The Woman Who Died a Lot

by Jasper Fforde

  “It was possibly the least valuable,” said Daisy. “Almost every book in this room is worth more. Have a look at this.”

  She drew out a volume almost at random and passed it to Finisterre, who stared at it, lower lip trembling.

  “Pliny the Really Very Young’s account of being unable to see the eruption of Vesuvius due to being put to bed early for some bullshit excuse.”

  “We have only fragments of this stuff,” I murmured as Finisterre reverentially placed it back on the shelf. “Worth ten million?”

  “More. Much more.”

  We looked around at the book-lined chamber.

  “We’re surrounded by about half a billion pounds’ worth of books,” said Daisy. “Do you think we should consider insurance, and if so, what would be a reasonable excess?”

  My ears had stopped ringing by the time Finisterre called in Colonel Wexler, who arrived with ten of her crack Special Library Services troops dressed in their Antiquarian Book camouflage of musty browns and water-stained dark reds. Colonel Wexler nodded respectfully as she passed me, and we were about to leave when Detective Phoebe Smalls turned up.

  “Smalls, SpecOps 27,” she said to us when she arrived, presumably for Mother Daisy’s benefit, as we knew who she was. She was in a police tiltrotor along with half a dozen armed cops.

  “Hello, Phoebe,” I said brightly. “I knew we’d meet again soon. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m taking charge,” she said. “Why didn’t you report this in straightaway? I had to find out about the break-in through the grapevine.”

  “Is there a grapevine?” asked Finisterre.

  “I’ve heard there’s one,” I returned with a half smile.

  “Very funny,” said Smalls. “I want you to turn over the command of your SLS troops to me and have a full report on my desk by tomorrow morning—after you’ve given me a debrief on what you know right now.”

  “Where are your own people?” I asked, since she had arrived without any SO-27 operatives.

  She glared at me. “We’re having recruitment . . . issues,” she said quietly. “I went through the list of reassignment requests. The formation of SO-27 has been on the cards for weeks. Lots of time for officers to ask to join me.”

  “There weren’t any, were there?”

  “Not one,” said Phoebe, “but we’ll resolve that soon enough. Now, this is SO-27 jurisdiction. The debrief, Next.”

  “It’s our jurisdiction,” I said simply.

  “How do you figure that?” she demanded, her mood angrier by the second. “Scriptorium, theft,thirteenth-century codices— what could be more Literary Detective about it?”

  “We’ve given the Lobsterhood book collection Wessex Library status,” I said. “This library and all within comes under our control. The Special Library Services troops are legally empowered to shoot to kill. I can ask SO-27 for assistance, but that’s as far as it goes.”

  Phoebe Smalls looked at me, then at Mother Daisy, who nodded agreement. Smalls could have carried on in a dopey rant, but she was smart enough to know that yelling would be pointless and degrading, plus there was a better-than-good chance I knew what I was doing.

  “Very well,” she said at last. “SO-27 offers every assistance to the library in this matter. But I’d like to be kept in the loop,” she added in a softer tone, “simply as a professional courtesy.”

  “Okay,” I replied, “here it is: Thieves of unknown origin with an unknown motive destroyed a single leaf from a book with marginal value, literary merits or rarity.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. But,” I added, “there might be a Goliath angle to this, and if someone is monkeying around with thirteenth-century codices for no reason, all antiquarian suppliers, dealers and collectors need to be informed so they can increase security. You can do that better than I.”

  “It might not be the first time this has happened,” said Phoebe thoughtfully. “I’ll run through reports of any unexplained vandalism in the lucrative and highly buoyant seriously-ancientcodex market.”

  It wasn’t a good idea—it was a great idea. So great that I should have been the one making it.

  “Goes without saying,” I said, and she flashed me a quizzical look.

  “I’m glad to see we can work together,” she said. “I’ll have my staff make it happen. When I get staff. Shit. I’ll be doing it.” She paused. “What sort of Goliath angle?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “They have lots of angles. It shouldn’t be too hard to find two dozen. We can narrow it down from there.”

