Lost in a Good Book

4a. Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Thursday Next

Coincidences are strange things. I like the one about the poker player named Fallon, shot dead for cheating in San Francisco in 1858. It was considered unlucky to split the dead man’s $600 winnings so they gave the money to a passer-by, hoping to win it back. The stranger converted the $600 to $2,200, and when the police arrived was asked to hand over the original $600 as it was to be given to the dead gambler’s next of kin. After a brief investigation, the money was returned to the passer-by, as he turned out to be Fallon’s son, who hadn’t seen his father for seven years.

My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored. ‘It would be much more remarkable,’ he would say, ‘if there weren’t any coincidences.’

I stepped into the Skyrail car, pulled the emergency lever and ordered everyone off. The Neanderthal operator looked at me oddly as I jammed a foot in the open door of his driver’s cubicle. I hauled him out and thumped him on the jaw before handcuffing him. A few days in the cooler and he would be back to Mrs Kaylieu. There was shocked silence from the group of women in the Skyrail as I searched him and found… nothing. I looked in the cab and his sandwich box but the carved soap gun wasn’t there either.

The well-heeled woman who had earlier been so keen to jab the driver with her umbrella was suddenly full of self-righteous indignation.

‘Disgraceful!’ Attacking a poor defenceless Neanderthal in this manner! I shall speak to my husband about this!’

One of the other women had called SpecOps 21 and a third had given the Neanderthal a handkerchief to dab his bleeding mouth. I uncuffed Kaylieu and apologised, then sat down and put my head in my hands, wondering what had gone wrong. All the women were called Irma Cohen but none of them would ever know it. Dad said this sort of thing happened all the time.

‘You did what? asked Victor, a few hours later at the LiteraTec office.

‘I punched a Neanderthal.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought he had a gun on him.’

‘A Neanderthal? With a gun? Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘Granted, it was carved from soap—he wanted SO-14 to kill him. But that’s not the half of it. The intended victim was me. If I had journeyed on the Skyrail it would have been Thursday in the body-bag, not Kaylieu. I was set up, Victor. Someone manipulated events to try and bump me off with a stray SpecOps bullet—maybe that was their idea of a joke. If it hadn’t been for Dad taking me out I’d be playing a harp by now.’

Victor frowned and I showed him that morning’s copy of The Owl, the three clues outlined in green He read them aloud.

‘Meddlesome, Thursday, Goodbye.’

He shrugged.

‘Coincidence. I could make any sentence I wanted from any other clues just as easily. Look here.’

He scanned the answers for a moment.

‘Planet, Destroyed, Soonest. What does that mean? The world’s about to end?’

‘Well—’

He dumped my arrest report in his out-tray.

‘Take my advice, Thursday. Tell them you thought the Neanderthal was a felon, that he reminded you of the bogeyman—anything. Mention any unauthorised ChronoGuard shenanigans and Flanker will have your badge as a paperweight. I’ll write a good report to SO-1 about your work and conduct so far. With a bit of luck and some serious lying on your behalf, maybe you can get away with a reprimand. For goodness’ sake, Thursday, didn’t you learn anything from that Bad Time junket on the M1?’

He got up and rubbed his legs. His body was failing him. The hip he had replaced four years ago needed to be replaced. Bowden joined us from where he had been running the copied pages of Cardenio through the Verse Metre Analyser. Unusually for him he seemed to be showing some form of outward excitement. Bouncing, almost.

‘How does it look?’ I asked.

‘Astounding!’ replied Bowden as he waved a printed report. ‘Ninety-four per cent probability of Will being the author—not even the best fake Cardenio managed higher than a seventy-six. The VMA detected slight traces of collaboration, too.’

‘Did it say who?’

‘Seventy-three per cent likelihood of Fletcher—something that would seem to bear out against historical evidence. Forging Shakespeare is one thing, forging a collaborated work is quite another.’

There was silence. Victor rubbed his forehead and thought carefully.

‘Okay. Strange and impossible as it might seem, we may have to accept that this is the real thing. This could turn out to be the biggest literary event in history, ever. We keep this quiet and I’ll get Professor Spoon to look it over. We will have to be a hundred per cent sure. I’m not going to suffer the same embarrassment we had over that Tempest fiasco.’

