They were both standing by the window now, gazing across the house’s generous back garden at the fenced grounds of the Panacea Museum in Newnham Road, the sideboard and its indeterminate collection of debris or prophecy behind them. Angie turned to face her client, incredulous.

  ‘You know about The Handmaid’s Tale?’

  ‘Well, only the first season.’ He gave her a slightly guilty look. ‘I haven’t read the book.’

  Outside, an oddly diffused sunlight powdered the rear lawn of number eighteen, a bright rectangle enclosed by tall leylandii of a neatly manicured viridian. Beyond that, other than the back of the museum and the stand of trees on Newnham Road, not much was visible from Angie’s limited perspective. There was very little sky on view, though she supposed that the gargantuan figure with six wings and Derek-her-ex-husband’s head was still there in the west, morosely overseeing Bedford’s day of judgement. Angie at last put her finger on the one thing troubling her about this situation – other than the obvious, which was everything.

  ‘I think there’s something I’m not understanding here. How can you be so normal? I don’t mean, “Oh, you’re a big celebrity and yet you act so ordinary.” I’m not complimenting you about your common touch. I’m saying you watch boxsets, you wear trainers and naff T-shirts, and you’ve even got a Bedford accent. And yet you’re apparently the son of something inconceivable that made the universe. How is it even possible we’re standing here talking about The Handmaid’s Tale?’

  He looked hurt.

  ‘You don’t like the T-shirt?’

  Angie struggled to come up with a response that didn’t involve her immediate damnation.

  ‘Look, the T-shirt’s fine. My brother Craig had one just like it, but this is exactly what I’m having trouble with. Why are you dressed like somebody I might bump into at Games Workshop? Why should you care if I like your T-shirt? This can’t all be for my benefit. I’d have been just as happy if you’d turned up in the robe and sandals you wore last time. I know it’s not intended, but this is actually a bit confusing and upsetting. Sorry.’

  Plump face growing serious, the client nodded in acknowledgement.

  ‘Yes, well, how you see me isn’t how I am, but then, the robe and sandals version wasn’t either. It’s not some hypnotic screen that I’m projecting, some illusion to spare you the alien horror of my true state; nothing sinister like that. To be quite honest, it’s just human evolutionary biology. Mankind’s developing perceptual apparatus has consistently selected, sensibly enough, for practical survival value over accuracy. A true, comprehensive understanding of, say, a ferocious jaguar might well diminish a human’s ability to run away at the first glimpse, effectively eliminating such complete perceptions from the gene pool. How you see and hear things is a bit like simplified computer icons, or the way you read that map of London’s tube stations – you know the map bears no resemblance to any geographical reality, but if you follow the convenient fiction of its coloured lines, you’ll reach your destination. That’s much like how you perceive me. How your species perceives everything.’

  Despite beginning to wish that she’d never raised the issue, Angie did her best to take this in.

  ‘So, nothing’s ever been the way we thought it was, that’s what you’re saying? When I see you looking like a normal guy, in normal modern clothes, that’s just a kind of shorthand for something I wouldn’t have the language to conceive of or describe? And when I hear you talking about everyday things in contemporary English, with a Bedford accent, then it’s just some nonsense I’m inventing to hold my made-up reality together?’

  Once again Jez nodded, neckbeard wobbling to the beat.

  ‘Yeah, pretty much. Except it isn’t nonsense, and you’re not inventing it. It’s more like an approximation of what’s happening, a translation into human terms that are at least distant equivalents and thus might be of use to you. For instance, when you hear me talk about my dad, he’s not my dad. He isn’t even “he”. I’m not his son. It’s more like the relationship between a sentient meta-algorithm and a number value that the algorithm has spontaneously generated. Understandably, the average non-algorithmic man or woman has problems relating, but if it’s presented as a father-son arrangement or a corporate handover, they’ll have a way to comprehend the changes that are going on.’

  He turned back to the window and the sunlit grass beyond, features relaxing into what she thought might be a playful smirk.

