Nothing But Blue Skies (10 page)

‘You take your time,' Gordon said. ‘After all, if an impossible thing's worth failing to do, it's worth failing to do properly.'

Neville gave him a poisonous look and opened a drawer in his desk, from which he took a little net of the kind they sell in pet shops for evicting goldfish from their homes. The fish saw him coming and tried to avoid the net. It managed to make a pretty good job of it; at least three seconds passed before Neville was able to flick it out of the water and into an empty teacup. Gordon could see the poor thing squirming and wriggling—

‘For pity's sake, Neville,' he said disgustedly. ‘You'll kill it if you do that.'

Neville shrugged. ‘He's got it coming, if you ask me. But it'll be OK, so long as he does as he's told. Right then, you. Talk to me.'

And then, to his complete astonishment, Gordon could hear the goldfish gasping and panting. It sounded almost human. ‘Neville!' he shouted, and he struggled against the ropes, just as the fish was struggling against the air. Both of them were on a hiding to nothing, of course.

‘Now then, your worship,' Neville was saying to the fish. ‘Tell the nice gentleman who you are.'

‘No,' the goldfish said.

‘Please yourself. You aren't going back in the water till you do. And since you haven't got room in that cup to change shape—'

‘Want to bet?'

‘Yes,' Neville said pleasantly. ‘Go on, then.'

Gordon heard a terrible rasping noise, one of the ugliest sounds he'd ever heard in his life. It was the fish, trying to breathe. ‘Fish,' he shouted, ‘do as he says, please.'

‘No . . .' The voice was deep, with a strong accent Gordon couldn't place at all. The pain in it was all too easy to identify, however. For a split second, Gordon reckoned he knew what it must feel like to drown in air.

‘Stubborn little thing, isn't he?' Neville sighed. ‘Getting a civil answer out of him's like trying to get plain English from a lawyer; I'm not sure it can be done. We've been through this performance every day for a week, you know.'

The rasping noise was unbearable now. ‘Neville,' Gordon said, forcing himself to sound calm, ‘if I promise I believe you, will you put the fish back?'

Neville smiled. ‘It's all very well you saying that,' he replied, ‘but what makes you think I can trust you? After all,' he added, ‘you're a weatherman.'

‘Neville—'

Neville held up his hands. ‘All right,' he said, ‘I can see this is upsetting you. Come along, little fellow,' he said, picking up the teacup and dumping the fish back into the water. ‘Better now?'

For a few seconds the goldfish lay in the water at a disturbing angle, motionless. Gordon was about to yell out, ‘You bastard, you killed him!' when the fish dabbed feebly with its tail and pulled itself upright.

‘There, you see?' Neville said. ‘Right as rain, if you'll excuse the pun. Tough critters, these dragons. Strong-willed, too.'

Even now, Gordon wanted to try and reason with the lunatic; to try and explain that, even if what they'd both heard actually was a goldfish talking, all that proved was that here was a goldfish that could talk. All the stuff about dragons and rain was still—But it occurred to him that his colleague probably wasn't the most rational person in the world right now, and besides, he didn't want to provoke him into repeating the experiment he'd just had to witness. ‘I can see that,' he said. ‘Thank you for showing me. I don't suppose I'd ever have believed you if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.'

Neville sat down cross-legged on the floor and looked up at him, reminding Gordon of a starved greyhound. ‘Oh come on,' he said. ‘I'm not stupid, you know. You aren't really convinced. You probably think it was all done with hidden microphones and rubbish. It's going to take much more than that to make you
really
believe.' He shrugged his chickenbone shoulders. ‘But that's all right,' he said. ‘We'll convince you sooner or later, I'm positive of that. Pretty soon—' His expression changed; remarkable, Gordon couldn't help thinking, how being barking mad could make even a complete twit like Neville look distinctly sinister. ‘Pretty soon you'll have all the evidence you could possibly want; you and everybody else. And then - well, let's say it'll be interesting to see what happens. '

Gordon took a deep breath. He had no idea how one was supposed to go about handling situations like this - doubtless there were officially endorsed techniques, taught to professional loon-handlers to A level and beyond - but he had no objection to improvising. The best approach he could think of was to try and reawaken Neville's latent inferiority complex. Neville was bound to have an inferiority complex; you could-n't be an odious little squirt like Neville for forty-odd years without acquiring one.

‘Neville,' he said, trying to sound bored, ‘have you any idea how stupid you sound when you're trying to do Dr No impressions? If you want to kill the fucking goldfish, go ahead; they can't put you in prison for that. But if you don't get these bloody ropes off me in ten seconds flat, I'm going to stick them, and the goldfish bowl, and anything else I can fit in there, right up your . . .'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Really?' Gordon laughed. ‘So what're you going to do? You're going to keep me tied up here for ever? Kill me and dissolve the body in battery acid? You wouldn't even know how to get it out of the battery without spilling it down your trousers. Listen; pack it in now, while I'm still inclined to treat you as a sick but pretty funny joke, and we'll say no more about it. Otherwise it's going to turn nasty - you know, as in police and tabloids and prison? It's never worth it, Neville; even an idiot like you should be able to see that.'

The expression on Neville's face as he shook his head was little short of chilling. ‘I expect you're right,' he said sadly - but the sadness was remote, as if he was expressing formal sympathy for some unfortunate victim of famine or flood in one of those funny little countries you have to look up in the atlas. ‘But I stopped worrying about myself a long time ago. You can't afford to worry about what happens to you when you've got something as important as this to take care of.'

