Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

He smiled again and spoke to Felix8.

‘My friend, why don’t you make some enquiries and find out the extent of original manuscripts and their whereabouts?’

Felix8 looked at Acheron coldly.

‘I’m not a clerk, sir. I think Mr Hobbes would be eminently more suitable for that task.’

Acheron frowned. Of all the Felixes only Felix3 had ever contradicted a direct order. The hapless Felix3 was liquidated following a very disappointing performance when he hesitated during a robbery. It had been Acheron’s own fault, of course; he had tried to endow Felix3 with slightly more personality at the expense of allowing him a pinch of morality. Ever since then he had given up on the Felixes as anything but loyal servants; Hobbes and Dr Mьller had to be his company these days.

‘Hobbes!’ shouted Hades at the top of his voice. The unemployed actor scuttled in from the direction of the kitchens holding a large wooden spoon.

‘Yes, sire?’

Acheron repeated the order to Hobbes, who bowed and withdrew.

‘Felix8!’

‘Sir?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble, lock Mycroft in his room. I dare say we will have no need of him for a couple of weeks. Give him no water for two days and no food for five. That should be punishment enough for disposing of the manuscript.’

Felix8 nodded and removed Mycroft from the hotel’s old lounge. He took him out into the lobby and up the broad marble staircase. They were the only ones in the mouldering hotel; the large front door was locked and bolted.

Mycroft stopped by the window and looked out. He had once visited the Welsh capital as a guest of the Republic to give a talk on synthesising oil from coal. He had been put up in this very hotel, met anyone who was anyone and even had a rare audience with the highly revered Brodyr Ulyanov, octogenarian father of the modern Welsh Republic. It would have been nearly thirty years ago, and the low-lying city had not changed much. The signs of heavy industry still dominated the landscape and the odour of ironworks hung in the air. Although many of the mines had closed in recent years, the winding gears had not been removed; they punctuated the landscape like sentinels, rising darkly above the squat slate-roofed houses. Above the city on Morlais hill the massive limestone statue of John Frost looked down upon the Republic he had founded; there had been talk of moving the capital away from the industrialised South but Merthyr was as much a spiritual centre as anything else.

They walked on and presently came to Mycroft’s cell, a windowless room with only the barest furniture. As he was locked in and left alone, Mycroft’s thoughts turned to that which troubled him most: Polly. He had always thought she was a bit of a flirt but nothing more; and Mr Wordsworth’s continued interest in her caused him no small amount of jealous anxiety.

Commander Braxton Hicks threw the newspaper on the desk in front of us. He paced around for a bit before collapsing heavily into his chair.

‘I want to know who told the press,’ he announced. Jack Schitt was leaning on the window frame and watching us all while smoking a rather small arid foul-smelling Turkish cigarette. The headline was unequivocal:

Chuzzlewit death: SpecOps blamed It went on to outline specifically how ‘unnamed sources’ within Swindon SpecOps had intimated that a botched ransom payment had been the cause of Quaverley’s death. It was arse about face but the basic facts were correct. It had placed Hicks under a lot of pressure and caused him to overspend his precious budget by a phenomenal amount to try to discover Hades’ whereabouts. The spotter plane that Bowden and I had pursued had been found a burned-out wreck in a field on the English side of Hay-on-Wye. The Gladstone full of the counterfeit money was close by along with the ersatz Gainsborough. It hadn’t fooled Acheron for one second. We were all convinced that Hades was in Wales but even political intervention at the highest level had drawn a blank—the Welsh Home Secretary himself had sworn that they would not knowingly stoop to harbour such a notorious criminal. With no jurisdiction on the Welsh side of the border, our searches had centred around the Marches—to no avail.

‘If the press found out, it wasn’t from us,’ said Victor. ‘We have nothing to gain from press coverage and everything to lose.’ He glanced over at Jack Schitt, who shrugged.

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Schitt non-committally, ‘I’m just an observer, here at the behest of Goliath.’

Braxton got up and paced the room. Bowden, Victor and I watched him in silence. We felt sorry for him; he wasn’t a bad man, just weak. The whole affair was a poisoned chalice, and if he wasn’t removed by the regional SpecOps commander, Goliath would as likely as not do the job themselves.

‘Does anyone have any ideas?’

We all looked at him. We had a few ideas, but nothing that could be said in front of Schitt; since he was so willing to let us be killed that evening at Archer’s place, not one of us would have given Goliath so much as the time of day.

‘Has Mrs Delamare been traced?’

‘We found her okay,’ I replied. ‘She was delighted to discover that she had a motorway services named after her. She hasn’t seen her son for five years but is under surveillance in case he tries to make contact.’

‘Good,’ murmured Braxton. ‘What else?’

Victor spoke.

‘We understand Felix has been replaced. A young man named Danny Chance went missing from Reading; his face was found in a waste basket on the third floor of the multistorey. We’ve distributed the morgue photos of Felix; they should match the new Felix.’

‘Are you sure Archer didn’t say anything but “Felix” before you killed him?’ asked Hicks.

‘Positive,’ assured Bowden in his best lying voice.

We returned to the LiteraTec office in a glum mood. Braxton’s removal might provoke a dangerous shake-up in the department, and I had Mycroft and Polly to think of. Victor hung up his coat and called across to Finisterre, asking him if there had been any change. Finisterre looked up from a much-thumbed copy of Chuzzlewit. He, Bailey and Herr Bight had been rereading it on a twenty-four-hour relay basis since Acheron’s escape. Nothing seemed to have changed. It was slightly perplexing. The Forty brothers had been working on the only piece of information we had that SO-5 or Goliath didn’t. Sturmey Archer had made a reference to a Dr Mьller before expiring and that had been the subject of a rigorous search on SpecOps and police databases. A rigorous yet secretive search; that was what had taken the time.

‘Anything, Jeff?’ asked Victor, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

Jeff coughed.

‘There are no Dr Mьllers registered in England or on the Continent, either in medicine or philosophy–‘

‘So it’s a false name.’

‘—who are alive.’ Jeff smiled. ‘However, there was a Dr Mьller in attendance at Parkhurst prison in 1972.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘It was at the same time that Delamare was banged up for fraud.’

This is getting better.’

‘And Delamare had a cellmate named Felix Tabularasa.’