One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (8 page)

I nodded, so he continued.

“I have an overriding abhorrence for honey. No matter what happens, it always seems to end up in my insides, and it is the very devil to remove. In my last employ, my master insisted upon honey for breakfast, and a small quantity became lodged in my thought cogs. Until steam-cleaned, I became convinced I was the Raja of Sarawak.”

“No honey,” I said. “Promise.”

And so, fully introduced, we talked about the much-heralded and much-delayed introduction of the advanced Duplex-6 clockwork automaton. And, after that, the relative merits of phosphor-bronze over stainless steel for knee joints. So it was that I arrived, thoroughly versed in the Matters of the Cog, at the regional Conspiracy offices a few minutes later.

T
he local genre representative was sitting on a wicker chair on the veranda of his office, a clapboard affair that looked much ravaged by overreading. The rep was described as what we termed “UK-6 Aristocracy Dapper-12,” which meant that he had a fine pencil mustache and spoke as though he were from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I told Sprockett to wait for me outside, which he unhesitatingly agreed to do.

The rep did not rise from his chair and instead looked me up and down and then said in a disparaging tone, “You’re a long way from Mind, Body and Soul, old girl.”

It’s true that I may have looked a bit New Agey, but I didn’t really need this. Bolstered by my earlier claim to be the real Thursday, I decided to try the same here.

“The name’s Thursday Next,” I said, waving my shield. The reaction was electric. He choked on his afternoon tea and crumpet and, in his hurry to get to his feet, nearly woke a large and very hairy Sasquatch who dozed in a wicker chair a little way down the veranda.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed the genre rep. “Please excuse me. The name’s Bilderberg. Roswell Bilderberg. My office is your office. Hey!” He kicked the foot of the Sasquatch, who opened one eye and stared at him indifferently. “Thursday Next,” hissed Roswell, nodding in my direction.

The Sasquatch opened his eyes wide and jumped to his feet. “I was nowhere near the Orient Express that evening,” he said hurriedly, “and even if I was, I had nothing against Mr. Cassetti—isn’t that right, Roswell?”

“Don’t drag me into your web of deceit,” replied Roswell out of the side of his mouth, still smiling at me. “Now, how can we help you, Miss Next? Pleasure or business?”

“
Official
business,” I said as the Sasquatch nonchalantly picked up a set of snowshoes and sneaked guiltily away.

“What sort of official business?” asked Roswell suspiciously. “We’ve heard that the Council of Genres was planning on moving us across to Juvenilia as part of a secret cross-BookWorld plan to marginalize those genres that don’t toe the official line. And if we didn’t comply, we would all be murdered in our sleep by government assassins who can drip poison into your ear down a thread—if such a thing is possible, or even likely.”

As far as I knew, no such plans were afoot. But you didn’t live in Conspiracy for long without imagining all sorts of nonsense. Not that Conspiracy always got it wrong. On the few occasions they
were
correct, a rapid transfer to Nonfiction was in order—which threw those who were left behind into something of a dilemma. Being in Fiction meant a wider readership, something that Nonfiction could never boast. Besides, a conspiracy theory that turned out to be real wasn’t a theory anymore, and the loss of wild uncorroborated speculation could be something of a downer.

“I’m working with JAID—the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department.”

“Ah!” he replied, suddenly realizing what I was here for. “The Lola incident. I believe that Commander Herring is already up there. Can I stress at this time that we will afford Jurisfiction’s representatives all possible help and assistance?”

It was all he could say, really. No one wanted to fall afoul of Jurisfiction or the Council of Genres. This was Fiction. There were skeletons in everyone’s closet.

“It came to earth nine hours ago,” he said as we walked past two faked moon landings, three UFO abductions and a grassy knoll. “It bounced on a pamphlet regarding the notion that Diatrymas are being bred by the Goliath Corporation to keep people out of the New Forest, then landed on a book outlining the somewhat dubious circumstances surrounding the death of Lola Vavoom.”

With Sprockett following at a discreet distance, we took a shortcut through a field of crop circles, passed a laboratory covertly designing infectious diseases for population control, moved aside as a white Fiat Uno drove after a black Mercedes, then entered the subgenre of Lola Vavoom Suspicious Death. Roswell pushed open the swinging doors of a concrete multistory car park that opened directly onto the tenth floor, and standing next to a large lump of tattered wreckage the size of a truck were two men. I didn’t recognize the more disheveled of the two, but the older, wiser and clearly the boss was someone I did recognize: Regional Commander Herring of the BookWorld Policing Agency.

He was very much a hands-on type of administrator. He had no staff, carried all his notes in his head and was one of the few people who still jumped from book to book rather than taking a taxi or public transport. He was a BGH-87 character type. Male, persnickety and highly efficient, but seemingly without humor. He was about fifty and was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt with an infinite quantity of pens in his top pocket and a garish tie. He wore spectacles, but only for effect. He was high up in the chain of command at the Council of Genres and had access, it was said, to Senator Jobsworth himself. He was the most powerful man I knew.

“About time,” he said when I appeared. “Places to be, people to visit—wheels within wheels.”

“Wheels within wheels,” echoed the man next to him.

“This is Martin Lockheed,” explained Herring. “You’ll answer to him, as I am a busy man. After this meeting I do not expect us to meet again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your
Three Men in a Boat
investigation didn’t really impress,” he began.

“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

“Apologies don’t really cut it, Next, but I am a man loyal to friends, and the real Miss Next has always intimated in the past that you may show promise one day.”

“I’m very grateful to her . . . and you,” I managed to stammer.

“So I look upon you as an investment,” replied Herring, “and a long-standing favor to a valued colleague. Which is why we are here now. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“Good.”

