One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

11. Plot Thickens

I was up and about while everyone else in the book was still sleepily inactive. There had been no readings at all since 2:00 A.M., and I wanted to be in costume and ready on the off chance that anyone read a few pages before breakfast. It paid to keep at a state of readiness, just in case. There had been trouble inside Captain Corelli’s Mandolin when a sudden reinterest in the book caught everyone napping—the first hundred pages or so have yet to fully recover.

I walked about the settings of the series, checking to make sure everything was ready to go. My tour wasn’t just a technical housekeeping exercise either—it was about a sense of pride. Despite the lack of readers and a certain “dissatisfaction” from particular members of the cast who suggested that I might improve the readability by spicing up the prose with a bit more sex and violence, I still wanted to keep the books going as well as I could—and to win Thursday’s approval, which was more important than the author’s.

Once I had made sure that everything was to my satisfaction, I called Whitby to apologize for standing him up. He took it better than I had expected, but I could sense he was annoyed. I told him I would definitely be free for lunch, suggested the expensive and needlessly spacious Elbow Rooms, then pretended that Pickwick had broken something, so I could end the conversation.

I drew a deep breath, cursed myself for being so stupid, took a pager with me and walked down the road to Stubbs, the outrageously expensive coffee shop on the corner.

“Could I not have a coffee?” I said, meaning I wanted an empty cup. Stubbs had become so expensive that no one could afford the coffee, but since the ambience in the café was so good and the establishment so fashionable, it was always full.

“What would you not like?” asked Paul, who wore a black gown and a wig due to a syntactical head cold that made him unable to differentiate himself between a barista and a barrister.

“Better not give me a latte,” I replied, “and better not make it a large one.”

“How did the date with Whitby go?”

“So-so.”

Paul raised an eyebrow, made no comment and handed me an empty cup. I went to a booth at the back of the store and sat down. I came here most mornings and usually read the paper over my noncoffee. I scanned the headlines of The Word, but if Thursday was missing, they didn’t know about it. Oversize Books had gained a victory at the council. Constantly irked by snide comments about taking more than their allotted shelf space, they had sought to have their own genre and succeeded. A representative for Oversize Books had praised “common sense” and said that they looked forward to “moving to their own island as soon as one big enough was made available.”

There was more about Racy Novel, with Speedy Muffler claiming that troop movements near his borders were “an act of aggression.” In rebuttal, Senator Jobsworth of the Council of Genres reiterated that there would be no troop movements ahead of the peace talks on Friday.

“If Thursday is missing,” I said to myself, “there won’t be any peace talks.”

“Mumbling to yourself?”

I looked up. It was Acheron Hades, the designated evildoer and antagonist from The Eyre Affair. Inside the book he was a homicidal maniac who would surgically remove people’s faces for fun, but outside the book he collected stamps and wrote really bad poetry.

“Peace talks,” I said, showing him the paper.

“I’m not going to hold my breath,” he remarked. “Speedy Muffler is the master of brinksmanship. Any deal on the table will be unraveled the following morning—military intervention is the only thing that will stop him.”

Acheron’s attitude was not atypical. There were few who didn’t think an all-out genre war between Women’s Fiction and Racy Novel was pretty much inevitable. The more absorbing question was, Will it be broadcast live? And then, Will it involve me or damage my own genre?

“Dogma will almost certainly be dragged into the fray,” I said gloomily.

“And Comedy to the south,” added Acheron, “and they won’t like it. I don’t think they were joking when they said they would defend their land to the last giggle.”

The door opened, and the king and queen walked in. They looked a little worse for wear. I nodded a greeting, and they ordered a cappuccino each, which placed Paul in something of a panic—I don’t think he’d ever made one before.

“By the way,” said Acheron, “I think Lettie is the best understudy yet.”

“Carmy?”

“Carmine. Great interpretation. Are you going to keep her?”

“I’ve . . . not decided yet.”

“Just so you know, I approve,” he said. “She can vanquish me any day of the week.” He stared into his empty cup for a moment. “Can I talk to you about something?”

“Is it about your poetry?”

“It’s about Bertha Rochester.”