  ‘Of course, the only thing that none of this applies to is my Bedford accent. That’s completely how it sounds. I spent a lot of time in Bedford growing up. Shall we go out and have a butcher’s at the garden?’

  This was so abrupt that Angie found herself accompanying her client through a 1930s time-capsule kitchen to the property’s back door before she thought to ask him what he meant about his Bedford upbringing. Amused, he paused between a dreadnought gas stove and a bottomless stone sink to qualify his puzzling assertion, smiling sheepishly.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was kidding … although not entirely. It’s true I remember Bedford from way back, before I manifested physically, but that was a Precambrian Bedford. There were mudslides, there were geysers, but they didn’t have a noticeable local accent. That’s just me being a dick.’

  Although the answer would no doubt be mind-destroying, Angie asked her question anyway.

  ‘Why were you in Precambrian Bedford?’

  There was a refrigerator opposite the stove, which Angie’s client opened and briefly inspected before making his reply. The fridge was humming and its light worked, indicating that there was still electricity, although she didn’t quite see how there could be. Jez issued a grunt of moderate approval as he let the weighted door swing shut.

  ‘Sometimes the old man let me visit him at work, back then when he was setting up the business. During the Precambrian, his workshop was just up the road, northeast of here. I think Transition Cycles is there now. I used to sit there in the corner with a bag of sweets and watch him do all the gene-editing and that. He’d swear and kick things when he made a typo, got his guanine mixed up with his adenine, but I was only, what, three or four million, typical kid, so I just thought it was a laugh. I realised later that Dad was dyslexic, but back then, in the Precambrian … you have to understand it was a different time. We didn’t have the same awareness about learning difficulties, and so he was halfway through production on marsupials before anybody noticed anything was wrong. But anyway, yeah, I know Bedford from when Dad was doing the preliminary work on Eden.’

  Angie blinked five times in quick succession, then repeated the last word of his boyhood nostalgia back to him in a flat tone, without hope or enthusiasm.

  ‘Eden.’

  ‘Well, he had to put it somewhere, so why not? I think John Bunyan must have had an inkling, but the Panaceans hit the nail almost exactly on the head: they said that Eden had been situated in number eighteen’s back garden, just outside. Which one of these keys that you gave me is the one to the back door?’

  As if dazed by a theological concussion, Angie mutely indicated a brass mortice key attached to the Carstairs & Calderwood calligraphy. After a moment’s fumbling and a comment that the lock could use some WD-40, the door opened and they both stepped out into the mentholated morning air. Her view no longer cropped by the rear windows of the property, she glanced up at the double-glazed sky and immediately forgot about the Eden shock-reveal that had so recently transfixed her.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  She hadn’t meant to say it. Angie clapped her hand across her mouth in horror and stared wide-eyed at the client, cringing in apology. Jez shook his head and waved one chubby palm in her direction, chuckling as he brushed aside the faux pas.

  ‘No, don’t worry. Blasphemy, it’s not even a misdemeanour these days, is it? I use that expression all the time, like when I finally got to see the company accounts. And in the case of that stuff going on up there, I’m in complete agreement. I mean, Jesus Christ.’

  They stood together at the top of the brick steps that led down to the garden proper, necks craned back as they regarded the uproarious skies directly overhead.

  Against the blue glass of the upper atmosphere, appalling mile-high spectres were suspended like Magritte trombones, two forms that faced each other in a stalled tableau of violent opposition. One was female and extremely pregnant. With the other it was difficult to say. The gravid female figure seemed to have more altitude, her anxious features angled down towards the couple in the garden. Angie thought she recognised the face but, in her holy terror, couldn’t say where from. The woman had an upturned crescent moon beneath her naked feet. She wore a constellation of twelve stars as a tiara, and the garment that she clutched in disarray about her was too bright to look upon, a rag of crumpled plasma clinging to her parted legs and swollen belly, as though torn white-hot from off the sun. She had the faraway translucency of watercolour, and she looked afraid.

