Clint remained, as did Mal. Mal was wondering what kind of mood Shinsala would be in when he got back to her flat. As he swung the car door shut, as he listened to the chirrup of the lock, would he feel the excuse me of fear in his chest? Not physical fear, of course, but fear. Was fear a mood?
‘You could do it by maths,’ said Clint. ‘Divide his weekly wage by his IQ. Something like that.’
‘Clint mate,’ said Mal, winding up.
Smoker offered him a look of effusive contrition. In the last thirty minutes there had been a power-shift between the two men. Clint had tended, in his previous dealings with Mal, to regard him as an affable plonker obliged to earn a living with his fists. But male anger, male heat so easily translatable into male violence, had rearranged this view. Clint thought of himself as big and strong, and there were those ragged brawls of his that he always won. Still, Mal’s violence was efficient, professionalised and above all righteous: it was something that Clint could never counter. At this moment Clint’s fear felt to him like love – love for Mal Bale.
‘Clint mate. Are you a cunt?’
‘No, Mal. I’m not a cunt.’
‘Now. What happens if you let me down.’
‘Well, obviously the proverbial’ll hit the fan, won’t it. Obviously.’
‘If you want to know how hard, give your boy Andy a call at the end of the week. All right?’
‘Yeah mate. All the best then, Mal. Go easy. Take care, mate.’
Clint Smoker was laughing by the time he hoisted himself on to the flight deck of his black Avenger. Adrenalin: it’s very good stuff. As he put his foot down (within minutes, consecutive thought would be entirely sacrificed to motorly concerns) Clint began to compose an e-mail in his head, beginning, ‘What do you say to the hoary old chestnut, Does size matter?’
3. On the Royal Train
The King was not in his counting-house, counting out his money – and the Queen was not in the parlour, eating bread and honey …
Henry was coming south on the Royal Train. This train of his had an ‘office’ car, a conference car, a drawing-room car, a bedroom car, a dining-room car, a kitchen car, a staff car, a security car, and an observation car. The potentate was in the ‘office’ car, writing his daily letter to the Princess. Like nearly all the interiors he had ever known, it was a chamber of restless lines: absolutely nothing had been left in peace. Every plane was harassed with ornament; the walls were tiled with paintings and framed photographs, the flat surfaces infested with curios and bibelots; each panel of the ceiling insisted on its cloudscape, its putto, its madonna, its nude. Denied the freedom of vast dimension, the train was like the condition of being royal: it was always on at you and it never let you be.
There were frequent and durable and much-resented delays, but the Royal Train was technically non-stop. At this stage only the King knew of the coming rendezvous, in a siding at Royston, near Cambridge, with Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, who claimed to bear both positive and negative news.
‘My darling daughter,’ the letter had begun … ‘The Lepers’, he now wrote, ‘were rather a pain. Then the nightmare of the flight back. The turbulence over the Channel was, as always, pretty good hell. On landing, straight off to the Head Injury lot, which was a fair form of medieval torture. You have to hang round listening to people who can barely talk and say how wonderfully they’re getting on. Then, in the afternoon, I went north, on the Train.’
He paused. Going north had been like a journey into organic depression, a journey into night and into winter. At first, merely the obese cauldrons of the power-stations adding their clouds to the huge grey. Then the sky turned fuzzily black, with bright seams. Every now and then the sun would appear, like a miner’s helmet coming down a chimney. They met the night at three-fifteen. And finally the Kyle of Tongue, strapped on to its crag in the North Sea.
‘There has, alas, been no change in Mummy’s condition,’ Henry wrote on, his elaborate calligraphy rendered even more tremulous by the careening wheels. ‘I must say I now thoroughly dread these visits. What’s so heartbreaking is that Mummy is quite unchanged, as serenely handsome as ever.’ He broke off, and shuddered. ‘The hairdresser still attends her once a day, they still do her nails once a week, and she is of course frequently “turned”. If it weren’t for the ghastly wheezing of the ventilator, one might expect her to open her eyes and say, with all the old joviality, “Oh Daddy, don’t just sit there! Where’s my pot of tea?” As I have often said, whilst there have been cases of people emerging from “PVS” after periods of several years, we must contine to steel ourselves for the worst. The “team”, my darling, may be reduced from three to two, but it’s still a team, you and I, my dearest one. You and I. We Two.
