V 02 - Domino Men, The (35 page)

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the man.  “But I have to say something.”

“What?” hissed the prince.

“Fight it, sir!  You have to fight it!”

The prince stared at the servant.  No doubt he had passed the man a thousand times, but his face was entirely unfamiliar to him.  The fellow had a strange, whiskery moustache and an air of almost feline sleekness.

“What…” he began.  “What did you say?”

“I said you’ve got to fight it,” said the under-butler again.  “For the sake of us all, you have to snap out of this.”

The man backed away and disappeared, his courage evidently all used up.

Arthur tried not to think too hard about this strange interlude and lurched on toward his quarters.

He heard the sounds before he even reached his door.  Animal noises.  Grunts and groans.  Yells and screeches.  He paused outside.  Had he been mistaken?  No, there they were, the sounds of passion, almost comical in their volume and excess.  There were squealed suggestions of the most indecent nature.  There were hoarse commands and whimpered pleasures.  The prince heard his oldest friend yelp in delight and his lover moan in delirious abandonment.

As ampersand gurgled through his synapses, slimed down his nervous system and surged along his bloodstream, the prince felt the weight of the gun in his pocket and knew what he had to do.

He opened the door and walked inside.  Who knows what he saw behind that door, what grotesquerie, what lurid pornography, what leering simulacra.

You might reasonably expect at this point, when the drug ampersand had almost completely destroyed his capacity for reason, for us to tell you about a couple of gunshots, to be told about the ferocious whip-crack of that revolver echoing around the corridors of Clarence House.

That wasn’t to be.  Instead, two minutes later, the prince simply re-emerged, as inside the sounds of romance went on unabated.

Only one thing had changed in this picture.  A single, unremarkable detail which none of us could have predicted but which immediately made everything different.

There was a small gray cat strolling by his side.

In the corridor, two old acquaintances stood waiting.  Each held a pasty in his hand — half-eaten, their glistening insides dripping onto the floor, where they clung glutinously to the plush strands of carpet.

“Evening, cock!” crowed Detective Chief Inspector George Virtue.

“Wotcha!” bugled Detective Sergeant Vince Mercy.

“Why are you here?” Arthur asked.

One of the fat men wiped his meat chop of a hand across his nose.  “Bottled it, didn’t you, scout?”

“Couldn’t go through with it, could you?”

“Wassock.”

“Toss-pot.”

“Nonce.”

“You gonna stand about and let people laugh at you?”

“You gonna let them take the piss?”

“Be a man, guv.”

“Get yourself blooded.”

Arthur stared, a little more understanding inching into his consciousness.  “What did you say?”

“Blooded, guv.”

“That’s what he said.  Get yourself blooded.”

The prince stared at them both, suddenly hopeful, suddenly aware of the possibility for redemption.  “Gentlemen!” he said, sounding for the first time in days something like his old self.

“Yeah?” Mercy asked through a mouth of semi-digested mulch.

“I don’t believe you’re real.”

“Oh, that’s gutting, mate.”

Arthur went on.  I can’t believe what I’m hearing from that room.  Or what I saw in there either.  It’s an illusion, isn’t it?  It’s a trick being played on me be ampersand.”

“Don’t know what you’re on about, pal.”

The prince glared at them.  “Why?” he asked.  “Why do you want me to kill my wife?”

“What’s the matter with you?” Virtue shouted.  “There’s a bloke in there porking your missus and you’re wasting time yammering with us.”

Deliberately, Arthur turned away from them (behind him, their cries went on — “Do it, you arsehole!”  “Pull the bleeding trigger!”) and, his gun lowered, went back into the bedroom.

As the ampersand-filter descended from his eyes, he saw the truth of it — Laetitia on the bed, alone and fast asleep, curled up under the covers, the picture of innocence and chastity (though perhaps looking a little heavier than Arthur could remember having seen her before).

Back outside, the detectives Virtue and Mercy had disappeared.  The prince fell to his knees in relief, wracked with sobs at how close he had come.  At first he didn’t even notice what had walked in beside him and begun to nuzzle against his legs.

Arthur Windsor wiped his eyes, dabbed the snot from his nose and, miraculously, managed a kind of smile.

The gray cat looked up at him and purred.

“You again,” whispered the prince.

The cat purred, seemed to smile and stalked closer to the downed prince, please at what had been averted, knowing the dangers which still lay ahead but ready at last for the endgame.

The prince fell back upon the floor as the cat came closer.  He was about to say something more, to offer the animal some thanks, some further words of gratitude, when exhaustion washed over him and everything faded away.  The last thing he saw was a feline face, small and gray, filled with wisdom and concern, opening its mouth as though it was about to speak and, at long last, explain it all.

At 9:01
A.M.
that Tuesday morning, Mr. Derek Mackett, who had dedicated the great majority of his life to safeguarding the Civil Service Archive Unit, waved two of the most notorious killers in British history past reception without even asking for their ID.  It was the only blot on a career which (with its 100 percent attendance record and five-time commendation for loyal service) stood otherwise unblemished.

Mackett was never able to forgive himself for the oversight.  How could he have failed to stop two people who transparently had no business in a civil service building without getting them to sign in for guest passes?  How could he have blithely hurried them through, even going so far as to speed them on their way with a gruffly avuncular smile and a friendly nod?  Why did he think that there was nothing at all suspicious in two grown men dressed as schoolboys wandering into an office block?  Why couldn’t he have smelt the bloodlust on them?

The counselors were good with him, awfully decent and kind.  They told him that the Prefects were able to warp perception, that they were masters of deceit and that Mr. Mackett was far from the only person responsible for what happened.  But Derek took his job very seriously indeed, and as far as he was concerned, the buck stopped with him.

