A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (2 page)

BOOK: A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5
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“The Crimea has got sod all to do with the United Nations.”

He liked to talk about the Crimea with me despite our opposing views. No one else really wanted to. Soldiers involved in the ongoing dispute with Wales had more kudos; Crimean personnel on leave usually left their uniforms in the wardrobe.

“I suppose not,” I replied noncommittally, staring out of the window to where I could see a Crimean veteran begging at a street corner, reciting Longfellow from memory for a couple of pennies.

“Makes all those lives seem wasted if we give it back now,” added Stanford gruffly. “We've been there since 1854. It belongs to
us
. You might as well say we should give the Isle of Wight back to the French.”

“We
did
give the Isle of Wight back to the French,” I replied
patiently; Stanford's grasp of current affairs was generally confined to first division croquet and the love life of actress Lola Vavoom.

“Oh yes,” he muttered, brow knitted. “We did, didn't we? Well, we shouldn't have. And who do the UN think they are?”

“I don't know but if the killing stops they've got my vote, Stan.”

The barkeeper shook his head sadly as Duff-Rolecks concluded his speech:

“. . . there can be little doubt that the Czar Romanov Alexei IV
does
have overwhelming rights to sovereignty of the peninsula and I for one look forward to the day when we can withdraw our troops from what can only be described as an incalculable waste of human life and resources.”

The Toad News anchorwoman came back on and moved to another item—the government was to raise the duty on cheese to 83 percent, an unpopular move that would doubtless have the more militant citizens picketing cheese shops.

“The Ruskies could stop it tomorrow if they pulled out!” said Stanford belligerently.

It wasn't an argument and he and I both knew it. There was nothing left of the peninsula that would be worth owning whoever won. The only stretch of land that hadn't been churned to a pulp by artillery bombardment was heavily mined. Historically and morally the Crimea belonged to Imperial Russia; that was all there was to it.

The next news item was about a border skirmish with the People's Republic of Wales; no one hurt, just a few shots exchanged across the River Wye near Hay. Typically rambunctious, the youthful president-for-life Owain Glyndwr VII had blamed England's imperialist yearnings for a unified Britain; equally typically, Parliament had not so much as even made a statement about the incident. The news ground on, but I wasn't
really paying attention. A new fusion plant had opened in Dungeness and the president had been there to open it. He grinned dutifully as the flashbulbs went off. I returned to my paper and read a story about a parliamentary bill to remove the dodo's protected species status after their staggering increase in numbers; but I couldn't concentrate. The Crimea had filled my mind with its unwelcome memories. It was lucky for me that my pager bleeped and brought with it a much-needed reality check. I tossed a few notes on the counter and sprinted out of the door as the Toad News anchorwoman somberly announced that a young surrealist had been killed—stabbed to death by a gang adhering to a radical school of French impressionists.

2.
Gad's Hill

. . . There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one...

Tie seller in Victoria, June 1983

M
Y PAGER
had delivered a disconcerting message; the unstealable had just been stolen. It was not the first time the
Martin Chuzzlewit
manuscript had been purloined. Two years before it had been removed from its case by a security man who wanted nothing more than to read the book in its pure and unsullied state. Unable to live with himself or decipher Dickens's handwriting past the third page, he eventually confessed and the manuscript was recovered. He spent five years sweating over lime kilns on the edge of Dartmoor.