‘The presence of the media …’
He paused. And continued:
‘… simultaneously cheapens and confuses one’s sufferings. Of course I am moved, of course I am shaken. But must I display my wounds to the camera? And this is when they are at their most respectful! “Don’t be afraid to shed a tear, Your Majesty”! It makes one want to vom. More and more viscerally do I feel that the media are base violators who poison everything they touch.’
He paused. How had Bugger put it? ‘The Princess should be told’, Urquhart-Gordon had said, ‘that there may have been a breach of her privacy.’ No, thought Henry: too early for that. And continued: ‘It seems to me that we two ought to have a “peptalk” on this very subject, and on security in general; I will come on Saturday (5th), and we can have a lovely chat in that perfectly decent hotel.’
There followed a fantastic display of diminutives and endearments.
Henry then rang for Love.
At Royston they began to slow. Up ahead, in an almost invisibly fine mist, lay the siding where large-eyed Urquhart-Gordon now stood with a lone detective. And the black car, beyond, with its driver. The train was still moving when Brendan climbed aboard.
Henry IX said, ‘Give me the bad first, that good may come of it.’
‘The discouraging news, sir, is that the photograph is not, in fact, a photograph.’ Brendan composed the sleek lines of his eager, clever face. ‘It is a still.’
He had mentally set aside quite a few seconds for Henry to take this in. And the King’s head actually idled on its base for a full half-minute before he murmured,
‘From a film.’
‘Well, yes, sir. From a film.’
Brendan heard Henry’s sigh – long and searching, with a muted whimper at the end of it.
‘From a DVD DigiCam 5000, to be precise, sir.’
‘You know, Bugger: I hope this comet or whatever it is smeshes us all to smithereens.’
‘It won’t smash us, sir. If it hits it’ll burn us.’
‘Even better. Hellfire. It’s no less than we deserve.’
Now Brendan contemplated his monarch. It seemed a nice question: in a life so straitened, so predetermined, so locked down – you’d have thought that there was no room at all for individual variance. But Henry was an established royal anomaly. Unlike his father, Richard IV, and his brother, the Duke of Clarence, and unlike so many other males in their line, Henry had piloted no jets or helicopters, commanded no icebreakers or minesweepers, drilled no troops, bunked in no submarines, simulated no fighter-evasion sorties, parachuted athwart no mountainsides. Nor did he share his house’s enthusiasm for horticulture, music, hunting, practical jokes and eastern faiths. Henry had merely loafed his way through a geography degree at Oxford and then got on with his social life. Even before he acceded, of course, his diary was plagued with ‘functions’, and he continued to shirk and chuck as many as he could. But the minimum was already a very great deal. Brendan thought that half the secret of the royal existence lay in the fact that it was quite unbelievably boring. You became a man of action to counterbalance this; you sought danger, exertion, intense states. And you busied yourself with arcana, with obsessional crankery – anything that would fill your mind. Henry was defenceless. He simply
endured it, all the boredom, like a daily dose of chemotherapy.
Unlike his numerical predecessor, that glittering Renaissance prince, who was interested in astronomy, theology, mathematics, military science, navigation, oratory, modern and ancient languages, cartography and poetry, Henry IX was interested in watching television – or in staying still while it was on. Two years earlier, Brendan would have said that the King, at fifty-one, was senescent with ennui. For some reason his preternatural indolence endeared him to the million, and he had always been popular, despite everything (the gaffes, the insensitivity, the fathomless ignorance). They liked his frown, his blink, his sandy mop. Nowadays his numbers had in fact slightly dipped from their usual 75 per cent. The public didn’t want to see their king trudging down hospital corridors and having fiendishly strained conversations with turbaned community-leaders. They wanted to see him fast asleep at the races.
‘I went to her bedroom,’ said Henry vaguely. ‘It’s still a zoo of cuddly toys. She’s still so little, Bugger …’
Brendan reached for and unlocked his steel briefcase. ‘Sir, we’re somewhat further for’ard than we were. We think we have the location.’
‘The location?’
‘See, sir.’
Again the photograph – with the body of the Princess whited out of it. Though he recognised the propriety of the excision, Henry suffered a moment of snowblind alarm. Where had she gone? Whited out, like a mummy, like a ghost.
