‘… and all the clouds that lower’d upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean, buried… ’
   ‘When were our brows bound?’ yelled the audience.
   ‘Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,’ continued Richard, ignoring them completely. We must have been to this show thirty times and even now I could feel myself mouthing the words with the actor on the stage.
   ‘… to the lascivious pleasing of a lute… ” continued Richard, saying ‘lute’ loudly as several other members of the audience gave alternative suggestions.
   ‘Piano!’ shouted out one person near us. ‘Bagpipes!’ said another. Someone at the back, missing the cue entirely, shouted in a high voice ‘Euphonium!’ halfway through the next line and was drowned out when the audience yelled: ‘Pick a card!’ as Richard told them that he ‘was not shaped for sportive tricks…’
   Landen looked across at me and smiled. I returned the smile instinctively; I was enjoying myself.
   ‘I that am rudely stamp’d…’ muttered Richard, as the audience took its cue and stamped the ground with a crash that reverberated around the auditorium.
   Landen and I had never wanted to tread the boards ourselves and had never troubled to dress up. The production was the only show at the Ritz; it was empty the rest of the week. Keen amateur thespians and Shakespeare fans would drive from all over the country to participate, and it was never anything but a full house. A few years back a French troupe performed the play in French to rapturous applause; a troupe went to Sauvignon a few months later to repay the gesture.
   ‘… and that so lamely and unfashionable, that dogs bark at me…’
   The audience barked loudly, making a noise like feeding time at the dogs’ home. Outside in the alley several cats new to the vicinity momentarily flinched, while more seasoned moggies looked at each other with a knowing smile.
   The play went on, the actors doing sterling work and the audience parrying with quips that ranged from the intelligent to the obscure to the downright vulgar. When Clarence explained that the King was convinced that ‘… by the letter “G” his issue disinherited shall be… ’ the audience yelled out:
   ‘Gloucester begins with G, dummy!’
   And when the Lady Anne had Richard on his knees in front of her with his sword at his throat, the audience encouraged her to run him through; and just before one of Richard’s nephews, the young Duke of York, alluded to Richard’s hump: ‘Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me; because that I am little, like an ape, he thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders–‘ the audience yelled out: ‘Don’t mention the hump, kid!’, and after he did: ‘The Tower! The Tower!’
   The play was the Garrick cut and lasted only about two and a half hours; at Bosworth field most of the audience ended up on the stage as they helped re-enact the battle. Richard, Catesby and Richmond had to finish the play in the aisle as the battle raged about them. A pink pantomime horse appeared on cue when Richard offered to swap his kingdom for just such a beast, and the battle finally ended in the foyer. Richmond then took one of the girls from behind the ice-cream counter as his Elizabeth and continued his final speech from the balcony with the audience below hailing him as the new King of England, the soldiers who had fought on Richard’s side proclaiming their new allegiance. The play ended with Richmond saying: ‘God say Amen!’
   ‘Amen!’ said the crowd, amid happy applause. It had been a good show. The cast had done a fine job and fortunately this time no one had been seriously injured during Bosworth. Landen and I filed out quickly and found a table in a cafe across the road. Landen ordered two coffees and we looked at one another.
   ‘You’re looking good, Thursday. You’ve aged better than me.’
   ‘Nonsense,’ I replied. ‘Look at these lines—!’
   ‘Laughter lines,’ asserted Landen.
   ‘Nothing’s that funny.’
   ‘Are you here for good?’ he asked suddenly.
   ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I dropped my gaze. I had promised myself I wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving, but—
   ‘It depends.’
   ‘On—?’
   I looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
   ‘—on SpecOps.’
   The coffee arrived at that point and I smiled brightly.
   ‘So, how have you been?’
   ‘I’ve been good,’ he said, then added in a lower tone, ‘I’ve been lonely, too. Very lonely. I’m not getting any younger, either. How have you been?’
   I wanted to tell him that I’d been lonely too, but some things can’t easily be said. I wanted him to know that I still wasn’t happy with what he had done. Forgive and forget is all very well, but no one was going to forgive and forget my brother. Anton’s dead name was mud and that was solely down to Landen.
   ‘I’ve been fine.’ I thought about it. ‘I haven’t, actually.’
   ‘I’m listening.’
   ‘I’m having a shitty time right now. I lost two colleagues in London. I’m chasing after a lunatic who most people think is dead, Mycroft and Polly have been kidnapped, Goliath is breathing down my neck and the Regional Commander at SpecOps might just have my badge. As you can see, things are just peachy.’
   ‘Compared to the Crimea, this is small beer, Thursday. You’re stronger than all this crap.’
   Landen stirred three sugars into his coffee and I looked at him again. ‘Are you hoping for us to get back together?’
   He was taken aback by the directness of my question. He shrugged. ‘I don’t think we were ever truly apart.’
   I knew exactly what he meant. Spiritually, we never were.
   ‘I can’t apologise any more, Thursday. You lost a brother, I lost some good friends, my whole platoon and a leg. I know what Anton means to you, but I saw him pointing up the wrong valley to Colonel Frobisher just before the armoured column moved off. It was a crazy day and crazy circumstances, but it happened and I had to say what I saw—!’
   I looked him squarely in the eye.
   ‘Before going to the Crimea I thought that death was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. I soon realised it was only for starters. Anton died; I can accept that. People get killed in war; it’s inevitable. Okay, so it was a military debacle of staggering proportions. They also happen from time to time. It’s happened many times before in the Crimea.’
   ‘Thursday!’ implored Landen. ‘What I said. It was the truth!’
   I rounded on him angrily.
   ‘Who can say what the truth was? The truth is whatever we are most comfortable with. The dust, the heat, the noise! Whatever happened that day, the truth is now what everyone reads in the history books. What you told the military inquiry! Anton may have made a mistake, but he wasn’t the only one that day.’
   ‘I saw him point down the wrong valley, Thursday.’
   ‘He would never have made that mistake!’
   I felt an anger I hadn’t felt for ten years. Anton had been blamed for the charge, it was as simple as that. The military leaders managed to squirm out of their responsibilities once again and my brother’s name had entered the national memory and the history books as that of the man who lost the Light Armoured Brigade. The commanding officer and Anton had both died in the charge. It had been up to Landen to tell the story.
   I got up.
   ‘Walking out again, Thursday?’ said Landen sardonically. ‘Is this how it will always be? I was hoping you would have mellowed, that we could have made something out of this mess, that there was still enough love in us to make it work.’
   I shot a furious look at him.

