Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  Demetrius Palaeologus (est: 1954) Antiques - Rare Books - Prints - Maps - Vintage Scientific Instruments - Toothbrushes

  Mr Palaeologus, or his duly appointed representative, was a short, cheerful-looking man with a completely spherical bald head, round glasses and chins like a concertina; the face and the shape were more than a little familiar, something to do with coffee and cake, but Paul couldn’t quite place it. Mr Palaeologus had a toothbrush for sale; he even had a blue toothbrush, though he admitted that he couldn’t personally endorse that particular model, whereas the green one with the textured handle—No? The blue one, then. Fine.

  ‘And you’d like that gift-wrapped,’ the man said; a statement, not a question.

  ‘Well, not really,’ Paul said, but the man wasn’t there any more; he’d darted into the back room, taking the toothbrush, and Mr Laertides’s fiver, with him.

  Paul settled down to wait. There wasn’t a great deal in the shop to interest him; apart from the toothbrushes, distinctly separate in a perspex display of their very own on the far wall, it was just a few bits of tatty old furniture, some framed maps and a shelf of big, fat leather-bound books. After ten minutes of standing around, Paul pulled out one of the books and glanced at it, but the title page was in Latin and the rest of it was just a load of old-fashioned maps of (apparently) Nova Scotia, with a few line drawings of fallen-down old castles and the like. Eventually, the man came out holding a parcel the size of a shoebox, covered in bright red paper and festooned with curly ribbon. Biting back the truth, Paul thanked him, said it was very nice and left quickly. There were no taxis to be had, so he went back to the office on the bus. People stared at him all the way.

  ‘This is stupid,’ he complained, dumping the loathsome parcel down on Mr Laertides’s desk. ‘All right, the flower stuff was harmless and it wasn’t bad getting out of the office to look at that tree, but—’

  ‘Get a grip,’ Mr Laertides said. ‘Just imagine, it could’ve been pink.’

  ‘It’s not far off pink,’ Paul maintained bitterly. ‘Well, aren’t you going to open the bloody thing, after I’ve been to all that trouble?’

  Mr Laertides shook his head. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘I trust you to know a blue toothbrush when you see one. Now—’

  ‘Aren’t you going to explain? Please?’ Paul said hopefully. ‘Just a hint’d do.’

  ‘Sorry, not possible. Now, I want you to look through that big cardboard box over in the corner there, and choose the eight CDs you’d least like to be stranded on a desert island with.’

  And so it went on, day after day. Carefully examine these seven identical steel washers and say which you think is the shiniest. If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, which would you choose, rice pudding or Rich Tea biscuits? Who do you think looks better in a hat, Robin Cook or Severiano Ballesteros? Imagine a goldfish, a claw hammer, a mountain, a pile of tins of grapefruit, a shoe, dawn over the Nile delta in February. If toothache had a colour, would it be red, black or yellow? Go to a suburban road in Dunstable and count the number of blue cars parked on the south-facing kerb.

  Still, it was better than work; and Paul was getting out of the office quite regularly, and nobody seemed to notice or mind if he dawdled on his way back. The extra money was nice, too, as were the friendly smiles of the partners as he passed them in the corridors, and the general sense of not being a quarry species at a predators’ convention. Mr Tanner’s mum was back to her normal flamboyant self at the front desk, but so far she was leaving him well alone; he missed being able to talk to her, but he had other people to chat with now, and besides, he was busy, no time for idle banter . . . Actually, he realised, the being busy all the time was maybe the greatest improvement of all in his quality of life. Paul Carpenter had been able to shut out the weirdness, and even turn a blind eye to much of the sheer horror and fear, but the one thing he’d never figured out how to cope with was the boredom of hours sitting in his office with nothing to do. Popular Phil Marlow, on the other hand, might spend his working day carrying out one set of unfathomably bizarre orders after another, but at least he was kept occupied. And if the work he was doing seemed pointless, ridiculous and a total waste of time and effort, how was that different from the working lives of millions of his fellow citizens? The tasks that Mr Laertides set him were no more fatuous than the job descriptions of any number of civil servants, local government officers, Revenue officials and duly accredited inspectors of this and that; and unlike them, he wasn’t doing anybody any harm, so what was there to complain about?

