A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (13 page)

. . . This morning Thursday Next joined the Litera Tec office in place of Crometty. I cannot help thinking that she is particularly unsuited to this area of work and I have my doubts as to whether she is as sane as she thinks she is. She has many demons, old and new, and I wonder whether Swindon is quite the right place to try and exorcise them . . .

From Bowden Cable's diary

T
HE
S
WINDON
SpecOps headquarters were shared with the local police; the typically brusque and no-nonsense Germanic design had been built during the Occupation as a law court. It was big too, which was just as well. The way into the building was protected by metal detectors, and once I had shown my ID I walked into the large entrance hall. Officers and civilians with identity tags walked briskly amid the loud hubbub of the station. I was jostled once or twice in the throng and made a few greetings to old faces before fighting my way to the front desk. When I got there, I found a man in a white baggy shirt and breeches remonstrating with the sergeant. The officer just stared at him. He'd heard it all before.

“Name?” asked the desk sergeant wearily.

“John Milton.”

“
Which
John Milton?”

John Milton sighed.

“Four hundred and ninety-six.”

The sergeant made a note in his book.

“How much did they take?”

“Two hundred in cash and all my credit cards.”

“Have you notified your bank?”

“Of course.”

“And you think your assailant was a Percy Shelley?”

“Yes,” replied the Milton. “He handed me this pamphlet on rejecting current religious dogma before he ran off.”

“Hello, Ross,” I said.

The sergeant looked at me, paused for a moment and then broke into a huge grin.

“Thursday! They told me you'd be coming back! Told me you made it all the way to SO-5 too.”

I returned his smile. Ross had been the desk sergeant when I had first joined the Swindon police.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Starting up a regional office? SO-9 or something? Add a touch of spice to tired old Swindon?”

“Not exactly. I've transferred into the Litera Tec office.”

A look of doubt crossed Ross's face but he quickly hid it.

“Great!” he enthused, slightly uneasily. “Drink later?”

I agreed happily, and after getting directions to the Litera Tec office, left Ross arguing with Milton 496.

I took the winding stair to the upper floor and then followed directions to the far end of the building. The entire west wing was filled with SpecOps or their regional departments. The Environmental SpecOps had an office here, as did Art Theft and the ChronoGuard. Even Spike had an office up here, although he was rarely seen in it; he preferred a dark and rather fetid
lockup in the basement car park. The corridor was packed with bookcases and filing cabinets; the old carpet had almost worn through in the center. It was a far cry from the LiteraTec office in London, where we had enjoyed the most up-to-date information retrieval systems. At length I reached the correct door and knocked. I didn't receive an answer so I walked straight in.

The room was like a library from a country home somewhere. It was two stories high, with shelves crammed full of books covering every square inch of wall space. A spiral staircase led to a catwalk which ran around the wall, enabling access to the upper shelves. The middle of the room was open plan with desks laid out much like a library's reading room. Every possible surface and all the floor space were piled high with more books and papers, and I wondered how they managed to get anything done at all. About five officers were at work, but they didn't seem to notice me come in. A phone rang and a young man picked it up.

“Litera Tec office,” he said in a polite voice. He winced as a tirade came down the phone line to him.

“I'm very sorry if you didn't like
Titus Andronicus,
madam,” he said at last, “but I'm afraid it's got nothing to do with us— perhaps you should stick to the comedies in future.”

I could see Victor Analogy looking through a file with another officer. I walked to where he could see me and waited for him to finish.

“Ah, Next! Welcome to the office. Give me a moment, will you?”

I nodded and Victor carried on.

“. . . I think Keats would have used less flowery prose than this and the third stanza is slightly clumsy in its construction. My feeling is that it's a clever fake, but check it against the Verse Meter Analyzer.”

The officer nodded and walked off. Victor smiled at me and shook my hand.

“That was Finisterre. He looks after poetry forgery of the nineteenth century. Let me show you around.”

He waved a hand in the direction of the bookshelves.

“Words are like leaves, Thursday. Like people really, fond of their own society.”

He smiled.

“We have over a billion words here. Reference mainly. A good collection of major works and some minor ones that you won't even find in the Bodleian. We've got a storage facility in the basement. That's full as well. We need new premises but the Litera Tecs are a bit underfunded, to say the least.”

He led me around one of the desks to where Bowden was sitting bolt upright, his jacket carefully folded across the back of his chair and his desk so neat as to be positively obscene.

“Bowden you've met. Fine fellow. He's been with us for twelve years and concentrates on nineteenth-century prose. He'll be showing you the ropes. That's your desk over there.”

He paused for a moment, staring at the cleared desk. I was not supernumerary. One of their number had died recently and I was replacing him. Filling a dead man's shoes, sitting in a dead man's chair. Beyond the desk sat another officer, who was looking at me curiously.

“That's Fisher. He'll help you out with anything you want to know about legal copyright and contemporary fiction.”

Fisher was a stocky man with an odd squint who appeared to be wider than he was tall. He looked up at me and grinned, revealing something left over from breakfast stuck between his teeth.

Victor carried on walking to the next desk.

“Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose and poetry are looked after by Helmut Bight, kindly lent to us by our opposite
number across the water. He came here to sort out a problem with some poorly translated Goethe and became embroiled with a neo-Nazi movement attempting to set Friedrich Nietzsche up as a fascist saint.”

