“My booty shake brings all the girls to the yard!” sang Arvin Cummerbund, striking a heroic pose.
None of the women on his step was Helena, and one of the Not-Helenas was staring at him and smiling with what appeared to be steel teeth. There were four of them, or rather, a group of three and a ringmaster or divine huntress who stood apart, whom he recognised unhappily from surveillance photographs as Mary Angelica “Polly” Cradle.
“I find that… profoundly disturbing, if true,” she said.
Arvin Cummerbund hoped very much that his towel was well-secured, because he was conscious of shrinkage. The three women with her were, to a graduate of a good university, alarmingly familiar. The Graeae. The fates. The maiden must be (oh, Jesus!) Abbie Watson, with what appeared to be her husband’s boating hook in one hand; the mother was Harriet Spork, gangster’s moll and flagellant nun now apparently resuming her career in thuggery, and the crone—the teeth! My God, the teeth!—had to be Cecily Foalbury of Harticle’s. His eye settled hopefully on Polly Cradle. She was small, and very intent, and… resolved. Discreetly, as if not wanting to make too much of a fuss about it, she was carrying a large pistol. It was an old one, very well-kept, and it seemed to have seen recent deployment. Arvin Cummerbund thought of the two dead men in Edie Banister’s flat, and of the other piece of news Rodney had imparted to him, of Edie’s death.
Not the Graeae. Worse: “Tricoteuses!” some part of his mind gargled in alarm. “The guillotine hags! Knitting of corpses’ hair. Flee, Arvin! Flee!”
However, a Cummerbund does not flee at his own gate. He stands. Most especially when there is the additional issue of a Webley Mk VI whose target is one’s own enormous belly, an easy mark at some remove, but at close quarters almost literally impossible to miss, even with the rather iffy Webley.
All of which is recent and regrettable history. Looking now at these three very determined women, and at the mistress of hounds with her enormous certainty, Arvin Cummerbund feels very cold, and very small. He glances southward, to his towel.
“Oh,” Arvin Cummerbund says damply.
“Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle murmurs. “Would you be so kind as to come with us?”
Somewhere back in the flat, there’s a satellite-linked panic button which he carries in his pocket at all times. It actually has a lanyard so that he can wear it in the shower, but it gets in the way of the soap situation and is—being designed not by Apple or Sony but by the MOD—extremely ugly. It is therefore notably out of reach, even if he has remembered to replace the battery recently. He glances back at the boathook, seeing the name WATSON in large painted letters along the haft, and he chills—even further—as he tracks the message inherent in that. Abbie Watson glowers.
Arvin Cummerbund sighs, and allows them to lead him away.
“The error you have made,” Polly Cradle says in the house by Hampstead Heath, “lies, if you will forgive me, in your assessment of yourself in relation to your enemies—of whom, incidentally, your attack upon Joshua Joseph Spork makes me one. You believe, because it suits you to do so as emissaries of a great and powerful conspiracy in service to commerce and personal gain, that you and your charming friend Mr. Titwhistle have what I will call the ‘moral low ground.’”
Mercer Cradle sits at a kidney desk on the other side of the room, watching his sister work and leafing through a copious file. The tricoteuses occupy a nasty little semicircle close by, also watching. Cecily Foalbury has the largest chair, a wooden rocker, profoundly inappropriate for an interrogation, which she appears to enjoy. She is drinking tea and slurping it around her metal teeth. Leaning against a bookshelf at the back of the room is a tall, bulky figure in a long coat. He is in shadow, but Arvin Cummerbund recognises Britain’s Most Wanted by the line of his jaw. That said, there is something… collected… about him. He’s come of age somehow.
Arvin’s own chair is an expensive one from Liberty, in chintz. It’s very comfortable. He has also been allowed to retain his towel and even given a blanket for warmth. He fusses with it.
Polly Cradle waits until she has his full attention, and continues. “You think there are no depths to which you will not stoop. From this perception you draw a sense of invulnerability. You believe that you are—if I may put it crudely—the bad guys. You cherish the notion that you serve a great necessity, and thus your evil deeds, from which you derive a certain frisson, are legitimised. Nonetheless, though regrettably necessary they are unquestionably evil, and in some small way, so are you. You bear this burden for the nation and the world, sacrificing your own nobility in the cause of higher salvation. I’m terribly impressed.
“This construction would make us,” she indicates the room in general, “the good guys. Misguided, but morally clean. As a consequence of our goodness, you feel safe in this very quiet, very secluded room.”
She smiles, then tuts as the dog Arvin Cummerbund earlier observed tugs at something in a carpet bag under the table, a rubbery sort of item. Harriet Spork picks the bag up off the floor and starts absently to unpack it. A rubber apron. A length of surgical hose. Arvin Cummerbund feels a sort of rushing feeling in his stomach. Polly Cradle nods a thank-you and goes on.
“The thing is, Arvin—you don’t mind if I call you Arvin, do you?—the thing is that you and Rodney are really quite nice people. You don’t break the law if you can help it, or misuse your personal power. You don’t bear grudges. You’re probably expecting me to say I don’t hold a grudge, either, because good people don’t, but actually I rather do. You sent my lover to be tortured. I do take that personally, Arvin. May I say also, inter alia, that torturing someone by proxy is even more contemptible than doing it oneself?”
From the bag: a box (half full) of surgical gloves. Gauze. Lint. Tape. Distilled water. Spirit. A pair of those odd little bent scissors which look like the ones used for cutting grapes, but which are intended for a more medical purpose. Cecily Foalbury leans over and scrabbles for a piece of plastic tubing, and measures it against her arm, then bites through it and measures again. Better.
Harriet Spork sighs. Something is missing from the pile. What is it? Has the dog got it? A quite obvious, commonplace something, a trivial item, no one in their right mind would leave home without one… where is it? Abbie Watson comes to her rescue.
“Bastion! Drop!”
There it is, dratted dog. Tourniquet. Abbie Watson sets it on the table, and looks at Arvin Cummerbund without compassion.
“My husband,” she says distantly, “is going into surgery right about now.”
Which gives rise to the first genuine silence Arvin has heard in years. Even Cecily Foalbury stops drinking her tea.
“Yes,” Polly Cradle murmurs after a moment. “Even so, I must regretfully inform you that you and your friend Rodney are not bad men at all, not in that sense. You are driven by a perceived necessity. You are good. The corollary of which is that we are very much the other thing. You are fallen into the hands of villains. I would advise you to consider the implications of that for a moment.” She does not point to the items on the table. Arvin looks at them anyway. “Mr. Cummerbund,” Polly Cradle goes on gently, “you are under the delusion that your safety is assured by common decency, but it is not. We are wicked and we are angry. There is no decency in this room. You have connived in the assassination of Edie Banister. You have taken Harriet’s son and put him to the question. You have done harm to this woman’s mate. And you have deprived me of my lover.