   ‘What about loyalty, Landen? He was your greatest friend!’
   ‘And I still said what I said,’ sighed Landen. ‘One day you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that Anton fucked up. It happens, Thursday. It happens.’
   I stared at him and he stared back.
   ‘Can we ever get over this, Thursday? I need to know as a matter of some urgency.’
   ‘Urgency? What urgency? No,’ I replied, ‘no, no, we can’t. I’m sorry to have wasted your fucking precious time!’
   I ran out of the cafe, eyes streaming and angry with myself, angry with Landen and angry with Anton. I thought about Snood and Tamworth. We should all have waited for back-up; Tamworth and I fucked up by going in and Snood fucked up by taking on an enemy which he knew he was not physically or mentally prepared to face. We had all been flushed with excitement by the chase; it was the sort of impetuous action that Anton would have taken. I had felt it once before in the Crimea and I had hated myself for it then, too.
   I got back to the Finis at about one in the morning. The John Milton weekend was ending with a disco. I took the lift up to my room, the distorted beat of the music softening to a dull thud as I was transported upwards. I leaned against the mirror in the lift and took solace in the coolness of the glass. I should never have come back to Swindon, that much was obvious. I would speak to Victor in the morning and transfer out as soon as possible.
   I opened my room door and kicked off my shoes, lay on the bed and stared at the polystyrene ceiling tiles, trying to come to terms with what I had always suspected but never wanted to face. My brother had fucked up. Nobody had bothered to put it so simply before; the military tribunal spoke of ‘tactical errors in the heat of the battle’ and ‘gross incompetence’. Somehow ‘Fucked up’ made it seem more believable; we all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice. If Anton had been a baker and forgotten the yeast, nothing would have been made of it, but he would have fucked up just the same.
   As I lay there thinking I slowly drifted into sleep and with sleep came troubled dreams. I was back at Styx’s apartment block, only this time I was standing outside the back entrance with the upturned car, Commander Flanker and the rest of the SO-1 interview panel. Snood was there too. He had an ugly hole in his wrinkled forehead and was standing, arms crossed and looking at me as if I had taken his football and he had sought out Flanker for some kind of redress.
   ‘Are you sure you didn’t tell Snood to go and cover the back?’ asked Flanker.
   ‘Positive,’ I said, looking at them both in turn.
   ‘She did, you know,’ said Acheron as he walked past. ‘I heard her.’
   Flanker stopped him.
   ‘Did you? What exactly did she say?’
   Acheron smiled at me and then nodded at Snood, who returned his greeting.
   ‘Wait!’ I interrupted. ‘How can you believe what he says? The man’s a liar!’
   Acheron looked offended and Flanker turned to me with a steely gaze.
   ‘We only have your word for that, Next.’
   I could feel myself boil with inner rage at the unfairness of it all. I was just about to cry out and wake up when I felt a tap on my arm. It was a man dressed in a dark coat. He had heavy black hair that fell over his dour, strong features. I knew immediately who he was.
   ‘Mr Rochester?’
   He nodded in return. But now we were no longer outside the warehouses in the East End; we were in a well-furnished hall, lit by the dim glow of oil lamps and the flickering light from a fire in the large hearth.
   ‘Is your arm well, Miss Next?’ he asked.
   ‘Very well, thanks,’ I said, moving my hand and wrist to demonstrate.
   ‘I should not trouble yourself with them,’ he added, indicating Flanker, Acheron and Snood, who had started to argue in the corner of the room near the bookcase. ‘They are merely in your dream and thus, being illusory, are of no consequence.’
   ‘And what about you?’
   Rochester smiled, a forced, gruff smile. He was leaning on the mantelpiece and looked into his glass, swirling his Madeira delicately.
   ‘I was never real to begin with.’
   He placed the glass on the marble mantel and flipped out a large silver hunter, popped it open, read the time and returned it to his waistcoat pocket in one smooth, easy movement.
   ‘Things are becoming more urgent, I can feel it. I trust I can count on your fortitude when the time comes?’
   ‘What do you mean?’
   ‘I can’t explain. I don’t know how I managed to get here or even how you managed to get to me. You remember when you were a little girl? When you chanced upon us both that chill winter’s evening?’
   I thought about the incident at Haworth all those years ago when I entered the book of Jane Eyre and caused Rochester’s horse to slip.
   ‘It was a long time ago.’
   ‘Not to me. You remember?’
   ‘I remember.’
   ‘Your intervention improved the narrative.’
   ‘I don’t understand.’
   ‘Before, I simply bumped into my Jane and we spoke briefly. If you had read the book prior to your visit you would have noticed. When the horse slipped to avoid you it made the meeting more dramatic, wouldn’t you agree?’
   ‘But hadn’t that happened already?’
   Rochester smiled.
   ‘Not at all. But you weren’t the first visitor we have had. And you won’t be the last, if I’m correct.’
   ‘What do you mean?’
   He picked up his drink again.
   ‘You are about to rouse from your sleep, Miss Next, so I shall bid you adieu. Again: I can trust in your fortitude when the time comes?’
   I didn’t have time to answer or question him further. I was woken by my early morning call. I was in my clothes from the previous evening, the light and the television still on.

19. The very Irrev. Joffy Next

   ‘Dearest Mum,
   Life here in the Deleted by censors camp is great fun. The weather is good, the food average, the company AOK. Colonel Deleted by censors is our co; he is a cracking fellow. I see Thurs quite often & although you told me to look after her I think she can look after herself. She won the battalion ladies’ boxing tournament. We move up to Deleted by censors next week, i will write again when i have more news.
   Your son, Anton’

