Something rotten (9 page)

But then, as the small group moved closer, I started to feel a curious impulse not to trap Kaine but to join in with the infectious enthusiasm. The atmosphere was electric, and being swept along with the crowd was something that just suddenly seemed
right.
Joffy had fallen under the spell already and was waving and whistling his support. I fought down a strong feeling to stop what I was doing and perhaps give Yorrick the benefit of the doubt when he and his entourage were upon us. His hand came out towards the crowd. I steadied myself, glanced at the opening lines of
Zenobians
and waited for the right moment. I would have to hold on tight as I read our way into the BookWorld, but that didn’t bother me, as I’d done it many times before. What did worry me was the fact that my resolve was softening even faster.

Before the Kaine magnetism could take me over any further, I took a deep breath, grabbed the outstretched hand and muttered quickly, “It was a time of peace within the land of the Zenobians. . . .”

It didn’t take long for me to jump into the BookWorld. Within a few moments, the bustling nighttime crowd in the car park of ToadNewsNetwork studios had vanished from view, to be replaced by a warm, verdant valley where herds of unicorns grazed peacefully under the summer sun. Grammasites wheeled in the blue skies, riding the thermals that rose from the warm grassland.

“So!” I said, turning to Kaine and receiving something of a shock. Beside me was not Yorrick but a middle-aged man holding a Whig Party flag and staring at the crystal-clear waters babbling through a gap in the rocks. I must have grabbed the wrong hand.

“Where am I?” asked the man, who was understandably confused.

“It’s a near-death experience,” I told him hastily. “What do you think?”

“It’s beautiful!”

“Good. Don’t get too fond of it. I’m taking you back.”

I grasped him again, muttered the password under my breath and jumped out of fiction, something I had a lot less trouble with. We arrived behind some dustbins just as Kaine and his entourage were driving off. I ran up to Joffy, who was still waving good-bye, and told him to snap out of it.

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “What happened to you?”

“Don’t ask. C’mon, let’s go home.”

We left the scene as a very excited and confused middle-aged man tried to tell anyone who would listen about his “near-death experience.”

I went to bed past midnight, my head spinning from my experience of Kaine’s almost hypnotic hold of the populace. Still, I wasn’t out of ideas. I could try to grab him again and, failing that, use the eraserhead I had smuggled out of the BookWorld. Destroying him didn’t bother me. I’d be no more guilty of murder than would an author with a delete key. But while Formby opposed him, Kaine would not become dictator, so I had a bit of time to work up a strategy. I could observe and plan. “Time spent doing renaissance,” Mrs. Malaprop used to say, “is never wasted.”

4.

A Town Like Swindon

Formby Denies Kaine

President-for-Life George Formby vetoed Chancellor Kaine’s attempts to make himself dictator of England yesterday during one of the most heated exchanges this nation has ever seen. Kaine’s Ultimate Executive Power Bill, already passed by parliament, requires only the presidential signature to become law. President Formby, speaking from the presidential palace in Wigan, told reporters, “Eeee, I wouldn’t have a ***** like that run a grocer’s, let alone a country!” Chancellor Kaine, angered by the President’s remark, declared Formby “too old to have a say in this nation’s future,” “out of touch” and “a poor singer,” the last of which he was forced to retract after a public outcry.

Article in
The Toad,
July 13, 1988

I
t was the morning following
Evade the Question Time,
and I had slept badly, waking up before Friday, which was unusual. I stared at the ceiling and thought about Kaine. I’d have to follow him to his next public engagement before he discovered that I had returned. I was just thinking about
why
Joffy and I had nearly been sucked into the whole Yorrick circus when Friday awoke and blinked at me in a breakfast sort of way. I dressed quickly and took him downstairs.

“Welcome to
Swindon Breakfast with Toad,
” announced the TV presenter as we walked in, “with myself, Warwick Fridge, and the lovely Leigh Onzolent—”

“Hello.”

“—bringing you two hours of news and views, fun and competitions to see you into the day.
Breakfast with Toad
is sponsored by Arkwright’s Doorknobs, the finest door furniture in Wessex.”