Gad's Hill Palace was where Charles Dickens lived at the end of his life, but not where he wrote
Chuzzlewit
. That was at Devonshire Terrace, when he still lived with his first wife, in 1843. Gad's Hill is a large Victorian building near Rochester which had
fine views of the Medway when Dickens bought it. If you screw up your eyes and ignore the oil refinery, heavy water plant and the ExcoMat containment facility, it's not too hard to see what drew him to this part of England. Several thousand visitors pass through Gad's Hill every day, making it the third-most popular area of literary pilgrimage after Anne Hathaway's cottage and the Brontës' Haworth House. Such huge numbers of people had created enormous security problems; no one was taking any chances since a deranged individual had broken into Chawton, threatening to destroy all Jane Austen's letters unless his frankly dull and uneven Austen biography was published. On that occasion no damage had been done, but it was a grim portent of things to come. In Dublin the following year an organized gang attempted to hold Jonathan Swift's papers to ransom. A protracted siege developed that ended with two of the extortionists shot dead and the destruction of several original political pamphlets and an early draft of
Gulliver's Travels.
The inevitable had to happen. Literary relics were placed under bullet-proof glass and guarded by electronic surveillance and armed officers. It was not the way anyone wanted it, but it seemed the only answer. Since those days there had been few major problems, which made the theft of
Chuzzlewit
all the more remarkable.

I parked my car, clipped my SO-27 badge into my top pocket and pushed my way through the crowds of pressmen and gawkers. I saw Boswell from a distance and ducked under a police line to reach him.

“Good morning, sir,” I muttered. “I came as soon as I heard.”

He put a finger to his lips and whispered in my ear:

“Ground-floor window. Took less than ten minutes. Nothing else.”

“What?”

Then I saw. Toad News Network's star reporter Lydia
Startright was about to do an interview. The finely coiffured TV journalist finished her introduction and turned to us both. Boswell employed a neat sidestep, jabbed me playfully in the ribs and left me alone under the full glare of the news cameras.

“—of
Martin Chuzzlewit
, stolen from the Dickens Museum at Gad's Hill. I have with me Literary Detective Thursday Next. Tell me, Officer, how it was possible for thieves to break in and steal one of literature's greatest treasures?”

I murmured “bastard!” under my breath to Boswell, who slunk off shaking with mirth. I shifted my weight uneasily. With the enthusiasm for art and literature in the population undiminished, the LiteraTec's job was becoming increasingly difficult, made worse by a very limited budget.

“The thieves gained entrance through a window on the ground floor and went straight to the manuscript,” I said in my best TV voice. “They were in and out within ten minutes.”

“I understand the museum was monitored by closed-circuit television,” continued Lydia. “Did you capture the thieves on video?”

“Our inquiries are proceeding,” I replied. “You understand that some details must be kept secret for operational purposes.”

Lydia lowered her microphone and cut the camera.

“Do you have
anything
to give me, Thursday?” she asked. “The parrot stuff I can get from anyone.”

I smiled.

“I've only just got here, Lyds. Try me again in a week.”

“Thursday, in a week this will be archive footage. Okay, roll VT.”

The cameraman reshouldered his camera and Lydia resumed her report.

“Do you have any leads?”

“There are several avenues that we are pursuing. We are
confident that we can return the manuscript to the museum and arrest the individuals concerned.”

I wished I could share my own optimism. I had spent a lot of time at Gad's Hill overseeing security arrangements, and I knew it was like the Bank of England. The people who did this were good.
Really
good. It also made it kind of personal. The interview ended and I ducked under a SpecOps
DO NOT CROSS
tape to where Boswell was waiting to meet me.

“This is one hell of a mess, Thursday. Turner, fill her in.”

Boswell left us to it and went off to find something to eat.

“If you can see how they pulled this one off,” murmured Paige who was a slightly older and female version of Boswell, “I'll eat my boots, buckles and all.”

Both Turner and Boswell had been at the Litera Tec department when I turned up there, fresh from the military and a short career at the Swindon Police Department. Few people ever left the Litera Tec division; when you were in London you had pretty much reached the top of your profession. Promotion or death were the usual ways out; the saying was that a LiteraTec job wasn't for Christmas—it was for life.

“Boswell likes you, Thursday.”

“In what sort of way?” I asked suspiciously.

“In the sort of way that he wants you in my shoes when I leave—I became engaged to a rather nice fellow from SO-3 at the weekend.”

I should have been more enthusiastic, but Turner had been engaged so many times she could have filled every finger and toe—twice.