Letter from Anton Next sent two weeks before he died


   Apart from one other person I had the breakfast room all to myself. As fate would have it, that one other person was Colonel Phelps.
   ‘Good morning, Corporal!’ he said cheerfully as he spotted me trying to hide behind a copy of The Owl.
   ‘Colonel.’
   He sat down opposite me without asking.
   ‘Good response to my presence here so far, y’know,’ he said genially, taking some toast and waving a spoon at the waiter. ‘You there, sir, more coffee. We’re having the talk next Sunday; you are still coming, I trust?’
   ‘I just might be there,’ I responded, quite truthfully.
   ‘Splendid!’ he gushed. ‘I must confess I thought you’d stumbled off the path when we spoke on the gasbag.’
   ‘Where is it being held?’
   ‘A bit hush-hush, old girl. Walls have ears, careless talk, all that rot. I’ll send a car for you. Seen this?’
   He showed me the front page of The Mole. It was, like all the papers, almost exclusively devoted to the upcoming offensive that everyone thought was so likely there didn’t seem even the slightest hope that it wouldn’t happen. The last major battle had been in ‘75 and the memories and lessons of that particular mistake didn’t seem to have sunk in.
   ‘More coffee I said, sir!’ roared Phelps to the waiter, who had given him tea by mistake. ‘This new plasma rifle is going to clinch it, y’know. I’ve even thought of modifying my talk to include a request for anyone wanting a new life on the peninsula to start filing claims now. I understand from the Foreign Secretary’s office that we will need settlers to move in as soon as the Russians are evicted for good.’
   ‘Don’t you understand?’ I asked in an exasperated tone. ‘There won’t be an end. Not while we have troops on Russian soil.’
   ‘What’s that?’ murmured Phelps. ‘Mmm? Eh?’
   He fiddled with his hearing aid and cocked his head to one side like a parakeet. I made a non-committal noise and left as soon as I could.
   It was early; the sun had risen but it was still cold. It had rained during the night and the air was heavy with water. I put the roof of the car down in an attempt to blow away the memories of the night before, the anger that had erupted when I realised that I couldn’t forgive Landen. It was the dismay that I would always feel the same rather than the dismay over the unpleasant ending to the evening which upset me most. I was thirty-six, and apart from ten months with Filbert I had been alone for the past decade, give or take a drunken tussle or two. Another five years of this and I knew that I would be destined not to share my life with anyone.
   The wind tugged at my hair as I drove rapidly along the sweeping roads. There was no traffic to speak of and the car was humming sweetly. Small pockets of fog had formed as the sun rose, and I drove through them as an airship flies through cloud. My foot rolled off the throttle as I entered the small parcels of gloom, then gently pressed down again as I burst free into the morning sun once more.
   The village of Wanborough was not more than ten minutes’ drive from the Finis Hotel. I parked up outside the GSD temple—once a C of E church—and turned off the engine, the silence of the country a welcome break. In the distance I could hear some farm machinery but it was barely a rhythmical hum; I had never appreciated the peace of the country until I had moved to the city. I opened the gate and entered the well-kept graveyard. I paused for a moment, then ambled at a slow, respectful pace past the rows of well-tended graves. I hadn’t visited Anton’s memorial since the day I left for London, but I knew that he wouldn’t have minded. Much that we had appreciated about one another had been left unsaid. In humour, in life and in love, we had understood. When I arrived in Sebastapol to join the 3rd Wessex Tank Light Armoured Brigade, Landen and Anton were already good friends. Anton was attached to the brigade as signals captain; Landen was a lieutenant. Anton had introduced us; against strict orders we had fallen in love. I had felt like a schoolgirl, sneaking around the camp for forbidden trysts. In the beginning the Crimea just seemed like a whole barrel of fun. None of the bodies came home. It was a policy decision. But many had private memorials. Anton’s was near the end of the row, underneath the protective bough of an old yew and sandwiched between two other Crimean memorials. It was well kept up, obviously weeded regularly, and fresh flowers had recently been placed there. I stood by the unsophisticated grey limestone tablet and read the inscription. Simple and neat. His name, rank and the date of the charge. There was another stone not unlike this one sixteen hundred miles away marking his grave on the peninsula. Others hadn’t fared so well. Fourteen of my colleagues on the charge that day were still ‘unaccounted for’. It was military jargon for ‘not enough bits to identify’.
   Quite suddenly I felt someone slap me on the back of my head. It wasn’t hard but enough to make me jump. I turned to find the GSD priest looking at me with a silly grin on his face.
   ‘Wotcha, Doofus!’ he bellowed.
   ‘Hello, Joffy,’ I replied, only slightly bemused. ‘Want me to break your nose again?’
   ‘I’m cloth now, sis!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t go around bashing the clergy!’
   I stared at him for a moment.
   ‘Well, if I can’t bash you,’ I told him, ‘what can I do?’
   ‘We at the GSD are very big on hugs, sis.’
   So we hugged, there in front of Anton’s memorial, me and my loopy brother Joffy, whom I had never hugged in my life.
   ‘Any news on Brainbox and the Fatarse?’ he asked.
   ‘If you mean Mycroft and Polly, no.’
   ‘Loosen up, sis. Mycroft is a Brainbox and Polly, well, she does have a fat arse.’
   ‘The answer’s still no. Mind you, she and Mum have put on a bit of weight, haven’t they?’
   ‘A bit? I should say. Tesco’s should open a superstore just for the pair of them.’
   ‘Does the GSD encourage such blatant personal attacks?’ I asked.
   Joffy shrugged. ‘Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t,’ he answered. ‘That’s the beauty of the Global Standard Deity—it’s whatever you want it to be. And besides, you’re family so it doesn’t count.’
   I looked around at the well-kept building and graveyard.
   ‘How’s it all going?’
   ‘Pretty well, thanks. Good cross-section of religions and even a few neanderthals, which is quite a coup. Mind you, attendances have almost trebled since I converted the vestry into a casino and introduced naked greasy-pole dancing on Tuesdays.’
   ‘You’re joking!’
   ‘Yes, of course I am, Doofus.’

   ‘You little shit!’ I laughed. ‘I am going to break your nose again!’
   ‘Before you do, do you want a cup of tea?’
   I thanked him and we walked towards the vicarage.
   ‘How’s your arm?’ he asked.
   ‘It’s okay,’ I replied. Then, since I was eager to try to keep up with his irreverence, I added: ‘I played this joke on the doctor in London. I said to him when he rebuilt the muscles in my arm, “Do you think I’ll be able to play the violin?” and he said: “Of course!” and then I said: “That’s good, I couldn’t before!”‘
   Joffy stared at me blank-faced. ‘SpecOps Christmas parties must be a riot, sis. You should get out more. That’s probably the worst joke I’ve ever heard.’
   Joffy could be infuriating at times, but he probably had a point—although I wasn’t going to let him know it. So I said instead: ‘Bollocks to you, then.’
   That did make him laugh.
   ‘You were always so serious, sis. Ever since you were a little girl. I remember you sitting in the living room staring at the News at Ten, soaking in every fact and asking Dad and the Brainbox a million questions—Hello, Mrs Higgins!’
   We had just met an old lady coming through the lichgate carrying a bunch of flowers.
   ‘Hello, Irreverend!’ she replied jovially, then looked at me and said in a hoarse whisper: ‘Is this your girlfriend?’
   ‘No, Gladys—this is my sister, Thursday. She’s SpecOps and consequently doesn’t have a sense of humour, a boyfriend, or a life.’
   ‘That’s nice, dear,’ said Mrs Higgins, who was clearly quite deaf, despite her large ears.
   ‘Hello, Gladys,’ I said, shaking her by the hand. ‘Joffy here used to bash the bishop so much when he was a boy we all thought he would go blind.’
   ‘Good, good,’ she muttered.
   Joffy, not to be outdone, added: ‘And little Thursday here made so much noise during sex that we had to put her in the garden shed whenever her boyfriends stayed the night.’
   I elbowed him in the ribs but Mrs Higgins didn’t notice; she smiled benignly, wished us both a pleasant day, and teetered off into the churchyard. We watched her go.
   ‘A hundred and four next March,’ murmured Joffy. ‘Amazing, isn’t she? When she goes I’m thinking of having her stuffed and placed in the porch as a hatstand.’
   ‘Now I know you’re joking.’
   He smiled.
   ‘I don’t have a serious bone in my body, sis. Come on, I’ll make you that tea.’
   The vicarage was huge. Legend had it that the church’s spire would have been ten feet taller had the incumbent vicar not taken a liking to the stone and diverted it to his own residence. An unholy row broke out with the bishop and the vicar was relieved of his duties. The larger-than-usual vicarage, however, remained.
   Joffy poured some strong tea out of a Clarice Cliff teapot into a matching cup and saucer. He wasn’t trying to impress; the GSD had almost no money and he couldn’t afford to use anything other than what came with the vicarage.
   ‘So,’ said Joffy, placing a teacup in front of me and sitting down on the sofa, ‘do you think Dad’s boffing Emma Hamilton?’
   ‘He never mentioned it. Mind you, if you were having an affair with someone who died over a hundred years ago, would you tell your wife?’
   ‘How about me?’
   ‘How about you what?’
   ‘Does he ever mention me?’
   I shook my head and Joffy was silent in thought for a moment, which is unusual for him.
   ‘I think he wanted me to be in that charge in Ant’s place, sis. Ant was always the favoured son.’
   ‘That’s stupid, Joffy. And even if it were true—‘which it isn’t—there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Ant is gone, finished, dead. Even if you had stayed out there, let’s face it, army chaplains don’t exactly dictate military policy.’
   ‘Then why doesn’t Dad ever come and see me?’
   I shrugged.
   ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a ChronoGuard thing. He rarely visits me unless on business—and never for more than a couple of minutes.’
   Joffy nodded then asked: ‘Have you been attending church in London, sis?’
   ‘I don’t really have the time, Joff.’
   ‘We make time, sis.’
   I sighed. He was right.
   ‘After the charge I kind of lost my faith. SpecOps have chaplains of their own but I just never felt the same about anything.’
   ‘The Crimea took a lot away from all of us,’ said Joffy quietly. ‘Perhaps that is why we have to work twice as hard to hang on to what we have left. Even I was not immune to the passion of the battle. When I first went to the peninsula I was excited by the war—I could feel the insidious hand of nationalism holding me upright and smothering my reason. When I was out there I wanted us to win, to kill the foe. I revelled in the glory of battle and the camaraderie that only conflict can create. No bond is stronger than that welded in conflict; no greater friend is there than the one who stood next to you as you fought.’
   Joffy suddenly seemed that much more human; I presumed this was the side of him his parishioners saw.
   ‘It was only afterwards that I realised the error of what we were doing. Pretty soon I could see no difference between Russian and English, French or Turk. I spoke out and was banned from the front line in case I sowed disharmony. My bishop told me that it was not my place to judge the errors of the conflict, but to look after the spiritual wellbeing of the men and women.’
   ‘So that’s why you returned to England?’
   ‘That’s why I returned to England.’
   ‘You’re wrong, you know,’ I told him.
   ‘About what?’
   ‘About not having a serious bone in your body. Did you know Colonel Phelps was in town?’
   ‘I did. What an arse. Someone should poison him. I’m speaking opposite him as “the voice of moderation”. Will you join me at the podium?’
   ‘I don’t know, Joff, really I don’t.’
   I stared at my tea and refused a Hobnob that he offered me.
   ‘Mum keeps the memorial well, doesn’t she?’ I said, desperate to change the subject.
   ‘Oh, it’s not her, Doofus. She couldn’t bear to even walk past the stone—even if she did slim down enough to get through the lichgate.’
   ‘Who, then?’
   ‘Why, Landen, of course. Did he not tell you?’
   I sat up.
   ‘No. No, he didn’t.’
   ‘He might write crap books and be a bit of a dork, but he was a good friend to Anton.’
   ‘But his testimony damned him for ever—!’
   Joffy put his tea down and leaned forward, lowered his voice to a whisper and placed his hand on mine.
   ‘Sister dearest, I know this is an old cliche but it’s true: The first casualty of war is always truth. Landen was trying to redress that.
   Don’t think that he didn’t agonise long and hard over it—it would have been easier to lie and clear Ant’s name. But a small lie always breeds a bigger one. The military can ill afford more than it has already. Landen knew that and so too, I think, did our Anton.’
   I looked up at him thoughtfully. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to Landen but I hoped I would think of something. He had asked me to marry him ten years ago, just before his evidence at the tribunal. I had accused him of attempting to gain my hand by stealth, knowing what my reaction would be following the hearing. I had left for London within the week.
   ‘I think I’d better call him.’
   Joffy smiled.
   ‘Yes, perhaps you’d better—Doofus.’

