“Ey, so. They noticed me noticing, didn’t they? One day I turn up with my kit and there’s the body, but he’s… fresh. Still warm. I good as pissed myself, and then I heard sirens. Didn’t occur to me until they come in through the front door what was going on. They’d set me up, hadn’t they, to take the fall for the whole lot. For fifty or sixty poor dead bastards… and then there was the back room, wasn’t there?”
The back room was famous—infamous. Parry had been escalating, according to the story. Serial killers apparently do this. Not content with one expression of their madness, they develop more and more outré, dreadful rituals and appetites until they are stopped.
In the back room was the latest victim’s family. What was done there had caused one of the investigating detectives to take an overdose. Two more retired from the force.
“They said it was all me,” Parry reports woodenly. “The mother, the kid. All me. I’m sorry if I can’t cry any more,” he adds, “but I’ve been in for over a year. First in the police nick and then some hospital and then there. I’ve been Vaughn the killer all that time. I’ve got false teeth now, after they kicked them in. I’m… someone I never was, now. It’s what happens, isn’t it? We lose who we are. Become someone else.” He shudders.
“What about you?” Vaughn Parry says at last. “What’s the deal with you? The way I hear it, they hate you even worse’n me.”
Joe sighs, and gives an abbreviated version of recent events, and an even more curtailed description of life in the House of Spork. He doesn’t want Parry inside his life, even if his confession is a true one. The man who was considering giving Mr. Ordinary a taste of his own medicine is not someone he wishes to share intimacies with, more than he must.
“Mechanical bees,” Vaughn Parry mutters. “And you say it’s big?”
“Huge, I think. Going-to-war sort of big.”
“Bloody hell.”
The road surface changes, the whine of the tyres giving way to a deep grumble.
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Parry goes on, “I’ve got more to tell you. I s’pose I owe it to you, or to bloody Dalton. Payback. And if it’s that important, too…”
“What is it?”
“Your friend Ted… confessed to me, is the only word. Because I was an undertaker once. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t a Waiting Man proper. Didn’t seem to matter much at that point. Not to him, anyway.” Parry’s face flickers with something like horror. “He was all messed up. They’d had at him, then they let him know who I was and brought him to me. They wanted him to be scared of Monstrous Vaughn, you see, but he was past caring. Something was broke in his chest. You could hear it flapping about… he wanted absolution.” Parry sighs. “From me. Of all the people on God’s Earth, he wanted absolution from the man supposed to be the worst bastard ever walked. And I couldn’t give it to ’im because it’s bin so long since anyone even looked at me with anything other than hate I didn’t have the words. I just stared at him and he choked out the ’ole thing and then he died.”
Vaughn Parry shudders. “You’ve got this thing they want, though?” Vaughn Parry says abruptly. “I mean, it’s not all a complete bloody joke, right? Not a total waste of time?”
“Yes,” Joe says absently. “I worked it out, in there.”
“Sholt said you had. It was like a kind of revelation for ’im. Like an angel, he said. But I was—” He stops. “I’m rattling on like a pillock.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“I haven’t talked for a bit.”
No. You haven’t. But Parry’s lisp is already better.
“It’s fine,” Joe assures him. “What were you saying?”
“When he said that, I was, well… I was afraid. For the first time in howeverlong I had something to hope for, that you’d find this blessed whatsis and stick it up their collective arse, ey?” Parry laughs. “Although, maybe you better just hang onto it. Keep it in a safe place.”
It’s a relief to be able to talk about this aloud. Joe has been screaming it, in rhyme, for—he doesn’t know how many days. Breath of the docks. Beneath the rocks. Frankie’s drum has chicken pox. He frowns and makes an uncertain gesture with his hand: this way, that way. “It’s safe for the moment,” he says. “It’s in the Death Clock. She sent it to my grandfather and he kept it in the Death Clock, because it’s so ugly no one looks at it twice. And he commended it to me for ‘special study.’ I thought he was just being annoying and educational. And now they’ve got it and they don’t even know. All this,” he waves at himself, his bruises and by extension the whole of Happy Acres, “and it was there, all the time. They’ve probably got it in a box.”
Vaughn Parry peers at him. “Well, I’m sure you know what that means to the world at large,” he says at last. “Buggered if I do, though. No, for God’s sake, don’t tell me! Bloody hell, I don’t want your trouble as well as mine, do I?”
Joe Spork shakes his head. He feels an urge to get back to his natural habitat, even if he has to hide beneath the streets among the Tosher’s Beat, in the rooms the toshers don’t bother with.
The bus stops briefly, and a man climbs on board who must be a fruit picker. His hands are swaddled in elastoplast. He wears a T-shirt written in a European alphabet Joe doesn’t recognise, and carries a white plastic bag full of unseasonal greenhouse plums.
Joe Spork considers his good fortune. He has escaped from a heavily guarded institution in the company of a monster who turns out to be quite nice. He has eluded what must be a major search—by speed? Stealth? Confusion? And he alone in all the world—apart from Vaughn Parry—knows the location of the calibration drum.
Just the two of them.
“This bus is now non-stopping all the way to London,” the driver says. Joe feels a momentary claustrophobia, and then his mind jumps sideways and around a corner. Not claustrophobia. Vertigo, on the cliff of impossible convenience. A straight course, all the way home. Back to Mercer and Polly. Parry giving answers to questions desperately asked. Parry as Sholt’s confidant, in that strange clarity before dying. Parry, the country’s most wanted man, suddenly a kindred spirit.
Too easy.
All that time being tortured, and then this. So simple. A bit of pain and a bit of work, and the whole place gone. A prisoner’s dream.
They have shown you the stick. Soon, they will show you the carrot.
A prisoner’s fantasy.
There is no carrot. Polly and I are your only friends.
This game is fixed.
Not lucky at all. Three-Card Monte.
I thought I was choosing the card I wanted, but the bunco man was slipping me the one he wanted me to have. I haven’t found the lady. I’ve drawn the Joker.
Vaughn Parry.
In which case, you work for someone, don’t you? I’m wrong. You’re not a loner at all. You’re not what you say you are. You’re a lie and a liar, and I’m taking you where you want to go. Telling you what you want to know.