  “Right. May I ask a favor in return?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would you have a word with Bowden Cable? I need a good deputy, and he’d be pretty much perfect.”

  “He’s very happy working at Acme Carpets,” I said, “but I’ll ask him.”

  She nodded, placed her armed police under the command of Colonel Wexler, then departed. If she couldn’t get any staff to work for her—SpecOps was always voluntary—then the department could be closed as quickly as it had been reopened. It wouldn’t affect Braxton’s wasteful-budget policy, as there were plenty other SpecOps departments in which to squander money.

  Finisterre vented some steam from the condensers before winding the craft up to liftoff power.

  “All right back there?” he asked.

  Sister Megan was with Sister Henrietta, whose kneecap had been placed back in position and then covered with bandages. The blood was already seeping through. We asked for an expedited transit of the Salisbury range and were at the Lola Vavoom Discount Sofa Warehouse See Press for Details Memorial Hospital less than twenty minutes later.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to be checked over?” asked Finisterre after we had offloaded the recently renamed Brother Henry. “Bruised and sore, but I’ll be fine,” I told him. “Despite being pretty much useless, I actually enjoyed myself.”

  “Don’t get too used to it. You’re chief librarian now: less running around waving a pistol and more in charge of policy and procurement, appointments and budget responsibility.”

  “I am, aren’t I?”

  If I had clout, it was time to use it. I called the office to tell Duffy that I needed to see Swindon’s Goliath representative in my office first thing in the morning “as a matter of the utmost urgency.”

  Duffy said he would take care of it, then asked me what time I wanted to be picked up in my car in the morning and whether I had any “dietary considerations” as regarding lunch. I was going to tell him I didn’t need a car, but since I couldn’t drive myself and it wasn’t fair to use Landen as a taxi service, I told him 9:00 A.M. and that I ate most things except okra and marzipan.

  “James?” I said as soon as I had rung off.

  “Yes?” he replied, scooting low across Liddington Castle as he made the short hop to Aldbourne.

  “Why did we only find Crabbe’s descender?”

  We had been to look at Jack and Crabbe’s escape route before Smalls had arrived. The rope was still there, and the descender used by Crabbe—but no sign of Jack’s.

  “Logic would dictate that he escaped using another method. Not sure how, though—a BASE jump would be the only other way out, but there was no evidence of a parachute either. Unless you have any bright ideas?”

  I didn’t, which raised the question: If Jack didn’t parachute out and didn’t go down the rope, how did he escape?

  19.

  Tuesday: Home

  From when it first opened, motorway services were always a welcome mix of good food, restful surroundings, clean and spacious hotels and reasonably priced shopping. Some people ventured solely onto the motorway to visit these oases of calm on the bellowing asphalt, and poor food and less-than-exemplary service were simply not tolerated. When Aust Services lost a prestigious Dunlop Star from its rating, the manager, overcome by shame, set himself on fire and threw himself into the river Severn.

  J. Fforde, Motorway Services and
Sarcasm, Unsubtly Used

  “Holy cow!” said Landen when he saw me. “What happened to you?”

  “Remember how Daisy Mutlar said she would devote her life to silent introspection of an obscure religion if she couldn’t marry you?”

  “We all make threats like that. No one takes them seriously.”

  “Daisy was totally serious. She’s now Mother Daisy over at the Salisbury Lobsterhood.”

  “She always did want to be a mother. She did all this to you?”

  “Only that one and . . . that one,” I replied, showing him the bruises that had been Daisy-inflicted.

  “The rest was Jack Schitt and one of his cronies.”

  “I’ve a feeling you weren’t reminiscing about the old days over a glass of wine.”

  “Very astute of you.”

