The Eyre Affair

by Jasper Fforde

  “So you’re his father?”

  Snood walked through to the kitchen but I wasn’t going to let it go.

  “So how is he? Where’s he living these days?”

  The old man fumbled with the kettle.

  “I find it hard to talk about Filbert,” he announced at length, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “It was so long ago!”

  “He’s dead?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” murmured the old man. “He’s not dead; I think you were told he was unavoidably detained, yes?”

  “Yes. I thought he had found someone else or something.”

  “We thought you would understand; your father was or is, I suppose, in the ChronoGuard and we use certain—let me see—euphemisms.”

  He looked at me intently with clear blue eyes staring through heavy lids. My heart thumped heavily.

  “What are you saying?” I asked him.

  The old man thought about saying something else but then lapsed into silence, paused for a moment and then shuffled back to the main room to mark up videotape labels. There was obviously more to it than just a girl in Tewkesbury, but time was on my side. I let the matter drop.

  It gave me a chance to look around the room. A trestle table against one damp wall was stacked with surveillance equipment. A Revox spool-to-spool tape recorder slowly revolved next to a mixing box that placed all seven bugs in the room opposite and the phone line onto eight different tracks of the tape. Set back from the windows were two binoculars, a camera with a powerful telephoto lens, and next to this a video camera recording at slow speed onto a ten-hour tape.

  Tamworth looked up from the binoculars.

  “Welcome, Thursday. Come and have a look!”

  I looked through the binoculars. In the flat opposite, not thirty yards distant, I could see a well-dressed man aged perhaps fifty with a pinched face and a concerned expression. He seemed to be on the phone.

  “That’s not him.”

  Tamworth smiled.

  “I know. This is his brother, Styx. We found out about him this morning. SO-14 were going to pick him up but our man is a much bigger fish; I called SO-1, who intervened on our behalf; Styx is our responsibility at the moment. Have a listen.”

  He handed me some earphones and I looked through the binoculars again. Hades’ brother was sitting at a large walnut desk flicking through a copy of the London and District Car Trader. As I watched, he stopped, picked up the phone and dialed a number.

  “Hello?” said Styx into the phone.

  “Hello?” replied a middle-aged woman, the recipient of the call.

  “Do you have a 1976 Chevrolet for sale?”

  “Buying a car?” I asked Tamworth.

  “Keep listening. Same time every week, apparently. Regular as clockwork.”

  “It’s only got eighty-two thousand miles on the clock,” continued the lady, “and runs really well. MOT and tax paid ’til year’s end too.”

  “It sounds perfect,” replied Styx. “I’ll be willing to pay cash. Will you hold it for me? I’ll be about an hour. You’re in Clapham, yes?”

  The woman agreed, and she read over an address that Styx didn’t bother writing down. He reaffirmed his interest and then hung up, only to call a different number about another car in Hounslow. I took off the headphones and pulled out the headset jack so we could hear Styx’s nasal rasp over the loudspeakers.

  “How long does he do this for?”

  “From SO-14 records, until he gets bored. Six hours, sometimes eight. He’s not the only one either. Anyone who has ever sold a car gets someone like Styx on the phone at least once. Here, these are for you.”

  He handed me a box of ammunition with expanding slugs developed for maximum internal damage.

  “What is he? A buffalo?”

  But Tamworth wasn’t amused.

  “We’re up against something quite different here, Thursday. Pray to the GSD you never have to use them, but if you do, don’t hesitate. Our man doesn’t give second chances.”

  I took the clip out of my automatic and reloaded it and the spare I carried with me, leaving a standard slug on top in case of an SO-1 spot check. Over in the flat, Styx had dialed another number in Ruislip.

  “Hello?” replied the unfortunate car owner on the other end of the line.

  “Yes, I saw your advert for a Ford Granada in today’s Trader,” continued Styx. “Is it still for sale?”

  Styx got the address out of the car owner, promised to be around in ten minutes, put the phone down and then rubbed his hands with glee, laughing childishly. He put a line through the advert and then went onto the next.

  “Doesn’t even have a license,” said Tamworth from the other side of the room. “He spends the rest of his time stealing ballpoints, causing electrical goods to fail after the guarantee has expired and scratching records in record shops.”

  “A bit childish, isn’t it?”

  “I’d say,” replied Tamworth. “He’s possessed of a certain amount of wickedness, but nothing like his brother.”

  “So what’s the connection between Styx and the Chuzzlewit manuscript?”

  “We suspect that he may have it. According to SO-14’s surveillance records he brought in a package the evening of the break-in at Gad’s Hill. I’m the first to admit that this is a long shot but it’s the best evidence of his whereabouts these past three years. It’s about time he broke cover.”

  “Has he demanded a ransom for the manuscript?” I asked.

  “No, but it’s early days. It might not be as simple as we think. Our man has an estimated IQ of one eighty, so simple extortion might be too easy for him.”

  Snood came in and sat down slightly shakily at the binoculars, put on the headphones and plugged in the jack. Tamworth picked up his keys and handed me a book.

