He can’t get to the riverside store by his usual route. The image of an old lady, six foot tall and wearing a Carmen fruit hat, pegging it along an alleyway in the company of a dark-haired bombshell with erotic toes would almost certainly attract some attention.
“Down here, then right,” he tells her, then guides her onward through the maze of almost-dead ends and derelict warehouses. Twice, he actually takes her through one of the buildings, cavernous spaces with the river wind blowing through them and rags hanging on the broken glass of the windows. He hopes nothing cuts up the tyres.
A few moments later, they’re standing on a long wooden pier. A thick snake of electrical cable runs along the edge out over the water, and at the far end dives into the hatch of a top-heavy old riverboat. Aboard the riverboat, towards the prow, is a sandy-haired man with a pony tattooed on one arm. He holds a grubby life-jacketed toddler on a sort of lead, and over some manner of infant rebellion is trying to read aloud from a dog-eared copy of Winnie The Pooh. Griff Watson is an anarchist and the husband of an anarchist, not to mention the notional owner of that evil cat known only as the Parasite, but he looks more like the sort of person who would write a book on professional fly-fishing.
“Hullo, Joe!” cries Griff. “Where away?” Because it is his fantasy that the houseboat is a vessel under weigh, and not moored for ever on the muddy bank of the Thames.
“Hullo, Griff! This is Polly. Polly, this is Griff.”
“Hullo, Polly! Come aboard. It’s not too choppy today.”
Polly Cradle looks at Joe, and he nods. “Yes, Cap’n,” she says gamely, but Griff Watson corrects her gently. To an order from the captain, he explains, the only proper response is “aye aye.”
Joe Spork has shed his hat disguise, but is still wearing a rather unbecoming floral wrap. If Griff Watson sees anything odd in this, he doesn’t say. Before he can get too cosy, though, or start to discuss conditions in the German Bight, Joe raises a hand.
“Griff, I need a favour. But you have to think about it—you can’t just say yes.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Is for me. You’re one of the good ’uns.”
“I need to borrow the dinghy and go up to the riverside store. You remember?” Griff once kept an ancient harpsichord there, found in pieces and reassambled in Joe’s workshop, a present for his wife. It’s in the top cabin even now. On summer nights, you can sometimes hear her picking out a tune, hesitant, arrhythmic plinking rattling over the water. The harpsichord needs tuning, but even if it didn’t, Abbie Watson has a tin ear.
“ ’Course I remember. Shall we go now?”
“That’s the easy part. The hard part is that I may be in some trouble. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I’m mixed up in a mess, and you could get some stick for it.”
“Will this help you get out of the trouble?”
“It might.”
“So do you want to go now?”
“You don’t want to ask Abbie?”
“She’d want to know why I hadn’t done it already. You’re a good neighbour, Joe. Decent man. One day the scales will fall from your eyes. There’s not many like you round here. Or anywhere in the world, come to it.” He glances at Polly. “He’s awfully stubborn about taking help, isn’t he?”
“He thinks everything that happens anywhere on Earth is in some way his fault,” she replies. “My brother says it’s some sort of inverted egotism.”
“What sort of trouble is it, then?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Government?”
“Yes. I think so.”
Griff spits very precisely into the river. The gesture doesn’t suit him, which makes it oddly powerful. This is not a spitting man. This is a mild fellow, but that’s how strongly he feels.
“Got a name?” Griff has an encyclopaedic knowledge of conspiracy theories. He can summon information about everything from black helicopters and the arms trade to drug cartels to MJ-12 and the Freemasons and a curious body called the Ark Mariners.
Joe glances at Polly Cradle. “Titwhistle,” she says.
Griff growls. “Bastard.”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“ ’Course I have. He’s on the Legacy Board. Is the bloody Legacy Board, most likely.”
“What’s that, when it’s at home?”
“Tidies up the government’s messes, doesn’t it? All the odds and ends. All the secrets they kept so long they don’t know what they mean any more. When one hand mustn’t know what the other one’s up to, the one doing the whatever-it-is is the Legacy Board. Started in Henry the Eighth’s time, killing bastards. Illegitimates, not bastards like Titwhistle. You watch your back, Joe.”
“If you’d rather not be involved…”
“Piss off. You’re in the war now, mate. Brother in arms. Just don’t know it yet.” And with this alarming endorsement, Griff leans down into the boat. “Jen! Come up and look after your brother. I’m sorting out the whaler.”
Polly glances at Joe.
“The correct term for Griff’s dinghy,” Joe Spork explains, because he doesn’t wish to talk about whether the Legacy Board is a fantasy on fringe websites or a serious problem, “is technically a ‘whaler’. These things are very important.”
“Are they?”
“They are if you’re Griff.”
Griff hands the toddler on a leash to a smudged, whey-faced girl with coloured cotton wrapped into her hair and purple dungarees. In one hand, she clutches a cracked china doll on a wooden base.
“How’s Rowena?” Joe asks her, indicating the doll. Jen smiles and touches the base. A pleasing musical tinkle strikes up, and the base rotates. If one were to stand the toy up, the doll would now be turning in a slow circle to the music. One of the small bits of bric-a-brac Joe Spork passed to the Watsons in calmer days. “Good,” Joe says. Jen nods.
From the water side of the houseboat, a dull gurgle announces that the whaler has been woken from its slumber. The smell of cheap fuel burning in a mistimed engine washes over the boat. The toddler makes a face.
“Flow tide,” Griff calls. “Time to go!” He hesitates. “Do you need me to come with you?”
“No, Griff,” Joe says firmly. There are limits to the gifts of trust he will accept. “I can handle an outboard. You took me fishing, remember? We’ll just be ten minutes.” And nearly crashed us into a coastguard ship, insisting we had right of way. Which no doubt we did, but we were very tiny and those things have no brakes.
“All right, then! Godspeed.” He casts them off.
The whaler whickers out across the oily Thames, and along the wood-buttressed banks. It’s perhaps a mile to the warehouse, a little less to the store. Are they watching the river? Are there faces pressed against the glass? A thin man and a fat man, perhaps? But there’s no direct access to the river unless you count the Victorian flood run-off pipe under the basement, which goes into the Thames itself, and he doesn’t see them as desperate enough to swim in the Thames on the off chance. Besides, as far as they know, he’s hiding in the Raspberry Room at Noblewhite Cradle, like a good, sensible boy. And why isn’t he?
Joe cuts the engine and the whaler drifts in towards the shore. He hands the tiller to Polly Cradle. “You know how to do this?”
“Yes.”
“Let the whaler run back with the tide. Give me about two minutes, then start the engine again—red button there, I know you know—and come and get me. If we keep it running, someone might hear.”
Talking to his girl. His confederate. His co-conspirator. His accomplice. Jesus. I’m on the lam. I’m running from the Law.
A moment later, Joe steps onto the slimy lower step of the store, and opens the door. He scoops up the record bag, along with the golden bee and the mysterious tools, wishing he’d thought to add a portable gramophone to the trove, and turns to go. He sees something drop from above onto the narrow ledge. His first thought is a dead crow or a rubbish sack falling from the ledges above. Then it seems to expand out of itself, straighten and stiffen.