Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(51)
“Hugh Barnaby, Max Isaacs. We work with Randolph in—well, his sort of business. You know. The occult.” Barney gave his occupation with a sort of muttered embarrassment, much as if confessing to designing ladies’ undergarments.
“You’re like Randolph?”
“God, no, not at all. We’re...well, we’re sui generis, aren’t we, Isaacs?”
“Pretty sure I seen ’er on stage at the Alhambra,” Isaacs said. “Did a dance in feathers.”
Barney snorted with laughter. Saul gathered up his patience. “All right, but how—”
“There’s honestly no use asking me, old fellow.” Barney overtook a Ford Model T with not nearly enough space. Saul shut his eyes. “Randolph’s the expert; we just do what we can. I understand you’ve been caught up in something nasty recently? Yes, that was very much what happened to us. It’s like one of those whatsits, those things, you get into them and you can’t get out. What am I thinking of?”
“Chokey? Tar pits?” Isaacs suggested.
“No, not that. It’s a sort of rat-catching device.”
“Man traps?”
Barney removed a hand from the wheel to snap his fingers, causing the car to lurch. “That’s it. Lobster pot.”
“Notwithstanding which...” Saul said.
“What I’m getting at is, can’t help you.” Barney’s voice held just a hint of a suggestion that it was time to stop asking questions. “If you want answers, Randolph will give them to you.”
Isaacs made an indescribable noise. Barney looked round, grinning again. “All right, perhaps he won’t. But I’ll take you to him so he can fail to give them in person. All right?”
CHAPTER TEN
RANDOLPH WOULDN’T HAVE ADMITTED HE was waiting for a knock at the door. He was, however, hovering irritably in his sitting room not doing anything while the knock failed to come, and when it finally sounded he had to prevent himself from running. He checked his hair in the mirror instead, smoothing it to sleekness, and went to open the door.
Saul was there. He looked haunted, as well he might, and the dreadful thing was, it suited him, with his dark eyes, the fine, sensitive mouth. He looked vulnerable, which was a rotten thing to find attractive, and nervy too, which Randolph could permit himself to relish at the thought of making those nerve endings sing for him.
“Hello to you too,” said Barney, as though Randolph ought to have noticed him beside Saul. “Sam says, sort out whatever it is and catch up at Fetter Lane tomorrow, could you? Cheerio, Lazenby, nice to meet you.”
Randolph stepped back, letting Saul in. He was wearing the brown suit he’d had on in the Fens with black shoes of the kind one might wear for dinner. He shrugged at Randolph’s examining look. “I lost my other shoes in the Fens. Which is a shame as I’ve doubtless lost my position as well.”
“Have you?”
“Well, Major Peabody returned to London after my disappearance, and I’ve been AWOL for days. After which I was more or less placed under arrest by the Shadow Ministry, if that’s what we must call them, and brought down here, then snatched away by the worst driver in London at your behest—”
“I do apologise for Barney. Would you care for a drink?”
“Yes, I bloody would.”
“Will dry sherry do?”
“If it has alcohol in it.”
Randolph led him into the lounge and gestured to him to take one of the pair of easy chairs by the fireplace, empty this warm afternoon. Saul sat, looking around, and Randolph wondered what the place might look like to him. It was large, light and bright, with pale cream walls and furniture chosen because otherwise the collection of leatherbound books and carved faces might have become rather overpowering.
“Green Men, I see.” Saul nodded at the carvings, all foliage and deep pits for eyes, as Randolph handed him a glass. “I looked at one of those in the church at Burwell and I could have sworn it looked back at me. With eyes. I don’t know whether to fear I’m going mad or to hope it.”
“For good or ill, you’re not going mad.”
“It hardly matters. A sanatorium room, government detention, I’ll still be in a cell.”
“Nobody will lock you up. The Shadow Ministry has no authority over you, and they grossly overreached if they suggested they did. I’ll have words for Delingpole, and for that fool Herbert too. I told him to look after you, not throw you to the wolves.”
“Oh, I don’t blame him,” Saul said. “For one thing, he’s old and afraid and obviously doesn’t want whatever ghastly responsibility was foisted on him, and for another, he had no particular reason to want me on his hands. It wasn’t him rolling around the grass with me before I got ravished into unconsciousness by a ghost.”
“Right.” Randolph took the other chair, feeling he’d need it. “I gather you’re unhappy.”
“I am, yes. I woke up wondering if I was in some sort of asylum to discover that you’d gone back to London and my employer is no longer interested in whether I live or die, and was promptly collected up by some sort of hush-hush Government organisation that appears to operate outside the law, and accused of things I don’t understand, without so much as the right to a lawyer. I am very unhappy, in fact. Since you ask.”