Free Edie Investigates by Nick Harkaway Page A

way, and is considered a brilliant advance. This could almost be a prototype. No doubt somewhere the ghost of a dead artisan is fuming.
    He glances at Edie for permission, ignites a tiny blowtorch, heats a strip of metal and twists, crimps, folds.
Snickersnack
again. He blows on it. Crimps once more. Yes. Like that, around there, and … so.
Consumatum est
, as his mother would have it.
    Joe looks up, and Edie Banister is watching him, or perhaps she is watching her own life from a great distance. Her face is still, and for one ghastly moment he imagines she has expired right there. Then she shudders and smiles a little fey smile, and says thank you, and he winds the toy and sets it marching, a wee soldier trump-trump-trumping around the table and rucking up the cloth with miniature hobnail boots.
    The dog peers back at him: eerie blind hound, stubby ears alert, straining to look through glass eyes.
Not perfect, horologist. It drags one foot. But it will suffice. Behold: my mistress is much moved. This, for your pains. And now
—
begone
.
    Joe Spork hurries away, suddenly quite certain she wanted something else from him; she has some other secret, a grander one which requires this endless testing of J.J. Spork before it can be unveiled. He wonders a bit wistfully how he failed, considers going back. But perhaps she’s just lonely, and recognises in him a fellow isolate.
    Not that he’s alone the way she is.
    And not that he’s alone now, not entirely. In the corner of his eye something flickers, a dark shape reflected in the windows of a passing bus. A shadow in a doorway. He turns and looks both ways beforecrossing the road, very alert as he sweeps the street to his left. Almost, he misses it completely. It’s so still, it’s hard to make out; his eyes are seeking joints and movements where there are none. But there, in the shadowed porch of a boarded-up bakery, it seems that someone watches: a bundled figure in a dress or a heavy overcoat, with a veil like a mourner’s. A beekeeper or a widow, or a tall, thin child playing at being a ghost. Or most likely an old burlap sack hanging on a rack, deceiving the eye.
    A moment later a long green estate car nearly runs him over. The angry maternal face behind the wheel glowers at him resentfully for being in the world, and the watcher—if there really was one—goes right out of his head.

    Moody and unsettled, Joe stops in at the corner shop to see whether Ari will sell him some cat poison.
    When Ari arrived in London, he called the shop
Bhred nba’a
. He had come to the conclusion from watching English television that the people of London were fond of both puns and corner shops, and he reasoned that a combination must inevitably be a big success. Bread and butter became
Bhred nba’a
, and it emerged almost immediately that although Londoners do indeed admire both puns and convenience, they’re not keen on shop owners who appear to be taking the piss out of them while looking foreign. Correct use of the apostrophe to denote a glottal stop was not a defence.
    Ari learned fast, and shortly painted over the offending sign. It’s not clear to Joe whether his name actually is anything like Ari, or whether he has just selected a comfortably foreign-yet-English noise which doesn’t startle the natives with complexity or suggestions of undue education.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ari is reticent on the poison issue. Ari regards cats as lessons in the journey through life. Cats, he explains, are divine messengers of patience. Joe, one shoulder still sore from a near miss two weeks ago, says they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus. Ari says this is possible, but by the workings of the ineffable divinity, even if they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus, they are
also
tutors sent by the Cosmic All.
    “They are of themselves,” Ari says, clutching this morning’s consignmentof organic milk, some of which is leaking through the plastic, “an opportunity