Warwick turned to Leigh, who was looking way too glamorous for eight in the morning.

She smiled and continued, “This morning we’ll be speaking to croquet captain Roger Kapok about Swindon’s chances in the SuperHoop-88 and also to a man who claims to have seen unicorns in a near-death experience. Network Toad’s resident dodo whisperer will be on hand for your pet’s psychiatric problems, and our Othello backwards-reading competition reaches the quarterfinals. Later on we talk to Mr. Joffy Next about tomorrow’s potential resurrection with St. Zvlkx, but first the news. The CEO of Goliath has announced contrition targets to be attainable within—”

“Morning, daughter,” said my mother, who had just walked into the kitchen. “I never thought of you as an early riser.”

“I wasn’t until junior turned up,” I replied, pointing at Friday, who was eyeing the porridge pot expectantly, “but if there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s eat.”

“It’s what you did best when you were his age. Oh,” added my mother absently, “I have to give you something, by the way.”

She hurried from the room and returned with a sheaf of official-looking papers.

“Mr. Hicks left them for you.”

Braxton Hicks was my old boss back at Swindon SpecOps. I had left abruptly, and from the look of his opening letter, it didn’t look like he was very happy about it. I had been demoted to “Literary Detective Researcher,” and it demanded my gun and badge back. The second letter was an outstanding warrant of arrest due to a trumped-up charge over possession of a small amount of illegally owned bootleg cheese.

“Is cheese still overpriced?” I asked my mother.

“Criminal!” she muttered. “Over five hundred percent duty. And it’s not just cheese, either. They’ve extended the duty to cover all dairy products—even yogurt.”

I sighed. I would probably have to go into SpecOps and explain myself. I could beg forgiveness, go to the stressperts and plead posttraumatic stress disorder or Xplkqulkiccasia or something and ask for my old job back. Perhaps if I were to get handy with a nine iron, it might swing things with my golf-mad boss. Outside SpecOps was not a good place to be if I wanted to hunt Yorrick Kaine or lobby the ChronoGuard for my husband back; it would help to have access to all the SpecOps and police databases.

I looked through the papers. I had apparently been found guilty of the cheese transgression and fined five thousand pounds plus costs.

“Did you pay this?” I asked my mother, showing her the court demand.

“Yes.”

“Then I should pay you back.”

“No need,” she replied, adding before I could thank her, “I paid it out of
your
overdraft—which is quite big now.”

“How . . .
thoughtful
of you.”

“Don’t mention it. Bacon and eggs?”

“Please.”

“Coming up. Would you get the milk?”

I went to the front door to fetch the milk, and as I bent down to pick it up, there was a
whang-thop
noise as a bullet zipped past my ear and thudded into the doorframe next to me. I was about to slam the door and grab my automatic when an unaccountable stillness took hold, like a sudden becalming. Above me a pigeon hung frozen in the air, the wingtip feathers splayed as it reached the bottom of a downstroke. A motorcyclist on the road was balancing impossibly still, and passersby were now as stiff and unmoving as statues—even Pickwick had stopped in midwaddle. Time, for the moment at least, had frozen. I knew only one person who had a face that could stop a clock like this—my father. The question was, where was he?

I looked up and down the road. Nothing. Since I was about to be assassinated, I thought it might help to know who was doing the assassinating, so I walked down the garden path and across the road to the alley where de Floss had hidden himself so badly the previous day. It was here that I found my father looking at a small and very pretty blond woman no more than five foot high who was time frozen halfway through the process of disassembling a sniper’s rifle. She was probably in her late twenties and her hair was pulled back into a pony tail held tight with a flower hair tie. I noted with a certain detached amusement that there was a lucky mascot attached to the trigger guard and the stock was covered with pink fur. Dad looked younger than I, but he was instantly recognizable. The odd nature of the time business tended to make their operatives live nonlinear lives—every time I met him, he was of a different age.

“Hello, Dad.”

