‘You’ve got to admire his gall if nothing else,’ said Sebastian. ‘Blatantly breaking the rules like that. The insolence is fucking incredible. Does he honestly think that we can’t see him? That we don’t know exactly where he is every damned minute of the night?’ He rose, bringing his billiard cue back to an upright position. Somewhere to the rear of the gloomy room, Jessye Norman fulfilled the title role of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène on a portable cassette player. Sebastian was very, very disappointed. He had expected a better show of gamesmanship from Vincent. The boy was simply not taking any of this seriously. How many people would they have to kill to prove the gravity of their intentions?
‘Come along, Barwick, you glutinous little tick, it’s your shot. Let’s finish this game. I’m starving.’
‘What are you going to do with him? Perhaps we should call the whole thing off.’
He pretended to consider the option, although nobody took Barwick’s opinions seriously. ‘I was rather wondering about that. I suppose I could put it to a vote.’
‘The others have already gone into dinner. They’ll agree with whatever you suggest. But something must be done. It’s a clear breach of the rules. And he’s already running late for the next challenge.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Sebastian irritably. He watched as Barwick spectacularly failed to pot the red. ‘This game’s going to go on all night if you don’t start showing some finesse, Barwick.’ He looked around for the end of his cigar. ‘As I see it, we have two choices. One, we abandon the challenge in order to conduct the whole thing democratically, as Caton-James suggested from the start. Or two, we allow Reynolds to continue, but we punish him in order to acknowledge his breach of the rules. I vote for two. And you do as well, don’t you?’
‘Well, er, yes.’ Barwick always did exactly as he was told.
Sebastian set his cue back in the rack. ‘Serious punishment is called for. Implement it, would you? Stir that unmetabolised sludge you call a body, go and talk to St John Warner. It’ll mean interrupting him during his soup so he won’t be very happy. And tell him not to leave connections, eh? Remember what happened last summer. You might try ringing Stevens direct.’ Sebastian straightened his brocade waistcoat and checked his bow-tie in the tall gilt mirror that hung beside the table. ‘I’ll be down to dinner shortly. Now go about your task and don’t be long about it.’
Barwick nodded anxiously. He was already punching out a number on his mobile phone as he hastened in the direction of the dining room.
It was only when he was alone that Sebastian was able to express his rage. He could not afford to let the others see him so vexed. Emotion of any kind was a sign of weakness, and they needed no encouragement to find fault with him.
The situation was controllable; it simply needed a firm hand. As in any game, penalties had to be exacted. It was important to deal with infringements swiftly and severely. Fucking little oik! No jumped-up, council-flat, white-trash wideboy was going to show him up before his peers and get away with it.
A glance in the mirror revealed that he was actually baring his teeth at the thought, growling rhythmically like some kind of inadequately caged panther.
‘So,’ he said aloud, ‘you still think it’s a game, do you? Let’s see if you think that in an hour’s time. Then, perhaps, you’ll start doing what you’re told.’
‘Blind Pew,’ explained Vince. ‘In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island Pew holds out the piece of paper with the dreaded Black Spot on it.’
‘The mark of disease,’ said Strangeways. ‘We could try a clap clinic. James Pringle House, I’ve been there a few times. I picked up a girl in their reception area once. We waited until we both had the all-clear, then went at it like goats.’
‘There’s supposed to be an ancient plague-site at Highbury Fields. They built windmills over it. It was said that the bread of London was ground on the bones of the city’s dead. And plague victims were buried in the great pit at Cripplegate.’
‘How come you know so much about it?’
‘My specialist subject, this city,’ Vince replied proudly. ‘I’ve never had a chance to use the knowledge until now.’
‘So where are we going?’
They were still waiting for a train on the empty platform at Golders Green station. The electronic board above them promised to deliver one in five minutes. London Transport minutes were longer than real-life minutes, and could be stretched infinitely.
‘To Blackfriars.’
‘Why there?’
‘The Mermaid Theatre. Every year it stages Treasure Island at Christmas. Look.’ A poster for the production had been pasted to the wall no more than ten metres from them. Previews were starting in a few days’ time. ‘Blind Pew comes on stage waving the Black Spot about, frightening all the kids in the audience. The clincher was the sea salt, a bit of a giveaway, that. So, we just go there, retrieve the envelope—’
‘Hold on, how long do you have to keep this up?’
‘The challenges? There are supposed to be ten of them. This is the third.’
‘And say you don’t get completely cream-crackered from all this running about and manage to find all ten envelopes, then what’s supposed to happen?’
‘I win the right to go public with my story, the whole bit.’
‘And you honestly think you’ll be allowed to do that?’
The same thought had not left Vince’s mind. ‘These people pride themselves on being gentlemen,’ he explained unconvincingly. ‘It’s what they hang on to most in life. Honour and duty. Victorian values. I think they’ll stand by their word.’
‘It didn’t bother Lord Lucan, mate. I guess we move in different circles. I trust myself and Crippen. And I don’t even trust him because he’ll go with whoever feeds him. And I especially don’t trust this city. The richer you get the more private you become, the more private you become the more you disappear. And when you disappear, you can hide anything. London’s so private it’s almost invisible. A place of great secrets. I think you should protect yourself.’
‘How?’
‘You could give me a copy of what you’ve written. I’ll put it somewhere safe.’
There was a distant booming as the train approached.
