Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

“Are you OK, Henry? You seem miles away.”

“Difficult day,” I murmured.

“You can talk to me, you know.”

I laughed, and judging from Abbey’s expression, I imagine the sound cannot have been a pretty one.

Consequently, when the doorbell rang, I was grateful for the excuse to get to my feet.

The sky was stormy and black, and Mr. Steerforth was standing on our doorstep. He seemed bulkier than ever, dressed in some kind of flak jacket and the sort of khaki trousers which boast a preposterous amount of pockets. “You all right? ’Cause you look bloody rough.”

“I’m fine.”

Steerforth snorted. “The secret will do that to you. Better get used to it.”

“What do you want?”

“Get your coat. You’re going to see them tonight.”

“See who?”

“I can’t say their names. Not their real names. But I call them…” He swallowed hard. “I call them the Domino Men.”

“What?”

“Just get your coat,” he barked, then, unable to resist a grin: “Nice sweater.”

“Who was that?” Abbey asked, her attention half on me, half on the TV, which had now begun to show a montage of the heir to the throne’s baby photos.

“It’s work. I’ve got to go out.”

“This late?”

“Sorry. Can’t be helped.”

The look that she gave me was split between sympathy and suspicion. “I wish you could tell me what’s really going on.”

“Believe me,” I said grimly. “So do I.”

It had begun to rain, a mean, thin drizzle, and Barnaby was waiting in the car, slouched in his seat, engrossed in the Dissemination of Irony: The Challenger Narratives Through the Prism of Postmodernism .

“What a bloody awful sweater,” he said, then blew his nose defiantly on the sleeve of his jacket.

Steerforth was already inside.

“Isn't Jasper coming with us?” I asked.

The driver spat out of the window. “Too chicken. Strap yourselves in.” I did as I was told and Barnaby started the engine with the dutiful air of a man doing the school run for someone else’s kids.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” Barnaby said.

Steerforth nudged me in the ribs. “Dedlock wants to talk.”

“Fine.” I looked around for a phone. “How’s he going to manage that?”

“Give me a minute.” Steerforth screwed up his face s though grappling with the most gruesome kind of constipation. “He’s coming through.”

Then the big man’s face began to twist, flex and gurn; it was possessed by rubbery quivers, spasms and twitches, contorting itself into strange and horrible shapes. He was evidently in considerable pain and it only seemed to end when the man who sat opposite me was utterly transformed. He may still have had Steerforth’s body, but through some impossible realignment of his features, he’d become a parody of the old man in the tank. Even his voice was altered, moving into a higher pitch, suddenly wavery with unnatural age.

“Good evening, Henry Lamb,” he said.

I stared, astonished. “Dedlock?”

“Do not be alarmed. Steerforth is the pit bull of the Directorate. Some time ago, he submitted to a small procedure which allows me, on occasion, to borrow his physical form.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Indeed. And speaking of unbelievable… What a splendid pullover.” The body of Steerforth emitted a series of gurgles which I presumed, after a while, to be laughter. “We’ve been left with no choice,” he said. “Tonight, you meet the prisoners. You need to prize just one single piece of information from them. The whereabouts of a woman called Estella. Have you got that, Henry Lamb? Am I making myself unequivocally clear?”

“Who are these prisoners? How do they know so much?”

“I don’t wish to say their names. Not now.”

“Dedlock? I need to know who these people are.”

It was raining harder now, each drop a hammer-blow against the pane. “My, my.” The thing in Steerforth gave a liquid giggle. “Who said anything about them being people?”

There was a final burble, then Steerforth’s face, running with rivulets of sweat, went slack and sagged back into its old, familiar lineaments.

“What the hell was that?”

Steerforth yanked a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. “Now you see the price of the war,” he murmured. “And we can’t afford it. Not by a long shot.”

The car sped on through the night, passing out of south London, over the river, toward the center of the city. It was a silent journey except for the deluge which beat ferociously against the windows, the windscreen, the roof.

At last, we headed past Trafalgar Square and turned into Whitehall, stopping outside a metal barricade guarded by a man with a machine gun slung around his neck. Hair plastered to forehead, his uniform sodden with rain, the sentry motioned for Barnaby to wind down the window. “State your business,” he said, with all the thoroughgoing charm of a German border official.

“My name is Barnaby. This is Steerforth. We work for Mr. Dedlock.”

The soldier peered into the back of the car, then took a stumbling step backward. “Sorry, gents,” he said. Then again, cravenly: “Really sorry.”

Barnaby muttered something resentful, wound up his window and drove on toward the most famous address in England.

I think I might actually have shaken my head. “You can’t be serious.”

Steerforth was unable to keep a hint of pride from his voice. “Welcome to Downing Street.”

Number Ten Downing Street is full of false doors. Built, re-built, altered, extended, improved and reconceived over generations by a plethora of architects eager to impress, almost everything done by one designer his later been summarily reversed by another. The result is that the building his acquired the air of a folly, filled with corridors which lead nowhere, staircases that curve gracefully into thin air, doors which open onto brickwork. It is a place of doubles and traps where little is what it seems and nothing can be trusted.

Steerforth led me inside (the door to Number Ten, being perpetually open, has no handle), down a long, tapering corridor which, rather dispiritingly, seemed every bit as gray and nondescript as those in my old office. Eventually, we reached a spiral staircase, the walls of which were decorated with portraits of past prime ministers, beginning with the most recent incumbent before stretching chronologically backward in time.

Then Steerforth led me down into the past. At first I recognized many of the politicians depicted on the walls — men and women who had held high office in my lifetime — but as we descended, the pictures grew older and increasingly unrecognizable, their costumes changing with the unfurling of the years, from starched collars and cravats to powder wigs and frock coats to lace and frills until, as we reached the lower levels, they scarcely seemed like statesmen at all. The people in those paintings were men of shadows, their faces half-masked and their bodies shrouded in darkness. At the end of the sequence, there were men in animal pelts and furs, hailing from an era of history I wasn’t even sure I recognized at all.

At the bottom of the staircase was a lavish library, its walls filled with shelves, packed tight with books — but not the kind of books that one would expect to see here, not parliamentary records, treaties, contracts and points of order, but other, more troubling titles, akin to those I had found in Granddad’s house, though stranger still. The tang of the forbidden was in that room. Often I think back to some of those half-glimpsed titles and I shudder.

The only space not taken up with books was filled by a life-sized portrait of a Victorian gentleman, his face still young but starting to show the corruption of age, his dark hair worn daringly collar length, a flutter of grim amusement on his face. I thought I recognized that smile. I have my suspicions as to why, but even now, I shouldn’t like to say for certain.