  “I have to meet up with my opposite number at SO-4. I’ll be about an hour. If anything happens, just page me. My number is on redial one. Have a read of this if you get bored.”

  I looked at the small book he had given me. It was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre bound in thick red leather.

  “Who told you?” I asked sharply.

  “Who told me what?” replied Tamworth, genuinely surprised.

  “It’s just . . . I’ve read this book a lot. When I was younger. I know it very well.”

  “And you like the ending?”

  I thought for a moment. The rather flawed climax of the book was a cause of considerable bitterness within Brontë circles. It was generally agreed that if Jane had returned to Thornfield Hall and married Rochester, the book might have been a lot better than it was.

  “No one likes the ending, Tamworth. But there’s more than enough in it regardless of that.”

  “Then a reread will be especially instructive, won’t it?”

  There was a knock at the door. Tamworth answered it and a man who was all shoulders and no neck entered.

  “Just in time!” said Tamworth, looking at his watch. “Thursday Next, this is Buckett. He’s temporary until I get a replacement.”

  He smiled and was gone.

  Buckett and I shook hands. He smiled wanly as though this sort of job was not something he relished. He told me that he was pleased to meet me, then went to speak to Snood about the results of a horse race.

  I tapped my fingertips on the copy of Jane Eyre that Tamworth had given me and placed it in my breast pocket. I rounded up the coffee cups and took them next door to the cracked enamel sink. Buckett appeared at the doorway.

  “Tamworth said you were a Litera Tec.”

  “Tamworth was correct.”

  “I wanted to be a Litera Tec.”

  “You did?” I replied, seeing if there was anything in the fridge that wasn’t a year past its sell-by date.

  “Yeah. But they said you had to read a book or two.”

  “It helps.”

  There was a knock at the door and Buckett instinctively reached for his handgun. He was more on edge than I had thought. />
  “Easy, Buckett. I’ll get it.”

  He joined me at the door and released the safety from his pistol. I looked at him and he nodded back in reply.

  “Who’s there?” I said without opening the door.

  “Hello!” replied a voice. “My name’s Edmund Capillary. Have you ever stopped to wonder whether it was really William Shakespeare who penned all those wonderful plays?”

  We both breathed a sigh of relief and Buckett put the safety back on his automatic, muttering under his breath:

  “Bloody Baconians!”

  “Steady,” I replied, “it’s not illegal.”

  “More’s the pity.”

  “Shh.”

  I opened the door on the security chain and found a small man in a lumpy corduroy suit. He was holding a dog-eared ID for me to see and politely raised his hat with a nervous smile. The Baconians were quite mad but for the most part harmless. Their purpose in life was to prove that Francis Bacon and not Will Shakespeare had penned the greatest plays in the English language. Bacon, they believed, had not been given the recognition that he rightfully deserved and they campaigned tirelessly to redress this supposed injustice.

  “Hello!” said the Baconian brightly. “Can I take a moment of your time?”

  I answered slowly:

  “If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I must be dafter than I look.”

  The Baconian was not to be put off. He obviously liked fighting a poor argument; in real life he was most likely a personal accident barrister.

  “Not as daft as supposing that a Warwickshire schoolboy with almost no education could write works that were not for an age but for all time.”

  “There is no evidence that he was without formal education,” I returned evenly, suddenly enjoying myself. Buckett wanted me to get rid of him but I ignored his gesticulations.

  “Agreed,” continued the Baconian, “but I would argue that the Shakespeare in Stratford was not the same man as the Shakespeare in London.”

  It was an interesting approach. I paused and Edmund Capillary took the opportunity to pounce. He launched into his well-rehearsed patter almost automatically:

  “The Shakespeare in Stratford was a wealthy grain trader and buying houses when the Shakespeare in London was being pursued by tax collectors for petty sums. The collectors traced him to Sussex on one occasion in 1600; yet why not take action against him in Stratford?”

  “Search me.”

  He was on a roll now.

  “No one is recorded in Stratford as having any idea of his literary success. He was never known to have bought a book, written a letter or indeed done anything apart from being a purveyor of bagged commodities, grain and malt and so forth.”

  The small man looked triumphant.

  “So where does Bacon fit into all this?” I asked him.

  “Francis Bacon was an Elizabethan writer who had been forced into becoming a lawyer and politician by his family. Since being associated with something like the theater would have been frowned upon, Bacon had to enlist the help of a poor actor named Shakespeare to act as his front man—history has mistakenly linked the two Shakespeares to give added validity to a story that otherwise has little substance.”

  “And the proof?”

  “Hall and Marston—both Elizabethan satirists—were firmly of the belief that Bacon was the true author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. I have a pamphlet here which goes into the matter further. More details are available at our monthly gatherings; we used to meet at the town hall but the radical wing of the New Marlovians fire-bombed us last week. I don’t know where we will meet next. But if I can take your name and number, we can be in touch.”

  His face was earnest and smug; he thought he had me. I decided to play my trump card.

  “What about the will?”

  “The will?” he echoed, slightly nervously. He was obviously hoping I wasn’t going to mention it.

