“It’s me, Mercer,” Joe says.
“Oh,” Mercer says. And then, “Joe, for God’s sake, you’ve got my cellphone number.” And then meditatively, “Oh, crap. What’s happened? Don’t say anything to anyone except me.”
“Billy’s dead, Mercer. I’ve just found him.”
“Billy Friend?”
“Yes.”
“Dead like slipped on a bar of soap or like Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping?”
“Very much the latter.”
“And you, you poor rube, are standing there at the crime scene up to your neck in shit.”
“Yes.”
“Bethany? Police?”
“On their way, Mr. Cradle. Someone called them five minutes ago.”
“Joe, you are a pillock. Was that you?”
Joe doesn’t know. It may have been.
“Never mind, then. First question: are you Colonel Mustard?”
“No.”
“You are not the Colonel in any way, shape or form?”
“No.”
“Could anyone unkindly imagine that you have the look of a military man? Have you been seen entering the library carrying plumbing supplies?”
“I came to look for Billy. I needed to talk to him. I’ve been into all the rooms but I haven’t touched much. I’ve got a poker.”
“Not one you brought with you, I trust.”
“Billy’s.”
“Fine. Quite shortly, the place will be swarming with unhappy coppers. Their first instinct will be to clap you in irons and give you the impression that you’re going to prison for ever. Stay silent until I get there. Do not speak, even to say ‘Good evening officer, the corpse is through here.’ Just point. Do not make a voluntary statement. Do not be helpful. Stay in the corridor—are you in the corridor?”
“I am. I was in the flat, before. He’s on his bed.”
“And you no doubt touched him as little as possible? You did not, in a mistaken rush of affection for the little prick, embrace the deceased and smear yourself in blood and him in fibres of your clothing?”
“He’s under a sheet. I didn’t lift it.”
“Good. Fine. What was my first instruction?”
“Say nothing. Wait for you.”
“And did I say you could in any way do anything else? Did I, for example, give you permission to reminisce about your old friend William and his little ways? About your shared history as dealers in entirely legitimate antiques?”
“No. You said to say nothing and wait.”
“Excellent. Then I shall ask the maître to stick the lamb in a bit of foil and cork the bottle for me, and we shall picnic.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You will be by the time we’re done, Joseph. This is apt to become a long and tedious soirée. Under what circumstances may you offer help and assistance to Lily Law?”
“None, until you get here.”
“So that I may translate what you say into words which will be understood by Lily and her chums Bob Magistrate and Charlie DPP as ‘I am not some tiny tit you can fit up for this heinous crime, I am a bystander and thus I shall remain.’”
“Understood.”
“I am on the way, Joseph. Bethany?”
“We’re making an incident room, Mr. Cradle. Keep us up to date.”
“I will.”
Joe Spork leans on the wall and waits.
Christ, the smell.
He breathes through his mouth, and feels he has betrayed a debt. When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossibly prim.
Billy, you’re an idiot. Were an idiot.
In exasperation, not judgement. Then ungrudging acknowledgement:
You were my idiot. My friend.
In his mind’s eye, he buries Billy, cries for him, misses him every time he sees a bit of dodgy Victorian smut, then slowly forgets him and misses him more seldom as life goes on, more lonely, and ultimately Billy really is gone, abandoned twice over to his end.
And at the same time, another part of him eschews all this love and poesy, and looks for edges, escapes, and angles. Joe reluctantly encourages it. This is bad trouble, and unless there’s more coincidence in the world today than there was yesterday, it pursues him. Here, with Billy’s repulsive mortal remains, he can feel its breath. So while he waits for Mercer, and for the predicted horde of arresting officers, Joe Spork unwillingly combs his mind for old habits and ways of thinking, and this inevitably begins, as all discussions of wrongdoing must, with Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork.
He has been so successful in discarding his father that he cannot, for a moment, recall Mathew’s face, or his voice, until he reaches for memories too old to be useful and hears it, mock-severe, coming from up above him, because he’s a child and getting ready for his day.
“Hurry it up, Joshua Joseph, please! A man is always busy, a man has affairs of state to attend to! This man must also make breakfast for his offspring before delivering him into the vile jaws of school. Booooo! to school!” Joe’s father wears a coat with a sheepskin collar and a fat-knotted, striped tie. Wide shoulders and narrow hips make him look like an isosceles triangle balanced on its point (his Italian brogues in two colours). The child Joshua Joseph pauses to consider his father as if he were, for the sake of argument, a scalene or an equilateral triangle. Both images are very odd.
On this day, Mathew Spork is playing the man of commerce rather than the gangster prince, and so he has left almost all of his guns in the box under the bed. Almost all, because a man in his profession does not generally walk abroad without something to give people pause.
He’s waiting for an answer. The boy Joshua Joseph—who has been planning in his mind the theft of the Crown Jewels by a series of tunnels and hang-gliding escapades—responds: “Boo!”
In fact, Joshua Joseph quite likes school. It’s controllable and therefore restful, and things which start out inexplicable become clear. It is in this way utterly unlike his life, which remains mysterious despite years of intense study. Also, he is by popular acclaim the hooligan-in-chief of a small band of under-tens. On the other hand, it keeps him away from his father, whom he adores for his magnificence and resents for his loudness in equal measure. He sets out two blue breakfast bowls.
“Quite right,” Mathew says. “Boo! to school and hooray for Mum and Dad and Grandad and all the rest. However, Josh, school is a necessary evil. You hungry?”
“Yes. Dad, what are affairs of state?”
“Kings and Prime Ministers; Kings and Prime Ministers. Ruling the mighty nations of the Earth, taking weighty decisions—and among those mighty nations, which one has the brightest future? The finest soldiers and the greatest leaders? And which one, Josh, has the wisest and most brilliant heir to the throne?”
“England!”
“Close, Josh. Very close. But no! The nation I speak of is the House of Spork, with its fine and splendid Prince Joshua Joseph, and blessings be upon him and all he surveys. Yes?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“All right, then. Eggs or cornflakes?”
And Joshua Joseph gives whichever answer he adjudges will satisfy his incessant parent. Papa Spork is completely unaware of how his banter sometimes compresses and confines his son. He thinks himself great fun, a Dad to end all Dads, but the sheer volume of him—the relentless effervescence, the way in which everything relates to the great, manifest destiny of the Spork family, the bone-deep conviction that success is just around the corner of his son’s young life—is, on in-between days, just too much. The Crown Jewels temporarily forgotten, Joe considers instead a recent school visit to the British Museum, during which he saw any number of interesting and enlightening things, including—when she leaned to indicate a neolithic ritual object—his form mistress’s startlingly erotic undergarments. The object he presently recalls most strongly, however, is the yoke in the farming exhibit, laid over a pair of mighty stuffed oxen.