Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

“Who the bloody hell is this?”

The voice was deep, gruff and filled with oddly mirthless laughter. “Hello, guv.”

“To whom am I speaking?”

“The name’s Detective Chief Inspector Virtue, guv. You’re on speakerphone with DS Mercy. We met earlier today.”

Arthur wondered how on earth they had got hold of his private number.

“You all right?” one of them asked.

“Thank you, Detective. I am perfectly well.”

“It’s just that I’ve been thinking. Well, we’ve been thinking. About your missus. Course we seen her on the telly. Succulent piece. Nice tush.”

Another voice chipped in now and Arthur could picture all too easily his bloated jowls and sunken chin, his fat lips smeared with animal grease.

“We’ve been thinking about all the things she lets him do to her. About his hairy arse in her face.”

The other one again: “We’ve been picturing their screws, guv. Their quickies. Their tumbles. Their knee tremblers.”

“We’ve been imagining the mucky bits on your behalf, guv. Been wondering who likes it dirty. Who likes it rough. Who puts what in where.”

“I hope you appreciate this, guv. We’re looking out for you here. We’re watching yer back.”

The conversation which followed was a long one, endlessly, inventively upsetting, and by the time detectives Virtue and Mercy had finished speaking, the prince’s eyes were red and raw from weeping.

We were waiting at the Directorate in expectation of a miracle. That was what the odious Mr. Jasper had called her — “a genuine, irrefutable, copper-bottomed miracle.”

Dedlock’s squad of killers had found nothing. Hawker and Boon were still at large and the air seemed to crackle with a perplexing combination of urgency and exhaustion.

I stood apart from the others, staring out of the pod, past the illusory tourists and toward the real world, where, beyond the mirage of camera wielders and guidebook flourishers, I could see the snake of real punters waiting patiently in line. Past them — the lights of the South Bank, the neon and halogen of real life.

A hand on my shoulder. “You look tired, Henry.”

It was Miss Morning, more battle weary than ever.

“I am,” I said. “And I’m starting to wonder whether this miracle of Jasper’s is ever going to show up.”

Mr. Jasper strolled over to us, a look of smug self-satisfaction uncurling itself across his face. “Trust me,” he said, “she’ll be worth the wait.”

In this, if in nothing else, Jasper was right. As we watched, the queue of tourists began to part in wonder and envy as a woman, a stranger, strode through the crowd and stepped smartly into the pod like she belonged there. The door hissed shut and we began to move, but with a judder, as though even the Eye itself had been thrown off kilter by the newcomer.

Straightaway we knew that she was what we’d been waiting for, that she was Jasper’s miracle.

She was tapered, statuesque, with a mane of jet-black hair, and the curves of her exquisite figure were encased in a tightly belted trench coat which flapped about her like a cape. She was flawlessly complexioned and what light make-up she had applied served only to accentuate the splendor of her cheekbones, the imperious curve of her nose, the glacial sensuality of her lips. Most striking of all were her eyes. Once they had been turned upon you, it was impossible to imagine denying her anything she might desire.

There was something terrible about this woman. Hers was the bleak beauty of nature, the desolate grandeur of an ice field, the awful grace of a tiger stalking its prey.

But the most surprising thing of all was that I thought I recognized her from somewhere.

“Barbara?” I asked.

I looked closer and I was certain. It was her. A stretched, plucked, distended parody of her, perhaps, but unquestionably the girl from the office all the same. She favored me briefly with a condescending glance but did not offer a reply.

“Gentlemen.” Jasper was wearing the look of the cardsharp who knows he can never lose a game. “This is our hunter.”

The woman did not smile or bow or in any way acknowledge the introduction but gazed at us in much the same way that the first Cro-Magnon may have surveyed a gathering of Neanderthals.

“Remarkable,” Miss Morning murmured. “Repugnantly immoral, of course, but still — remarkable.”

“Barbara?” I asked again. “It is you, isn’t it?”

She turned her head in my direction with a motion that was strangely mechanical. I noticed that she already wore the same earpiece as the rest of us and I wondered if I might not be able to hear the whir of motors, the clank of gears.

“Hello, Henry,” she said, and I could tell from her voice that it was still her. Changed, alchemized, transformed, but somehow still Barbara. Her perfect lips formed words as though they were still learning how. “Barbara’s in her somewhere. Buried very deep. She says hello.” The word ‘hello’ was spoken as though it was barely familiar to her, alien and slightly dirty, like a judge struggling with the patois of some young offender brought before him in the dock.

I turned to Jasper. “What the hell have you done to her?”

He giggled. “I’ve made her better. This is Estella come back to us. This is victory.”

“Enough,” Dedlock snapped. “I want proof.”

Barbara sashayed past and walked as close to the tank as she could. “The first Estella is inside me. And she knows you, Mr. Dedlock.” Why, at this, I was put in mind of Marilyn singing “Happy Birthday” to the president, I really couldn’t fathom.

“Estella…,” the old man stuttered. “You’ve come back to me.”

“It’s good to be back, sir,” she said, although her voice was wholly without conviction.

The man in the tank squirmed. If it had been possible for us to see, I have no doubt that Dedlock’s upper lip would have been coated in sweat, in the shifty rime of mendacity and betrayal. “How much do you remember?”

“I remember almost everything.”

“ Almost everything?”

“I can recollect some of the smallest details of Estella’s life. I can remember a great deal of the existence of poor Barbara. But I am more than either of them.”

The head of the Directorate looked afraid.

“Gentlemen, we’re wasting time.” Barbara paced briskly back to the center of the pod. “The Directorate had frittered away the last twenty-four hours. We should have the Prefects in custody by now.”

“Tell me,” Dedlock said in a little boy’s voice. “How do we find them?”

“The answer’s been staring you in the face. Any one of you could have worked it out for yourself.”

Most of us could no longer stand to look at her so we gazed dolefully at the floor or stared shamefacedly out of the window, like a line-up of new arrivals at the kind of penitentiary where they favor throwing away the key.

“Dedlock,” snapped Barbara. “Bring up a heat map of the city.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We don’t have time for your game playing. Just do it. Say a ten-mile circumference from Whitehall.”

Dedlock’s fingers twitched in the water and behind him, miraculously, we saw the lines of London shimmer into existence, the streets and roads form themselves out of the fluid in some impossible liquid cartography. Overlaid upon the familiar landmarks were splashes of yellow and orange.

“A heat map’s no good,” Dedlock protested. “Everything has a signature.”

Barbara raised a hand to silence him. “The Prefects are creatures of fire and sulphur. Watch the screen. They will reveal themselves.”