“That’s good,” said Lockheed, as if I might not have heard what Herring said. The regional commander waved a hand at the wreckage.

“Easy one for you to cut your teeth on. It has all the signs of being another unprecedented event that despite all expectations has become repeatedly unrepeatable. Don’t let me down, will you? Wrap it up nice and neat and don’t get all showy or anything. Fiction has a 99.97 percent book-safety record, and the last thing we want is the residents of this fair island worried that the fabric of their world is prone to shredding itself at the drop of a participle, hmm?”

“I’ll do my very best to discover that it’s an unrepeatable accident,” I told him, “and with indecent haste.”

“Very good. Twenty-four hours should suffice, yes?”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir, and I’d like to thank you for the opportunity.”

“No need. Lockheed?”

“Yes, sir?”

Herring snapped his fingers impatiently, and the rather harassed Lockheed passed him a clipboard.

“These are the reported items of debris,” Herring said, handing the clipboard straight to me without looking at it. “Not good, having narrative falling from the skies, so let’s keep it simple, eh? Wheels within wheels, Thursday.”

“Wheels within wheels,” added Lockheed earnestly.

“Wheels within wheels, sir. Would you thank Miss Next for me when you see her?”

“When next I see her. She’s very busy.”

He then looked at Sprockett, who was standing off from the group, being unobtrusive. “Who’s that?”

“Sprockett,” I replied, “my butler.”

“I didn’t know you had a butler.”

“Everyone needs a butler, sir.”

“I have no argument with that. Duplex-3, is he?”

“Duplex-5, sir.”

“The Fives were prone to be troublesome without sufficient winding. I’ll let you get on. You can call Lockheed anytime you want for guidance. Any questions?”

I thought of asking him if he had seen the real Thursday Next recently but decided against it. The red-haired gentleman had spoken of “being able to trust no one but myself,” and besides, I didn’t want to look a fool if the man on the tram really
was
a murderous nutjob.

“No questions, sir.”

“Good luck, Miss Next.”

He gave me a half smile, shook my hand and vanished.

“I’ll be off, too,” said Lockheed, handing me a business card and a folder full of health-and-safety literature. “Commander Herring is a great and good man, and you are lucky to have been given this opportunity to converse. He doesn’t usually speak to people as low as you.”

“I’m honored.”

“And so you should be. I was his assistant for three years before he deigned to look me in the eye. One of my proudest moments. If you need me, the JAID offices are at Norland Park.”

And he walked off. Eager not to waste the opportunity I had just been given, I turned my attention to the wreckage.

The chunk of book had splintered off the main novel as it broke up. But this wasn’t pages or ink or anything; it was a small part of
setting
. Despite the ragged textual word strings that were draped across and the graphemes lying scattered on the floor nearby, the misshapen lump seemed to be a room from a house somewhere. It had landed on the asphalt covering of the car park and cracked the surface so badly that the textual matrix beneath the roadway was now visible. The battered section had landed upside down just behind Lola Vavoom’s Delahaye Roadster, which had prevented her from reversing too quickly from her parking place, breaking through the barriers and falling eighty feet to her death. It had always been a suspicious accident, but nothing untoward was ever found to suppose it wasn’t just that—an accident.

“Will this take long, dahling?” asked Lola, who was dressed in tight slacks and a cashmere sweater with a pink scarf tied around her hair. Her eyes were obscured by a pair of dark glasses, and she was casually sitting on the trunk of her car smoking a small Sobranie cigarette.

“As long as it must,” I said, “and I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Do your best, dear,” she intoned patronizingly, “but if I’m not dead in mysterious circumstances by teatime, someone is going to have some serious explaining to do.”

I turned my attention to the wreckage. Spontaneous breakups were uncommon but not unheard of, and it was JAID’s job to try to find the cause so that other books wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Losing a cast of a thousand or more was not just a personal tragedy, but expensive. When a book-club edition of
War and Peace
had disintegrated without warning a few years ago as it passed over Human Drama, all those within the debris field were picking brass buttons and lengthy digressions out of their hair for a week. The JAID investigator assigned to the case painstakingly reconstructed the book, only to find that a batch of verbs had been packed incorrectly at the aft expansion joint and had overheated. Punctuation lock had no effect, and in a last desperate attempt to bring the book under control, the engineers initiated Emergency Volume Separation. A good idea, but undertaken too quickly. The smaller and lighter Epilogues could not alter course in time and collided with Volume Four, which in turn collided with Volume Three, and so forth. Of the twenty-six thousand characters lost in the disaster, only five survived. Verb quality control and emergency procedures were dramatically improved after this, and nothing like it had happened since.

“It seems to be a bed-sitting room of some variety,” murmured Sprockett as he peered inside the large lump of scrap. “Probably ten pounds a week—furnished, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Are we looking for anything in particular?”

“An International Standard Book Number,” I said, “an ISBN. We need to know what the book is and where it came from before we can start trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s sometimes harder than it seems. The wreckage is often badly mangled, widely scattered—and there are a lot of books out there.”

We stepped into the upside-down bed-sitting room, all its contents strewn around inside. It was well described, so it was either a popular book given depth and color by reader feedback, or pre-feedback altogether. The room hadn’t been painted for a while, the carpets were threadbare, and the furniture had seen better days. It might seem trivial, but it was these sorts of clues that allowed us to pinpoint which book it was from.

“Potboiler?” I suggested.

“It’s from HumDram if it is,” replied Sprockett as he picked up a torn
Abbey Road
album. “Post-1969, at any rate.”

We searched for half an hour amongst the debris but found no sign of an ISBN.