Herr Bight was about fifty and looked at me suspiciously. He wore a suit but had removed his tie in the heat.

“SO-5, eh?” asked Herr Bight, as though it were a form of venereal disease.

“I'm SO-27 just like you,” I replied quite truthfully. “Eight years in the London office under Boswell.”

Bight picked up an ancient-looking volume in a faded pigskin binding and passed it across to me.

“What do you make of this?”

I took the dusty tome in my hand and looked at the spine.

“The Vanity of Human Wishes,”
I read. “Written by Samuel Johnson and published in 1749, the first work to appear in his own name.”

I opened the book and flicked through the yellowed pages. “First edition. It would be very valuable, if—”

“If?—” repeated Bight.

I sniffed the paper and ran a finger across the page and then tasted it. I looked along the spine and tapped the cover, finally dropping the heavy volume on the desk with a thump.

“—if it were real.”

“I'm impressed, Miss Next,” admitted Herr Bight. “You and I must discuss Johnson some time.”

“It wasn't as difficult as it looked,” I had to admit. “Back in London we've got two pallet-loads of forged Johnsonia like this with a street value of over three hundred thousand pounds.”

“London
too?
” exclaimed Bight in surprise. “We've been after this gang for six months; we thought they were local.”

“Call Boswell at the London office; he'll help in any way he can. Just mention my name.”

Herr Bight picked up the phone and asked the operator for a number. Victor guided me over to one of the many frosted-glass doors leading off the main chamber into side offices. He opened the door a crack to reveal two officers in shirtsleeves who were interviewing a man dressed in tights and an embroidered jacket.

“Malin and Sole look after all crimes regarding Shakespeare.”

He shut the door.

“They keep an eye on forgery, illegal dealing and overtly free thespian interpretations. The actor in with them was Graham Huxtable. He was putting on a felonious one-man performance of
Twelfth Night
. Persistent offender. He'll be fined and bound over. His Malvolio is
truly
frightful.”

He opened the door to another side office. A pair of identical twins were operating a large computing engine. The room was uncomfortably hot from the thousands of valves, and the clicking of relays was almost deafening. This was the only piece of modern technology that I had seen so far in the office.

“These are the Forty brothers, Jeff and Geoff. The Fortys operate the Verse Meter Analyzer. It breaks down any prose or poem into its components—words, punctuation, grammar and so forth—then compares that literary signature with a specimen of the target writer in its own memory. Eighty-nine percent accuracy. Very useful for spotting forgeries. We had what purported to be a page of an early draft of
Antony and Cleopatra
. It was rejected on the grounds that it had too many verbs per unit paragraph.”

He closed the door.

“That's all of us. The man in overall charge of Swindon SpecOps is Commander Braxton Hicks. He's answerable to the Regional Commander based in Salisbury. He leaves us alone most of the time, which is the way we like it. He also likes to
see any new operatives the morning they arrive, so I suggest you go and have a word. He's in room twenty-eight down the corridor.”

We retraced our steps back to my desk. Victor wished me well again and then disappeared to consult with Helmut about some pirate copies of
Doctor Faustus
that had appeared on the market with the endings rewritten to be happy.

I sat down in my chair and opened the desk drawer. There was nothing in it; not so much as a pencil shaving. Bowden was watching me.

“Victor emptied it the morning after Crometty's murder.”

“James Crometty,” I murmured. “Suppose you tell me about him?”

Bowden picked up a pencil and tried to balance it on its sharp end.

“Crometty worked mainly in nineteenth-century prose and poetry. He was an excellent officer but excitable. He had little time for procedure. He vanished one evening when he said he had a tip-off about a rare manuscript. We found him a week later in the abandoned Raven public house on Morgue Road. They had shot him six times in the face.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“I've lost friends before,” said Bowden, his voice never wavering from the measured pace of speech he used, “but he was a close friend and colleague and I would gladly have taken his place.”

He rubbed his nose slightly; it was the only sign of outward emotion that he had shown.

“I consider myself a spiritual man, Miss Next, although I am not religious. By spiritual I merely mean that I feel I have good in my soul and am inclined to follow the correct course of action given a prescribed set of circumstances. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Having said that, I would still be
very
keen to end the life of the person who did this foul deed. I have been practicing on the range and now carry a pistol full time; look—”

“Show me later, Mr. Cable. Do you have any leads?”

“None. Nothing at all. We don't know who he was seeing or why. I have contacts over at Homicide; they have nothing either.”

“Being shot six times in the face is the mark of a person with a gleeful passion for the undertaking of their duties,” I told him. “Even if Crometty had been carrying a gun I don't think it would have made much difference.”

“You could be right,” sighed Bowden. “I can't think of a single time that a pistol has been drawn on a Litera Tec investigation.”

I agreed. Ten years ago in London it had been the same. But big business and the huge amounts of cash in the sale and distribution of literary works had attracted a bigger criminal element. I knew of at least four London Litera Tecs who had died in the line of duty.

“It's becoming more violent out there. It's not like it is in the movies. Did you hear about the surrealist riot in Chichester last night?”

“I certainly did,” he replied. “I can see Swindon involved in similar disturbances before too long. The art college nearly had a riot on its hands last year when the governors dismissed a lecturer who had been secretly encouraging students to embrace abstract expressionism. They wanted him charged under the Interpretation of the Visual Medium Act. He fled to Russia, I think.”