  ‘Good work,’ Mr Laertides said enthusiastically, as Paul reported back after a morning spent playing Death Throes 2005 on the office computer. ‘Thanks for that, I do believe we’re beginning to make some progress at last. Now—’

  Paul shut his eyes, but only for a moment.

  ‘I want you,’ Mr Laertides went on, ‘to nip down to Trafalgar Square and feed the pigeons.’

  Paul looked at him. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Trafalgar Square,’ Mr Laertides repeated, slowly and clearly. ‘Pigeons.’

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  Mr Laertides frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘There aren’t any pigeons in Trafalgar Square these days,’ Paul said. ‘The government had them all gassed or something. It was on the news at the time.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mr Laertides shrugged. ‘In that case, I want you to go to St James’s Park and feed the ducks.’ He paused. ‘There are still ducks in St James’s Park?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘They haven’t all been lined up against the wall with little duck-sized blindfolds on or anything?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Fine. In that case, here’s a kilo and a half of birdseed,’ he added, pointing to a fat paper bag on the desk. ‘You’ll need to take someone with you, give you a hand.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Paul objected. Freedom of speech wasn’t an issue with Mr Laertides, he could say pretty much what he liked, raise objections, ask questions, whatever. Of course, his questions weren’t answered and his objections were ignored, but it was the principle of the thing. ‘How could feeding the birds, tuppence a bag, possibly need two people?’

  ‘You could take that secretary of yours,’ Mr Laertides continued, with a grin, ‘give the poor kid something to do for a change. She must be bored silly, waiting around for you to give her some typing or filing to do. What did you say her name was, again?’

  Paul shook his head. ‘I’d rather not, thanks,’ he said. ‘Look, is it extremely heavy birdseed or something? Or does one of us chuck it around while the other one takes notes?’

  ‘Or,’ Mr Laertides said, his face suddenly blank, ‘you could ask her to help you.’

  Sophie’s name hadn’t been mentioned in Mr Laertides’s room before, but even so there was no need to ask who her was. Paul opened his mouth to refuse, then shut it again.

  ‘And it’ll take you a while,’ Mr Laertides went on, ‘and there’s no point you both trudging back to the office at one o’clock and then back again at five past two, so you might as well have lunch out somewhere. Together,’ he added.

  Whenever Mr Laertides dropped hints, it made Paul think of some US Air Force bunker a mile under the roots of the Rocky Mountains, and frantic missile technicians trying to shoot the hint down with tactical nukes before it collided with Earth and started a new ice age. Nevertheless. He hadn’t actually seen Sophie to talk to since Phil Marlow’s first day; and a shared cappuccino and sandwich couldn’t do any lasting harm, surely. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Should I—?’

  Mr Laertides shook his head. ‘I’ll send Theo a memo asking if we can borrow her,’ he replied; and just then there was a knock at the door, and Sophie came in.

  Paul’s first instinct was to look away, but he batted it aside like an over-persistent moth. She paused just inside the room, smiled at him, then handed Mr Laertides an envelope. He opened it, read the single sheet of paper inside
it, smiled and handed it to Paul.

  From: Theodorus Van Spee

  To: Frank Laertides

  You will wish to borrow Ms Pettingell to help with your current project. I can spare her until 3.45. She will wish to order a banana milk shake, but should be dissuaded from doing so as bananas bring her out in unsightly facial blemishes, a fact which her liking for bananas has led her to ignore.

  Cordially

  TVS

  Paul straitjacketed his facial muscles, nodded and handed it back. ‘That seems to be in order,’ he said, and Mr Laertides inclined his head gravely. A few minutes later, Paul and Sophie were out in the open air, armed with birdseed and heading for St James’s Park in a taxi.

  ‘So,’ Paul said after a long silence, during which Sophie had smiled at him at least three times. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’ She made a pantomime of rolling her eyes. ‘Honestly, Van Spee can be absolutely bloody insufferable sometimes. ’ Pause, frown. ‘Have you come across him yet?’ she asked. ‘Tall, thin bloke, white beard, cross between Mycroft Holmes and the Wizard of Oz.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘Haven’t had that pleasure,’ he replied. ‘You’re in his department, right?’