‘Neville,' Gordon said; but he didn't get any further, because that was when someone kicked the door in. What with the thunderflashes and the tear gas that followed the initial forced entry, Gordon didn't get much of a look at the men who came bursting into the room - some through the door, some in through the window on ropes, as in the Milk Tray adverts - but to judge by their black balaclavas and exotic automatic weapons, they probably weren't collecting for the church roof fund.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘G
et real, will you?' said the pet-shop owner. ‘Where am I going to get my hands on an okapi?'

The men in grey suits looked at each other. ‘Two okapis,' their spokesman said.

‘What?'

‘We need two okapis,' the spokesman explained. ‘One male and one female.'

‘Do you really?' The pet-shop owner breathed out through his nose. ‘Look, lads,' he said, ‘why can't you just settle for a nice hamster instead? I've got plenty of hamsters.'

The spokesman frowned. ‘So have we,' he said. ‘In fact, we've got more hamsters than we need, really. We started off with two a short while ago, but now we seem to have lots of them. Tell you what,' he added, ‘we could do a deal. All our spare hamsters for a pair of okapis.'

‘That's a lot of hamsters,' pointed out his chief aide.

The pet-shop man sighed and went back behind his counter, in a manner designed to suggest that he'd lost interest in these negotiations. ‘Listen,' he said. ‘I'd love to be able to help you out here, but I can't. No okapis. No lemurs or ocelots or bird-eating spiders.' He picked up a thick wad of paper from the counter and held it out to the spokesman. ‘None of the stuff on this list. They're lines we just don't carry. Sorry.'

‘Can't you order them in?'

‘No.'

‘Oh.' The spokesman frowned, as if having trouble coming to terms with the concept. ‘That's a shame,' he said. ‘Are you sure? We'd pay cash, if that'd help.'

The pet-shop man took a deep breath. ‘How about a nice kitten?' he said. ‘Or two kittens? I can do you two kittens.'

‘Thanks, but we've got that covered.' The spokesman thought for a moment. ‘In that case, can you suggest anywhere else we could try?'

The pet-shop man grinned. ‘A zoo, maybe,' he said.

‘All right. Where's the nearest zoo to here?'

‘I was joking.'

‘Were you? I see. How about a serious suggestion?'

The pet-shop man could think of several things to suggest, some of which could easily prove very serious indeed. ‘What do you boys want all these animals for, anyway?' he asked.

The spokesman took a step backwards. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘that's none of your business. This is a shop. We want to buy. That's all there is to it.'

‘Like hell.' The pet-shop man's attitude had changed; even the spokesman could see that, and this was his first extended mission among humans. ‘You know what? I wouldn't sell an animal to you people even if I had what you wanted. I don't trust you.'

‘Really? That's sad. Why not?'

‘Did we mention we're willing to pay cash?' added the senior aide.

‘In fact,' the pet shop man said, ‘I think I'd like it if you nutcases got out of my shop, before I call the RSPCA. Understood?'

The spokesman looked away and his lips moved, as if he was trying to figure out what the acronym stood for. ‘If that's how you feel, we'll be on our way,' he said. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.' He took three paces towards the door and then stopped. ‘Oh, one last thing,' he added. ‘Has anybody been in here recently trying to sell you a goldfish?'

‘What?'

‘Goldfish. Little orange bugger with fins and a face like William Hague. You see, a friend of ours had one stolen recently, and we just thought we'd ask—'

The question seemed to offend the pet-shop man, because he went a funny reddish colour. ‘Yeah, right,' he said. ‘Of course I'm in the habit of buying stolen goldfish from people who walk in off the street. That's precisely the way I run my business.'

‘Is it? Ah. In that case, the next time someone comes in with one, could you possibly ring this number—?'

‘Get out.' The pet-shop man was snarling now. ‘Go on, bugger off, before I set the rabbits on you.'

‘Actually,' said the senior aide, ‘we're pretty well off for rabbits right now. In fact—'

 

I will be good
, Karen promised.
I will control my emotions. Big girls don't rain
.

Hard enough to say that immediately after the phone call, when guilt and shock were fresh enough in her mind. Harder still, now that she was looking out of a train window, rattling away from all the reasons she'd come down here in the first place. Wingless bipeds, of course, didn't rain when they were sad. The closest they could get was a slight seepage from the eyes, a token shedding of water, as vestigial and useless as the human appendix. But she hadn't quite worked out how to do that yet, so all she could do was sit still and try not to think about it. Concentrate on the job in hand, the work that was still to do, and you forgot about the things that were outside your control, no matter how all-encompassingly awful they might seem; that was what a dragon would say, her father would say, if he was here, which he wasn't.

And if that didn't work, get on a train and go to Wolverhampton.

Simple draconian logic; Wolverhampton was near as made no odds, the centre of England, and if you were planning on conducting a thorough search, it made sense to start at the centre and work outwards. As to how one went about looking for a missing dragon, she hadn't the faintest idea. Obviously he wasn't in dragon shape, or a search wouldn't be necessary, which meant he was either a human or a goldfish. There were quite a lot of both of those in England, rather too many for a straightforward process of elimination to be practical. As far as alternative strategies went, she didn't even know if there were any. To put it another way, she hadn't a clue what she was supposed to be looking for, where it was likely to be, or how she'd recognise it if she did happen to stumble across it. Hardly scientific; but very human. After all, it was precisely the technique humans used when looking for a prospective mate, the one special person in the whole world who was meant for them, and if the bulk of human literature (up to and including the chocolate and perfume commercials) was to be believed, the technique worked for most people.