The house is at the end of a narrow road.
Knock, knock.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Tam.”
With a recently pinched Mercedes and a girlfriend who looks like some sort of crime all by herself.
Tam shouts back through the door. “No, no, this is where you say ‘Oh, is it five in the bloody morning? I’m so sorry, I must be out of my fucking mind!’”
“Soot and sorrow, Tam. It’s Joe Spork.”
Uncle Tam—leaner and grizzlier, but verifiably the original—flings open the door and stares at him, meerkat eyes bright in a craggy face.
“Shit. I s’pose it was inevitable… Did I or did I not teach you, young Lochinvar—who is on the run and a plague to all men’s houses—that folk of the Market do not have names? We don’t say ‘I am,’ we say ‘I am called,’ and the reason for that is not so that fairies can’t take our teeth when we sleep with our mouths open on Midsummer’s Night, it is for perfectly simple deniability, so that old Tam does not have to fall back on ‘I am an old fart, officer, and too senile to recognise a wanted felon when I see one.’ Hullo,” he says, looking at Polly Cradle, “all right, I’ve changed my mind, you can come in. What’s my name?”
“I never heard it,” she replies smartly.
“You was raised proper,” Tam says approvingly, “not like Lochinvar. Always a troubled boy.”
“We came here in a stolen car, and he’s going to get me a bouncier one when we leave so we can screw like mink on the A303,” Polly informs him brightly.
Tam glares at her, then groans. “Christ,” he says, “I’m old.” He leaves the door open as he sinks despairingly back inside.
They follow him. Tam’s place is a bungalow, and he drags one foot. Joe, thinking of the great cat burglar of days gone by, feels a bit mournful.
The house is cramped and not very warm. It ought to have a kind of moth-eaten grandeur, but it doesn’t. It’s just lonely. There are books along the walls, old science fiction novels muddled with copies of the European Timetable and random magazines Tam hasn’t thrown away. One shelf is taken up entirely with ledgers of old shipping companies.
“I am a wanted man, Tam. And she’s a wanted woman, too, I suppose.”
Tam doesn’t answer Joe directly. He glances at Polly.
“I swear to God,” he mutters, “he does this to upset me. Oy,” he adds, turning to Joe, “if you don’t tell me I can’t know and I can’t be done for not calling the rozzers, now can I? I am assuming all this is woeful bravado from a boy with a proper job who wants to impress an old mate of his dad’s. You giant rollicking twerp. What do you want, Lochinvar? You and your girl with the naughty feet?”
“I need something, Tam. It’s not anything big.”
Tam glowers. “You’re just like him. He used to say that just before he said something like ‘Tam, old friend, it seems to me the Countess of Collywobble has too many diamonds and we have too few, so get your crampons, we’re off to scale the north face of Mount Collywobble Hall!’ and then before I knew it I was standing in front of the beak asking for clemency and pleading bloody stupid in mitigation. What are you looking for?”
“Whatever he left with you.”
Tam frowns. “Are you sure? Times have changed, Joe. No room for Mathew’s sort of living now.”
“I’m sure.”
Tam measures him, and nods. “Had to ask,” he says, “before I gave this over. Mathew left it for you. Said you’d never need it, left it anyway. He believed in planning ahead, when it suited him.” He scribbles on a piece of paper: three digits, then a letter and another three numbers. “It’s round the corner,” Tam says. “McMadden Storage. Looks all modern now, but nothing’s really changed. First number tells you which door to use. The letter’s for which floor, and the last one tells you which container it is. It’s all locked up, of course.”
“Where’s the key?” Polly Cradle asks.
Tam grins. “Oh, well…”
Joe Spork grins back, a wolf’s lolling tongue peeping out from under a sheep costume. “If you need a key, you’ve got no use for what’s in the box.”
Polly persuades Joe not to crash the car through the fence, which is his first, heady option, so he cuts the wire instead, right under a security camera. She waits for the alarm to go off, and nothing happens.
“Most of them don’t have one,” Joe murmurs, “and the ones which do, well, it’s property crime, isn’t it, not residential. Police’ll show up in the morning. Guard’s not about to come and see what’s happening if he can help it, is he? Even if the cameras work, which that one likely doesn’t because it’s not plugged into anything. Most of the world works that way. It just assumes you’re too chicken to find out.”
“I think it’s wireless,” Polly Cradle says carefully. “I remember the catalogue.”
“Oh.” He looks at the little lens. It abruptly seems very alert. “Well, best we hurry, then.” He grins, unrepentant, and she laughs.
A few moments later, in the shadow of the corrugated iron wall, he uses the same bolt-cutters on the padlock of door 334. He shoulders through, then shuts the door and turns on the lights.
“Wow,” Joe Spork says after a moment.
This is almost certainly the most orange place in England. It may be the most orange place in the world. Row upon row of numbered orange boxes, and beyond them, orange doors set into orange walls. It is not a soft, sunset orange or a painter’s orange, but a bright, plastic, waxed-fruit orange which knows no compromise. It’s the kind of orange which would allow you to find your container in a blizzard or after an avalanche.
Polly Cradle assumes he will also cut the lock on container C193, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just lifts the door up and out, and it comes off quite smoothly. He uses the padlock as a hinge.
Inside, there’s a man.
He’s sitting with his back to them in a big leather armchair. He wears a hat and a pair of gloves. By his left hand is a carpet bag, and by his right, a trombone case. He doesn’t move.
Joe Spork edges forward, and breathes out. It’s just a dressmaker’s dummy. Very ha ha, he thinks. Very Mathew. A small shock, just to keep you on your toes, test your mettle. Or maybe just for fun. Mind you, Mathew himself might have shot it, and that would have ruined a perfectly decent hat. Exactly the kind of hat Joe was thinking of a few hours ago. A hat to ravish dancehall girls in, to shade a fellow’s face while he runs moonshine. He moves closer.
The zip on the carpet bag is thick and dry. It sticks. He tugs at it, back, then forward, then back. Yes. The bag opens.
Shirts. A wad of money, perhaps a thousand pounds, in useless old-style ten-pound notes. A small pouch containing what can only be diamonds. Today’s value in the straight world: a couple of hundred thousand. Walking-around money. A toothbrush, because Mathew hated to be without, and a couple of tins of preserved fruit. A bottle of Scotch, a packet of tobacco. And… oh. Another set of Polaroids, rather ribald: a rubicund fellow in a wealth of female company on the sofa at one of Mathew’s parties. Not a lot of clothing to speak of, and a number of things going on which one newspaper or another might consider a bit naughty. The Hon Don takes his pleasure, 1 of 6 in Mathew’s hand on the back. A very solid bit of blackmail, ho ho, and surely this is what the somewhat dishonourable Donald was expecting when Joe bearded him the other day.
He looks around and sees what he’s looking for, taped loosely to the trombone case: a dirty postcard from Brighton circa 1975 showing a cheeky disco girl with her dress falling down.
Joe glances at the card, praying to God the text on the back is not long, not tortured, most of all that it will not apologise or accuse, or tell him he has sisters in five counties and a brother in Scotland. Or that there’s a corpse field under the warehouse.