  We went through to the kitchen, where we exchanged passwords before I sat at the large kitchen table and related all that had happened. While I talked, he fetched some antiseptic and a packet of cotton wool. I had numerous scratches, cuts and abrasions from when the trapdoor was blown open, and I winced as he tended to them. When I’d finished speaking, he stared at me for a while, concerned rather than shocked.

  “Trouble really does follow you around, doesn’t it? Even when you’re just a librarian.”

  “There’s nothing ‘just’ about being a librarian,” I corrected him. “And as for Jack Schitt—I’ve a feeling we’ve not heard the last of him.”

  “It doesn’t make much sense, him allowing you to see his face and survive, does it?”

  “None of it adds up,” I replied with another wince as he picked a splinter out of my head. “How have things been here?”

  “The Wingco got through to Land’s End International. Neither Quinn, Highsmith nor Aornis ever got there.”

  “It’s a long journey from Swindon to Cornwall,” I said. “They must have stopped for fuel.”

  “Millon came up with these,” said Landen, laying some pictures on the table in front of me. They were grainy images from a security camera at a motorway services somewhere.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “These were taken at Agutter Services two hours after Aornis and the van left Swindon.”

  He pointed to three figures—one, Aornis, being escorted by two others, recognizable as Quinn and Highsmith.

  “Okay,” I said, “a toilet break. Now what?”

  He showed me another taken a minute later, with Aornis on her own.

  “Probably made them forget what they were doing,” said Landen. “The whole deafness-as-defense must have been totally wrong—she can manipulate memories in quite another way.”

  “What happened to her after that?” I asked, and Landen showed me a picture of Aornis, this time getting into a Alfa-Morris Spyder. There was a road sign next to her, which indicated she was heading back the way she came.

  “Okay,” I said, “so she headed back up the motorway. See what Millon can find from the motorway cameras. There can’t be many Alfa-Morris Spyders on the roads these days. It’s a start at least.”

  “Why are we looking for Aornis again?” asked Landen. “I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I can’t remember what it is.”

  “One of us has a mindworm. We have to kill Aornis to get rid of it.”

  “Is it me?”

  I nodded.

  “Hmm. Wonder what it is? Don’t tell me! Will I forget about having one soon enough?”

  “Pretty soon, yes.”

  “Good.”

  He returned his attention to the splinters stuck in my neck and shoulder.

  “Ow!” I said as he wiped some dirt out of a wound, “Be careful. How did Tuesday feel about the failure of the defense shield?”

  “She’s taking it well, but something’s brewing at the city council—she overheard them as they made their way out. Since they think it’s unlikely the Anti-Smite Shield will be operational by Friday, they said that Smite Solutions will have to be confirmed instead.”

  “Is Smite Solutions an evacuation plan or something else?”

  “Not sure,” he replied, “but even with an evacuation, the entire city center will still be destroyed in a firestorm. A billion pounds’ worth of damage, in less time than it takes to prepare ramer noodles—and no insurance due to the Act of God clause. Will you keep still?”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “I didn’t tell you to go out and do fieldwork.”

  “I was going to look at some books—it became fieldwork. Shit, I need a Dizuperadol patch the size of a washcloth. My leg is screaming at me like a stuck pig.”

  “You’re not allowed to replace them until seven,” replied Landen, checking his watch.

  “You’re my doctor now?”

  “No, I’m your husband now. And you’re meant to have only three, changed every two days. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Damn the doctor.”

  Landen sighed. “I can run you down to Lola Vavoom Memorial,” he said. “You can argue with them instead. They’ll say the same—only with medical authority.”

  “Never mind,” I muttered.

  He glared at me. “There’s no point in grumping at everything and everyone, Thursday.”

  I shot him an angry look. “Oh, and you weren’t grumpy when you lost your leg?”

  “Yes, I was grumpy. Very grumpy. In fact, I was probably the biggest pain in the arse imaginable. But I had someone to tell me when I was being too grumpy for my own good.”

  “That’s completely different.”

  “No, it’s completely the same. You told me not be an arse then, and I’m telling you not to be an arse now.”

