My Hero (9 page)

‘I sympathise,' replied Mr Shark, ‘believe me, I do. Unfortunately, we're into a rather grey area of the law here. I think this may take some time.'

‘Time? How much time?'

‘Immigration law is tricksy stuff,' Mr Shark replied. ‘The last thing we want to do is rush into anything. We could come badly unstuck if we do.'

‘Mr Shark,' said Hamlet, controlling himself with difficulty, ‘I'm going to come badly unstuck any bloody minute now. Have you got any suggestions, or would you rather I took my business elsewhere?'

‘Now then,' said Mr Shark, ‘calm down, let's not say anything we might later regret. You have my word we'll start looking into this thing right away, and as soon as
there's any progress I'll let you know. Happy now?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘And,' Mr Shark went on, ‘in the meantime we will of course need a small payment on account, say twenty thousand to be going on with, so if you'd just send a cheque—'

‘Ah. That might be a problem. You see, I haven't actually got any money over here. Not as such.'

‘I see.' Mr Shark leaned back in his chair and scowled at the ceiling. ‘You know, you're putting me in a very difficult position here.'

‘Really? Your toes have just fallen off too, have they?'

‘I'm sorry,' said Mr Shark. ‘I'd love to help, really I would, but our policy as a firm is very strict. Unless we have money up front, there's very little we can—'

The line went dead. Mr Shark shrugged and replaced the receiver.

‘I don't know,' he sighed. ‘Bloody clients.'

 

The literary equivalent of stacking dynamite against a wall:

‘Hello?'

‘Hey!' Regalian shouted into the receiver. ‘Cut that out! I know you're there, because the line's been engaged for the last half hour. Hello?'

Regalian swore under his breath. He hated talking into the bloody machines.

‘Right,' he said, ‘now listen carefully.This is what you've got to do . . .'

 

Mr Prosser, of Prosser and White Funeral Services Ltd, drew his dressing gown tight around his waist and peered round the door.

‘Yes?' he said.

‘Excuse me,' said Jane, ‘but it did say twenty-four-hour service in the phone book, and it's rather an emergency.'

Mr Prosser suppressed an inner sigh. Twenty years in corpse disposal had taught him that people who are dead today are almost invariably still dead tomorrow, and frequently still dead the day after. The term ‘emergency' should not, therefore, have any meaning within the parameters of his profession. Still, bereavement does funny things to people, and the golden rule of bespoke gravemaking is, be sympathetic, even to the nerks and the time-wasters. ‘Of course,' he said. ‘Do please come in.' He removed the chain from the door, and refrained from mentioning the fact that ‘twenty-four-hour service' was in fact a reference to his answering machine.

‘Thank you ever so much,' Jane said, having refused a cup of tea. ‘To get straight to the point, I need someone embalmed.'

‘I see,' said Mr Prosser. ‘And the identity of the sadly departed?'

Jane pointed. ‘Him.'

There is another golden rule of bespoke gravemaking, if anything, even more fundamental than the first. Never be shocked, never allow yourself to be sickened or revolted, never let the punter see that you want to throw up. ‘Quite,' said Mr Prosser. ‘Might I just point out that the sadly departed would still appear to be alive?'

‘Yes, I know,' Jane replied wearily. ‘And we did try the hospital first but they threw us out.' She shuddered from head to foot. ‘I was all right, but he landed sort of awkwardly. We've got all the bits in this plastic bag here. Actually, while you're at it, you might just see if you can't sort of sew them back on, if that's all right with you.'

Golden rule, Mr Prosser muttered to himself under his
breath, golden rule. ‘Perhaps I'm not explaining myself clearly enough, miss,' he said. ‘We really do prefer to specialise here in, um, dead people. That's basically what we're all about, you see, and your, er, friend here isn't really all that dead, now is he? Not as such, I mean.'

‘All right,' said a voice from under the paper bag, ‘let me talk to him. Listen, creep.'

‘Um—'

‘Don't interrupt. Now, unless you make with the suture and the embalming fluid pretty damn quick, I shall be back here tomorrow. And I shall take this bag off, and I shall strut up and down in front of your shop window stopping passers-by and saying, You don't want to go in there, the service is absolutely terrible, I mean, just
look
at me. Now, are you going to co-operate?'

Mr Prosser sat down, closed his eyes and swallowed a couple of times. Then he stood up again. He was twitching slightly, but, apart from that, he was his usual professional self once more.

‘That won't be necessary, sir,' he said politely. ‘Now, if you would care to follow me into the, er, if you would care to follow me.'

‘I shall be watching what you do,' Hamlet went on. ‘And don't you dare cut any corners, or you'll regret it. The first suggestion of a bolt through the neck, and I phone Esther Rantzen.'

‘Quite,' said Mr Prosser. ‘This way, please.'

 

‘Yes? Wassawant?'

‘It's Jane here. I got your message. Are—?'

Regalian growled, and switched on his bedside light. ‘For crying out loud, it's half past two in the morning.'

‘I've only just got in. Look, if you're ready, I can start immediately.'

‘Alternatively, you could go to bed and we could make
a start in the morning. Have you considered that line of approach in any significant detail?'

‘I . . .'

‘Yes, I know, it's a tricky decision to have to make, and I don't want to rush you. Tell you what, you sleep on it and call me back tomorrow. Goodnight.'

‘I think,' Jane said, ‘we should start right away, if it's all the same to you. It's really a question of how long things are going to hold together at this end.'

‘Hold together?'

