Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘Pretty much. But if I win the wager,’ she added, ‘I get no money but retain my children’s rights.’

‘You’re very brave.’

‘Nope,’ she said sadly, ‘I’m just a girl who’s all out of options – and who had rubbish parents.’

‘It could have been worse,’ I said, ‘they could have harvested and then sold all your eggs the day after your sixteenth birthday to pay for a, I don’t know – a new roof, kitchen extension and a minibus.’

‘I guess. But this is the only wager Treacle would take. The Gronk is out there. I just have to get some evidence. Keep that camera handy, won’t you?’

She jumped down from the counter where she’d been sitting, gave me a cheery smile and returned to her work. She was technically a winsomniac, but was earning her tuck. There was a world of difference between the deserving and undeserving awake.

My attention wandered back to the wall that was covered with the pictures of the missing. A sea of faces, all absent. Most ages, every gender, no pattern. As I scanned the posters a particular set of eyes caught my attention, sunk deep in the overlapping mass of lost souls. They were the same eyes I’d seen staring back at me from the Polaroid in my dream, the one that had been taken of me and Birgitta by the photographer on the Gower. Charles. Birgitta’s Charles. I reached out and plucked the picture from the board.

The missing man used to work at HiberTech as an orderly, and his name, I read, was Charles Webster. He went missing three years before, just after starting a Winter season – pretty much as Birgitta had described her missing husband.

And that wasn’t possible.

I couldn’t have recognised him because I didn’t know what he looked like. Reality first, then dream . I felt myself grow woozy again, and oak-dappled sunlight began to filter through to the office floor. I steadied myself against a table and took long, slow breaths. Treacle hadn’t noticed my attack of the narcs, Laura was busy filing and Toccata was still ranting behind the glass partition. I calmed myself, and repeated Birgitta Birgitta Birgitta Birgitta to quell the sense of rising panic. It worked, and now calmer, I ran over the likely scenario: I’d clothed my dream with Charles Webster’s name and face retrospectively. That he had the same first name as mine was coincidence, nothing more.

‘What you got there?’

I jumped, but it was only Treacle.

‘Some guy named Webster,’ I mumbled, passing him the flyer, ‘went missing three years ago.’

Treacle stared at the picture and nodded.

‘First season I was here. We never found him. Actually,’ he added, ‘we never looked. HiberTech staff are HiberTech problems. Why the interest?’

I had to think quickly.

‘We were at the same Pool, though ten years apart. I think he was popular with the sisterhood and they’d always wanted to know what happened to him.’

‘Ah,’ said Treacle, ‘keep it if you want.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and folded up the flyer and put it in my pocket.

‘Hullo, Treacle,’ said Jonesy, entering through the shock-gate and sitting down to pull off her boots. ‘Enter these in the Vermin Control book and tally up my record, will you?’

She tossed an evidence bag containing two freshly severed thumbs on the desk.

‘Will do,’ said Treacle cheerily. ‘That must be sixty-two, yes?’

‘Sixty-three.’

There was another explosive level of muffled swearing from behind the frosted glass.

Treacle and Jonesy smiled as though this sort of thing happened all the time, and we heard the phone slammed down, then a crash as something was either kicked or thrown across the room.

‘She’s a bit… sweary ,’ I said.

‘You should hear her when she really gets pissed off.’

I had a thought and pulled Birgitta’s severed thumb out of my pocket. It was still wrapped in a handkerchief, the blood now caked dark brown. I felt a sense of nausea rise up within me, and handed it to Jonesy.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘do you want to add this to your score?’

‘Oh, you darling !’ she said, eagerly accepting the prize and carefully placing it on the counter next to the other two. She beamed at me and went off to her desk. Treacle glared at me as though I’d just given her flowers, chocolates, a TOG-28 coat and a card.

‘I thought you said I’d have no problems from you?’ he said, once she was out of earshot.

‘It was only a thumb,’ I whispered back.

‘That’s how it started with Cotton,’ said Treacle in a grumbly sort of voice, ‘first a thumb, then a gift, sort-of-real coffee in the Wincarnis . Next thing you know you’ve been bumped up to number one on her bundling list. If you are, will you describe what it’s like for three hundred euros?’

‘No.’

‘Cotton did,’ he said in a whiny sort of voice.

‘I’m not Cotton.’

Jonesy didn’t see or hear this exchange; she was busy pecking out a report on a typewriter that more closely resembled an antiquated pipe organ. Treacle held up Birgitta’s thumb.

‘Whose thumb is this anyway?’

‘Birgitta,’ I said, ‘from the Siddons .’

‘Baggy went walkies?’ he murmured. ‘That’s a shame – she was quite delightful in a perpetually pissed-off sort of way. Amazing eyes, and a terrific painter. We dated once.’

‘Really?’ I said, not meaning it to sound quite so incredulous. Treacle sighed.

‘If you must know,’ he said, ‘I bought a date with her at a charity auction in aid of the Sector Twelve Pool. She didn’t find any of my jokes or anecdotes remotely interesting, then threatened to bite me on the face if I tried to kiss her when we said goodnight. She didn’t elaborate, but I figured a second date was out of the question.’

‘Very astute of you.’

He held up the two thumbs and stared at them.

‘The large thumb was from a travelling sire named Eddie Tangiers,’ I said, ‘the smaller from a female, also Siddons , mid-twenties, freshly married.’

‘I’ll call Lloyd,’ he muttered, ‘he’ll know.’

He wrote down ‘Tangiers’ and ‘Manderlay’ and ‘Newlywed Siddons ’ on a slip of paper and went off to confirm them.

‘What do you think?’ asked Jonesy, who had finished her report and was hunting in vain for a stapler.

‘What do I think about what?’

‘About Treacle.’

‘Owning Laura’s child options makes him something of a heel.’

‘To a bondsman, that’s good business – and legal. They’ll both be millionaires when Laura hits eighteen; I can see her point, though. I meant aside from that.’

‘He’s very keen on you.’

‘I know,’ she said, looking all crestfallen. ‘Do you think I should just kill him and make it look like a Gronk attack? It would help Laura out, too.’

‘You could pay back the dowry,’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, right – and who would I borrow the cash from? Treacle himself?’

‘No, you could—’

I didn’t get to finish my sentence as the door to Toccata’s office had opened. I turned, expecting to see Winter Consul Toccata. But it wasn’t – it was Aurora. I opened my mouth to greet her but then stopped. Although she looked the same, her demeanour seemed utterly different. Aurora had been relaxed and friendly, whereas this woman seemed sharp, driven, and utterly without humour. She strode forward with a purposeful swagger and a clearly aggressive sense of purpose. The only other differences I could see were in her clothes, which were now Consular uniform, and her eyes. Unlike Aurora’s, her right was gazing absently off and looking blank, and her left fixed me with a steely glare.