Lost in a good book (3 page)

“What?”

“I said I don’t—”

“She says she doesn’t like toast!” said the floor manager in an exasperated tone.
“What in hell’s name are we going to do!?!”

Flanker stood up.

“Next, eat the sodding toast will you? I’ve got a meeting in two hours.”

“And I’ve a golf tournament,” added Braxton.

I sighed. I thought perhaps I had a small amount of control on the show, but even that had vanished.

“Does marmalade fit in with your plans, sir?” I asked Braxton, who grunted in the affirmative and sat down again.

“Okay. Make it granary with marmalade, go easy on the butter.”

The floor manager smiled as though I had just saved his job—which I probably had—and everything started over once again.

“Would you like some toast?” asked Lush.

“Thanks.”

I took a small bite. Everyone was watching me, so I decided to make it easy for them.

“Very good indeed.”

I saw the floor manager giving me an enthusiastic thumbs-up as he dabbed his brow with a handkerchief.

“Right,” sighed Lush. “Let’s get on with it. First I would like to ask the question that everyone wants to know: How did you actually get into the book of
Jane Eyre
in the first place?”

“That’s easily explained,” I began. “You see, my uncle Mycroft invented a device called a Prose Portal—”

Flanker coughed. I could sense what he was going to say and I cursed myself for being so foolish as to believe
The Adrian Lush Show
would be uncensored. I
was
SpecOps, after all.

“Ms. Next,” began Flanker, “perhaps you don’t know it but your uncle is still the subject of a secrecy certificate dating back to 1934. It might be prudent if you didn’t mention him—or the Prose Portal.”

The floor manager yelled, “We’ve cut!” again and Lush thought for a moment.

“Can we talk about how Hades stole the manuscript of
Martin Chuzzlewit
?”

“Let me think,” replied Flanker, then after a tiny pause, said: “No.”

“It’s not something we want the citizenry to think is—” said Marat so suddenly that quite a few people jumped. Up until that moment he hadn’t said a word.

“Sorry?” asked Flanker.

“Nothing,” said the ChronoGuard operative, who was now in his mid-sixties. “I’m just getting a touch proleptic in my old age.”

“Can we talk about the successful return of Jane to her book?” I asked wearily.

“I refer you to my previous answer,” growled Flanker.

“How about the time my partner Bowden and I drove through a patch of bad time on the motorway?”

“It’s not something we want the citizenry to think is easy,” said Marat—who was now in his early twenties—with renewed enthusiasm. “If the public think that ChronoGuard work is straightforward, confidence might well be shaken.”

“Quite correct,” asserted Flanker.

“Perhaps you’d like to do this interview?” I asked him.

“Hey!” said Flanker, standing up and jabbing a finger in my direction. “There’s no need to get snippy with us, Next. You’re here to do a job in your capacity as a serving SpecOps officer. You are
not
here to tell the truth as you see it!”

Lush looked uneasily at me; I raised my eyebrows and shrugged.

“Now look here,” said Lush in a strident tone, “if I’m going to interview Ms. Next I must ask questions that the public want to hear!”

“Oh, you can!” said Flanker agreeably. “You can ask whatever you want. Free speech is enshrined in statute, and neither SpecOps nor Goliath have any business to coerce you in any way. We are just here to observe, comment, and
enlighten.
”

Lush knew what Flanker meant and Flanker knew that Lush knew. I knew that Flanker and Lush knew it and they both knew I knew it too. Lush looked nervous and fidgeted slightly. Flanker’s assertion of Lush’s independence was anything but. A word To Network Toad from Goliath and Lush would end up presenting
Sheep World
on Lerwick TV, and he didn’t want that. Not one little bit.

We fell silent for a moment as Lush and I tried to figure out a topic that
was
outside their broad parameters.

“How about commenting on the ludicrously high tax on cheese?” I asked. It was a joke, but Flanker and Co. weren’t terribly expert when it came to jokes.

“I have no objection,” murmured Flanker. “Anyone else?”

“Not me,” said Schitt-Hawse.

