Snatched

Table of Contents

Cover

A Selection of Recent Titles by Bill James from Severn House

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

DOUBLE JEOPARDY

FORGET IT

FULL OF MONEY

HEAR ME TALKING TO YOU

KING'S FRIENDS

THE LAST ENEMY

LETTERS FROM CARTHAGE

MAKING STUFF UP

NOOSE

OFF-STREET PARKING

THE SIXTH MAN and other stories

SNATCHED

TIP TOP

WORLD WAR TWO WILL NOT TAKE PLACE

The Harpur and Iles Series

VACUUM

UNDERCOVER

PLAY DEAD

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First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2014 by Bill James.

The right of Bill James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

James, Bill, 1929- author.

Snatched.

1. Museums–Fiction. 2. Black humor.

I. Title

823.9'14-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8379-7 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-511-7 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-529-1 (ePub)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

In the chair as Director, George Lepage considered this weekly session of the museum's management board to be getting along unusually well: some argument, yes, some insults, but nothing actually barbaric or even inhumane. And then, as if to kick Lepage's guarded smugness to death, the door was shoved hard open and, from the corridor outside, Keith Jervis stuck his head and short, thick, blondish pigtail a few inches into the Octagon Room. Alarmed, Lepage saw what appeared to be a broad streak of blood across his brow and more of it staining the lapels of his azure uniform jacket.

In a throaty, not quite panic-driven voice, Jervis, one of the economy-measure, hourly paid, part-time porters, said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen officers of the Hulliborn Regional Museum and Gallery, we got what could be designated in my opinion a fucking riot at the Folk Department, pardon the demotic. Well,
starting
at the Folk. Ongoing. Now it's reached Coins, Badges, Medals and Smaller Artefacts. What I'm reporting for here, now, is to be given orders, really. This kind of incident – outside my parameters, especially not being promoted to established, salaried staff, despite representations. I'll accept lip from visitors and even assault, up to a point, but thereafter through channels – such as this door into the Octagon, yes – thereafter, through channels, reference must be made to my superiors, to the policy makers, as it were. That's only fair. Noblesse-o-what-they-call.'

‘A disturbance in the Folk Hall spreading to Coins?' Lepage said. He stood.

‘It's nasty, no getting away from it,' Jervis said. ‘We was outnumbered. Withdrawal seemed the only feasible. “Regrouping” is the term, I believe. It's chaos, though. In the rush I stumble and knock against a glass showcase of specie, and suffer the wound.' He pointed to his forehead but didn't touch it, so as not to get his hand bloody. ‘They got dangerous edges, some of them display stands. The public safety authorities wouldn't like them. But, then again, I got to admit there wouldn't normally be someone, such as self, falling over in the museum owing to a galloping fracas.'

‘Quite,' Lepage said, ‘but you've done admirably, and I'm distressed to see you're hurt.' Jervis had come a few steps into the room now. ‘Please give us the details, Keith.'

‘What's that terrible noise?' Pirie asked, very tense.

Lepage had heard it, too. From behind Jervis through the open door came the distant sound of an angry, possibly violent, crowd. The word ‘baying' entered George's head to describe the din, but this he quashed at once: crowds in the museum was a difficult enough idea, but a
baying
crowd? ‘We must go there at once,' Lepage said. He was in charge.

Some might ask how come he was in charge. Possibly, they'd consider him too young for his post as Director of a major museum, like the Hulliborn, especially at a time when museums and their finances had begun to suffer increasingly unpleasant problems. Perhaps the last time they heard of George he was only head of a department here (Archaeology), among a barrelful of other department heads. However, George had moved up on the death of Flounce last September, ‘Flounce' being the unaffectionately used nickname of Sir Eric Butler-Minton, former Director.

Anyway, now here was George Lepage, kingpin of the Hulliborn. He did look reasonably, though not outrageously, young: that is reasonably, not outrageously, young for such a job – forty-eight. He kept himself decently spry. Or in that area. His face was long and bony, though not cadaverous, in his judgement. He had good fair skin and was clean shaven – very efficiently clean-shaven: no missed stubble nests. His hair was straight – mousy to straw – and, to date, as full as it had ever been, with an impertinent, boyish cowlick that needed pushing back off his forehead now and then, but not so far that it didn't fall into position again soon. His brown eyes were keen and lively, not absolutely unsly but not ruthless or egomaniac, either: nobody could run a museum without at least a sliver of slyness.

