A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (21 page)

“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?”

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 onto affect those about us in unseen ways. I was lucky that I had so clear a purpose.

THURSDAY NEXT
—
A Life in SpecOps

B
UT 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 ax unless I get the following: £10 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
Delamare” 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 practicing 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's 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 practice his putting.

“
You
may have the honor, 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-fertilization 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 synthesize 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 forever 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 moralizing, 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 neighbors. 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 gets the Prose Portal, we get the manuscript, your uncle and aunt are freed, and SpecOps-5 gets 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
fiancée.
”

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 around 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 Litera Tec 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.”

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 realization 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 honor 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

B
OWDEN 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 inquiries 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 parlor 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 onto 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 White Queen used to believe six 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 favor 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.”