One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (14 page)

“That was dumb,” I said when I’d returned. “He’s taken almost everything.”

Carmine looked at me, then at Pickwick, then burst into tears and ran from the room.

“Goblins!” said Pickwick with a snort. “They’re just trouble with a capital
G
. By the way,” she added, now cheerier since she’d been proved correct, “Sprockett wanted to show you something. He’s in your office.”

I walked through to my study, where Sprockett was indeed waiting for me. He wasn’t alone. He had his foot on top of a struggling goblin, and a burlap sack full of stolen possessions was lying on the carpet.

“Your property, ma’am?” he asked. I nodded, and he took the letter opener from the desk, held the goblin tightly by one ear and placed the opener to its throat. His eyebrow twitched. It was clearly a bluff. I decided to play along.

“No,” I said, “you’ll ruin the carpet. Do it outside.”

The goblin opened his eyes wide and stared at me in shocked amazement, then started to babble on about an “influential uncle” who would “do unpleasant things” if he “went missing.”

“Just kidding,” I added. “Let him go.”

“Are you sure?” asked Sprockett. “I can make it look like a shaving accident.”

“Yes, I’m sure. You,” I said, jabbing a finger at the goblin, “are a disgrace. Place a single toe in my series again and I’ll make you wish you’d never been written.”

Sprockett took his foot off the goblin, and it ran to the window, paused on the sill for a moment, made an obscene gesture and then ran off. That was the trouble with being stuck in Fantasy—too many goblins, spells, ogres, wizards, elves and warlocks. I reckoned it frightened readers off.

“So,” I said, locking the window after the goblin, “what’s the deal?”

“I was reappraising the condition of the wreckage from the debris field.”

He showed me the Triumph Bonneville’s exhaust pipe. It had been folded almost in half by the impact. He pointed to a small patch on the chrome. There was a slight mottling about four inches long and an inch wide.

“A fault in the manufacturing?” I suggested.

“But it wasn’t manufactured,” said Sprockett. “It was
written
. It should be perfect—better than any real motorcycle.”

“You asked me in here to show me an imperfection on a Bonneville exhaust?”

“There’s more. I found this orange inside the bed-sit. Here.”

He tossed the orange across, and I noticed that this
also
had a slight mottling on the side. He then showed me similar imperfections on a Polaroid camera, a toaster, a half-eaten sandwich and a plastic bath duck. Then I got it.

“The mottling,” I said slowly. “They are—
were
—ISBNs. Are you trying to tell me someone has
removed
all identification marks from this book?”

He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. All doubts were off.
This wasn’t an accident.
Someone had hacked into the novel’s source code to delete the ISBN in order to cover his tracks and ensure that no one found out which book had been destroyed or why. The epizeuxis worm and now this. We didn’t have a crashed book, we had a crime scene. But it wasn’t
quite
that simple.

“Only Text Grand Central or the Council of Genres would have the power to scrub ISBNs and put together a rhetorical device,” I said. “And while I’m not one to use coarse idioms, someone would have to be connected up the wazoo to pull this off. Have you attempted to find out what the ISBN actually was?”

Sprockett placed a series of photographs on the desk. “I took the liberty of subjecting the marks to a complex series of photographic techniques, which while appearing to have the veneer of scientific reality actually just sounded good. Do you want the full two pages of dull exposition or just the results?”

“Better just give me the results,” I said, looking at my watch. “Whitby will be here any moment for a lunch date.”

“Might I inquire where you are going, ma’am?”

“We thought we’d try the Elbow Rooms.”

“A fine establishment. I meet up with the Hartzel chess player every two weeks there to discuss Matters of the Cog. I’d avoid the lobster.”

“Food poisoning?”

“No, no, not on the menu—at the bar.
Very
opinionated and apt to lapse into unspeakably dull arthropod-related digressions. But see here.”

He handed me a photograph that was many images superimposed on top of one another. The revealed ISBN was indistinct but legible. I jotted down the number in my notebook.