“Or me,” added Rabone.

“
I
have an objection,” said a woman who had been sitting quietly at the side of the studio. She spoke with a clipped home counties accent and was dressed in a tweed skirt, twinset and pearls.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” she said in a loud and strident voice. “Mrs. Jolly Hilly, Governmental Representative to the Television Networks.” She took a deep breath and carried on: “The so-called ‘unfair cheese duty burden’ is a very contentious subject at present. Any reference to it might be construed as an inflammatory act.”

“587% duty on hard cheeses and 620% on smelly?” I asked. “Cheddar Classic Gold Original at £9.32 a pound—Bodmin Molecular Unstable Brie at almost £10! What’s going on?”

The others, suddenly interested, all looked to Mrs. Hilly for an explanation. For a brief moment and probably the only moment ever, we were in agreement.

“I understand your concern,” replied the trained apologist, “but I think you’ll find that the price of cheese has, once adjusted for positive spin, actually gone
down
measured against the retail price index in recent years. Here, have a look at this.”

She passed me a picture of a sweet little old lady on crutches.

“Old ladies who are not dissimilar to the actress in this picture will have to go without their hip replacements and suffer crippling pain if you selfishly demand cut-price cheese.”

She paused to let this sink in.

“The Master of the Sums feels that it is not for the public to dictate economic policy, but he is willing to make concessions for those who suffer particular hardship in the form of area-tactical needs-related cheese coupons.”

“So,” said Lush with a smile, “
wheyving
cheese tax is out of the question?”

“Or he could raise the custard duty,” added Mrs. Hilly, missing the pun. “The pudding lobby is less—well—how should I put it—
militant.
”

“Wheyving,”
said Lush again, for the benefit of anyone who had missed it. “
Wheyve
—oh, never mind. I’ve never heard a bigger load of crap in all my life. I aim to make the ludicrous price of cheese the subject of an Adrian Lush Special Report.”

Mrs. Hilly flushed slightly and chose her words carefully.

“If there were another cheese riot following your Special Report we might look very carefully as to where to place responsibility.”

She looked at the Goliath representative as she said this. The implication wasn’t lost on Schitt-Hawse or Lush. I had heard enough.

“So I won’t talk about cheese either,” I sighed. “What
can
I talk about?”

The small group all looked at one another with perplexed expressions. Flanker clicked his fingers as an idea struck him.

“Don’t you own a dodo?”

2.
The Special Operations Network

The Special Operations Network was initiated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty-two departments in all, starting at the more mundane Horticultural Enforcement Agency (SO-32) and going on to Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Transport Authority (SO-21). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard were SO-12 and SO-1 were the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone’s guess. What
is
known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police. Operatives rarely leave the service after the probationary period has ended. There is a saying: “A SpecOps job isn’t for probation—it’s for life.”

MILLON DE FLOSS
,
A Short History of the Special Operations Network
(revised)

I
t was the morning after the transmission of
The Adrian Lush Show.
I had watched for five minutes, cringed, then fled upstairs to rearrange our sock drawer. I managed to file all the socks by color, shape and how much I liked them before Landen told me it was all over and I could come back downstairs. It was the last public interview I’d agreed to give, but Cordelia didn’t seem to remember this part of our conversation. She had continued to besiege me with requests to speak at literary festivals, appear as a guest on
65 Walrus Street
and even attend one of President Formby’s informal song-and-ukulele evenings. Job offers arrived daily. Numerous libraries and private security firms asked for my services as either “Active Associate” or “Security Consultant.” The sweetest letter I got was from the local library asking me to come in and read to the elderly—something I delighted in doing. But SpecOps itself, the body to which I had committed much of my adult life, energy and resources, hadn’t even
spoken
to me about advancement. As far as they were concerned I was SO-27 and would remain so until they decided otherwise.

“Mail for you!” announced Landen, dumping a large pile of post onto the kitchen table. Most of my mail these days was fan mail—and pretty strange it was, too. I opened an envelope at random.

“Anyone I should be jealous of?” he asked.