  “Yes,” I continued. “If Shakespeare were truly two people, then why would the Shakespeare in Stratford mention the London Shakespeare’s theater colleagues Condell, Heming and Burbage in his will?”

  The Baconian’s face fell.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.” He sighed. “I’m wasting my time, aren’t I?”

  “I’m afraid you are.”

  He muttered something under his breath and moved on. As I threw the bolt I could hear the Baconian knocking at the next door to ours. Perhaps he’d have better luck down the corridor.

  “What is a Litera Tec doing here anyway, Next?” asked Buckett as we returned to the kitchen.

  “I’m here,” I answered slowly, “because I know what he looks like; I’m not permanent in the least. As soon as I’ve fingered his man, Tamworth will transfer me back again.”

  I poured some yogurty milk down the sink and rinsed out the container.

  “Might be a blessing.”

  “I don’t see it that way. What about you? How did you get in with Tamworth?”

  “I’m antiterrorist usually. SO-9. But Tamworth has trouble with recruitment. He took a cavalry saber for me. I owe him.”

  He dropped his eyes and fiddled with his tie for a moment. I peered cautiously into a cupboard for a dishcloth, discovered something nasty and then closed it quickly.

  Buckett took out his wallet and showed me a picture of a dribbling infant that looked like every other dribbling infant I had ever seen.

  “I’m married now so Tamworth knows I can’t stay; one’s needs change, you know.”

  “Good-looking kid.”

  “Thank you.” He put the picture away. “You married?”

  “Not for want of trying,” I replied as I filled the kettle. Buckett nodded and brought out a copy of Fast Horse.

  “Do you ever flutter on the gee-gees? I’ve had an unusual tip on Malabar.”

  “I don’t. Sorry.”

  Buckett nodded. His conversation had pretty much dried up.

  I brought in some coffee a few minutes later. Snood and Buckett were discussing the outcome of the Cheltenham Gold Stakes Handicap.

  “So you know what he looks like, Miss Next?” asked the ancient Snood without looking up from the binoculars.

  “He was a lecturer of mine when I was at college. He’s tricky to describe, though.”

  “Average build?”

  “When I last saw him.”

  “Tall?”

  “At least six-six.”

  “Black hair worn swept back and graying at the temples?”

  Buckett and I looked at one another.

  “Yes?—”

  “I think he’s over there, Thursday.”

  I jerked the headphone jack out.

  “—Acheron!!” came Styx’s voice over the loudspeaker. “Dear brother, what a pleasant surprise!”

  I looked through the binoculars and could see Acheron in the flat with Styx. He was dressed in a large gray duster jacket and was exactly how I remembered him from all those years ago. It didn’t seem as though he had aged even one day. I shivered involuntarily.

  “Shit,” I muttered. Snood had already dialed the pager number to alert Tamworth.

  “Mosquitoes have stung the blue goat,” he muttered down the phone. “Thank you. Can you repeat that back and send it twice?”

  My heart beat faster. Acheron might not stay long and I was in a position for advancement beyond the LiteraTecs for good. Capturing Hades would be something no one could ever ignore.

  “I’m going over there,” I said almost casually.

  “What?!”

  “You heard. Stay here and call SO-14 for armed backup, silent approach. Tell them we have gone in and to surround the building. Suspect will be armed and highly dangerous. Got it?”

  Snood smiled in the manner that I had so liked in his son and reached for the telephone. I turned to Buckett.

  “You with me?”

  Buckett had turned a little pale.

  “I’m . . . ah .
. . with you,” he replied slightly shakily.

  I flew out of the door, down the stairs and into the lobby.

  “Next!—”

  It was Buckett. He had stopped and was visibly shaking.

  “What is it?”

  “I . . . I . . . can’t do this,” he announced, loosening his tie and rubbing the back of his neck. “I have the kid!—You don’t know what he can do. I’m a betting man, Next. I love long odds. But we try and take him and we’re both dead. I beg you, wait for SO-14!”

  “He could be long gone by then. All we have to do is detain him.”

  Buckett bit his lip, but the man was terrified. He shook his head and beat a hasty retreat without another word. It was unnerving to say the least. I thought of shouting after him but remembered the picture of the dribbling kid. I pulled out my automatic, pushed open the door to the street and walked slowly across the road to the building opposite. As I did so Tamworth drew up in his car. He didn’t look very happy.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Pursuing the suspect.”

  “No you’re not. Where’s Buckett?”

  “On his way home.”

  “I don’t blame him. SO-14 on their way?”

  I nodded. He paused, looked up at the dark building and then at me.

  “Shit. Okay, stay behind and stay sharp. Shoot first, then question. Below the eight—”

  “—above the law. I remember.”

  “Good.”

  Tamworth pulled out his gun and we stepped cautiously into the lobby of the converted warehouse. Styx’s flat was on the seventh floor. Surprise, hopefully, would be on our side.

  5.

  Search for the Guilty, Punish the Innocent

  . . . Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth’s funerals. She missed everything . . . except the blame. It was waiting for her when she awoke . . .