Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

I idled on my own for a moment, picked up a mint on my way out and mooched onto the street just in time to see her vanish around the corner. For a second, I felt a compulsion to run after her, throw myself upon her mercy and tell her everything. Instead, I just stood there like an idiot and watched her disappear.

Once she was out of sight, I reached for my wallet and prized free a small square of card. There was a number printed on it and as I typed the digits into my mobile I felt what little lunch I’d managed to consume lurch back up.

When I spoke I had to raise my voice to be heard above the clamor of the city.

“Miss Morning?” I said. “It’s Henry Lamb. The answer is yes.”

In Ruskin Park, not five minutes’ walk from where my granddad lay in hopeless oblivion, the ducks were famished. In the short time that we were there, they managed to devour an entire loaf of wholemeal between them.

Miss Morning looked as prim and fastidious as ever in a pair of tiny black gloves and a powder-blue hat, impeccably poised even as she stooped to scatter gobbets of bread. A couple of adventurous pigeons flew down to pilfer what they could but the old lady shooed them fiercely away.

“Here,” she said, passing me a slice. “Make sure he gets some.”

I did as I was told and tossed the bread into the path of a particularly sluggish goose who was dawdling dozily by the banks of the pond.

“Why did you call me?” she asked, once the last of the crumbs had been shaken from the bag and the waterfowl, sensing that we had nothing left for them, had waddled away in search of more promising giants.

“The Prefects…,” I said heavily.

“So you’ve met them?” she asked, her expression of wrinkled benignity shifting into something calculating and shrewd. “We should walk. Since we’re almost certainly being tracked the least we can do is make our conversation difficult for the bastards to hear.”

I gazed around at the gray, deserted park, with its stark trees, its balding grass and unpromising patches of scabby earth. “How could anyone be listening to us here?”

“Eyes in the sky. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Directorate is just three men and a filing cabinet. You’ve only seen the tip of their operation.” She paused for breath. “But what was it you wanted to know?”

“Hawker and Boon… What are they? I mean, what the hell are they?”

Miss Morning flinched and for an instant I glimpsed the old steel in her, the skein of ruthlessness which must have made her fit for service in the Directorate. “They are the Domino Men, Mr. Lamb.”

“The Domino Men? Steerforth used that phrase.”

“All history is a game to them and all human lives their pieces. Their weapons are our selfishness, our greed and our cupidity. With infinite patience, over days and weeks and years, they set us up into long unknowing rows until at last, with the merest flick of their wrists, they send us toppling down, one after the other, and clap their hands at the fun of it. They were there at Maiwand, Sebastopol and Balaclava, at Kabul, Rourke’s Drift and Waterloo. And all the time — and this I can promise you, Mr. Lamb — as men died around them in the thousands, those creatures were laughing. They were doubled up at the sheer hilarity of it all.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question,” I said, unable, perhaps, to hide my frustration. “Who exactly are these people? What do they want?”

Miss Morning fixed her eyes on mine. “They’re mercenaries. Their services are for hire to anyone who cares to pay. At this particular moment in time they also happen to be the key to ending the war. With your grandfather gone, they’re the only ones who know the whereabouts of Estella.”

“And that’s another thing,” I said, on a roll now. “Who on earth is this woman? Why’s she so important? Dedlock won’t tell me.”

A grim smile on the old lady’s lips. “Mr. Dedlock has always relished his secrets. He hoards them as a miser keeps banknotes under his mattress.”

“Please…”

“Very well.” The old woman cleared her throat. “Estella was one of us.”

“You mean she worked for the Directorate?”

“She was the best agent we’d ever had. Passionate, elegant, deadly. Beautiful death in a trench coat. But she’s been lost to us for many years.”

“Granddad knew where she was. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”

Miss Morning nodded. “It was he who hid her from us.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he wanted to keep her safe. Because some things were more important to him even than the war.”

I sensed that Miss Morning was growing impatient and perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed her any further, but I had to know. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

The old woman spoke softly so as not to be heard by those satellites which she imagined to have turned their lidless gaze upon us, but I could tell that, if she felt that she was able, she would have screamed her answer at me. “I think he loved her,” she said. “Loved her with a burning devotion that most of the time you only ever read about in poetry.”

I thought of my grandma, whose sullen face I knew only from old photographs and a few half-remembered family stories, and wondered, not for the first time, if I’d actually known Granddad at all. Another betrayal, I suppose. A defection of the heart.

“The hospital is nearby,” said Miss Morning. “I think I should like to see him now.”

It took us a quarter of an hour to get there. Miss Morning, fatigued from our walk in the park, suddenly seemed much older than before and I wondered how much of her usual appearance was simply a facade shored up by will power and tenacity. I led her to the Machen Ward, and when she saw the old bastard laid out like he was waiting for the undertaker, she staggered into my arms as though she was winded. I found us some chairs, we sat beside him and she took his hand in hers.

The scene reminded me of another time when I’d been in the hospital. Years ago, as a child, when I’d been ill and had those operations, I’d been in Granddad’s place and he’d been in mine watching fondly from a distance as Mum grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight.

Miss Morning gazed at my grandfather, her face blank and unreadable. “You foolish old man,” she murmured. She inclined her head toward me but did not lift her eyes from the bed. “Will you see the Prefects again?”

“Tonight. I don’t seem to have been given a choice.”

“Watch your step, Henry. The Domino Men are without morality or compunction. Stop your ears against their lies and their wicked distortions of the truth. Give away nothing of yourself. But keep asking your questions. Be relentless. They will almost certainly offer you a deal but the price they ask is never one you can afford.” She put my granddad’s arm, followed by its forlornly trailing plastic tube, back on his chest. “As I think he discovered in the end.”

I realized she was crying.

At my most haplessly maladroit, faced with raw emotion, I placed a hand on her shoulder and cast around for the platitudes which people usually say at times like these. “Please,” I murmured. “He wouldn’t want you to cry.”

“I’m not crying for him,” she said as the tears poured unchecked down her cheeks. “I’m crying for you.” She sniffled, dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “I’m crying because of what’s going to happen to you.”

Enough feckless rambling from Henry Lamb. By the by, we should point out that most of the material in the Chinese restaurant is a fiction — the wretched girl simply wished to get rid of an undesirable suitor and was trying to find a means of letting the sap down gently. Trust poor Henry to be so hopelessly enraptured by the yielding outline of her figure that he failed to see until it was far too late that the young lady never cared a damn for him at all.