“Biting again?”

Acheron showed me his hand, which had nasty tooth marks on it.

“Painful,” I agreed. “I told you to keep the bite mask on until the last moment. But you do throw her to her death. She’s allowed to struggle a bit.”

“That’s another thing,” he said as he pulled a pained expression. “Does she have to look at me in that accusatory way when I chuck her off the roof? It makes me feel all funny inside.”

Unlike Acheron, who differed wildly from his in-book persona, Bertha really was bonkers. She had come to us after a grueling forty-six-year stint as Anne Catherick in The Woman in White and was now quite beyond any form of rehabilitation. In a cruel and ironic twist, Grace Poole kept our version of Bertha Rochester locked securely up in the attic. It was safer for everyone that way.

“I’ll have a word,” I said, then asked after a pause, “So . . . why do you think Carmine is so good?”

“Her interpretation is respectful, but with an edginess that is both sympathetic and noir.”

“And you think that’s better than my interpretation?”

“Not better,” replied Acheron diplomatically, “different. And there’s nothing wrong with that,” he added cautiously, finding a piece of invisible fluff on his jacket. “Carmine just plays her in a way that is . . . well, how shall I put it?”

“More readable?”

“She’s an A-4—you’re an A-8. You’d expect her to exhibit a bit more depth.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Don’t sweat it. Carmine can’t handle quantity, and when and if she can, she’ll be off to the bright lights of HumDram/ Highbrow. Your job is assured. Besides,” he added in a lighter tone, “if it did come to a vote, I’d go with you.”

“I’m grateful for that at the very least,” I replied despondently. “So you prefer the real Thursday Next to a more marketable one?”

“Well, yes—and the free time. Poetry is a most absorbing pastime.”

It wasn’t what I really wanted to hear, and after chatting for a few more minutes he left. I finished the paper and wandered back to the book. I had a brief chat with the series prop master on the way. He was the technician responsible for all the interactive objects in the series—items that could be handled or manipulated in some way.

“We’ve managed to repair your car,” he said, “but go easy on it during the car chase. If you could just pull up sharply rather than slewing sideways, I’d really appreciate it.”

We were working to a budget these days. The remaking of the BookWorld had sneakily reorganized its budgetary systems. Instead of the “single-book payment,” we now earned a “reader stipend” for every reading, with a labyrinthine system of bonuses and extra payments for targets. It wasn’t universally liked. Any book that fell below the hundred-readers-a-week level could find itself hit by a double whammy: not enough funds to maintain the fabric of the novel, yet not enough Feedback Loop to hope the readers would do it for you.

I got back to the house at midmorning to find Pickwick already laying the table for lunch. She often picked up fads and trends from the BookWorld and just recently had caught the “reality bug” and insisted we sit for every meal, even though there was nothing to eat and we didn’t need to. She also insisted that we play parlor games together in the evenings. This would have been fine if she didn’t have to win at everything, and watching a dodo cheat badly at KerPlunk was not a happy spectacle.

I found Scarlett in the kitchen looking a little green about the gills and with an ice pack on her head.

“Problems?” I asked.

“N-n-n-none at all,” groaned Carmine. “I j-j-just think I hit the hyphens a little t-t-t-too hard last n-n-night.”

She groaned, closed her eyes and pressed the ice pack more firmly to her head.

“If you’re hyphenated while working you’ll be in serious trouble,” I said in my most scolding voice. “And as your mentor, so will I.”

“Yeah, yeah,” murmured Carmine, eyes firmly closed. “I’ll be fine. B-b-but can you p-p-p-please get the b-b-birdbrain over there to shut up?”

“I’m sorry,” said Pickwick haughtily, “but was the drunken tart addressing me?”

“Why, is there another b-b-birdbrain present?”

“Okay, okay,” I said, “calm down, you two. What’s the problem?”

“That b-birdbrain insists on staring at m-me and sighing.”

“Is this true?”

Pickwick ruffled her feathers indignantly. “She brought a goblin home, and they’re nothing but trouble. What’s more, I think she is entirely unsuitable for carrying on the important job of being Thursday. We all like a hyphen from time to time, but consorting with pointy-eared homunculi is totally out of order!”

