The bee drops back into the air and lands on the tabletop again, where it wanders bee-ishly around in a random pattern.
Apis mechanica. Live and in person. He watches it without thinking about it, because all of his mind is burning with Mathew and Daniel, and the sense that he has misunderstood everything he has ever known to be true.
A moment later, the bee takes wing again and bumbles around the room. It bumps cheerfully into Polly Cradle’s head, the lampshade, and finally the window.
Everyone starts talking at once, and in the confusion it’s quite natural for Joe to slip out and wash his face.
When Joshua Joseph Spork steps out of the door of Polly Cradle’s house, it is with a strange feeling of coming home and a powerful sense of betrayal. Moving down the street in the gathering dark, knowing that he is to some degree on the run, he feels a kinship with his father which surpasses anything he has ever before experienced. He flinches at shadows, ducks away from lamplight, and when he accidentally catches someone’s eye, he rides the stare, throws such aggression into it that they immediately look away, and do not see him. Indeed, they actively seek to forget him. He steps onto a bus, and out of sheer perversity steps off at the next stop and takes another which goes the long way around to his destination. Or rather, not perversity, but a natural understanding that what he is doing now is rash, and stemming from that, the certain knowledge that it must be done well, or not at all. It must be done in the high style of the Night Market, with all due deference to misdirection and sleight of mind.
He feels alive.
On the other hand, he feels rotten. Mercer will be fine, will call Joe an idiot and then set about rescuing the situation. It’s not quite so certain that Polly Cradle will be fine. Obviously, she will take no physical harm, but that Joe has sneaked out—successfully executing this time the plan he formulated when she caught him before—will wound her, and he knows it and she will know that he knows it and has done it anyway, and that will hurt her again. He has no regrets about his decision: this isn’t a case of wanting to recant. Blood is not optional. At the same time, whatever is happening between them is also not to be underestimated. They have found in each other some kind of jigsaw-puzzle match, a mutual knowing which goes beyond the smell of her still on his skin, and which he is at pains not to define or recognise until it has time to settle into him.
That Polly could be family one day, that she might—and he might—unite Cradle and Spork in one great dynasty of unlikely rules and criminal histories, his present, practical mind puts firmly to one side. Before he can even reach for that future, or one like it, he has to climb up on top of the rubble of the past and see what the world actually looks like. The rubble of Mathew’s past, which now appears to have been less a wrong turn than the heavy footsteps of a man carrying more than his fair share of other people’s history—a description which Joshua Joseph Spork has always considered applied to himself, and which it now appears applies to almost everyone.
He changes buses again and peers through the window, seeing his own eyes as black gaps in his reflection, and looking through them. The building he needs will be an absence against the dark; a shadow in a shadow. It’s not a tourist spot. The nuns do not light their façade with burning lamps as some churches these days do. The place is less than a hundred years old, and ugly beyond reasonable measure. It is the most woebegone religious building he has ever seen.
The gate is black, and so is the path leading up to it: black gravel, pieces of marble and basalt. It must have seemed like a good idea in ’68 and now no one is allowed to change it; the design is protected by all manner of orders and by-laws.
The walls are yellow stone, stained by time and by London’s population of motor vehicles. When Harriet Spork first came here, there was a pile of flowers left at the foot of a lamp-post in memory of a cyclist killed in a collision with a glazier’s van—decapitated, apparently, by a sheet of reinforced safety glass destined for a local school. From sideways on, the safety turned out to be limited.
All of the bouquets were removed after a few weeks save one, a narrow vase the woman’s brother glued to the lamp-post and the concrete slab in which it is set with some concoction not even the borough’s street-sweepers have been able to undo. Joe came once a month in those days, until Harriet asked him to stop, and over half a year he watched the grim little flowers go from living, to dead, to dry, and finally to a kind of strange fossilisation.
And there it is. He lets it slip by, ignores it. There will be danger here, of that he’s quite certain. The enemy—he doesn’t name them because when you name something you believe you have understood something about it, and he has no idea, still, what his enemy really is—would have to be stone stupid to miss this one. They will anticipate disguises and diversions. They will be watching.
Mathew, in his head: Watching is a mug’s game. You watch for something, you think you know what it will look like. If it doesn’t look like that, it can walk right past you. The human brain, son, is a miracle of rare device, but it dreams and fabulates and it can be induced to deceive the eye. Remember the Monte? Yes? Well, this is like that. You watch too hard for one thing, you miss the other. So when you’re lookout, Joe, don’t watch for coppers. Just wait and see who comes along. You’ll know trouble when it turns up. That’s science, that is.
Joe skips off the bus and turns left down a small street with a crowd of kids. He walks with them as if he’s their big brother, then carries on when they duck into a building site for cigarettes and chilly, frustrated foreplay.
Careful to look merely curious rather than like a man contemplating a spot of B&E, he glances up, feeling a long-suppressed and pleasurable thrill.
Here’s to crime.
The far end of this alley is the back wall of a modern block built at a time when human aesthetic preferences were not considered a factor in local government architecture and all housing was to be neat, sheer, and above all cheap. Somewhat less attention was paid than should have been to London’s clay soil and underground rivers, and inevitably the structure bowed and sagged, and had to be saved from collapse using metal struts which run through the entire frame. These struts, the housebreaker’s friend, protrude from the end wall like rungs on a ladder, affording access to a neighbouring Victorian fire escape on a far more elegant building, which in turn—if you have long arms—offers a way onto the flat roof of the block.
Joe the clockworker never quite got out of the habit of pull-ups on the lintel, so Joe the burglar has lean, narrow muscles which play and crunch under his coat. One, two, three… and up.
Wish Polly could see this. Or Mathew, even. I’m good at this.
Joe skids as he lands; water has collected on the asphalt. He flaps his arms and yelps, half-joyful, then remembers that this is a deadly secret mission and he will almost certainly have terrible things happen to him if he is caught, and drops to his knees. He hisses a swear word as sharp grit in the mud grazes his leg through his trousers.
No alarms. No klaxons. No searchlights. He grins. Oh, yeah. Joe the kid cracksman. He scurries across the roof and climbs down a maintenance ladder to the gables of a red-brick schoolhouse. From there, he walks along the ridge to the far end and lowers himself out over the air. Strong hands, long, thick fingers. Bad for guitar, good for burglary… A downpipe, yes, as expected. Burglars have more than a passing knowledge of exterior plumbing. And sometimes, of course, plumbers have a knowledge of burglary, too… metal pipe. Not more than three years old. Good screws… fine.