‘I thought we’d have to start by trawling through every bathroom in all the royal households, looking for that tub, that mirror, that basin, in that particular alignment. But Oughtred’s people have rather brilliantly narrowed it down. Look, sir. To the Princess’s left is a bar of soap in its dish.’
Brendan paused, giving Henry time to say,
‘Are you telling me that this is the only royal bathroom with a cake of soap in it?’
‘No, sir.’ Brendan dipped into his case and was presently unscrolling what seemed to be a poster or a silkscreen: twenty by twenty, and glossy to the point of liquefaction, and all white.
‘And what may I ask is this?’
‘The bar of soap, sir. Or rather a detail from it: the crest.’
Henry stared into the swimming cream.
‘It’s rather worn down, sir, but you see the indentation. A lily. Three petals bound together. The fleur-de-lis. That’s the brand the household uses at Cap d’Antibes. The Princess holidayed with you there for two weeks in August. And that, I submit, sir, was when her seclusion was surprised.’
‘That’s a pretty way of describing what I consider to be a capital crime, Bugger. Well then. Now what?’
Brendan had never seen it before: the King with a kingly air. He said, ‘With your permission, Your Majesty, Oughtred and I fly to Nice tonight.’
‘Given … Oh, poor darling.’
The two men listened to the train as it slowly rocked and knocked … Brendan considered. Victoria England, naturally, had already been the theme of many a national furore. The first of them erupted when she was seventeen days old: a sacked nanny claimed she had walked out because the Queen refused to practise ‘demand’ feeding. Six months later the country was similarly divided on the question of whether the Princess was ready to be weaned. And so on. Should she be allowed to ride a training-bike indoors without a crash-helmet? Should she be eating fast food on school outings? Should she have worn ‘that’ miniskirt at the ill-fated ‘Dunsinane Disco’? It was at this stage (the Princess was eleven) that Brendan started to detect a half-conscious salacity in the native fixation. No, not salacity: something indecent, but innocently indecent. When she turned twelve there was a sudden crossfire of think-pieces on the arguable virtues of a) sanitary napkins, and b) riding sidesaddle – in which the Princess was of course never mentioned. You could feel it gathering, building; it was on the people’s mind: Victoria poised between childhood and nubility. So much disquiet, concentrated on the precious membrane of the Princess … Brendan thought that the relationship between the English and the Englands was incestuous and narcissistic but essentially subliminal (sub: under; limin-: threshold); down there all was obscure, sunless, moonless, starless.
‘You’ll see she gets this today, Bugger.’
Henry now stood and moved to his desk where, using an ivory shaving-brush and a silver saucer of water, he fixed the envelope containing his letter to the Princess, adding the Royal Seal with the ring on the third finger of his right hand.
Brendan gathered his things. First the blow-up, the grotesque enlargement, like a plastic tablecloth. Then the photograph itself. He was glad he couldn’t see Victoria’s face, with her pupils on the top left-hand corners of her eyes, which disquieted him so. He thought he knew what the Princess was doing. She was listening.
The sprawling map of the fleur-de-lis, now that was just a detail: the crest. Why, who knew? With a bar of soap that size, maybe you could wash all Fucktown clean …
Laterally the Royal Train moved across North London, continuing west.
Andy New saw it pass. He was down on the actual track (his fresh stashpoint), and he saw the curtained carriages, the crests and emblems. He thought: taxpayers’ money! Not that And was much of a taxpayer …
And was a pusher: of drugs, and of pornography.
And And was an anarchist, a street-partyer, and a committed savager of junkfood restaurants during antiglobalisation riots. Two years earlier his common-law wife, Chelci, had presented him with a child: little Harrison.
Having vaulted the gate, he made his way up the back slope, meanwhile fielding a call from his older brother, Nigel. Nigel had been a bit savoury in his earlier days but now he was dead straight just like any other cunt.
Nigel: ‘You’re not still peddling that muck, are you?’ And: ‘The videos and that: course. Freedom of expression. But not that stuff.’ Nigel: ‘Because that’s a no-no, that is.’ And: ‘Definitely no go.’ Nigel: ‘It’s not on.’ And: ‘No soap whatso.’ Nigel: ‘I worry about you, And. On the train to Manchester.’ The brothers had recently travelled to Manchester, to watch the match and see their dad. The City Hall wearing a green fishnet vest, and the cabbie’s shortwave going Britannia Ridgeway, Rodger-Rodge, Oxnoble, Tango Three, Midland Dinsbury. Nigel: ‘Us sitting on the floor between the compartments? Okay, there’s nowhere else to sit. But I look at you and I think: He fucking loves it. Down there in the dirt with his can of lager.’ And: ‘What’s this in aid of, Nige?’ Nigel: ‘I worry about you, And.’ And: ‘Well worry about your fucking taxes.’
