Nicola Barker - Darkmans

Kane didn’t bother looking up, so he turned the picture over and inspected the back (as he inspected, Kane removed a small, metal kidney tray from Geraldine’s pocket of the type generally used in a hospital to deposit swabs or samples in). The photo wasn’t dated. Gaffar sucked on his tongue, irritated. He was suddenly fascinated by this luminescent Beede.

‘Well, well, well …’ Kane chuckled, cupping his hands together and rattling four, small dice in them. Gaffar’s eyes shot up, attracted by their familiar sound. He tapped, naively, at his jacket pocket, removed one, lonely die, gazed at it, appalled, then mutely held out his hand for the others. Kane passed them over and then delved back into the coat again…

Six used scratchcards.

‘Are these yours?’ Kane asked.

Gaffar shook his head.

‘Good,’ Kane grumbled, ‘I hate those fucking things…’

He tried Geraldine’s other pocket. ‘A- ha! ’

He withdrew Gaffar’s set of house keys and cheerfully jangled them at him. ‘The mystery is finally solved…’

’That evil vixen!’ Gaffar exclaimed. ’She must’ve ransacked my pockets when we were riding on the scooter.’

‘Yup.’

’Damn! ’ Gaffar looked disappointed. ’So that’s the reason why her hands were crawling everywhere.’

Kane dug around some more. He gingerly removed the bottom half of an old pair of dentures.

’Are those hers?’ Gaffar asked, shaking his head, horrified.

Next up, a book. A paperback. Kane stared at it for a moment. ‘ Jesus . How’d she get a hold of this? It’s Beede’s. He dropped it, the other day, in the restaurant, and I picked it up…’

He inspected the front cover. There was something slightly unusual about it. Then he realised — no author’s name. He turned to the back.

‘Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets,’ he read out, somewhat haltingly, ‘concerns the world of patriarchs, palliards and priggers of prancers, of autem morts and walking morts, of fraters, abraham men and rufflers — the elaborate, criminal anti-society of Elizabethan England…’

‘Hang on…’ he stared up at Gaffar, blankly.

‘Huh?’

Gaffar wasn’t paying attention. Kane slowly shook his head, frowning. ‘For a moment back there — for a split second, as I read — I suddenly…it just…I dunno — it all made perfect sense …’

He opened the text, perplexedly, to where Beede had finally quit reading during their random meeting at the French Connection (the corner had been carefully turned at page 103). Here Kane’s eye alighted on the sub-heading: ‘Priggers of Prancers’ and the following sentence: ‘A prigger of prancers be horse stealers; for to prig signifieth in their language to steal, and a prancer is a horse…’

He re-read this sentence.

‘A prigger of prancers be horse stealers; for to prig…’

‘I already knew that,’ he murmured.

‘Beede knew of this rug,’ Gaffar joined in, shuffling, distractedly, through some of the other photographs (in one there was an image of Beede, at ease, in full, white, Marine regalia. In another, a four-year-old Kane was snuggled up asleep in his pushchair with the woman from the previous picture crouched down behind him, grimacing theatrically as she held on to a rapidly melting ice cream. In a third, a ten-year-old Kane was gamely pushing the same woman around in a wheelchair. The woman was now totally transformed, but smiling).

‘ What?!’

Kane was gazing up at him, shocked. ‘How could he tell? That burn had all-but disappeared . Jesus wept , the man’s like some kind of pneumatic hound …’

Gaffar stared at him, blankly.

‘Did you let it slip?’

‘ Me?! ’ Gaffar looked hurt.

‘Was he furious?’

‘No. Was fine . We laugh . He thought was big…uh… joke .’

‘A joke?’ Kane didn’t look convinced.

‘Sure. Ha ha .’

Kane glanced down at the book again, opening the text, randomly, and finding himself on page 57 in a chapter entitled: ‘A Manifest Detection of Dice Play’. There, placed neatly between the folds of the pages, was a small, white card, a business card: Petaborough Restorations, he read. No address, just a number. He inspected the code. Was that Appledore? Tenterden?

‘Petaborough Restorations,’ he murmured, ‘P.B.R.’

P.B.R.?

It rang a distant bell.

P.B.R.?

His mind turned back to a day or so before, when he’d been rummaging through Beede’s old cheque stubs, struggling to decipher his impenetrable short-hand. P.B.R. He was pretty sure — no, certain —that he’d encountered these three letters, and repeatedly, somewhere.

He peered down at the book. A section of print had been heavily underlined towards the bottom of the page: ‘At the gentleman’s next returning to the house, the damsel dallied so long with the chain, sometimes putting it about her neck, and sometimes about his, that in the end she foisted the copper chain in the other’s place, and thereby robbed him of better than forty pounds.’

?

Kane shut the book and inspected the cover. It consisted of a slightly yellowed detail from a sixteenth-century painting in which several gentlemen could be seen hunched over a table playing cards. The table was liberally sprinkled in gold coins. The only hand on display (to the viewer, at least) was one held to the fore of the detail where a heavily beringed gentleman clutched on to a Jack. He looked closer. The Jack of Hearts; and a blond, plump, slightly dissolute-seeming Jack, at that.

‘Jack of Hearts,’ Kane murmured.

He blinked.

Eh?!

He opened the book to page 103 again. ‘A prigger of prancers,’ he read. He shut his eyes for a moment. He saw a man, in yellow, astride a horse–

Holy fuck!

His eyes flew open.

The toilet flushed. He leaned sideways and tipped the kidney-shaped tray and the teeth back into Geraldine’s coat pocket. He shoved the book down his side of the sofa.

’You’re not gonna confront her?’ Gaffar asked loudly, pointing indignantly.

‘Christ no. It’s a sickness ,’ Kane hushed him, ‘it’s not vindictive. It’s pathetic. She can’t control it.’

Geraldine re-emerged from the bathroom and sailed back into their orbit, quite the ship of state; magnificently serene, blissfully unaware.

‘Shit. I’m suddenly really hungry …’ Kane exclaimed, clutching on to his stomach, as if at once panicked and delighted by this sudden, very real, very powerful sense of appetite.

In Beede’s dream he was hurling himself — at breakneck speed — up a steep, spiral staircase. The staircase was built of stone and it was dimly lit. As he climbed he felt panicked, angry — caught in the grip of some kind of emotional frenzy — but still astonishingly vigorous. So much stronger— inside, out —than normal. So much lighter. His limbs — legs, arms, chest — far more obliging, more supple, more resilient…

Huh?!

He ground to a sudden halt, his head snapping around–

What was that?!

He braced himself, gasping, against a cold, stone wall–

The stamp of a boot?

The clink of…

Eh?

A drawn sword?

He slitted his eyes, sweat trickling down the sharp furrows of his lean face–

Is it…?