She squawked the last bit, and Carmine rolled her eyes.

“I didn’t b-bring a g-goblin home.”

“He followed you home. It amounts to the same thing.”

“You’re j-just sour because you’re not g-g-getting any,” sneered Carmine. “And anyway, Horace is n-n-not like other g-g-goblins.”

“Hang on,” I said. “So you did bring a goblin home?”

“He g-g-got locked out of his b-b-book. What was I supposed to d-d-do?”

I threw up my arms. “Carmine!”

“D-don’t you be so j-judgmental,” she replied indignantly. “Look at yourself. F-f-five books in one s-series, and each by a different g-g-ghostwriter.”

“Your private life is your own,” I replied angrily, “but goblins can’t help themselves—or rather they can help themselves—to anything not nailed down.”

I ran upstairs to find that my bedroom had been ransacked. Anything of even the slightest value had been stolen. Inviting a goblin to cross your threshold was a recipe for disaster, and certainly worse than doing the same with a vampire. With the latter all you got was a nasty bite, but the company, the extraordinarily good sex and the funny stories more than made up for it—apparently.

“That was dumb,” I said when I’d returned. “He’s taken almost everything.”

Carmine looked at me, then at Pickwick, then burst into tears and ran from the room.

“Goblins!” said Pickwick with a snort. “They’re just trouble with a capital G. By the way,” she added, now cheerier since she’d been proved correct, “Sprockett wanted to show you something. He’s in your office.”

I walked through to my study, where Sprockett was indeed waiting for me. He wasn’t alone. He had his foot on top of a struggling goblin, and a burlap sack full of stolen possessions was lying on the carpet.

“Your property, ma’am?” he asked. I nodded, and he took the letter opener from the desk, held the goblin tightly by one ear and placed the opener to its throat. His eyebrow twitched. It was clearly a bluff. I decided to play along.

“No,” I said, “you’ll ruin the carpet. Do it outside.”

The goblin opened his eyes wide and stared at me in shocked amazement, then started to babble on about an “influential uncle” who would “do unpleasant things” if he “went missing.”

“Just kidding,” I added. “Let him go.”

“Are you sure?” asked Sprockett. “I can make it look like a shaving accident.”

“Yes, I’m sure. You,” I said, jabbing a finger at the goblin, “are a disgrace. Place a single toe in my series again and I’ll make you wish you’d never been written.”

Sprockett took his foot off the goblin, and it ran to the window, paused on the sill for a moment, made an obscene gesture and then ran off. That was the trouble with being stuck in Fantasy—too many goblins, spells, ogres, wizards, elves and warlocks. I reckoned it frightened readers off.

“So,” I said, locking the window after the goblin, “what’s the deal?”

“I was reappraising the condition of the wreckage from the debris field.”

He showed me the Triumph Bonneville’s exhaust pipe. It had been folded almost in half by the impact. He pointed to a small patch on the chrome. There was a slight mottling about four inches long and an inch wide.

“A fault in the manufacturing?” I suggested.

“But it wasn’t manufactured,” said Sprockett. “It was written . It should be perfect—better than any real motorcycle.”

“You asked me in here to show me an imperfection on a Bonneville exhaust?”

“There’s more. I found this orange inside the bed-sit. Here.”

He tossed the orange across, and I noticed that this also had a slight mottling on the side. He then showed me similar imperfections on a Polaroid camera, a toaster, a half-eaten sandwich and a plastic bath duck. Then I got it.

“The mottling,” I said slowly. “They are— were—ISBNs. Are you trying to tell me someone has removed all identification marks from this book?”

He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. All doubts were off. This wasn’t an accident. Someone had hacked into the novel’s source code to delete the ISBN in order to cover his tracks and ensure that no one found out which book had been destroyed or why. The epizeuxis worm and now this. We didn’t have a crashed book, we had a crime scene. But it wasn’t quite that simple.

“Only Text Grand Central or the Council of Genres would have the power to scrub ISBNs and put together a rhetorical device,” I said. “And while I’m not one to use coarse idioms, someone would have to be connected up the wazoo to pull this off. Have you attempted to find out what the ISBN actually was?”