  ‘Worse luck. Actually,’ she added, ‘it’s not so bad; I mean, there’s no goblins or demons or dragons or anything, you know, yetch. And he doesn’t throw tantrums or shout or try and look down the front of my blouse or anything. It’s just—’

  ‘Weird,’ Paul supplied.

  ‘Weird,’ she repeated. ‘Absolutely and completely weird. Like, yesterday he had me colouring in a kid’s colouring book all afternoon. And we spent three hours this morning playing chess.’

  ‘Really? Who won?’

  ‘I did,’ Sophie replied, with a slight frown. ‘Which is odd, because I’m rubbish and you’d have thought a bloke like that’d be brilliant at chess. But no, I beat him six times and drew twice.’

  ‘Go you,’ Paul said approvingly. ‘But that’s not the point, is it?’

  She nodded briskly. ‘Not the point at all. It’s weird, and it’s starting to freak me out. I mean, the filing and the photocopying and looking things up in books and traipsing up and down stairs carrying messages, it was boring and miserable but at least—’ She shook her head. ‘If it carries on like this, I’m going to go to Tanner and ask to be transferred. Talking of which,’ she added, and maybe she’d got something in her eye, ‘do you need any help in your department? Only it’s always interested me a lot, public relations and media and, um, whatever.’

  Paul grinned. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure you’d want to. For instance,’ he went on before she could object, ‘did anyone tell you what we’re going to be doing?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Sophie replied. ‘Van Spee just looked up at me suddenly from the papers he was reading, handed me that envelope - it was there on his desk all morning, ready - and told me to go and see you. Well, you plural,’ she added in a hurry. ‘So, what exactly are we doing?’

  ‘Feeding the ducks in St James’s Park,’ Paul said. ‘As witness, one paper bag full of birdseed.’

  ‘Feeding the ducks? Why?’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Because he likes birds, or—’ He couldn’t think of a reason. ‘Truth is, most of the stuff we do in PR and Media is like that. Bizarre and incomprehensible.’

  Sophie paused and looked at him curiously. ‘Bizarre and incomprehensible to the outside observer,’ she said, ‘but of course you know exactly what it’s all in aid of, because it’s your speciality. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Well,’ Paul admitted, ‘actually, no. Actually, I haven’t got a clue. I just do as I’m told, and at the end of the month I get paid money. Presumably there’s a point to it all, but—’ He checked himself. He was sounding a little bit too much like Paul Carpenter back from the dead, and if anyone around JWW was likely to notice, it’d be Sophie. ‘It’s like when they were building the pyramids, or the great cathedrals,’ he said, smiling cheerfully. ‘Frank Laertides is the architect, I just haul on a rope and assume that he knows what he’s doing. It’s a very complicated branch of the trade,’ he added grandly, ‘takes a lifetime to learn, and even then you’ve got to have the gift or you’ll never get anywhere. ’

  ‘I see,’ Sophie replied, and there was a tiny hint of suspicion in her voice. ‘You don’t mind that? Not having a clue, I mean.’

  Paul did a rather fine doesn’t-bother-me gesture with his hands; completely spontaneous and unrehearsed, too. ‘I go with the flow,’ he said. ‘Obviously, I pick up bits of theory and stuff as I go along; and once the job’s finished, naturally you look at it and think, of course, that’s what all that was for, how dumb of me not to figure it out.’

  ‘Ah,’ Sophie said. ‘Traditional British apprenticeship, in other words. Left-handed screwdrivers and stuff.’

  ‘In a sense,’ Paul replied, a trifle huffily. ‘I think of it more as being Dr Watson, and you only find out the solution to the case at the end, when Holmes explains it all. I rather like it that way,’ he added defiantly. ‘At least it keeps it from getting boring.’

  ‘I guess,’ Sophie said; and then the suspicion and scepticism seemed to drain out of her, like oil from the crankcase of a British motorbike, and Paul could have sworn that she almost sort of batted her eyelashes. Now it was his turn to be suspicious: the Sophie he’d known would rather have been staked out over an anthill in the desert than knowingly have batted an eyelash. Mr Tanner’s mum, now: in her day, she’d left no eyelash unbatted, and had moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue so often it was a wonder she hadn’t had permanent cold sores. But they’d walked past her at reception on their way out of the office, so it couldn’t be her; and none of the other female goblins in the building had ever shown that sort of interest in him. Besides . . . a moment later, presumably without realising she was doing it, Sophie started cleaning out her ear with the tip of her index finger, and that was so definitively Sophie that it had to be her. In which case - Don’t go there, Paul warned himself, and for once he had the good sense to listen to his own advice.