Just before Jervis's incursion George had been wondering whether he could award himself some credit for the prevailing, moderately polite, generally civilized atmosphere of the management meetings, following his replacement of Flounce. Possibly. The orderliness of today's proceedings had pleased but also scared George. Wasn't it eerie to look down the big, leather-padded, mahogany table and see for a long stretch of consecutive seconds definite smiles and contentment on these customarily contempt-filled, arid, avid faces? This afternoon, no voice had employed yet that high-pitched, enraged snottiness, dubbed throughout the trade ‘curator's retch', in which so much major business was traditionally done in premier division museums, here and overseas.

Lepage returned to the notion that perhaps some of his colleagues' apparent happiness derived from seeing him, George Lepage, actually there in the Director's chair, sturdy, unarguable evidence that Flounce really had been screwed down in that long, fake-oak box, garnished with a pair of foxgloves and burned at the crem: no question of a vigorous, slavering return, in one of his unbelievable Dominican Republic suits, to slag them off as cock-sucking subscribers to the
Independent.

This didn't mean everything was peachy. The Hulliborn had enemies. Which museum worth its grant didn't? Sadly, several of Hulliborn's had previously been distinguished members of the staff, but now nursed festering psychological injuries after being flung out in the recent cutback programme implemented by Butler-Minton as one of his last duties, though enforced from Downing Street. For some, the Hulliborn's vast halls of preserved death and the past had been life. Deprived of them, they grew evil. Some went mad.

George had decided he would deal with this trouble as well as he could, but not for ever; not even for very long. He calculated that, with his improved pension entitlement, he could take extremely early retirement from the episodes of vividly-expressed, engulfing, bureaucratic flimflam, such as today's, and every other bit of this grand, tricky post. At fifty-four, or, with skill and luck, maybe before that – say 1993, when he'd be fifty-two – he might be able to quit and make a shapely, non-poverty-line go of things, granted, as he surely would be, a little flints and shards consultancy; plus whatever Julia made at her ‘Spud-O'-My-Life' jacket potato kiosk near the rail station, if Julia were still interested then. He recognized, though, that he must not go before he got the Hulliborn's future properly established. Or had clearly failed, and would just as clearly go on failing, to get the Hulliborn's future properly established.

The Director loved Julia and her body and so on, and he loved the Prime Minister, also, though not in that way. Thatcherism decreed among other things that the young should do the work, while the marginally less young in the public sector took whacking redundough pay-offs and precocious pensions and were deemed old and spent, although almost everything about them – knees, bowels, sassiness, feet, self-esteem, appetite, genitalia – particularly these last three – said ‘get stuffed' to that. Just for now, as newly risen Supremo of the Hulliborn Regional Museum and Gallery, George had to be numbered among the trapped, working young, but he and Time should be able to rectify that, thanks very much. Time was something museum people knew about, and if anyone could get it by the short and curlies they could. At present, Time was unquestionably the Director's bread, butter and official Volvo, but soon it might be transubstantiated into an ejection seat.

He hoped that by then he would have totally wiped out most of the dire results of Flounce's period as Director. People who knew Flounce normally had very down-and-up reactions to him. In a million and a half ways, he had been a prime and towering shit, yet some did feel sympathy that he failed to live quite long enough to see the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November. So many of Flounce's shady, mysterious afflictions, which did the Hulliborn no good at all, seemed to stem from behind the Curtain under the old regime: maybe in East Berlin itself, but Rostock also was mentioned. The ripple of terrible, and terribly vague, rumours about the haversack straps and a whippet appeared to start in one or both locations, the geographical uncertainty part of that overall vagueness. But, however nauseating and absurd Butler-Minton had been, he'd surely deserved his personal fragment of Europe's grand triumph last year when that chunky, dangerous, check-pointed barrier came down. However, Butler-Minton had died just ahead of that. And so, Director George.

‘Hulliborn will undoubtedly emerge from the impending post-cuts appraisal and audit as a Grade One-A centre of excellence, to use the admin wallahs' own jejune, schoolmarm terms,' Simberdy, bulky, emphatic, focused, (Asiatic Antiquities), had said early in today's proceedings. ‘Naturally, it is crucial that we should, since under the current philistine political crew there will be next to no cash for the also-rans. Hulliborn, as we have known it, and know it, would be extinguished. Plainly, we will not let this occur.'