Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

‘I have in front of me a male European aged about forty with grey hair and poor dentition. He is approximately five foot eight inches tall and dressed in an outfit that I would describe as Victorian…’

As well as Bowden and Victor there were two homicide detectives present, the ones who had interviewed us the night before. They looked surly and bored and glared at the LiteraTec contingent suspiciously.

“Morning, Thursday,’ said Victor cheerfully. ‘Remember the Studebaker belonging to Archer’s killer?’

I nodded.

‘Well, our friends in Homicide found this body in the boot.’

‘Do we have an ID?’

‘Not so far. Have a look at this.’

He pointed to a stainless-steel tray containing the corpse’s possessions. I sorted through the small collection. There was half a pencil, an unpaid bill for starching collars and a letter from his mother dated 5 June 1843.

‘Can we speak in private?’ I said.

Victor led me into the corridor.

‘It’s Mr Quaverley,’ I explained.

‘Who?’

I repeated what Dr Spoon had told me. Victor did not seem surprised in the least.

‘I thought he looked like a book person,’ he said at length.

‘You mean this has happened before?’

‘Did you ever read The Taming of the Shrew?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, you know the drunken tinker in the introduction who is made to think he is a lord, and whom they put the play on for?’

‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘His name was Christopher Sly. He has a few lines at the end of Act One and that is the last we hear of him…’

My voice trailed off.

‘Exactly,’ said Victor. ‘Six years ago an uneducated drunk who spoke only Elizabethan English was found wandering in a confused state just outside Warwick. He said that his name was Christopher Sly, demanded a drink and was very keen to see how the play turned out. I managed to question him for half an hour, and in that time he convinced me that he was the genuine article—yet he never came to the realisation that he was no longer in his own play.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Nobody knows. He was taken for questioning by two unspecified SpecOp’s agents soon after I spoke to him. I tried to find out what happened but you know how secretive SpecOps can be.’

I thought about my time up at Haworth when I was a small girl.

‘What about the other way?’

Victor looked at me sharply.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you ever heard of anyone jumping in the other direction?’

Victor looked at the floor and rubbed his nose. ‘That’s pretty radical, Thursday.’

‘But do you think it’s possible?’

‘Keep this under your hat, Thursday, but I’m beginning to think that it is. The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning. Have you read Dickens’s Dombey and Son?’

‘Sure.’

‘Remember Mr Glubb?’

‘The Brighton fisherman?’

‘Correct. Dombey was finished in 1848 and was reviewed extensively with a list of characters in 1851. In that review Mr Glubb was not mentioned.’

‘An oversight?’

‘Perhaps. In 1926 a collector of antiquarian books named Redmond Bulge vanished while reading Dombey and Son. The incident was widely reported in the press owing to the fact that his assistant had been convinced he saw Bulge “melt into smoke”.’

‘And Bulge fits Glubb’s description?’

‘Almost exactly. Bulge specialised in collecting stories about the sea and Glubb specialises in telling tales of precisely that. Even Bulge’s name spelt backwards reads “Eglub”, a close enough approximation to Glubb to make us think he made it up himself He sighed. ‘I suppose you think that’s incredible?’

‘Not at all,’ I replied, thinking of my own experiences with Rochester, ‘but are you absolutely sure he fell into Dombey and Son?

‘What do you mean?’

‘He could have made the jump by choice. He might have preferred it—and stayed.’

Victor looked at me strangely. He hadn’t dared tell anyone about his theories for fear of being ostracised, but here was a respected London LiteraTec nearly half his age going farther than even he had imagined. A thought crossed his mind.

‘You’ve done it, haven’t you?’

I looked him straight in the eye. For this we could both be pensioned off.

‘Once,’ I whispered. ‘When I was a very young girl. I don’t think I could do it again. For many years I thought even that was a hallucination.’

I was going to go farther and tell him about Rochester jumping back after the shooting at Styx’s apartment, but at that moment Bowden put his head into the corridor and asked us to come in.

Mr Rumplunkett had finished his initial examination.

‘One shot through the heart, very clean, very professional. Everything about the body otherwise normal except evidence of rickets in childhood. It’s quite rare these days so it shouldn’t be difficult to trace, unless of course he spent his youth in another country. Very poor dental work and lice. It’s probable he hasn’t had a bath for at least a month. There is not a lot I can tell you except his last meal was suet, mutton and ale. There’ll be more when the tissue samples come back from the lab.’

Victor and I exchanged looks. I was correct. The corpse had to be Mr Quaverley’s. We all left hurriedly; I explained to Bowden who Quaverley was and where he came from.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Bowden as we walked towards the car. ‘How did Hades take Mr Quaverley out of every copy of Chuzzlewit! ’

‘Because he went for the original manuscript,’ I answered, ‘for the maximum disruption. All copies anywhere on the planet, in whatever form, originate from that first act of creation. When the original changes, all the others have to change too. If you could go back a hundred million years and change the genetic code of the first mammal, every one of us would be completely different. It amounts to the same thing.’

‘Okay,’ said Bowden slowly, ‘but why is Hades doing this? If it was extortion, why kill Quaverley?’

I shrugged.

‘Perhaps it was a warning. Perhaps he has other plans. There are far bigger fish than Mr Quaverley in Martin Chuzzlewit.’

‘Then why isn’t he telling us?’

But he was. When we got back a letter was waiting for me at the station. I had hoped it was from Landen but it wasn’t. It bore no stamp and had been left on the desk that morning. No one had seen who delivered it.

I called Victor over as soon as I had read it, laying the sheet of paper on my desk to avoid touching it any more than I had to. Victor put his spectacles on and read the note aloud.

Dear Thursday,

When I heard you had joined the LiteraTec staff I almost believed in divine intervention. It seems that we will at last be able to sort out our differences. Mr Quaverley was just for starters. Martin Chuzzlewit himself is next for the axe unless I get the following: Ј10 million in used notes, a Gainsborough, preferably the one with the boy in blue, an eight-week run of Macbeth for my friend Thomas Hobbes at the Old Vic, and I want you to rename a motorway services ‘Leigh Delamere’ after the mother of an associate. Signal your readiness by a small ad in the Wednesday edition of the Swindon Globe announcing Angora rabbits for sale and I will give you further instructions.