Falling Sideways

Tom Holt
was born in London in 1961. At Oxford he studied bar billiards, ancient Greek agriculture and the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines; interests which led him, perhaps inevitably, to qualify as a solicitor and emigrate to Somerset, where he specialised in death and taxes for seven years before going straight in 1995. Now a full-time writer, he lives in Chard, Somerset, with his wife, one daughter and the unmistakable scent of blood, wafting in on the breeze from the local meat-packing plant.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © Tom Holt 2002

Cover illustration by Ben Sharpe. Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First US e-book edition: September 2012

ISBN: 978-0-316-23346-0

In memory of

DAVID GRANT POTTER

(1947 – 2001)

– And thanks for all the fish.

CHAPTER ONE

H
er name was Philippa Levens, fifth marchioness of Ipswich; and as she smiled at him, her eyes were as clear and bright and brown as they'd been on the day she died, wearing her fire like a bridal veil, on the seventeenth of June 1602. She knew him better than anyone, he was convinced of that, and if only he could reach out and pull her through the glass—

He felt the rope brush against his knee, and pulled himself together. A few millimetres further and he'd have set off the alarm, again; and after the last time, he didn't want to do that. He took a long step back – it felt like a betrayal – and looked up at her again, but somehow the closeness between them had dissipated. She was disappointed in him.

(A middle-aged couple walked up behind him and stopped to look at the painting. He didn't want to resent them, but he did. English people seem to have difficulty telling the difference between art galleries and zoos; they don't often try to feed the pictures with bananas, but only because they know it wouldn't be allowed. English people are only comfortable in the presence of unruly, uncivilised things like animals or art if they know there's a sheet of toughened glass in the way, to stop the predators from getting out. The idea that they're the ones in the cage, or the frame, doesn't seem to have occurred to them yet.)

Ironically, it had been his mother (‘David, isn't it about time you found yourself a nice girl . . . ?') who'd introduced them, twenty-one years ago, on his twelfth birthday. That was his mother's idea of a birthday treat; dragging round some dreary old art gallery, followed by tea and stale Black Forest gateau in the gallery café. They'd only stopped in front of Philippa because Mum wanted to get a bit of gravel out of her shoe.

‘That's a nice one,' he'd said.

‘What?' Mum had looked up, a shoe in her hand. ‘Yes, dear. Willem de Stuivens, Dutch school. Quite derivative, of course.'

He'd neither known nor cared what she'd meant by that. He'd been too busy staring at the perfect heart-shaped face of the young girl in the picture. It wasn't a very good painting; the enormous dress was flat and unconvincing, giving him the impression of one of those fairground stalls where you have your photograph taken sticking your head and hands through a big plywood cut-out of the Fat Lady. She – the girl – seemed to think so too, or at least her smile, or grin, or smirk, suggested that she knew perfectly well that her body had come out two-dimensional, and that the joke was on Willem de Whatsisname, not her.

And then she'd stuck her tongue out at him.

It had happened just as he was turning away, and he'd only caught a fleeting glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye. He'd frozen and burned with shame – he had, after all, only that day turned twelve and had just fallen in love for the first time – and he hadn't dared look back; and then Mum had put her shoe back on and said they'd better be getting a move on, they still had rooms fifteen to twenty-six to do before lunch, and they'd been parted, before he'd even had a chance to look at the label on the wall and find out her name.

So, here he was again, twenty-one birthdays later, and here she still was. She was exactly the same, of course; he wasn't. He was very self-conscious about that. It was his thirty-third birthday and already he had a bald spot on the top of his head and a little round tummy like a hobbit, and a quiet voice at the back of his mind was pointing out (sounding ever so faintly like his mother) that it wasn't fair to expect her to wait for him for ever . . . His birthday, traditionally the point in the year when he should be taking stock of his life, considering the path he'd come by and the road ahead; also, by a coincidence so huge it blotted out the sun, the day when a lock of hair, reputed to be that of the notorious seventeenth-century witch Pippa Levens, was due to go under the hammer at Larraby's, five hundred yards down the road from the gallery.