‘It’s on my computer. But I made copies on disks.’
‘Where?’
‘I have one on me.’
‘Then let me look after it. Trust me. Just in case anything weird happens.’ He hoisted Crippen into his arms and wrapped him inside his overcoat. Vince hesitated. He knew nothing about his companion, beyond the fact that he was willing to help a stranger. Suppose Sebastian had planted him, instructed him to help Vince out with one of the clues, just to show that he was genuine? For what purpose, though, to make him hand over what he had written? There was no point in that, not when the League had shown how easily they could enter his flat. He could afford to trust no one, not tonight, perhaps never again.
‘I think I’ll hang on to this, if it’s all the same to you.’ As the train rushed in Vince reached for his bag and held it close to his chest.
The darkened theatre stood on Puddle Dock, at the edge of a blank new section of the city. Between the building that housed it and the sluggish grey waters of the Thames ran a four-lane road that passed alongside the gilt statues of Billingsgate on its way to the Tower of London. The area had been bombed flat during the Blitz, then rebuilt to accommodate a fast-lane society that was only beaten by the city’s Barbican Centre in its spectacular failure to co-exist with pedestrians. There was nothing remotely theatrical about the Mermaid. It was modern, anonymous, red-brick, hardly a theatre at all, more like a bottling plant. There were no glass awnings, no strings of bulbs, no Art Nouveau balustrades behind which to hide an envelope.
‘This has to be the place,’ said Vince. ‘Look, there’s even a picture.’ He pointed to an encased poster showing the character of Blind Pew displaying his dread message. Strangeways hopped up and down, trying to see above the entrance. Crippen decided that this must be the signal for something interesting and threw himself about in circles, growing ferociously overexcited.
‘I can’t see anything. Maybe it’s inside.’
‘The building’s locked up. He wouldn’t leave it in a place that was completely inaccessible to me. Sebastian wouldn’t be interested in playing if he thought I didn’t have at least a sporting chance.’
‘Sounds like you know a lot about him.’
‘I’m learning, believe me.’
Beside the theatre an arch passed over a narrower road, a slipway to the brilliant yellow tunnel which led to the bypass. From here came the sudden loud clang of steel on steel. Vince and Strangeways exchanged looks. The noise emanated from the rear of the building. As they followed the wall around, they left the main streetlights behind for an area where pedestrians were trespassers.
At the back of the theatre an extraordinary sight confronted them. Tall, waving palm trees. Dozens of them stood in rows, their emerald plastic fronds eerily rustling in the cold night air. The polystyrene logs of Ben Gunn’s island stockade stood against a wall, awaiting assembly. The vast steel doors to the stage stood wide, and the prow of a great wooden ship could be glimpsed within. Scenery shifters often worked at night, after performances. They must have been here only moments ago, but were nowhere in evidence now.
‘It’s there, look, that’s got to be it.’
Strangeways waved excitedly at him, pointing to one of the trees.
‘I don’t see anything.’
‘Here, take Crippen a sec.’ He threw Vince the string lead and ran forward into the artificial forest. It took Vince a while to spot the envelope taped high up in the tallest palm. Strangeways began climbing the trunk. ‘I’ll bring you back a coconut.’
‘You don’t know if it’ll take your weight. They’re not made to—’
Strangeways had already reached the envelope and pulled it free when he seemed to lose his balance. ‘Oh, fuck.’
The plastic foliage was rattling and shaking, then shaking still harder, shedding fronds. Something was flying through the trees—a tiny silver bird.
‘Strangeways?’ Vince could only imagine that he had slipped on the base of one of the trees, had fallen further into the faux-undergrowth and was attempting to pull himself back up. He ran forward, pushing through the cellulose tatters, trying to see in the faint light flickering from the arch. Strangeways was in the grass below him, and suddenly grabbed upwards at his jacket. He was like a winded footballer, too surprised by a foul to cry out. His hooked fingers were red and lustrous, as though they had been dipped in gloss paint. Vince saw the sickly oval of his face, his puzzled eyes. Heard him try to speak, only to spatter his chin and neck with blood. A black arc twisted his throat into a deathly grimace; the skin had been opened with a razor. Dark liquid poured over the lower rim of flesh like a flooding bath. As his head fell back, the parted wall of his trachea revealed itself in pornographic detail. The cascade abruptly ceased, and his body dropped down.
Strangeways passed from life to death in just a few seconds.
There was someone else in the prop-jungle, the blurred figure of a man in retreat, clambering over the papier-mâché rocks and hillocks. He felt Strangeways’s hand still digging at his stomach, and looked down to see the envelope crushed in his fist.
Then Vince was stumbling, slipping into the road, nearly swiped by a passing car, dodging across the entrance to the dazzling tunnel, vaulting over the railings, swerving across the bypass, brought up short by the wall of the Embankment. Hacking, gasping, vomiting into the river, frantically wiping the blood from his hands and jacket as he relived the strange speed of the attack. A man he had known for little more than an hour, a body bleeding to death among tropical palms…
And in his jacket the mobile phone, the phone he had failed to return, was buzzing against his chest. As he punched open the line, he fought to keep the bile from once more rising in his throat.
‘Perhaps now you’ll learn to keep this affair private, and to take me a little more seriously,’ said a sickeningly familiar voice. ‘It’s getting late, Vincent. There’s no time to mourn. You’ll never make it to the next deadline.’