20. Dr Runcible Spoon

   ‘… Several people have asked me where I find the large quantity of prepositions that I need to keep my Bookworms fit and well. The answer is, of course, that I use omitted prepositions, of which there are a superabundance in the English language. Journey’s end, for instance, has three omitted prepositions: the end of the journey. There are many other examples, too, such as bedside (the side of the bed) and street corner (the corner of the street), and so forth. If I run short I head to my local newspapers, where omitted prepositions can be found in The Toad’s headlines every day. As for the worm’s waste products, these are chiefly composed of apostrophes—something that is becoming a problem—I saw a notice yesterday that read: Cauliflower’s, three shilling’s each… ”

Mycroft Next, writing in the ‘Any questions?’ page of New Splicer magazine


   Bowden and Victor were out when I arrived at the office; I poured myself some coffee and sat down at my desk. I called Landen’s number but it was engaged; I tried a few minutes later but without any luck. Sergeant Ross called from the front desk and said that he was sending someone up who wanted to see a LiteraTec. I twiddled my thumbs for a bit, and had failed to reach Landen a third time when a small, academic-looking man with an overpowering aura of untidiness shambled into the office. He wore a small bowler hat and a herringbone-pattern shooting jacket pulled hastily over what looked like his pyjama top. His briefcase had papers protruding from where he had caught them in the lid and the laces of both his shoes were tied in reef knots. He stared up at me. It was a two-minute walk from the front desk and he was still fumbling with his visitor’s pass.
   ‘Allow me,’ I said.
   The academic stood impassively as I clipped his pass on and then thanked me absently, looking around as he tried to determine where he was.
   ‘You’re looking for me and you’re on the right floor,’ I said, glad that I had had plenty of experience of academics in the past.
   ‘I am?’ he said with great surprise, as though he had long ago accepted that he would always end up in the wrong place.
   ‘Special Operative Thursday Next,’ I said, holding out a hand for him to shake. He shook it weakly and tried to raise his hat with the hand that was holding the briefcase. He gave up and tipped his head instead.
   ‘Er—thank you, Miss Next. My name is Dr Runcible Spoon, Professor of English Literature at Swindon University. I expect you’ve heard of me?’
   ‘I’m sure it was only a matter of time, Dr Spoon. Would you care to sit down?’
   Dr Spoon thanked me and followed me across to my desk, pausing every now and then as a rare book caught his eye. I had to stop and wait a number of times before I had him safely ensconced in Bowden’s chair. I fetched him a cup of coffee.
   ‘So, how can I be of assistance, Dr Spoon?’
   ‘Perhaps I should show you, Miss Next.’
   Spoon rummaged through his case for a minute, taking out some unmarked students’ work and a paisley-patterned sock before finally finding and handing me a heavy blue-bound volume.
   ‘Martin Chuzzlewit,’ explained Dr Spoon, pushing all the papers back into his case and wondering why they had expanded since he took them out.
   ‘Chapter nine, page 187. It is marked.’
   I turned to where Spoon had left his bus pass and scanned the page.
   ‘See what I mean?’
   ‘I’m sorry, Dr Spoon. I haven’t read Chuzzlewit since I was in my teens. You’re going to have to enlighten me.’
   Spoon looked at me suspiciously, wondering if I was, perhaps, an impostor.
   ‘A student pointed it out to me early this morning. I came out as quickly as I could. On the bottom of page 187 there was a short paragraph outlining one of the curious characters who frequent Todger’s, the boarding house. A certain Mr Quaverley by name. He is an amusing character who only converses on subjects that he knows nothing about. If you scan the lines I think you will agree with me that he has vanished.’
   I read the page with growing consternation. The name of Quaverley did ring a bell, but of his short paragraph there appeared to be no sign.
   ‘He doesn’t appear later?’
   ‘No, Officer. My student and I have been through it several times. There is no doubt about it. Mr Quaverley has inexplicably been excised from the book. It is as if he had never been written.’
   ‘Could it be a printing error?’ I asked with a growing sense of unease.
   ‘On the contrary. I have checked seven different copies and they all read exactly the same. Mr Quaverley is no longer with us.’
   ‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ I murmured.
   ‘I agree.’
   I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and several links between Hades, Jack Schitt and the Chuzzlewit manuscript started to form in unpleasant ways in my mind.
   The phone rang. It was Victor. He was at the morgue and requested me to come over straight away; they had discovered a body.
   ‘What’s this to do with me?’ I asked him.
   As Victor spoke I looked over at Dr Spoon, who was staring at a food stain he had discovered on his tie.
   ‘No, on the contrary,’ I replied slowly, ‘considering what has just happened here I don’t think that sounds odd at all.’
   The morgue was an old Victorian building that was badly in need of refurbishment. The interior was musty and smelt of formaldehyde and damp. The employees looked unhealthy and shuffled around the confines of the small building in a funereal manner. The standard joke about Swindon’s morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma. This rule was especially correct when it came to Mr Rumplunkett, the head pathologist. He was a lugubrious-looking man with heavy jowls and eyebrows like thatch. I found him and Victor in the pathology lab.
   Mr Rumplunkett didn’t acknowledge my entrance, but just continued to speak into a microphone hanging from the ceiling, his monotonous voice sounding like a low hum in the tiled room. He had been known to send his transcribers to sleep on quite a few occasions; he even had difficulty staying awake himself when practising speeches to the forensic pathologists’ annual dinner-dance.
   ‘I have in front of me a male European aged about forty with grey hair and poor dentition. He is approximately five foot eight inches tall and dressed in an outfit that I would describe as Victorian…’
   As well as Bowden and Victor there were two homicide detectives present, the ones who had interviewed us the night before. They looked surly and bored and glared at the LiteraTec contingent suspiciously.
   “Morning, Thursday,’ said Victor cheerfully. ‘Remember the Studebaker belonging to Archer’s killer?’
   I nodded.
   ‘Well, our friends in Homicide found this body in the boot.’
   ‘Do we have an ID?’
   ‘Not so far. Have a look at this.’
   He pointed to a stainless-steel tray containing the corpse’s possessions. I sorted through the small collection. There was half a pencil, an unpaid bill for starching collars and a letter from his mother dated 5 June 1843.
   ‘Can we speak in private?’ I said.