Jane glanced at the figure stretched out on her sofa, reeking of preservatives and muttering softly about the pain in his seams. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘I don't think we've got much time. So I'm going to make a start at my end. I'll be about twenty-five minutes, okay?'

‘Okay,' Regalian sighed. ‘Don't use too many technical terms.'

Jane replaced the receiver and tottered wearily through into her workroom, where she plugged in the machine and slipped in the disk.

‘Inspiration, please,' she said.

And, either by coincidence or some unaccountable cross-dimensional telepathy, inspiration came. It wasn't particularly high-class inspiration; it bore the same degree of resemblance to the good stuff that works canteen coffee bears to the finest Arabica. But it did the job, in the circumstances, as far as the situation required.

Jane began to type.

 

Regalian slept, she typed. And, as he lay on his crude couch of z'myri hides, his bronzed limbs stretched out in slumber, he dreamed . . .

. . . Of a strange landscape, of a kind he had never seen before. It seemed to him as if he was walking down a dusty and deserted street, between rows of tall wooden-framed
buildings with weird shiny squares set into their sides, like sheets of crystal. And he noticed that he was wearing some outlandish costume: a buckskin shirt fringed with strips of hide, a large, broad-brimmed hat, strange wide-legged trousers and long boots, and around his waist a thick, wide belt, from which hung a scabbard. But there was no sword in the scabbard; only a small, heavy iron object that looked something like a hammer.

He stopped walking. There were three men barring his way. They too wore the same outlandish garb, and the same strange instruments hung by their sides. Their swarthy faces were grim.

‘Howdy, stranger,' cried the tallest of them . . .

‘
H
owdy, stranger,' said the tall man. Regalian blinked twice.

‘Sorry?' he said.

‘I said,' said the tall man, ‘howdy. You deaf or some-thin'? '

Regalian smiled ingratiatingly. ‘I do beg your pardon,' he replied, ‘I was miles away. My, what an attractive and pleasantly situated township you have here.'

Confused, the tall man turned to his colleagues and conferred briefly in whispers. ‘Yeah,' he said eventually. ‘We reckon it's kinda cute ourselves. Trouble is, we don't take too kindly to strangers in these parts.'

‘Quite right, too,' Regalian replied, nodding. ‘It's always better to be cautious at first when meeting new people. A certain initial diffidence frequently proves to be the bedrock on which a lasting relationship of mutual support and trust is constructed, don't you find?'

The tall man looked at him; rather as you'd expect a sentry to look when he's issued his time-honoured challenge and been told, ‘Foe'. He didn't seem entirely sure
what he should do next, but he was a tryer. He cleared his throat nervously.

‘Reckon so, stranger,' he said. ‘So why don't you jes' turn yourself round and head straight back out of town the way you jes' done come?'

He hesitated, as if aware that he was laying it on just a bit too thick. Too late now, however, to do anything about it.

‘I quite agree,' Regalian said. ‘What an eminently sensible suggestion, if I may say so. If one of you gentlemen would be kind enough to point me in the way of the next settlement down the line, I should be eternally obliged to you.'

This time, the tall man refused to be drawn, and there was an embarrassed silence; during which Regalian offered the three of them a peppermint. Eventually the man in the red shirt, who gave the impression of having learned his lines and being extremely loath to waste them, expressed the view that the town wasn't big enough for the both of them.

‘Excuse me?'

‘You heard.'

‘Yes,' Regalian answered, ‘but might I just briefly trouble you for a few words of explanation? You referred to “the both of us”, but, in point of fact, between us we number four. Which particular two did you have in mind?'

That, as far as the three men were concerned, put the tin lid on it. Without taking their eyes off Regalian, they started to back slowly away, and in due course backed right into the town watering-trough, fell over their feet and landed in a small, confused heap on the ground.

‘Hey,' whined the tall man, from underneath his two associates, ‘that ain't fair. That's cheatin'.'

Regalian shrugged, drew his revolver and thumbed back
the hammer. ‘You could say that,' he replied. ‘Now, get up slowly, or I'll blow your fucking heads off.'

The three men relaxed. Admittedly, they were being held at gunpoint at the mercy of their enemy, but at least they knew where they stood, or rather sprawled. Any minute now, one of them would try and go for his gun, there'd be some nice, familiar shooting and . . .

Quite so. For the record, the man in the red shirt went for his gun first, but he was so flustered that he dropped it on his foot. The tall man followed his lead, however, and was all poised for the nauseating sensation of hot lead punching holes in his body when he noticed that Regalian hadn't moved. In fact, he wasn't even looking in the right direction.

‘Hey!' he shouted.

‘With you in a minute,' Regalian replied over his shoulder. ‘Gosh,' he added, ‘that really is a stroke of luck.'

The tall man froze, his revolver in his hand and levelled at Regalian's heart. ‘Luck?' he repeated helplessly.

Regalian nodded. ‘Absolutely amazing,' he replied. ‘Look, you see that big white building with the horse and cart standing outside?'

‘The livery stable, yeah. What—?'

‘Well,' Regalian went on. ‘Follow the line of the roof about seventy yards to the left and you'll come to a low tree. Look over the top of that and you'll see another tree, sort of roundish with a bald patch halfway up. Got that?'

‘Sure thing. What—?'

‘Now then,' Regalian said. ‘Look closely at the lowest branch on the right-hand side, and if I'm right, and I'm pretty sure I am, the small green bird perched there is in fact a Jackson's warbler. Now, according to Audubon . . .'