Ouroboros.

“Don’t dawdle,” says Mr Keen as he applies the slightest pressure—no more than a fingertip—on Toby’s back.