  A wise man once said that in central London there are only two sorts of pedestrian, the quick and the dead. Having got out of the taxi on the south side of Birdcage Walk, they managed to sprint through a gap in the lava flow of traffic into the wrapper-strewn peace of the park and soon found themselves at the edge of the water, surrounded on all sides by a seething carpet of ducks. ‘Well,’ Paul said, ‘here goes. Good luck.’ He held out the birdseed bag, and Sophie gravely scooped up a handful.

  ‘The ancient Romans reckoned they could predict the future by watching birds,’ Sophie said, after a few distributions of largesse. ‘Maybe that’s what this is all about.’

  ‘Interesting theory,’ Paul replied, in his best Hugh Grant voice. ‘You mean, if they climb on each others’ backs and try to peck each others’ eyes out, it means that there’s going to be a general election.’

  A strange moment: at first, Sophie started to frown, as she generally did just before she treated a feeble joke with the contempt she felt it deserved. But then she sort of froze for a heartbeat; and then she giggled. Sophie didn’t often giggle, in the same way that deep pools of water are rarely set on fire by stray sparks. ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘Or if they all waddle about frantically with their bottoms in the air, it means—’

  Paul, who’d been watching a fat brown duck with a limp, waited for her to finish the sentence, but she didn’t. He looked round, but she wasn’t there any more. He swivelled his head round like a tank turret; she couldn’t have gone far, and they were at the edge of the pond, but he still couldn’t see her. Then he turned back, and nearly fell over.

  Where Sophie had been standing was a goblin; in broad daylight, all fangs and claws and round red eyes. And in its outstretched paw were a few grains of millet.

  CHAPTER SIX

  W‘hat the fuck,’ said the goblin, ‘am I doing here?’ It had taken Paul a long time and a great d
eal of concentration to learn to tell goblins apart. It should’ve been easy, because some of them were rat-headed, some of them had faces like pigs or dogs, some of them could almost have passed for human but for the six-inch curved tusks and the third nostril. This one was basically dog with a hint of cat around the cheekbones, and it only took Paul about a second and a half to remember where he’d seen it before. He even remembered that he knew its name, except he’d forgotten it for the moment. ‘You,’ he said; and then, ‘Where’s she gone? What’ve you done with her?’

  But the goblin only stared; first at Paul, then at the bits of grain in its paw. ‘For crying out loud,’ it hissed in a loud stage whisper, ‘I can’t be seen out like this - do something.’

  A duck waddled up, stopped dead eighteen inches from the goblin’s feet, opened its wings and flew away terribly fast. ‘What? I mean, like what?’

  The goblin had started quivering, like a guitar string. ‘I don’t bloody know, do I? Quick, take your coat off and give it here. Quickly. Your lot may be as perceptive as a box of small rocks, but any minute now someone’s going to start screaming, and then we’ll be up to our arses in the Filth.’

  Valid point. Paul slipped off his jacket and draped it awkwardly round the goblin’s shoulders. ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘Colin. Colin the goblin. You overheard me talking about Van Spee’s crystals and wanted to buy some off me.’

  The goblin flinched as if it had misjudged climbing over a very powerful electric fence. ‘Fuck you,’ it said. ‘Who are you, cops or something? That wasn’t me, I wasn’t even—’

  ‘We went to your lock-up,’ Paul went on. ‘You offered me, what was it, four million?’

  ‘How the hell do—?’ The goblin peered closely at Paul’s face, then took a step back. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know who you are or what in buggery’s going on; but the bloke I offered to buy the crystals off didn’t look anything like you and anyway, I know for a fact he’s dead, so you can’t be him. And I didn’t buy them anyhow, he wouldn’t sell, and failing utterly to traffic in prohibited substances isn’t a crime in anybody’s book, not even if the judges were Dave Blunkett and Attila the Hun. So if you’ll kindly stop frigging me about and send me back—’