As he came muttering up over the bridge a voice hailed him from behind:
‘I say! Excuse me! Young man!’
Turning, And saw a compact gent of late-middle years, wearing a chalkstripe suit with its three jacket buttons fastened, dark glasses, and a black borsalino.
‘Thank you, thank you. Now. I wonder if you could very kindly direct me to …’
With some difficulty he detached an envelope from his inside pocket. He smiled. ‘How are you?’ he asked heartily.
‘All right. How are you?’
‘I’ve never felt better in my life, thank you, and I’m thoroughly enjoying this spell of fine weather we’re having.’
One of those accents: posher than the King.
‘I’m looking for Mornington Crescent, do you see. Not Mornington Terrace, Mornington Crescent …’
Andy soon set him right.
‘Ah. Thank you so much.’
At this point, with an elegant rotation of the wrist, the man in the suit removed his dark glasses – to reveal the strangest eyes And had ever seen. So bright yet so pale: Antarctic blue, with yellow haloes. For a moment Andy wondered where the bloke had left his guide dog.
‘Tell me. Would you be Andrew New?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘My name is Semen Figner …’
Pronouncing the name in a different voice: Slavic. And New saw that the blue eyes had foully darkened.
‘Your woman
is shit,’ Semen Figner said normally. ‘Your kid is shit.’
February 14 (10.41 a.m.): 101 Heavy
First Officer Nick Chopko: Hey, that’s kind of cool …
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Excuse me?
Chopko: See it? Second to go, runway right.
Captain John Macmanaman: … Well well. The old De Hav Comet. What? Nineteen fifty-five? Where’s that going?
Ward: Croydon, maybe? The Aviation Museum?
Macmanaman: … This wait is going to eat into my retirement.
Chopko: Yeah. I would like to take off while I’m still quite young.
After the seventy-minute weather delay, CigAir 101 had pushed back from its stand and joined the queue on runway nine. Flight regulations insisted on a three-minute interval between ascents. But on this day, of course, all the transatlantic equipment had to be off the ground by eleven o’clock sharp. The tower decided on the Emergency Interval of 130 seconds. And the Captain coolly advised his passengers to prepare for some ‘slipstream turbulence’; with slipstream turbulence, he might have gone on to say, the passenger will feel more like a mariner than an aeronaut, shouldering through heavy seas at 200 miles per hour.
Tower: One oh one heavy, you are cleared.
Macmanaman: Acknowledge.
Tower: Up and dirty.
At 10.53, 101 Heavy put its head down and went looking for the escape velocity. Reynolds Traynor was bolt upright in seat 2B. She had a cigarette in her mouth and the trigger of a lighter waiting beneath the print of her bent left thumb.
Chopko: V1 … V2. Out of here.
The instant the tyres left the tarmac the Captain extinguished the no-smoking sign.
A climbing plane normally welcomes the surge of a stiff headwind; but the headwind facing 101 Heavy, while no longer describable as a storm, was still, at forty-six knots, a severe gale. The Captain thus faced two immediate dangers, one grave, one merely very serious, with or without the slipstream turbulence and its ‘funnelling’ effect. The first danger was that the aircraft would go ‘beneath the BUG’, or the minimum flying speed, and submit to its own gravity load (resulting in a black box which consisted of a brief squall of obscenities). The second danger was that of ‘nose-lift’: here, the windforce meets the plane on its rising breast and renders it vulnerable to ‘toppleback’. Nose-lift was what happened to 101 Heavy. Lighting a cigarette from its predecessor’s trembling ember, Reynolds leaned into the aisle and looked aft. The inter-compartment curtains had fluttered up to head height. She was staring into a lift-shaft – but one thickly peopled. The women she could see wore contorted faces: bared teeth, incredulous scowls. As for the others, their brows were marked by the childish, the calflike frowns of men expecting death.