“What?”
“You think you need to go there. We shall go. We shall do so wisely, and by that I mean that we shall do it my way.”
“What?”
“Please stop saying ‘what.’ It makes me doubt your intelligence. I am taking you to do whatever it is you think is important. You can explain on the way. When we do it, however, we will do it according to the Polly rules, not the Joe rules, because my rules are sophisticated and practical and yours are very strange and confused. I will make this happen for you, but not at the expense of your freedom or mine. Are we clear?”
“Yes.”
“You are going to sit very low in the back of my car and wear a very large, disgusting hat I bought for a wedding, which has fruit on it, and you are going to wrap yourself in a lace blanket and hunker down so that anyone looking will see a short, fat old besom being driven around by an attractive daughter-in-law.”
“Oh. Right.”
“This is where you say, for the sake of your own interior peace, ‘But why are you helping me?’”
“Why are you?”
“Because I am considering investing heavily in J. Joseph Spork stock, and I do not care to have the opportunity taken away. Also, this fidelity to the right thing over the clever thing speaks well of you as a romantic lead. It seems unlikely I will have to detach you from an Estonian fashion student or some similar harpy at any point down our mutual road together, if there should be one. This is a quality which a girl should value over and above common sense, although in doing so she must take on the burden of keeping you alive in the face of your own considerable nincompoopery. Thus. My way, or the highway.”
“Oh. Oh! Your way. Absolutely.”
“Yes. Now wait here. Because I swear if you run away on me, I will hunt you down and do terrible things to you.”
“Oh.”
“And later, Joe, be advised, you are going to do terrible things to me by way of compensation for missing the four fifty-one from Finch Chemicals.”
“Oh, right, yes! Of course.”
Polly Cradle favours him with a brain-melting smile.
“Then we can go.”
From the back of Polly Cradle’s car and disguised like Mr. Toad escaping from the clink, Joe Spork stares at his home.
Quoyle Street is a foreign land, overrun with blue lights and bailiffs’ vans and private security. A lone plain-clothes officer is there to see fair play and supervise the ruckus, and in case the homeowner (known to have shady connections and presently a person of interest in an ongoing murder inquiry) should return and kick up a fuss. Three large fellows are lifting a long-case clock, Alexander of Edinburgh, 1810, and they have left the workings loose, so even as Joe watches the weights roll up inside the case and smash the face through the glass front. He wonders if they have been instructed to be as brutal as possible with his stock. That bit there, in the light: that’s the pendulum, and those are the pieces of a very fine hand-painted dial. Now it’s kindling, and the pendulum could as well be a divining rod. He watches another man carry the Death Clock in a bear hug, more gentle. Typical. The one thing he really wouldn’t mind seeing smashed.
“They’re fitting you up,” Polly Cradle says.
“What?”
“This is a frame. All this mess and confusion. They’re leaving room in the thing for planting evidence later. When they want the truth, they’re tidy.” She glances at him. “Don’t look surprised. I am a Cradle.”
“That clock,” he murmurs, “is two hundred and fifty-nine years old. It has never done anyone any harm.”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” Polly says. A sharp-eyed policeman peers at the car. Polly Cradle ignores him.
“It’s not mine, really. I mean, I own it, but I never meant to keep it.” He shrugs. “I got it to sell on. But it’s… It’s a real thing. You could spend a lifetime just understanding what’s happened in front of it, how it got all those little nicks. I think it went to America and India. I’ve got provenances. That clock saw the rise and fall of the Empire. It outlasted Queen Victoria. My grand-father would have said the stricture of that clock was endurance. Or craftsmanship, maybe.”
“I don’t think they care.”
“No. I suppose they don’t.”
Joe stares through the car window into the broken doorway of his home. He can see things, scattered and strewn on the ground, which are his. He makes a noise he can’t classify, and hopes it sounds like an old lady if anyone’s listening. He fears they may think she’s dying and come to help. One of the bailiffs glances over and snorts. The old dear’s having a blub. Probably coming in to buy back Daddy’s watch.
The car glides on. Ari’s shop is just around the bend.
“Stop here, please,” Joe says.
“Not a good idea.” Polly glances over her shoulder. The policeman is looking away. She wonders if he is talking to someone. He seems very relaxed.
“Please, Polly.”
Ari stands outside his shop, hands clasped behind his head. Joe winds down the window and squeaks at him.
“Young man?”
Ari comes to the car in a series of half steps, then frowns. “Who’s that?”
“Ari, it’s me. Joe.”
“Joseph? You should not be here.”
“Yes. No, I shouldn’t. I know.”
“What is going on?”
“It’s a fix, Ari. I’m being screwed. Feel free to deny me to all comers. Thrice, if necessary.”
Ari sighs: a long-drawn-out noise of self-reproach and appreciation of tragedy. “Well. I should have seen it. I thought it was burglars and I rang you. Then there were the others, and then the police, so many of them. Are you a terrorist, Joseph?”
“No. I blame the cat for this. If you’d just let me kill it when I wanted to…”
“That would be a sin against the great ultimate, Joseph, for which I could never forgive myself.”
“The great ultimate likes demon cats but not antiques dealers?”
“It is not known. The universe is ineffable. Ineluctable. Sometimes intolerable.”
Ari smiles gently, forgiven, empathising. Then:
“I am so sorry, Joseph. Truly… I have something for you. They left a bag in the rubbish. My daughter went and fetched it. I tried to stop her, because I was afraid. But now I am glad…” He reaches into his shop and comes back with a pale plastic sack containing some fragments of wood, some cogs, and the broken remnants of two blue ceramic bowls. “It’s not much, and I don’t know what… well, there are pieces of springs and so on here…”
“Thanks, Ari.”
Ari nods again, and turns to go. Then he stops and turns, hesitantly. Joe sees guilt in his eyes, and shame.
“Joseph, I’d consider it a favour, if you wouldn’t speak to me for a while. Until all this is over. I don’t want my shop to burn down. I’m not proud to ask you, but you offered.”
Joe nods under his ridiculous hat. “Of course, Ari. I quite understand.”
“It’s not that we’re not friends.”
“Ari. I understand. I’d do the same.”
“I wanted to see where you live,” Polly says angrily.
“I’m sorry.”
“God, it’s not your fault.”
This seems like such an astoundingly astute and important observation that he nearly starts to cry. Instead, he swallows bile. There is a sharp determination in him where he expected to be desolate. It’s as if she turns him inside out, and things which should destroy him make him stronger instead.
The policeman is looking over again. Polly Cradle edges the car around the corner. “Where now?”