I heard that he died last month, not so much of a broken heart as of fatally punctured professional pride.

At 9:02
A.M.
, the Prefects were in the lift, chittering excitedly to one another, ascending toward the uppermost level.  Theoretically, there should still exist CCTV footage of their journey, but you might not be altogether surprised to learn that the tapes for that day show only electric snow, that they are filled end to end with the miserable vacuum of static.

At 9:03
A.M.
, Hawker and Boon arrived at the tenth floor and the carnage began.

Their first victim was Philip Statham, the safety officer.  He was leant over his desk, engrossed in a book of Sudoku, when Hawker and Boon strolled up to him, sliced away the front of his fan, deftly switched it on and pressed Mr. Statham’s face into the spinning blades.  Blood on the puzzles.  Desktop dappled, in a hideous kind of artistry, with red.

A secretary by the name of Emily Singer saw this happen.  I understand that she has never fully recovered from the experience and is unable to sleep with the lights out.  On that Tuesday, however, Mrs. Singer showed some presence of mind.  She screamed as loudly as she knew how, smashed the fire alarm with its little plastic hammer and dashed pell-mell for the exit.  This should have meant that the population of the entire building began an automatic evacuation onto the street, but for some reason the mechanism malfunctioned, failing to make any sound at all.  A satisfactory explanation for this has yet to be advanced.

Singer escaped to the exit but many of her colleagues were not so lucky.  They were corralled against the photocopier by the relentless storm of Hawker and Boon, who moved amongst them with penknives flashing and teeth shining, their eyes bright with the reaper’s joy on the first day of harvest.

“What ho!” said Boon, as he forced the hand of a Timothy Clapshaw (who I vaguely remember and who I think had something to do with accounts) into a paper shredder.

“Top of the morning to you!” said Hawker, energetically staple-gunning the hands of a brusque PA called Sandra Pullman to the surface of her boss’s desk.  “I don’t suppose any of you fine fellows has seen Estella?”

Anyone who could speak protested that they had never heard of the woman, let alone knew where she was.

Hawker shook his head in disappointment.  “That’s a dashed shame.”

Boon heartily concurred.  “If you’d only tell us, Hawker and I might think about giving all this up.”

“Too true, my old tup-weasel.  We’d throw in the towel.”

Someone from HR whimpered that no one knew what they were talking about.

“She’s here somewhere,” Hawker brayed.  “I can jolly well nose her.”

“Just so, old top.  But at least we can have a bit of fun while we’re looking.”

At 9:08
A.M.
, Hawker and Boon moved down to the ninth floor just as Miss Morning, Barbara and myself were attempting to fight our way up toward them.  On the stairwell, wading against the fleeing masses, I bumped into Peter Hickey-Brown.

“Christ,” he said.  “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Hello, Peter,” I said.

He sounded close to hyperventilating.  At the time I assumed that he was simply overwhelmed by panic.

“Just leave,” I snapped.  “Run for your life and don’t look back.”

Hickey-Brown gave a limp, lolling kind of nod, pushed past us and skipped girlishly down the stairs.

“They’re on the top floor,” Barbara shouted.  “The sooner we can intercept them, the fewer people need to die.”

I realized that someone was missing.  “Where’s Miss Morning?”

And so it was that at 9:12
A.M.
, on the eighth floor of the Civil Service Archive Unit, Hawker and Boon ran, almost literally, into an old acquaintance.

Miss Morning stood before them — my grandfather’s glass gun held outstretched in both hands, her gnarled little finger curled around its crystalline trigger, her arms shaking only slightly, trembling almost imperceptibly in the face of their blazered malevolence.

Of course, I can only take an educated guess at what happened next.

“Hawker,” the old lady said softly.  “Boon.  You haven’t aged a day.”

The ginger-haired man grinned.  “Whereas you, old girl, look absolutely hideous.”

“Miss Morning…” Boon said heavily.  “Didn’t you ever feel rather left out?  Everyone else had a made-up name and you had to get by with the one you were born with.”

“That was my choice,” Miss Morning said, unflinching.  “They offered me Havisham but I chose to keep my own.”

“Course you did.”  Boon winked.  “Course you did, old thing.”

Hawker mimed the stroking of a long imaginary beard.  “Itchy beard!” he shouted.  “Itchy beard!”

Then Boon was doing it, too, yelping out the same esoteric phrase.  “Itchy beard!  Itchy beard!”

Miss Morning was fed up.  “Behave!”  She pointed the gun toward Hawker’s head.  “You know who built this.  You know what it can do.”  She pulled back the safety and the device made a splintering click.

Suddenly, Boon looked pitiful and afraid, more child-like than ever.  “Please don’t pull the trigger, Miss Morning.”

“Oh, please don’t do it, Miss.”

“It’s really going to sting.”

“Pretty please!”

Without a second’s hesitation, without so much as a shiver of conscience or doubt, the old woman shoved the weapon hard against Hawker’s head and pulled the trigger.

The Prefect collapsed wailing to the floor, screeching in melodramatic agony.  For almost a minute, Miss Morning was actually fooled.  For a while there, she actually believed she might have won.

Hawker sat up with a big grin on his face and mimed a little wave.  He and Boon fell about laughing.

“That should have stopped you,” Miss Morning muttered.  “He promised.  He promised it would cut you down.”

She was still protesting as Hawker and Boon advanced upon her, their bodies visibly quivering at their own incorrigible naughtiness.

“Nothing stops us, old girl,” Hawker said, as he hoisted the pensioner in the air by her throat.  “You really ought to know that by now.”