“SO-3?” I queried, somewhat inquisitively. Being in SpecOps was no guarantee you would know which departments did what—Joe Public were probably better informed. The only SpecOps divisions I knew about for sure below SO-12 were SO-9, who were Antiterrorist, and SO-1, who were
Internal Affairs—the SpecOps police; the people who made sure we didn't step out of line.

“SO-3?” I repeated. “What do
they
do?”

“Weird Stuff.”

“I thought SO-2 did Weird Stuff?”

“SO-2 do
Weirder
Stuff. I asked him but he never got around to answering—we were kind of busy. Look at this.”

Turner had led me into the manuscript room. The glass case that had held the leather-bound manuscript was empty.

“Anything?” Paige asked one of the scene-of-crime officers.

“Nothing.”

“Gloves?” I asked.

The SOCO stood up and stretched her back; she hadn't discovered a single print of any sort.

“No; and that's what's so bizarre. It doesn't look like they touched the box at all; not with gloves, not a cloth—nothing. According to me this box hasn't been opened and the manuscript is still inside!”

I looked at the glass case. It was still locked tight and none of the other exhibits had been touched. The keys were kept separately and were at this moment on their way from London.

“Hello, that's odd—” I muttered, leaning closer.

“What do you see?” asked Paige anxiously.

I pointed to an area of glass on one of the side panels that undulated slightly. The area was roughly the size of the manuscript.

“I noticed that,” said Paige. “I thought it was a flaw in the glass.”

“Toughened bullet-proof glass?” I asked her. “No chance. And it
wasn't
like this when I supervised the fitting, I can assure you of that.”

“What, then?”

I stroked the hard glass and felt the shiny surface ripple
beneath my fingertips. A shiver ran up my back and I felt a curious sense of uncomfortable familiarity, the feeling you might get when a long-forgotten school bully hails you as an old friend.

“The work feels familiar, Paige. When I find the perpetrator, it'll be someone I know.”

“You've been a Litera Tec for seven years, Thursday.”

I saw what she meant.

“Eight years, and you're right—you'll probably know them too. Could Lamber Thwalts have done this?”

“He
could
have, if he wasn't still in the hokey—four years still to go over that
Love's Labor's Won
scam.”

“What about Keens? He could handle something as big as this.”

“Milton's no longer with us. Caught analepsy in the library at Parkhurst. Stone-cold dead in a fortnight.”

“Hmm.”

I pointed at the two video cameras.

“Who did they see?”

“No one,” replied Turner. “Not a dicky bird. I can play you the tapes but you'll be none the wiser.”

She showed me what they had. The guard on duty was being interviewed back at the station. They were hoping it was an inside job but it didn't look like it; the guard had been as devastated as any of them.

Turner shuttled the video back and pressed the play button.

“Watch carefully. The recorder rotates the five cameras and films five seconds of each.”

“So the longest gap between cameras is twenty seconds?”

“Got it. You watching? Okay, there's the manuscript—” She pointed at the book, clearly visible in the frame as the VCR flicked to the camera at the front door. There was no movement. Then the inside door through which any burglar would have to come; all the other entrances were barred. Then came
the corridor; then the lobby; then the machine flicked back to the manuscript room. Turner punched the pause button and I leaned closer. The manuscript was gone.

“Twenty seconds to get in, open the box, take
Chuzzlewit
and then leg it? It's not possible.”

“Believe you me, Thursday—it happened.”

The last remark came from Boswell, who had been looking over my shoulder.

“I don't know how they did it, but they did. I've had a call from Supreme Commander Gale on this one and he's being leaned on by the prime minister. Questions have already been asked in the House and someone's head is going to roll. Not mine, I assure you.”

He looked at us both rather pointedly, which made me feel especially ill at ease—I was the one who had advised the museum on its security arrangements.

“We'll be onto it straight away, sir,” I replied, punching the pause button and letting the video run on. The views of the building changed rhythmically, revealing nothing. I pulled up a chair, rewound the tape and looked again.

“What are you hoping to find?” asked Paige.

“Anything.”

I didn't find it.

BOOK: A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5
4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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