   Victor led me into the corridor.
   ‘It’s Mr Quaverley,’ I explained.
   ‘Who?’
   I repeated what Dr Spoon had told me. Victor did not seem surprised in the least.
   ‘I thought he looked like a book person,’ he said at length.
   ‘You mean this has happened before?’
   ‘Did you ever read The Taming of the Shrew?’
   ‘Of course.’
   ‘Well, you know the drunken tinker in the introduction who is made to think he is a lord, and whom they put the play on for?’
   ‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘His name was Christopher Sly. He has a few lines at the end of Act One and that is the last we hear of him…’
   My voice trailed off.
   ‘Exactly,’ said Victor. ‘Six years ago an uneducated drunk who spoke only Elizabethan English was found wandering in a confused state just outside Warwick. He said that his name was Christopher Sly, demanded a drink and was very keen to see how the play turned out. I managed to question him for half an hour, and in that time he convinced me that he was the genuine article—yet he never came to the realisation that he was no longer in his own play.’
   ‘Where is he now?’
   ‘Nobody knows. He was taken for questioning by two unspecified SpecOp’s agents soon after I spoke to him. I tried to find out what happened but you know how secretive SpecOps can be.’
   I thought about my time up at Haworth when I was a small girl.
   ‘What about the other way?’
   Victor looked at me sharply.
   ‘What do you mean?’
   ‘Have you ever heard of anyone jumping in the other direction?’
   Victor looked at the floor and rubbed his nose. ‘That’s pretty radical, Thursday.’
   ‘But do you think it’s possible?’
   ‘Keep this under your hat, Thursday, but I’m beginning to think that it is. The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning. Have you read Dickens’s Dombey and Son?’
   ‘Sure.’
   ‘Remember Mr Glubb?’
   ‘The Brighton fisherman?’
   ‘Correct. Dombey was finished in 1848 and was reviewed extensively with a list of characters in 1851. In that review Mr Glubb was not mentioned.’
   ‘An oversight?’
   ‘Perhaps. In 1926 a collector of antiquarian books named Redmond Bulge vanished while reading Dombey and Son. The incident was widely reported in the press owing to the fact that his assistant had been convinced he saw Bulge “melt into smoke”.’
   ‘And Bulge fits Glubb’s description?’
   ‘Almost exactly. Bulge specialised in collecting stories about the sea and Glubb specialises in telling tales of precisely that. Even Bulge’s name spelt backwards reads “Eglub”, a close enough approximation to Glubb to make us think he made it up himself He sighed. ‘I suppose you think that’s incredible?’
   ‘Not at all,’ I replied, thinking of my own experiences with Rochester, ‘but are you absolutely sure he fell into Dombey and Son?
   ‘What do you mean?’
   ‘He could have made the jump by choice. He might have preferred it—and stayed.’
   Victor looked at me strangely. He hadn’t dared tell anyone about his theories for fear of being ostracised, but here was a respected London LiteraTec nearly half his age going farther than even he had imagined. A thought crossed his mind.
   ‘You’ve done it, haven’t you?’
   I looked him straight in the eye. For this we could both be pensioned off.
   ‘Once,’ I whispered. ‘When I was a very young girl. I don’t think I could do it again. For many years I thought even that was a hallucination.’
   I was going to go farther and tell him about Rochester jumping back after the shooting at Styx’s apartment, but at that moment Bowden put his head into the corridor and asked us to come in.
   Mr Rumplunkett had finished his initial examination.
   ‘One shot through the heart, very clean, very professional. Everything about the body otherwise normal except evidence of rickets in childhood. It’s quite rare these days so it shouldn’t be difficult to trace, unless of course he spent his youth in another country. Very poor dental work and lice. It’s probable he hasn’t had a bath for at least a month. There is not a lot I can tell you except his last meal was suet, mutton and ale. There’ll be more when the tissue samples come back from the lab.’
   Victor and I exchanged looks. I was correct. The corpse had to be Mr Quaverley’s. We all left hurriedly; I explained to Bowden who Quaverley was and where he came from.
   ‘I don’t get it,’ said Bowden as we walked towards the car. ‘How did Hades take Mr Quaverley out of every copy of Chuzzlewit! ’
   ‘Because he went for the original manuscript,’ I answered, ‘for the maximum disruption. All copies anywhere on the planet, in whatever form, originate from that first act of creation. When the original changes, all the others have to change too. If you could go back a hundred million years and change the genetic code of the first mammal, every one of us would be completely different. It amounts to the same thing.’
   ‘Okay,’ said Bowden slowly, ‘but why is Hades doing this? If it was extortion, why kill Quaverley?’
   I shrugged.
   ‘Perhaps it was a warning. Perhaps he has other plans. There are far bigger fish than Mr Quaverley in Martin Chuzzlewit.’
   ‘Then why isn’t he telling us?’

21. Hades & Goliath

   ‘All my life I have felt destiny tugging at my sleeve. Few of us have any real idea what it is we are here to do and when it is that we are to do it. Every small act has a knock-on consequence that goes on to affect those about us in unseen ways. I was lucky that I had so clear a purpose.’