‘Since it isn’t in the public domain,’ observed Bowden, ‘Volescamper will have the sole copyright for the next seventy-six years.’

‘Every playhouse on the planet will want to put it on,’ I added, ‘and think of the movie rights.’

‘Exactly,’ said Victor. ‘He’s sitting on not only the most fantastic literary discovery for three centuries but also a keg of purest gold. The question is, how did it languish in his library undiscovered all this time? Scholars have studied there since 1709. How on earth was it overlooked? Ideas, anyone?’

‘Retrosnatch?’ I suggested. ‘If a rogue ChronoGuard operative decided to go back to 1613 and steal a copy he could have a tidy little nest egg on his hands.’

‘SO-12 take retrosnatch very seriously and they assure me that it is always detected, sooner or later or both—and dealt with severely. But it’s possible. Bowden, give SO-12 a call, will you?’

Bowden put out his hand to pick up the phone just as it started to ring.

‘Hello… It’s not, you say? Okay, thanks.’

He put the phone down.

‘The ChronoGuard say not.’

‘How much do you think it’s worth?’ I asked.

‘Hundred million,’ replied Victor, ‘two hundred. Who knows? I’ll call Volescamper and tell him to keep quiet about it. People would kill to even read it. No one else is to know about it, do you hear?’

We nodded our agreement.

‘Good. Thursday, the Network takes internal affairs very seriously. SO-1 will want to speak to you here tomorrow at four about the Skyrail thing. They asked me to suspend you but I told them bollocks so just take some leave until tomorrow. Good work, the two of you. Remember, not a word to anyone!’

We thanked him and he left. Bowden stared at the wall for a moment before saying:

‘The crossword clues bother me, though. If I wasn’t of the opinion that coincidences are merely chance or an overused Dickensian plot device, I might conclude that an old enemy of yours wants to get even.’

‘One with a sense of humour, obviously,’ I told him sullenly.

‘That rules out Goliath, I suppose,’ mused Bowden. ‘Who are you calling?’

‘SO-5.’

I dug Agent Phodder’s card out of my pocket and rang the number. He had told me to call him if ‘an occurrence of unprecedented weird’ took place, so I was doing precisely that.

‘Hello?’ said a brusque-sounding man after the telephone had rung for a long time.

‘Thursday Next, SO-27,’ I announced. ‘I have some information for Agent Phodder.’

There was a long pause.

‘Agent Phodder has been reassigned.’

‘Agent Kannon, then.’

‘Both Phodder and Kannon have been reassigned,’ replied the man sharply. ‘Freak accident laying linoleum. The funeral’s on Friday.’

This was unexpected news. I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so mumbled:

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Quite,’ said the brusque man, and put the phone down.

‘What happened?’ asked Bowden.

‘Both dead,’ I said quietly.

‘Hades?’

‘Linoleum.’

We sat in silence for a moment.

‘Does Hades have the sort of powers that might be necessary to manipulate coincidences?’ asked Bowden.

I shrugged.

‘Perhaps,’ said Bowden thoughtfully, ‘it was a coincidence after all.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, wishing I could believe it. ‘Oh—I almost forgot. The world’s going to end on the twelfth of December at 20.23.’

‘Really?’ replied Bowden in a disinterested tone. Apocalyptic pronouncements were nothing new to any of us. The imminent destruction of the world had been predicted almost every year since the dawn of man.

‘Which one is it this time?’ asked Bowden. ‘Plague of mice or the wrath of God?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve got to be somewhere at five. Do us a favour, would you?’

I handed him the small evidence bag my father had given to me. Bowden stared at the goo inside.

‘What is it?’

‘Exactly. Will you have the labs analyse it?’

We bade each other goodbye and I trotted out of the building, bumping into John Smith, who was manoeuvring a wheelbarrow with a carrot the size of a vacuum cleaner in it. There was a big label attached to the oversized vegetable that read ‘evidence’. I held the door open for him.

‘Thanks,’ he panted.

I jumped in my car and pulled out of the carpark. My appointment at five was at the doctor’s, and I wasn’t going to miss it for anything.