Jasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair

‘Must be pretty old.’

‘Twelve years this October.’

‘I had one of the early Thylacines,’ said the official glumly. ‘A Version 2.1. When we decanted him he had no ears. Stone deaf. No warranty or anything. Bloody liberty, I call it. Do you read New Splicer?’

I had to admit that I didn’t.

‘They sequenced a Stella Seacow last week. How do I even get one of those through the door?’

‘Grease its sides?’ I suggested. ‘And show it a plate of kelp?’

But the official wasn’t listening; he had turned his attention to the next dodo, a pinkish creature with a long neck. The owner caught my eye and smiled sheepishly.

‘Redundant strands filled in with flamingo,’ he explained. ‘I should have used dove.’

‘Version 2.9?’

‘2.9.1, actually. A bit of a hotchpotch but to us he’s simply Chester. We wouldn’t swap him for anything.’

The inspector had been studying Chester’s registration documents.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, ‘2.9.15 come under the new Chimera category.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not enough dodo to be dodo. Room Seven down the corridor. Follow the owner of the pukey, but be careful; I sent a quarkbeast down there this morning.’

I left Chester’s owner and the official arguing together and took Pickwick for a waddle in the park. I let him off the lead and he chased a few pigeons before fraternising with some feral dodos who were cooling their feet in the pond. They splashed excitedly and made quiet plock plock noises to one another until it was time to go home.

Two days after that I had run out of ways to rearrange the furniture, so it was lucky that Tamworth called me. He told me he was on a stakeout and that I needed to join him. I hastily scribbled down the address and was in the East End in under forty minutes. The stakeout was in a shabby street of converted warehouses that had been due for demolition two decades before. I doused the lights and got out, hid anything of value and locked the car carefully. The battered Pontiac was old and grotty enough not to arouse suspicion in the grimy surroundings. I glanced around. The brickwork was crumbling and heavy smears of green algae streaked the walls where the down pipes had once been. The windows were cracked and dirty and the brick wall at ground level was stained alternately with graffiti or the sooty blackness of a recent fire. A rusty fire escape zigzagged up the dark building and cast a staccato shadow on the potholed road and several burnt-out cars. I made my way to a side door according to Tamworth’s instructions. Inside, large cracks had opened up in the walls and the damp and decay had mixed with the smell of Jeyes fluid and a curry shop on the ground floor. A neon light flashed on and off regularly, and I saw several women in tight skirts hovering in the dark doorways. The citizens who lived in the area were a curious mix; the lack of cheap housing in and around London attracted a cross-section of people, from locals to down-and-outs to professionals. It wasn’t great from a law-and-order point of view, but it did allow SpecOps agents to move around without raising suspicion.

I reached the seventh floor, where a couple of young Henry Fielding fanatics were busy swapping bubble-gum cards. ‘I’ll swap you one Sophia for an Amelia.’

‘Piss off!’ replied his friend indignantly. ‘If you want Sophia you’re going to have to give me an Airworthy plus a Tom Jones, as well as the Amelia!’

His friend, realising the rarity of a Sophia, reluctantly agreed. The deal was done and they ran off downstairs to look for hub-caps. I compared a number with the address that Tamworth had given me and rapped on a door covered with peeling peach-coloured paint. It was opened cautiously by a man somewhere in his eighties. He half hid his face from me with a wrinkled hand, and I showed him my badge.

‘You must be Next,’ he said in a voice that was really quite sprightly for his age. I ignored the old joke and went in. Tamworth was peering through some binoculars at a room in the building opposite and waved a greeting without looking up. I looked at the old man again and smiled.

‘Call me Thursday.’

He seemed gratified at this and shook my hand.

‘The name’s Snood; you can call me Junior.’

‘Snood?’ I echoed. ‘Any relation to Filbert?’

The old man nodded.

‘Filbert, ah yes!’ he murmured. ‘A good lad and a fine son to his father!’

Filbert Snood was the only man who had even remotely interested me since I left Landen ten years ago. Snood had been in the ChronoGuard; he went away on assignment to Tewkesbury and never came back. I had a call from his commanding officer explaining that he had been unavoidably detained. I took that to mean another girl. It hurt at the time but I hadn’t been in love with Filbert. I was certain of that because I had been in love with Landen. When you’ve been there you know it, like seeing a Turner or going for a walk on the west coast of Ireland.

‘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 on to 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 on to 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 dialled 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.’