Thursday Next. A Life in SpecOps


   But he was. When we got back a letter was waiting for me at the station. I had hoped it was from Landen but it wasn’t. It bore no stamp and had been left on the desk that morning. No one had seen who delivered it.
   I called Victor over as soon as I had read it, laying the sheet of paper on my desk to avoid touching it any more than I had to. Victor put his spectacles on and read the note aloud.

   Dear Thursday,
   When I heard you had joined the LiteraTec staff I almost believed in divine intervention. It seems that we will at last be able to sort out our differences. Mr Quaverley was just for starters. Martin Chuzzlewit himself is next for the axe unless I get the following: Ј10 million in used notes, a Gainsborough, preferably the one with the boy in blue, an eight-week run of Macbeth for my friend Thomas Hobbes at the Old Vic, and I want you to rename a motorway services ‘Leigh Delamere’ after the mother of an associate. Signal your readiness by a small ad in the Wednesday edition of the Swindon Globe announcing Angora rabbits for sale and I will give you further instructions.

   Victor sat down.
   ‘It’s signed Acheron. Imagine Martin Chuzzlewit without Chuzzlewit!’ he exclaimed earnestly, running through all the possibilities. ‘The book would end within a chapter. Can you imagine the other characters sitting around, waiting for a lead character who never appears? It would be like trying to stage Hamlet without the prince!’
   ‘So what do we do?’ asked Bowden.
   ‘Unless you have a Gainsborough you don’t want and ten million in loose change, we take this to Braxton.’
   Jack Schitt was in Braxton Hicks’s office when we entered. He didn’t offer to leave when we told Hicks it was important and Hicks didn’t ask him to.
   ‘So what’s up?’ asked Braxton, glancing at Schitt, who was practising his putting on the carpet.
   ‘Hades is alive,’ I told him, staring at Jack Schitt, who raised an eyebrow.
   ‘Goodness!’ muttered Schitt in an unconvincing tone. ‘That is a surprise.’
   We ignored him.
   ‘Read this,’ said Victor, handing across Acheron’s note in a cellophane wrapper. Braxton read it before passing it to Schitt.
   ‘Place the ad, Officer Next,’ said Braxton loftily. ‘You seem to have impressed Acheron enough for him to trust you. I’ll speak to my superiors about his demands and you can inform me when he contacts you again.’
   He stood up to let us know that the interview had ended but I stayed seated.
   ‘What’s going on, sir?’
   ‘Classified, Next. We’d like you to make the drop for us but that’s the only way you can be involved in the operation. Mr Schitt has an extremely well-trained squad behind him who will take care of Hades’ capture. Good-day.’
   Still I didn’t rise.
   ‘You’re going to have to tell me more, sir. My uncle is involved, and if you want me to play ball I’m going to have to know what’s happening.’
   Braxton Hicks looked at me and narrowed his eyes.
   ‘I’m afraid—‘
   ‘What the hell,’ interjected Schitt. ‘Tell ‘em.’
   Braxton looked at Schitt, who continued to practise his putting.
   ‘You may have the honour, Schitt,’ said Braxton angrily. ‘It’s your show after all.’
   Schitt shrugged and finished the putt. The ball hit its mark and he smiled.
   ‘Over the last hundred years there has been an inexplicable cross-fertilisation between works of fiction and reality. We know that Mr. Analogy has been investigating the phenomenon for some time, and we know about Mr Glubb and several other characters who have crossed into books. We knew of no one to have returned so we considered it a one-way journey. Christopher Sly changed all that for us.’
   ‘You have him?’ asked Victor.
   ‘No; he went back. Quite of his own accord, although unfortunately because he was so drunk he went back not to Will’s version of The Taming of the Shrew, but to an uneven rendition in one of the Bad Quartos. Melted into thin air one day while under observation.’
   He paused for effect and polished his putter with a large red spotted handkerchief.
   ‘For some time now, the Goliath Advanced Weapons Division has been working on a device that will open a door into a work of fiction. After thirty years of research and untold expenditure, all we have managed to do is synthesise a poor-quality Cheddar from volumes one to eight of The World of Cheese. We knew that Hades was interested, and there was talk of clandestine experiments here in England. When the Chuzzlewit manuscript was stolen and we found that Hades had it, I knew we were on the right track. Your uncle’s kidnapping suggested that he had perfected the machine and the Quaverley extraction proved it. We’ll get Hades, although it’s the machine that we really want.’
   ‘You forget,’ I said slowly, ‘that the machine does not belong to you; knowing my uncle he’d destroy the idea for ever rather than sell out to the military.’
   ‘We know all about Mycroft, Miss Next. He will learn that such a quantum leap in scientific thought should not be the property of a man who is incapable of understanding the true potential of his device. The technology belongs to the nation.’
   ‘You’re wrong,’ I said obstinately, getting up to leave. ‘About as wrong as you can possibly be. Mycroft destroys any machine that he believes might have devastating military potential; if only scientists stopped to think about the possible effects of their discoveries, the planet would be a much safer place for all of us.’
   Schitt clapped his hands slowly.
   ‘Brave speech but spare me the moralising, Next. If you want your fridge-freezer and your car and a nice house and asphalt on the roads and a health service, then thank the weapons business. Thank the war economy that drives us to this and thank Goliath. The Crimea is good, Thursday—good for England and especially good for the economy. You deride the weapons business but without it we’d be a tenth-rate country struggling to maintain a standard of living anywhere near that of our European neighbours. Would you prefer that?’
   ‘At least our conscience would be clear.’
   ‘Naive, Next, very naive.’
   Schitt returned to his golf and Braxton took up the explanation: ‘Officer Next, we are extending all possible support to the Goliath Corporation in these matters. We want you to help us capture Hades. You know him from your college days and he addressed this to you. We’ll agree to his demands and arrange a drop. Then we tail him and arrest him. Simple. Goliath get the Prose Portal, we get the manuscript, your uncle and aunt are freed, and SpecOps 5 get Hades. Everyone gets something so everyone is happy. So for now, we sit tight and wait for news of the drop.’
   ‘I know the rules on giving in to extortionists as well as you do, sir. Hades is not one to try and fool.’
   ‘It won’t come to that,’ replied Hicks. ‘We’ll give him the money and nab him long before he gets away. I have complete confidence in Schitt’s operatives.’
   ‘With every respect, sir, Acheron is smarter and tougher than you can possibly imagine. We should do this on our own. We don’t need Schitt’s hired guns blasting off in all directions.’
   ‘Permission denied, Next. You’ll do as I tell you, or you’ll do nothing. I think that’s all.’
   I should have been more angry but I wasn’t. There had been no surprises—Goliath never compromised. And when there are no surprises, it’s harder to get riled. We would have to work with what we were given.