“Thank you, Sprockett. You’re a star.”

“Madam is most kind.”

I fetched the unimaginatively titled
Cheshire Cat’s Complete Guide to All Books Ever Written Everywhere
and looked up the ISBN. Our crashed book was from Self-Publishing and titled
The Murders on the Hareng Rouge,
by Adrian Dorset. I’d never heard of him. But it was Vanity, so I’d hardly be expected to. There was no other information. The ISBN database held only titles, authors, publishers’ details, three-for-two offers, that kind of thing. I looked at the map we had pinned on the wall that charted the book’s final journey. If you extended the line back through Adventure and past the Cliff of Notes, it made landfall in Vanity. We’d never considered such a thing. It must have lifted off there and proceeded in an almost straight line to where the Council of Genres was located, but it had come down over Conspiracy.

I sat, leaned back in my chair and ran through the likely scenarios. It was possible
The Murders on the Hareng Rouge
was a potential world beater on its way to being published. Jealousies ran deep in the BookWorld, and the possibility of someone in HumDram/Highbrow nobbling the potential competition was quite real. It had happened before; bad Vanity was universally disliked but tolerated in a condescending “yes, well done, jolly good” kind of way, but good Vanity was reviled as the worst kind of upstart.

“Blast,” I said, as a more personal note added itself to the mix. “It explains why I was asked to handle the investigation. No one expected me to find anything.”

Sprockett’s eyebrow pointed to “Bingo.”

“The thought had occurred to me, ma’am. In fact, the precise reason you were selected for this investigation, given your lack of adequacy, has been troubling me for some time.”

I thought about Acheron’s comments with regard to the fact that Carmine was an A-4.

“I so need that sort of comment right now.”

His eyebrow clicked from “Bingo” to “Apologetic.”

“Merely the facts as I see them, ma’am.”

I thought carefully. Part of me—the Thursday part—was outraged over the crime, but the rest of me was more realistic. There were some things that were simply not worth meddling with, and anyone willing to engineer the destruction of an entire book wouldn’t think twice about eliminating me. There were few—if any—characters who couldn’t be replaced.

“Have you told anyone about this?” I asked, and Sprockett shook his head.

“Keep it that way,” I murmured. “I think all we’ve found is what Red Herring wanted me to find: an unprecedented event that is unrepeatable.”

“If asked for an opinion, ma’am,” said Sprockett in an unusually forceful turn of phrase, “I should like to find out who asked Commander Herring to allocate you to this investigation.”

I stared at him. I should like to know, too, but I couldn’t think of a way to frame the question that wouldn’t have me in the trunk of a car heading towards the traditional place to dump bodies, the New Jersey area of Crime.

“This was never meant to be reported,” I said. “This was meant for looking the other way and carrying on with life as though nothing had happened. There was a good reason I was asked to do this, and I will not impugn my lack of competence by being irresponsibly accurate. I have a reputation to uphold.”

It was a hopelessly poor argument, and he and I both knew it. I sat down at my desk and drew a sheet of writing paper from my stationery drawer.

“Permission to speak openly?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say, but I should.”

“It’s not what Thursday Next would have done.”

“No,” I replied, “but then Thursday could deal with this sort of stuff. She
enjoyed
it. A woman has to know her limitations. If Herring had wanted this accident to be investigated properly, he would have given it to someone else. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe there really
are
wheels within wheels. Maybe some stuff has to be left, for the good of all of us. We leave crime to the authorities, right?”

“That would certainly seem to be the safe and conventional option, ma’am.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “Safe. Conventional. Besides, I have a series to look after and dignity to be maintained for Thursday. If anything happened to me, as likely as not Carmine would take over, and I’m not convinced she’d uphold the standards quite as I do, what with the goblins and the hyphenating and such.”

I looked away as I said it and began to rearrange the objects on my desk. I suddenly felt hot and a bit peculiar and didn’t want to look Sprockett in the eye.