“You were correct,” he said, comparing the woman’s rigid features with those on a series of photographs, “it’s an assassin, all right.”

“Never mind that for the moment!” I cried happily. “How are you? I haven’t seen you for years!”

He turned and stared at me. “My dear girl, we spoke only a few hours ago!”

“No we didn’t.”

“We did, actually.”

“We did
not.
”

He stopped, stared at me for a moment and then looked at his watch, shook it and listened to it, then shook it again.

“Here,” I said, handing him the chronograph I was wearing, “take mine.”

“Very nice—thank you. Ah! I stand corrected. Three hours
from
now. It’s an easy mistake to make. Did you have any thoughts about that matter we discussed?”

“No, Dad,” I said in an exasperated tone. “It hasn’t happened yet, remember?”

“You’re always so
linear,
” he muttered, returning to his job comparing the pictures to the assassin. “I think you ought to try and expand your horizons a bit—Bingo!”

He had found a picture that matched my assassin and read the label on the back.

“Expensive hit woman working in the Wiltshire-Oxford area. Looks petite and bijou but as deadly as the best of them. She trades under the name ‘The Windowmaker.’ ” He paused. “Should be Widowmaker, shouldn’t it?”

“But I heard that the Windowmaker was lethal,” I pointed out. “A contract with her and you’re deader than corduroy.”

“I heard that, too,” replied my father thoughtfully. “Sixty-seven victims—sixty-eight if she was the one that did Samuel Pring. She must have
meant
to miss. It’s the only explanation. In any event, her real name is Cindy Stoker.”

This was unexpected. Cindy was married to Spike Stoker, an operative over at SO-17 whom I had worked with a couple of times. I had even given him advice on how best to tell Cindy that he hunted down werewolves for a living—not the choicest profession for a potential husband.

“Cindy is my assassin? Cindy is the Windowmaker?”

“You know her?”

“
Of
her. Wife of a good friend.”

“Well, don’t get too chummy. She tries and fails to kill you three times. The second time with a bomb under your car on Monday, then next Friday at eleven in the morning—but she fails and you, ultimately, choose for her to die. I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but like we discussed, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“What bigger fish to fry?”

“Sweetpea,” he said, giving me his stern “Father knows best” voice, “I’m really not going to go through it all again. Now I have to get back to work—there’s a timephoon brewing in the Dark Ages, and if we don’t sort it out, we’ll be picking anachronisms out of the time line for a century.”

“Wait—you’re working at the ChronoGuard?”

“I’ve told you all about this already! Do try and keep up—you’re going to need all your wits about you over the next week. Now, get back to the house, and I’ll start the world up again.”

He wasn’t in a very chatty mood, but since I would be seeing him later and would find out
then
what we had just discussed, there didn’t seem a lot of point to talking anyway, so I bade him good-bye, and as I walked up the garden path, time returned to normal with a
snap.
The pigeon flew on, the traffic continued to move, and everything carried on as usual. Time had stopped so completely that everything my father and I had talked about occupied no time at all. Still, at least this meant I wouldn’t have to be constantly looking over my shoulder if I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn’t looking forward to her death. Spike would be severely pissed off.

I returned to the kitchen where Mum was still hard at work cooking my bacon and eggs. To her and Friday, I had been gone less than twenty seconds.

“What was that noise when you were at the door, Thursday?”

“Probably a car backfiring.”

“Funny,” she said, “I could have sworn it was a high-velocity bullet striking wood. Two eggs or one?”

“Two, please.”

I picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page exposé revealing that “Danish pastries” were actually brought to Denmark by displaced Viennese bakers in the sixteenth century. “In what other ways,” thundered the article, “have the dishonest Danes made fools of us?” I shook my head sadly and turned to another page.

Mum said she could look after Friday until tea, something I got her to promise
before
she had fully realized the implications of nappy changing and seen just how bad his manners were at breakfast. He yelled, “Ut enim ad veniam!” which might have meant “Look how far I can throw my porridge!” as a spoonful of oatmeal flew across the kitchen, much to the delight of DH-82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.