   When we got back to the office I called Landen again. This time a woman answered; I asked to speak to him.
   ‘He’s asleep,’ she said shortly.
   ‘Can you wake him?’ I asked. ‘It’s kind of important.’
   ‘No, I can’t. Who are you?’
   ‘It’s Thursday Next.’
   The woman gave a small snigger that I didn’t like.
   ‘He told me all about you, Thursday.’
   She said it disdainfully; I took an instant dislike to her.
   ‘Who is this?’
   ‘This is Daisy Mutlar, darling, Landy’s fiancee.’
   I leaned back in my chair slowly and closed my eyes. This couldn’t be happening. No wonder Landen asked me as a matter of some urgency if I was going to forgive him.
   ‘Changed your mind, have you, sweetheart?’ asked Daisy in a mocking tone. ‘Landen’s a good man. He waited nearly ten years for you but I’m afraid now he’s in love with me. Perhaps if you’re lucky we’ll send you some cake, and if you want to send a present, the wedding list is down at Camp Hopson.’
   I forced down a lump in my throat.
   ‘When’s the happy day?’
   ‘For you or for me?’ Daisy laughed. ‘For you, who knows? As for me, darling Landy and I are going to be Mr and Mrs Parke-Laine two weeks on Saturday.’
   ‘Let me speak to him,’ I demanded, my voice rising.
   ‘I might tell him you called when he wakes up.’
   ‘Do you want me to come round and bang on the door?’ I asked, my voice rising further. Bowden looked at me from the other side of the desk with an arched eyebrow.
   ‘Listen here, you stupid bitch,’ said Daisy in a hushed tone in case Landen heard, ‘you could have married Landen and you blew it. It’s all over. Go and find some geeky LiteraTec or something—from what I’ve seen all you SpecOps clowns are a bunch of weirdos.’
   ‘Now just you listen to—‘
   ‘No,’ snapped Daisy. ‘You listen. If you try anything at all to interfere with my happiness I’ll wring your stupid little neck!’
   The phone went dead. I quietly returned the receiver to its cradle and took my coat from the back of the chair.
   ‘Where are you going?’ asked Bowden.
   ‘The shooting range,’ I replied, ‘and I may be some time.’

22. The waiting game

   ‘To Hades, the loss of every Felix brought back the sadness of the first Felix’s death. On that occasion it had been a terrible blow; not only the loss of a trusted friend and colleague in crime, but also the terrible realisation that the alien emotions of loss he had felt betrayed his half-human ancestry, something he abhorred. It was little wonder that he and the first Felix had got on so well. Like Hades, Felix was truly debased and amoral. Sadly for Felix, he did not share any of Hades’ more demonic attributes and had stopped a bullet in the stomach the day that he and Hades attempted to rob the Goliath Bank at Hartlepool in 1975. Felix accepted his death stoically, urging his friend to “carry on the good work” before Hades quietly put him out of his pain. Out of respect for his friend’s memory he removed Felix’s face and carried it with him away from the crime scene. Every servant expropriated from the public since then had been given the dubious honour not only of being named after Acheron’s one true friend, but also of wearing his features.’

Millon de Floss. Life after Death for Felix Tabularasa


   Bowden placed the ad in the Swindon Globe. It was two days before we all sat down in Victor’s office to compare notes.
   ‘We’ve had seventy-two calls,’ announced Victor. ‘Sadly, all enquiries about rabbits.’
   ‘You did price them kind of low, Bowden,’ I put in playfully.
   ‘I am not very conversant in matters concerning rabbits,’ asserted Bowden loftily. ‘It seemed a fair price to me.’
   Victor placed a file on the table. ‘The police finally got an ID on that guy you shot over at Sturmey Archer’s. He had no fingerprints and you were right about his face, Thursday—it wasn’t his own.’
   ‘So who was he?’
   Victor opened the file.
   ‘He was an accountant from Newbury named Adrian Smarts. Went missing two years ago. No criminal record; not so much as a speeding fine. He was a good person. Family man, churchgoer and enthusiastic charity worker.’
   ‘Hades stole his will,’ I muttered. ‘The cleanest souls are the easiest to soil. There wasn’t much left of Smarts by the time we shot him. What about the face?’
   ‘They’re still working on that. It might be harder to identify. According to forensic reports Smarts wasn’t the only person to wear that face.’
   I started.
   ‘So who’s to say he’ll be the last?’
   Victor guessed my concern, picked up the phone and called Hicks. Within twenty minutes an SO-14 squad had surrounded the funeral parlour where Smarts’s body had been released to his family. They were too late. The face that Smarts had been wearing for the past two years had been stolen. Security cameras, unsurprisingly, had seen nothing.
   The news of Landen’s upcoming wedding had hit me pretty badly. I found out later that Daisy Mutlar was someone he met at a book signing over a year earlier. She was pretty and beguiling, apparently, but a bit overweight, I thought. She had no great mind either, or at least, that’s what I told myself. Landen had said he wanted a family and I guessed he deserved one. In coming to terms with this I had even begun reacting positively to Bowden’s sorry attempts to ask me out to dinner. We didn’t have much in common, except for an interest in who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I stared across the desk at him as he studied a small scrap of paper—with a disputed signature scrawled upon it. The paper was original and so was the ink. The writing, sadly, was not.
   ‘Go on, then,’ I said, recalling our last conversation when we were having lunch together, ‘tell me about Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford.’
   Bowden looked thoughtful for a moment.
   ‘The Earl of Oxford was a writer, we can be sure of that. Meres, a critic of the time, mentioned as much in his Palladis Tamia of 1598.’
   ‘Could he have written the plays?’ I asked.
   ‘He could have,’ replied Bowden. ‘The trouble is, Meres also goes on to list many of Shakespeare’s plays and credits Shakespeare with them. Sadly that places Oxford, like Derby and Bacon, into the front-man theory, according to which we have to believe that Will was just the beard for greater geniuses now hidden from history.’
   ‘Is that hard to believe?’
   ‘Perhaps not. The Red Queen used to believe four impossible things before breakfast and it didn’t seem to do her any harm. The front-man theory is possible, but there’re a few more things in favour of Oxford as Shakespeare.’
   There was a pause. The authorship of the plays was something that a lot of people took very seriously, and many fine minds had spent lifetimes on the subject.
   ‘The theory goes that Oxford and a group of courtiers were employed by the court of Queen Elizabeth to produce plays in support of the government. In this there seems some truth.’
   He opened a book and read from an underlined passage.
   ‘“A crew of courtly makers, noblemen and Gentlemen, who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble Gentleman, the Earl of Oxford.”‘
   He snapped the book shut.
   ‘Puttenham in 1598. Oxford was given an annual grant of a thousand pounds for just such a purpose, although whether this was for writing the plays or another quite different project it is impossible to tell. There is no positive evidence that it was he who actually penned the plays. A few lines of poetry similar to Shakespeare’s do survive, but it’s not conclusive; neither is the lion shaking a spear on Oxford’s coat of arms.’
   ‘And he died in 1604,’ I said.
   ‘Yes, there is that. Front-man theories just don’t seem to work. If you think Shakespeare might have been a nobleman anxious to remain anonymous, I should forget it. If someone else did write the plays I should be looking at another Elizabethan commoner, a man of quite staggering intellect, daring and charisma.’
   ‘Kit Marlowe?’ I asked.
   ‘The same.’
   There was a commotion on the other side of the office. Victor slammed down the phone and beckoned us over.
   ‘That was Schitt; Hades has been in touch. He wants us in Hicks’s office in half an hour.’

23. The drop

   ‘I was to make the drop. I’d never held a case containing Ј 10 million before. In fact, I wasn’t then and never have. Jack Schitt, in his arrogance, had assumed he would capture Hades long before he got to look at the money. What a sap. The Gainsborough’s paint was barely dry and the English Shakespeare Company weren’t playing ball. The only part of Acheron’s deal that had been honoured was the changing of the motorway services’ name. Kington St Michael was now Leigh Delamare.’