So: he took a step forward, as close to the rope and the invisible infra-red barrier as he dared to go, and looked her squarely in the eye.

‘Shall I?' he asked.

She grinned at him. It's well known that some paintings have eyes that follow you round the room. Pippa Levens had a grin that followed him everywhere, like a butcher's dog, and it was never the same grin twice.

‘Well?' he said, feeling just a little annoyed. The guard by the door turned her head and looked at him.

Of course, he should have known better than to expect a straight answer. He looked away and, as he did so, noticed something for the first time. It was curious, maybe just a trick of the light or a fluke of incidence and refraction, but the painting to the left of Pippa was clearly reflected in the glass of the big display cabinet in the middle of the room, and so was the big, heavy battle scene to her right. He could make out quite a lot of fine detail in both reflections – the horses and the cannon of the battle, the little squashed-looking bird on the hand of the chubby baroness – but Pippa wasn't there, just her frame and a gleaming, smeary blue glow.

He turned round and looked at her one more time. Now her grin was mocking him, telling him that she'd known all along that he didn't have the nerve for a stunt like this; that it was all right, she understood, because it'd be a pretty wild thing to do. Remarkable, this ability she had to burn him up with embarrassment and shame; maybe because, in all his thirty-three years, he'd never found such an accurate mirror as Pippa's glass

He had, of course, made his decision.

Bloody nerve, he thought. Even if she is over four hundred years old, a witch and quite definitively dead, she's got no right to go smirking at me like that, like I'm something small and wriggly she found in a rock-pool.

Now she was laughing at him for getting upset. That was the trouble with her knowing him so well: she could read him at a glance. The one thing he'd never been able to figure out, after all these years and all these visits, was whether she actually liked him.

There was only one way to find that out; and if he hung around here much longer, that one opportunity could easily be gone for ever. What if someone else got the lock of hair – some American, or a museum? Short of burglary (he wasn't cut out for burglary) he'd never have this chance again. At the very least, he had to buy the hair; once he'd got it, safely and permanently his, he could make up his mind about the rest of it later.

He looked up at the painting. Just for once, was she actually smiling now, with approval? He couldn't really see for looking. ‘Just stay there,' he said, ‘I'll be back.'

It cost him twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds, exclusive of buyer's premium and VAT. Just as he'd feared, there had been an American,
and
a museum, and they'd clung on like piranhas. It was the first time he'd bought anything in an auction. Probably the worst two hours of his life.

It was just as well that he'd got the necessary money (plus buyer's premium and VAT). Fortunately, one side effect of having fallen hopelessly in love with a dead witch at the age of twelve was that he'd never bothered with girls, parties, people his own age, a life or any of that stuff, which only left work and sleep. He'd got into computers simply because he seemed to have an affinity with bright things on the other side of a pane of glass, and now for the first time in his life he'd actually wanted something, and he'd been able to buy it. So that was all right.

Apparently, you couldn't just pick up what you'd bought and go home with it. You had to wait till the whole auction was over, though you were allowed to leave before the end. The man who'd come over and taken his credit details told him they'd probably all be through by four; that left him with two hours to kill. For some reason he didn't feel like going back to the gallery. He knew he'd feel embarrassed facing her. She'd grin at him (‘You spent fifteen thousand pounds on a few bits of old hair? You must be . . .') and he couldn't bear the thought of that. Crazy as a barrelful of ferrets, he muttered to himself, and went for a beer.

The nearest pub to Larraby's was the Blue Boar in New Row. He sat down at a table under the window; through the glass he could see the back door of Larraby's in one direction, and the roof of the building two doors down from the gallery in the other. The beer was authentic, had a silly name, and tasted as if something leprous had died in it several years earlier. He looked at his watch.