“As madam wishes.”

Sprockett bowed and withdrew, and I spent the next hour writing up a report for Herring. It wasn’t easy to write. Try as I might, I couldn’t make the report longer than forty words, and it deserved more than that. I managed at one point to write a hundred words, but after I’d taken out the bit about the epizeuxis worm and the scrubbed ISBN, it was down to only thirty-seven again. I decided to ask Whitby his hypothetical opinion and finish the report after lunch.

I called the Jurisfiction offices again to see if Thursday was available to talk.

“She’s still unavailable,” I reported as I trotted into the kitchen. “I might try to speak to her when I go over to deliver the report to Commander Herring this afternoon. Do you think I’m dressed okay for Whitby or should I . . .”

My voice had trailed off because something was wrong. Sprockett and Mrs. Malaprop were looking at me in the sort of way I imagine disgruntled parents might.

“You tell her,” said Mrs. Malaprop.

“It’s Whitby,” said Sprockett.

I suddenly had a terrible thought. This being fiction, long-unrequited romances often end in tragedy just before they finally begin, inevitably leading to a lifetime’s conjecture of what might have happened and all manner of tedious and ultimately overwritten soul-searching. The scenario was almost as hideous as actually losing Whitby.

“He’s dead?”

“No, ma’am, he’s not dead. At least he was still alive two minutes ago.”

“He was here? Why isn’t he here now?”

Sprockett coughed politely. “I am sorry to say, ma’am, that I had to send Mr. Jett away.”

I stared at him, scarcely believing what I was hearing. “Why would you do something like that?”

“I feel, ma’am, that he is
unsuitable
.”

He showed me a newspaper clipping that was about two years old. “I exhort you to read it, ma’am, no matter how painful.”

So I did.

“It is the painful duty of this journalist,” went the article, “to report an act of such base depravity that it causes the worst excesses of Horror to pale into insignificance. Last Tuesday an unnamed man, for reasons known only to himself, set fire to a busload of nuns who were taking their orphaned puppies to a ‘How cute is your puppy?’ competition. Unfortunately, the perpetrator of this vile and heartless act is still at liberty, and . . .”

I stopped reading as a sense of confusion and disappointment welled up inside me. There was a picture accompanying the article, and even though the piece did not mention Whitby by name, there was a photograph of a man whom “Jurisfiction wanted to question.” It was Jett, without a doubt—holding a two-gallon gasoline can and chuckling. I didn’t really know what was worse—Whitby killing the busload of nuns or me having finally plucked up the courage to have lunch at the Elbow Rooms, only for the rug to be pulled from under my feet.

“Is this true?”

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, ma’am. Was I wrong to send him away?”

“No, you were right.”

I sighed and stared at the report I was carrying. “Better call a cab. I’m going to tell Herring what he wants to hear. At least that way someone gets to be happy today. You can come, too.”

 

It took me twenty minutes to coax Carmine out of her bedroom. I assured her it wasn’t so bad, because Sprockett had caught the goblin and recovered the swag, so he wasn’t
technically
a thief. I had to tell her that he wasn’t
that
unhandsome—for a goblin—and that no, I was sure he wasn’t just saying nice things to her so he could be invited across the threshold. I told her she was now on book duty, as I would be out for a while, and she replied, “Yes, okay, fine,” but wouldn’t look at me, so I left her staring angrily at the patterned wallpaper in the front room.

12
.

I
took the bus to Le Guin Central and then the first train to HumDram/Classics. As the train slowly steamed from the station, I sat back and stared out the window. I was mildly interested to learn that Heathcliff was on the same train, although we didn’t see him—just a lot of screaming and fainting girls on the platform whenever we stopped. We halted briefly at Gaiman Junction before steaming on a wide arc to Shakespeare Terminus. There was a delay leaving the platform, as security was being taken a little more seriously than usual. A group of heavily armed Men in Plaid were scrutinizing everyone’s IDs.