Sprockett placed a series of photographs on the desk. “I took the liberty of subjecting the marks to a complex series of photographic techniques, which while appearing to have the veneer of scientific reality actually just sounded good. Do you want the full two pages of dull exposition or just the results?”

“Better just give me the results,” I said, looking at my watch. “Whitby will be here any moment for a lunch date.”

“Might I inquire where you are going, ma’am?”

“We thought we’d try the Elbow Rooms.”

“A fine establishment. I meet up with the Hartzel chess player every two weeks there to discuss Matters of the Cog. I’d avoid the lobster.”

“Food poisoning?”

“No, no, not on the menu—at the bar. Very opinionated and apt to lapse into unspeakably dull arthropod-related digressions. But see here.”

He handed me a photograph that was many images superimposed on top of one another. The revealed ISBN was indistinct but legible. I jotted down the number in my notebook.

“Thank you, Sprockett. You’re a star.”

“Madam is most kind.”

I fetched the unimaginatively titled Cheshire Cat’s Complete Guide to All Books Ever Written Everywhere and looked up the ISBN. Our crashed book was from Self-Publishing and titled The Murders on the Hareng Rouge, by Adrian Dorset. I’d never heard of him. But it was Vanity, so I’d hardly be expected to. There was no other information. The ISBN database held only titles, authors, publishers’ details, three-for-two offers, that kind of thing. I looked at the map we had pinned on the wall that charted the book’s final journey. If you extended the line back through Adventure and past the Cliff of Notes, it made landfall in Vanity. We’d never considered such a thing. It must have lifted off there and proceeded in an almost straight line to where the Council of Genres was located, but it had come down over Conspiracy.

I sat, leaned back in my chair and ran through the likely scenarios. It was possible The Murders on the Hareng Rouge was a potential world beater on its way to being published. Jealousies ran deep in the BookWorld, and the possibility of someone in HumDram/Highbrow nobbling the potential competition was quite real. It had happened before; bad Vanity was universally disliked but tolerated in a condescending “yes, well done, jolly good” kind of way, but good Vanity was reviled as the worst kind of upstart.

“Blast,” I said, as a more personal note added itself to the mix. “It explains why I was asked to handle the investigation. No one expected me to find anything.”

Sprockett’s eyebrow pointed to “Bingo.”

“The thought had occurred to me, ma’am. In fact, the precise reason you were selected for this investigation, given your lack of adequacy, has been troubling me for some time.”

I thought about Acheron’s comments with regard to the fact that Carmine was an A-4.

“I so need that sort of comment right now.”

His eyebrow clicked from “Bingo” to “Apologetic.”

“Merely the facts as I see them, ma’am.”

I thought carefully. Part of me—the Thursday part—was outraged over the crime, but the rest of me was more realistic. There were some things that were simply not worth meddling with, and anyone willing to engineer the destruction of an entire book wouldn’t think twice about eliminating me. There were few—if any—characters who couldn’t be replaced.

“Have you told anyone about this?” I asked, and Sprockett shook his head.

“Keep it that way,” I murmured. “I think all we’ve found is what Red Herring wanted me to find: an unprecedented event that is unrepeatable.”

“If asked for an opinion, ma’am,” said Sprockett in an unusually forceful turn of phrase, “I should like to find out who asked Commander Herring to allocate you to this investigation.”

I stared at him. I should like to know, too, but I couldn’t think of a way to frame the question that wouldn’t have me in the trunk of a car heading towards the traditional place to dump bodies, the New Jersey area of Crime.

“This was never meant to be reported,” I said. “This was meant for looking the other way and carrying on with life as though nothing had happened. There was a good reason I was asked to do this, and I will not impugn my lack of competence by being irresponsibly accurate. I have a reputation to uphold.”

It was a hopelessly poor argument, and he and I both knew it. I sat down at my desk and drew a sheet of writing paper from my stationery drawer.

“Permission to speak openly?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say, but I should.”

“It’s not what Thursday Next would have done.”