  I took a deep breath and gave him a hug so my mouth was close to his ear.

  “You were grumpier,” I whispered, and he laughed and threatened to tickle me, so I had to promise I’d be good. I hate being tickled.

  “You two are so disgustingly fond of one another,” said Millon the Hermit as he shambled in the back door. “

  You should try arguing once in a while. Good for marriages, apparently.

  "Holy cow, Thursday, what happened to you?”

  “An argument with a trapdoor. How’s your hermit exam revision going?”

  He narrowed his eyes and waved his hands randomly in the air. “It is adrift on the sea of time, lost in the endless wastes of human vanity.”

  Landen and I looked at one another and nodded.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Thank you. Want to hear what I found out about Krantz?”

  Millon did indeed have some news. Jacob Krantz had worked for seventeen years on the Book Project—Goliath’s attempt to enter the BookWorld.

  “Krantz was one of three scientists who had contributed significantly to the transfictional drive on the Austen Rover Transfictional Tour Bus,” said Millon. “He was professor of theoretical particle English at St. Broccoli’s in Oxford, so knew how to merge physics and literature. Loved both, they said.”

  “And then what?”

  “He was moved to the Synthetic Human Division. As soon as Synthetics were officially given banned chimera status, he was reassigned—but to where, I’m still trying to discover.”

  “Why is he in Swindon with a stack of Thursday Next lookalikes?”

  “He isn’t. He never left. He was found at home in Goliathopolis on Sunday morning—dead.”

  “Murder?”

  “Natural causes, it seems. A brain aneurysm. He was sixtyeight.”

  “Well,” I said, “there was someone or something that looked a lot like him in the Finis Hotel this morning.”

  “I’m not disputing that.”

  We all fell silent. I tried to figure it out, but my brain felt fluffy, so I thanked Millon and invited him to stay for supper, which he said would be a great improvement on the breadless gruel sandwich he had planned. We made some tea, and he and Landen chatted about the conspiracy network. Not so much about the imminent smiting but more long-term stuff like HR-6984’s
arrival in thirty-seven years. Namely, just what algorithms were being used by the Asteroid Strike Likelihood Committee to account for the 34 percent likelihood of a strike and why this might be important. I got bored just as Friday wandered in and started to rummage through the fridge. “How was work?” I asked.

  “ ’S’kay,” he replied, taking random bites from things. “Any news?”

  “Not really.”

  “Anything cool happen at Home De pot?”

  “Neh.”

  “Something on your mind?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You’ve just eaten Pickwick’s pet food.”

  “Ugh,” he said, and spit it in the bin.

  “It’s the Destiny Aware Support Group meeting,” he said, after swilling his mouth out with water. “I’m not sure I want to go.”

  “It might help to discover why you’re going to kill Gavin Watkins on Friday.”

  He looked up at me. “I think that’s why I don’t want to go.”

  “I’ll take you. We’ll leave at seven-thirty.”

  He grumpily agreed, gave me a silent hug and was gone. I took Tuesday some hot chocolate to her in her lab and found the Wingco in with her. Despite Tuesday’s ongoing work to discover the value of the illusive Uc, she was also committed to helping the Wing Commander with his efforts to try to prove the existence of the Dark Reading Matter.

  “What’s unique about early dodos is how they functioned with so few lines of code,” explained Tuesday when I asked them what they were doing. “Whoever first programmed the dodo’s brain must have discovered pretty quickly that it was possible to crash a dodo’s cortex simply by mild overstimulation. Watching a kitten while eating a cake and walking all at the same time would be enough to do it. And although a reboot would take only five minutes, the rebooted dodo would have forgotten everything it had ever learned, ever, which isn’t ideal. Rather than redesign the brain, they simply added a buffer to slow down the processing of information.”

  I looked at Pickwick, who was sitting on the workbench with an uncomfortable “If you wanted a guinea pig, why not just buy a blasted guinea-pig?” look about her.