  The creature hovering beneath her had its crimson back turned on the world and the observers far below, a boiling storm of beaded blood or rubies. Muscles big as counties knotted in its shoulder blades and buttocks, chilli-red with salamander frills. Its quadruped anatomy hunched forward to assail the woman and her unborn offspring, sticky highlights glinting from a rolling snakeskin hide and the meniscus of its arched spine helping, from that vantage, to conceal the fact it had too many heads.

  These cyclopean bodies hung there over Bedford, asteroids perpetually falling so that Angie thought them motionless, a frozen film still of industrial scale, until she saw that both were moving imperceptibly in glacial slow motion, as though through a different sort of time where legendary things were always and forever happening. The sun-clad woman’s lips began contorting to a scream, unhurried as an opening flower. Although more thin and tremulous than she remembered it, the fortyish solicitor at last retrieved her misplaced voice.

  ‘The woman, that’s … is that Joanna Southcott?’

  The incoming owner had resorted once more to his vape stick, sucking on it thoughtfully as he surveyed the lurid Weird Tales cover up above through narrowed eyes, with his expression that of a Victorian explorer. A bit pompous, Angie noted. Was he trying to impress her?

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, but it’s Joanna as a younger woman, or at least, that’s how you’re seeing this bit. Obviously, it was how she saw herself, clothed in the sun and in her last trimester. She was pretty, wasn’t she? I’m guessing this is what was in her mind when she lost consciousness after her phantom pregnancy. This is Joanna Southcott’s coma-dream.’

  He sipped the vape again, exhaling arabesques of fragranced steam, then looked at Angie.

  ‘Yeah, it’s just contractual language, but if an uneducated eighteenth-century serving girl with premonitions somehow gets a glimpse of it, she’s going to be all kinds of messed up. Stands to reason. And of course, most of this terminology, this imagery, it’s unbelievably hostile to women. Come on – we don’t need to watch this. I’d much sooner you were showing me the garden.’

  The vape went back in its rust-coloured breast pocket as the client descended to the lawn with Angie following, her eyes fixed on her shoes that navigated the uneven brickwork of the steps. She thought that if she could just learn the trick of never looking upward, she might yet get through this without losing any marbles. Following him out on to the level baize and limiting her gaze to the surrounding hedges, she resolved to stick with her initial strategy of focussing upon the job in hand.

  ‘Well, this is it. The ground from here to the museum is part of the property, so it’s all yours. It’s big for a backyard, admittedly, but I’d have never thought that this was Eden if you hadn’t said.’

  He raised an eyebrow, jacket striking an appealing contrast with the dark green hedge beyond.

  ‘Oh, sorry, no, this wasn’t Eden. Probably I didn’t put it very well, but what I said was, this is where the Panacea Society ladies thought Eden had been, and they were only out by a few dozen yards. The actual garden was just slightly further east, across Albany Road from the front door.’

  She had a sudden mental image of the world’s new chief executive as she’d first seen him, standing with his back to her and his new property, supping his vape pen and serenely gazing over …

  ‘Those allotments? That was where the Book of Genesis took place?’

  The bridge of his nose corrugated in a minimalist shrug.

  ‘Well, sort of. But the thing with Genesis, it’s hardly a first-hand account. How could it be? I think that it was written halfway through the Book of Kings, something like that. They took a garbled version of the story, as leaked by some babbling prophet in a lotus-stupor, then they altered that to make it all a metaphor for when Nebuchadnezzar kicked the Israelites out of Judea and burned down their temple. So, that bit about the angels with the fiery swords was just a more poetic way of saying Babylonian soldiers. The real Eden story happened here in Bedford, just over the road. The rest is bollocks. Although, to be honest, angels really do have fiery swords.’

  Angie, who’d been reflecting on the first time she’d heard Dylan’s ‘Gates of Eden’ and had not imagined them as waist-high chain-link, found that she was shocked by Jez’s mild profanity. Of course, after a moment’s thought, she saw that her reaction was ridiculous: if someone was omnipotent, then they must surely have the power to utter the word ‘bollocks’. In companionable silence, they trod ponderously about the shaved lime rectangle. She couldn’t think of anything further to say or ask concerning Eden’s local origins. As they turned back once more towards the rear of number eighteen, her eye level never venturing above the brick stairs and the open garden door, she changed the subject to what she hoped was a less contentious matter.