“I should keep the divorce lawyer on hold for a few more minutes—it’s another request for underwear.”

“I’ll send him a pair of mine,” grinned Landen.

“What’s in the parcel?”

“Late wedding present. It’s a—”

He looked at the strange knitted object curiously.

“It’s a . . .
thing.
”

“Good,” I replied, “I always wanted one of those. What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to teach Pickwick to stand on one leg.”

“Dodos don’t do tricks,” I told him.

“For a marshmallow I think I can make him do anything. Up, Pickwick, come on, one leg, up!”

Landen was a writer. We first met when he, my brother Anton and I fought in the Crimea. Landen came home minus a leg but alive—my brother was still out there, making his way through eternity from the comfort of a military cemetery near Sevastopol. I opened another letter and read aloud:

“Dear Miss Next, I am one of your biggest fans. I thought you should know that I believe David Copperfield, far from being the doe-eyed innocent, actually
murdered
his first wife, Dora Spenlow, in order to marry Agnes Wickfield. I suggest an exhumation of Miss Spenlow’s remains and a test for botulism and/or arsenic. While we are on the subject, have you ever stopped to wonder why Homer changed his mind about dogs somewhere between the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
? Was he, perhaps, given a puppy between the two? Another thing: Do you find Joyce’s
Ulysses
as boring and as unintelligible as I do? And why don’t Hemingway’s works have any smells in them?”

“Seems everyone wants you to investigate their favorite book,” observed Landen, sliding his arms around my neck and looking over my shoulder so closely our cheeks touched and I shivered. He put his mouth close to my ear and whispered:

“While you’re about it can you try and get Tess acquitted and Max de Winter convicted?”

“Not you as well!”

I took the marshmallow from his hand and ate it, much to Pickwick’s shock and dismay. Landen took another marshmallow from the jar and tried again.

“Up, Pickwick, come on,
up, up,
one leg!”

Pickwick stared at Landen blankly, eyes fixed on the marshmallow and not at all interested in learning tricks.

“You’ll need a truckload of them, Land.”

I refolded the letter, finished my coffee, got up and put on my jacket.

“Have a good day,” said Landen, seeing me to the door. “Be nice to the other children. No scratching or biting.”

“I’ll behave myself. I promise.”

I wrapped my arms round his neck and kissed him.

“Mmm,” I whispered softly. “That was nice.”

“I’ve been practicing,” he told me, “on that pretty young thing at number 56. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all,” I replied, kissing him again, “so long as you want to keep your other leg.”

“O-kay. I think I’ll stick to you for practice from now on.”

“I’m depending on it. Oh, and Land?”

“Yuh?”

“Don’t forget it’s Mycroft’s retirement party this evening.”

“I won’t.”

We bade each other goodbye and I walked down the garden path, shouting a greeting to Mrs. Arturo, who had been watching us.

It was late autumn or early winter—I wasn’t sure which. It had been mild and windless; the leaves were still brown on the trees and on some days it was hardly cold at all. It had to
really
get chilly to put the top up on my Speedster, so I drove into the SpecOps divisional HQ with the wind in my hair and WESSEX-FM blaring on the wireless. The upcoming election was the talk of the airwaves; the controversial cheese duty had suddenly become an issue in the way things do just before an election. There was a snippet about Goliath declaring themselves to be “the world’s favorite conglomerate” for the tenth year running whilst in the Crimean peace talks Russia had demanded Kent County as war reparations. In sport, Aubrey Jambe had led the Swindon Mallets croquet team into SuperHoop ’85 by thrashing the Reading Whackers.

I drove through the morning traffic in Swindon and parked the Speedster at the rear of the SpecOps HQ. The building was of a brusque no-nonsense Germanic design; hastily erected during the occupation, the facade still bore battle scars from Swindon’s liberation in 1949. It housed most of the SpecOps divisions but not all. Our Vampire and Werewolf Disposal Operation also encompassed Reading and Salisbury, and in return Salisbury’s Art Theft division looked after our area as well. It all seemed to work quite well.