Free Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway Page B

James is about to try the same thing, and sees him exactly where he was, next to the door, a look of absolute confusion on his young, sallow face. She points the gun near him rather than at him. Bastion, emerging from the kitchen in pursuit of Mr. Biglandry, finds his foe already fallen and clambers up on top of him to indicate his conquest.
Died of fright. I am mighty. You may now applaud
.
    Edie looks sharply at James. “Get rid of it.”
    James has a gun, but it’s in his pocket and, when it comes to it, not loaded. Sheepish, he puts the ammunition down on the floor next to the weapon. Edie shakes her head. He shrugs at her, surrendered.
    “Who sent you?”
    “Don’t know. Honestly!”
    “Ever see them?”
    “No! They had hats on. Or sheets. Like in Iran!”
    Like in Iran
. Yes, she might know someone matching that description. She sighs.
    “Have you got a mum?”
    “Yes. In Doncaster.”
    “Best piss off back there, ey?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    She nods, then peers at him.
    “This your first?”
    “Oh, God, yeah. Christ.”
    “Don’t hang about. Don’t go and tell anyone what happened. Best to vanish, all right? Go stay with your mum. No one cares if you didn’t die, so long as you aren’t seen again.”
    “Right.”
    “Ever. And James? Get a proper job,” Edie says.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Now, I’m going to pick up two bags and I’m going to walk out of here and we won’t see one another ever again. You’re going to sit in that chair, facing the window, and you’re going to ignore me for the five minutes I’ll still be here, and then you’re going to contemplate your soul in silence for another ten minutes in the company of these dead men you once called friends. And then …?”
    “Doncaster.”
    “Good boy.”
    Edie Banister waits until he sits in the chair and turns it round, and then she goes back into her bedroom and collects her flight bag (like the gun, maintained once a month to be sure it’s all ready to go at any time) and Bastion’s travel kit. She collects the dog, steps over Mr. Biglandry and George, and closes the door on James. In the hallway she wrestles briefly with her collapsible umbrella. Edie considers the name to be strictly truthful: the umbrella collapses well, but has issues with opening. Normally she wouldn’t bother, but today it looks like rain, and having sent two men to their graves to preserve her own life, she has no intention of dying of pneumonia before seeing this business through. Death is a reality for Edie Banister, and has been since she was young. All the same, no reason to invite it. Bastion would be devastated.
    The umbrella conquered, she glowers up at the grumbling sky, and leaves Rallhurst Court for ever.

    The same London sky, grey with a touch of orange from the street lights, unburdens itself of sheets of blinding rain as Joe Spork hurries through the streets of Soho. He has given up on the telephone and decided to make his representations to Billy Friend in person. Since he is here, and since he is very quickly getting soaked through, he is also visiting a stringy, irritating man called Fisher, a former burglar, present fence, and a full-time member of the Mathew Spork nostalgia club. Fisher, not even a member of Mathew’s outer circle, is one of the few people he can turn to on the subject of the unlawful and strange without incurring painful social obligations. Even so, Joe is troubled by a powerful sense of self-inflicted injury, and his grandfather’s voice, now doleful, is telling him
I told you so
. He hunches his shoulders and buries his chin in the collar of his coat: a big man trying to become a turtle.
    A bus—last of the much-despised bendy variety, as doomed as the clockwork business and equally clever and impractical—sprays him with road water and he yells and waves furiously, then catches his reflection in a shop window and wonders, not for the first time of recent days, who this person is who has taken up residence in