  ‘I suppose that you’ll be opening the box, the one you showed me, with Joanna Southcott’s prophecies inside?’ Angie resisted the temptation to look up and see how Southcott’s airborne younger self was doing with her labour pains. ‘I mean, I know you won’t be able to convene the bishops like she wanted, and it’s probably a bit late to be opening it now, with this already going on, but I’d have thought that you’d at least be curious about it. I know I would.’

  They reclimbed the steps to the back door. He shrugged his nose again, rather dismissively.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I’d prefer to let it stay a puzzle, like Schrödinger’s cat. It’s Schrödinger’s apocalypse, how’s that? I mean, the actual contents of the box are bound to be a let-down, aren’t they, after all this build up? What if it was just the pistol and the ticket for the lottery, like Harry Price insisted? That wouldn’t be very satisfying, would it? Wouldn’t be much of a revelation, even for a boxset season ender. You’d want something jaw-dropping, something impossibly dramatic that racked up the tension and left everybody hanging, desperate for the next instalment. Frankly, I don’t see whatever’s in Joanna’s box as having Killing Eve potential, unless …’

  Halfway up, he stopped and turned to Angie, face lit up by what had just occurred to him.

  ‘I know! What I’d do, if all this was the last episode of the whole series, I’d have me – that is, my character – I’d have me letting you, your character, open the box herself, if that was what she wanted. I’d perhaps have us joking around about the subject for a while and making light of it, you know, to lull the audience into a false sense of security. A sort of misdirection. Anyway, your character, we have her opening the box. Perhaps she feels that it’s an honour. Would she feel that? Or, I don’t know, she’s a modern woman, so perhaps she feels it’s just a joke? It doesn’t matter. Main thing is, she undoes all the strings – perhaps there’s seven of them, like the seven seals – and opens it. Inside there’s just a lottery ticket and a horse pistol, how Harry Price described it. Massive disappointment! You can see it in her face. I’m thinking close-up, from below.’

  Angie suppressed a shiver. Was it starting to get chilly, out here in the sun-drenched garden? What she wanted, more than anything, was to step back into the kitchen. It was so close, the back door ajar like that, but her client was caught up in his increasingly unnerving Vince Gilligan narrative.

  ‘So, both of us, our characters, are in the living room with the box open on the table and inside it nothing but the ticket and the pistol. You, your character, you’re really disappointed, but you reach into the box and you pick up the lottery ticket for a closer look, and it’s just that. It’s just a lottery ticket. It isn’t even ticket number six-six-six or anything. And then you turn it over.’

  Reaching the denouement, his light voice grew low and gravelly, as though recounting a ghost story or an urban legend, the bit where they look round and the hitchhiker has disappeared.

  ‘And on the other side, in spidery and faded writing, it says, “Take the gun and shoot him through the head, or he will end humanity.” There’s your reaction shot, just your stunned face, then bang, black screen, theme music, maybe something by Nick Cave, end credits. What do you think?’

  Angie was terrified, unable to prevent herself imagining the scene, the dreadful choice. What would she do? And what did he mean, telling her a story like that? Was that what was going to happen? Was this some preliminary game before she went to hell? She knew she probably deserved it. When she’d slept with Trevor from the office, her and Derek were still technically a married couple, so that was adultery. She wished she’d never done it; had wished that she’d never done it even during the six minutes when she was actually doing it. Trevor was hideous. ‘Take the gun and shoot him through the head, or he will end humanity.’ What would she do? The client was staring at her in dawning concern as finally he registered the shock and panic in her headlight-frozen eyes.

  ‘Oh, look, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. That sounded really creepy, didn’t it? And threatening. I didn’t mean it to, I promise. I watch too much television, and I’m shit at conversation with real people. And with you, I mean, you’re handling all of this so well, and I suppose that I was trying to say something entertaining, something that you’d think was funny. The last thing I wanted was to come across as scary. Please forgive me. You must think I’m an enormous twat.’