Thursday Next. A Life in SpecOps


   Braxton Hicks outlined the plan to us soon after—there was an hour to go until the drop. This was Jack Schitt’s way of ensuring that none of us tried to make our own plans. In every way this was a Goliath operation—myself, Bowden and Victor were only there to add credibility in case Hades was watching. The drop was at a redundant railway bridge; the only ways in were by two roads and the disused railway line, which was only passable in a four-by-four. Goliath men were to cover both roads and the railway track. They were ordered to let him in, but not out. It all seemed pretty straightforward—on paper.
   The ride out to the disused railway line was uneventful, although the phoney Gainsborough took up more room in the Speedster than I had imagined. Schitt’s men were well hidden; Bowden and I didn’t see a single soul as we drove to the deserted spot.
   The bridge was still in good condition, even though it had long since ceased to function. I parked the car a little way off and walked alone to the bridge. The day was fine, and there was barely a sound in the air. I looked over the parapet but couldn’t see anything remiss, just the large aggregate bed, slightly undulated where the sleepers had been pulled up all those years ago. Small shrubs grew among the stones, and next to the track was a deserted signal box from where I could just see the top half of a periscope watching me. I assumed it to be one of Schitt’s men and looked at my watch. It was time.
   The muffled sound of a wireless beeping caught my attention. I cocked my head and tried to figure out where it was coming from.
   ‘I can hear a wireless beeping,’ I said into my walkie-talkie.
   ‘It’s not one of ours,’ responded Schitt from the control base in a deserted farmhouse a quarter of a mile away. ‘I suggest you find it.’
   The wireless was wrapped in plastic and stashed in the branches of a tree on the other side of the road. It was Hades and it was a bad line—it sounded as though he was in a car somewhere.
   ‘Thursday?’
   ‘Here.’
   ‘Alone?’
   ‘Yes.’
   ‘How are you? I’m sorry I had to do what I did but you know how desperate we psychopaths get.’
   ‘Is my uncle okay?’
   ‘In the pink, dear girl. Enjoying himself tremendously; such an intellect, you know, but so very vague. With his mind and my drive I could rule the globe instead of resorting to all this banal extortion.’
   ‘You can finish it now,’ I told him. Hades ignored me and carried on:
   ‘Don’t try anything heroic, Thursday. As you must have guessed, I have the Chuzzlewit manuscript and I’m not afraid to disrupt it.’
   ‘Where are you?’
   ‘Tut, tut, Thursday, who do you think you’re talking to? We’ll discuss terms for your uncle’s release just as soon as I have my money. You’ll see on the parapet a karabiner attached to a length of wire. Place the money and the Gainsborough on the parapet and clip them on. Once that’s done I’ll come and pick them up. Until we meet again, Miss Thursday Next!’
   I repeated to the others what he had said. They told me to do as I was told.
   I placed the Gladstone with the money on the parapet and attached it to the Gainsborough. I walked back to the car, sat on the bonnet and watched Hades’ booty intently. Ten minutes went by, then half an hour. I asked Victor for advice but he just told me to stay where I was.
   The sun became hotter and the flies buzzed merrily around the hedgerows. I could smell the faint odour of freshly turned hay and hear far off the gentle thrum of traffic. It looked as though Hades was just testing us, a not unusual occurrence in the delicate task of paying ransoms. When the Poet Writer General was kidnapped five years previously it had taken nine attempts before the ransom was successfully delivered. In the event the PWG was returned unharmed; it turned out that he had engineered the whole thing himself to boost flagging sales of his decidedly lame autobiography.
   I got bored and walked up to the parapet again, ignoring Schitt’s request to back off. I toyed with the karabiner and absently followed the thin high-tensile cable that had been hidden in the brickwork. I traced its course to the loose soil at the base of the parapet, where it led off the bridge. I pulled it up slowly and found it attached to a bungee cord, coiled like a snake beneath some dried grass. Intrigued, I traced the bungee back to another length of high-tensile braided cable. This was taped carefully to a telegraph pole and then stretched ten feet above my head in a large double loop to another pole at the far end of the bridge. I frowned as the low growl of an engine made me turn. I couldn’t see anything but the engine was definitely coming towards me, and quite quickly. I looked along the gravel bed of the old railway, expecting to see a four-wheel-drive, but there was nothing. The noise of the approaching engine increased dramatically as a light aircraft appeared from behind an embankment, where it had obviously flown in low to avoid detection.
   ‘Plane!’ I shouted into my walkie-talkie. ‘They’ve got a plane!’ Then the firing began. It was impossible to say who started it, or even where it came from, but in an instant the quiet countryside was filled with the sharp, directionless crackle of small-arms fire. I ducked instinctively as several rounds hit the parapet, throwing up a shower of red brick dust. I pulled out my automatic and released the safety as the plane passed overhead. I recognised it as the sort of high-wing observation planes they used in the Crimea for artillery spotting; the side door had been removed and sitting half out of the plane with one foot on the wing strut was Acheron. He was holding a light machinegun and was blazing away quite happily at everything he could see. He peppered the dilapidated signal box and the Goliath men returned fire with equal enthusiasm; I could already see several holes open up in the plane’s fabric. Behind the plane, swinging in the slipstream, trailed a grapnel hook. As it passed over, the hook caught the wire strung between the telegraph poles and whisked off the Gladstone bag and the painting, the bungee cord taking the initial strain out of the pick-up. I jumped up and started to fire at the retreating plane, but it banked steeply away and dived behind the embankment, the bag and the Gainsborough flapping dangerously on the end of the rope. To delay now would definitely mean losing them and maybe the last real chance to catch Hades, so I sprinted to the car and reversed out in a shower of earth and small stones. Bowden clung on grimly and reached for his seat belt.
   But the aeroplane had not quite finished with us. The small craft went into a shallow dive to gain more airspeed then pulled up into a near vertical left bank, the port wingtip scraping through the top of a large beech as the pilot turned back towards us. A Studebaker full of Goliath men had set off after the aircraft but braked violently as the aeroplane came skidding towards them, the pilot booting full left rudder to allow Acheron a better view of his target. The black car was soon a mass of small bullet holes and it swung into a ditch. I stamped on the brakes as another Studebaker pulled in front of me. It too was peppered by Acheron and careered into a low wall approaching the bridge. The aircraft flew on over me, the Gainsborough now so low that it banged on the bonnet of my car, the rattle of gunfire now only weakly returned by Schitt’s men.
   I pressed hard on the accelerator and drove off in pursuit of the aircraft, past the two shattered cars and over the bridge. There was a straight road ahead of us and Hades’ plane was labouring against a slight headwind; with a bit of luck we might catch them. At the end of the straight there was a fork and a gated entry to a field straight on. The plane carried straight on. Bowden looked at me nervously.
   ‘Which way?’ he yelled.
   In answer I pulled out my automatic, aimed it at the gate and fired. The first two shots missed but the next three hit their mark; the hinges shattered and the gate collapsed as I bounced into the field, which happened to be populated by a herd of bemused cows. The plane droned on, and while not exactly gaining on it we did at least seem to be keeping up.