“No,” I replied, “but then Thursday could deal with this sort of stuff. She enjoyed it. A woman has to know her limitations. If Herring had wanted this accident to be investigated properly, he would have given it to someone else. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe there really are wheels within wheels. Maybe some stuff has to be left, for the good of all of us. We leave crime to the authorities, right?”

“That would certainly seem to be the safe and conventional option, ma’am.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “Safe. Conventional. Besides, I have a series to look after and dignity to be maintained for Thursday. If anything happened to me, as likely as not Carmine would take over, and I’m not convinced she’d uphold the standards quite as I do, what with the goblins and the hyphenating and such.”

I looked away as I said it and began to rearrange the objects on my desk. I suddenly felt hot and a bit peculiar and didn’t want to look Sprockett in the eye.

“As madam wishes.”

Sprockett bowed and withdrew, and I spent the next hour writing up a report for Herring. It wasn’t easy to write. Try as I might, I couldn’t make the report longer than forty words, and it deserved more than that. I managed at one point to write a hundred words, but after I’d taken out the bit about the epizeuxis worm and the scrubbed ISBN, it was down to only thirty-seven again. I decided to ask Whitby his hypothetical opinion and finish the report after lunch.

I called the Jurisfiction offices again to see if Thursday was available to talk.

“She’s still unavailable,” I reported as I trotted into the kitchen. “I might try to speak to her when I go over to deliver the report to Commander Herring this afternoon. Do you think I’m dressed okay for Whitby or should I . . .”

My voice had trailed off because something was wrong. Sprockett and Mrs. Malaprop were looking at me in the sort of way I imagine disgruntled parents might.

“You tell her,” said Mrs. Malaprop.

“It’s Whitby,” said Sprockett.

I suddenly had a terrible thought. This being fiction, long-unrequited romances often end in tragedy just before they finally begin, inevitably leading to a lifetime’s conjecture of what might have happened and all manner of tedious and ultimately overwritten soul-searching. The scenario was almost as hideous as actually losing Whitby.

“He’s dead?”

“No, ma’am, he’s not dead. At least he was still alive two minutes ago.”

“He was here? Why isn’t he here now?”

Sprockett coughed politely. “I am sorry to say, ma’am, that I had to send Mr. Jett away.”

I stared at him, scarcely believing what I was hearing. “Why would you do something like that?”

“I feel, ma’am, that he is unsuitable.”

“What?”

He showed me a newspaper clipping that was about two years old. “I exhort you to read it, ma’am, no matter how painful.”

So I did.

“It is the painful duty of this journalist,” went the article, “to report an act of such base depravity that it causes the worst excesses of Horror to pale into insignificance. Last Tuesday an unnamed man, for reasons known only to himself, set fire to a busload of nuns who were taking their orphaned puppies to a ‘How cute is your puppy?’ competition. Unfortunately, the perpetrator of this vile and heartless act is still at liberty, and . . .”

I stopped reading as a sense of confusion and disappointment welled up inside me. There was a picture accompanying the article, and even though the piece did not mention Whitby by name, there was a photograph of a man whom “Jurisfiction wanted to question.” It was Jett, without a doubt—holding a two-gallon gasoline can and chuckling. I didn’t really know what was worse—Whitby killing the busload of nuns or me having finally plucked up the courage to have lunch at the Elbow Rooms, only for the rug to be pulled from under my feet.

“Is this true?”

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, ma’am. Was I wrong to send him away?”

“No, you were right.”

I sighed and stared at the report I was carrying. “Better call a cab. I’m going to tell Herring what he wants to hear. At least that way someone gets to be happy today. You can come, too.”

It took me twenty minutes to coax Carmine out of her bedroom. I assured her it wasn’t so bad, because Sprockett had caught the goblin and recovered the swag, so he wasn’t technically a thief. I had to tell her that he wasn’t that unhandsome—for a goblin—and that no, I was sure he wasn’t just saying nice things to her so he could be invited across the threshold. I told her she was now on book duty, as I would be out for a while, and she replied, “Yes, okay, fine,” but wouldn’t look at me, so I left her staring angrily at the patterned wallpaper in the front room.