‘Do you mind if we refer to the place where I’ll be working as the studio?’ asked Dorothy. ‘I don’t like to think of myself as working in Tesco’s.’
The sprout, well aware that the project had been initiated by the Chief Commissioner, offered no objection.
‘If you can give me authority to hire some suspects, and a little money to pay for them to buy bicycles and construct trailers I can get the clay moved,’ said Dorothy.
The sprout said he thought it unlikely that such permission would be forthcoming. Dorothy said that in that case she’d be quite happy to forget about the 8,001 statues and would the sprout be kind enough to let the Chief Commissioner know that the project had been cancelled for lack of a few bits of scrap wood and some bicycles. The sprout, rather pale, hurried off to his boss, who on hearing that the project had been authorised by the Chief Commissioner herself, called Dorothy into her office.
‘There are rules about this sort of thing,’ said the sprout, standing up and pointing to a chair. Dorothy sat down. The sprout sat down.
‘First you must work out what you need, then you triple it, then you double that and ask for twice as much,’ she said. ‘We won’t give you that, of course. You’ll be lucky if you get half. But we will be impressed by the numbers – no one here will take you seriously if you say you can do whatever it is you’re doing cheaply – and well pleased that we’ve been able to cut you down. You’ll get far more than you need and I’ll get brownie points because I’ve cut the costs.’
Dorothy did some sums in her head and quoted a final figure.
‘Fine,’ said the sprout. She wrote down the figure Dorothy had given her on a large form and pushed the form across the desk. ‘Sign here, please.’ Dorothy signed the form and the sprout picked it up. ‘Would you wait here, please?’ She stood. ‘I’ll need to go and arrange for your application to be approved.’ She hurried off. ‘Make yourself at home,’ she said, over her shoulder.
Dorothy leant back and prepared for a long wait. In her experience applications usually took months. She wished she’d smuggled a book in with her. She looked around the office. It was the emptiest office she’d ever seen.
The sprout returned a minute and a half later with approval for all of Dorothy’s requirements.
Sir Czardas had taken it upon himself not to interrupt the Chief Commissioner, who was busy overseeing the arrival, and hanging in her office and along the corridor leading to it, of a collection of Old Masters liberated from the Tate Gallery.
‘There’s no point in leaving them there,’ the Chief Commissioner had explained to her personal assistant. ‘No one goes to art galleries and museums. Such a waste for them not to be seen.’ Her personal assistant had agreed and praised her public spirit in liberating the paintings so that they could be enjoyed by a discerning, if undoubtedly limited, number of art lovers.
‘Give Mrs Cobleigh anything she wants,’ said Sir Czardas. ‘And give it to her yesterday.’
‘You must be very important,’ said the sprout to Dorothy. ‘I’ve never known anything like this before.’
Chapter 43
‘We’re going to have to do something to the bodies,’ Tom said. ‘We can’t just put bodies into the terracotta moulds.’
‘I thought they’d go nice and stiff,’ said Dorothy. ‘Rigor mortis.’
‘They’ll stay stiff for about a day or two. But they’ll start to decompose after three days,’ said Tom. ‘They’ll bloat and start to fall apart. And you’ll have body fluids staining the terracotta and oozing out of the feet.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Exactly. We’ll need to embalm them otherwise any sprout who comes within a quarter of a mile of your studio will smell a rat. Or rather more than a rat if you see what I mean.’
‘I see what you mean. This is going to be more difficult than I thought. How do we embalm them?’
‘I talked to Stan. His Dad used to run a funeral parlour. He still prepares bodies for burial. He’ll help us. You bend and flex the muscles to get rid of the rigor mortis and then you inject embalming chemicals into the blood vessels, and you replace the stuff in the body cavities with more embalming chemicals.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘When a funeral guy does it to prepare a body so that it looks good for the relatives it takes hours but we just want the body to be preserved so that it doesn’t start bloating and rotting and stinking.’
‘Lovely.’
‘No, really. It won’t take long.’
‘And where do we get the embalming stuff from? I can hardly ask Sir Czardas to get me a tanker full of embalming fluid. He’s not the brightest guy in the world but even he is going to wonder why I need embalming fluid to make terracotta statues.’
‘It’s sorted. Stan says he still has a supplier. He can get all we need.
We can put what we like on the invoice we give to the sprouts.’
‘Enough for 8,001 bodies?’
‘Sure.’
‘Goody.’
Chapter 44
Banging sprouts on the head with a frying pan, as they wandered round your home, was retail killing. But killing 8,001 sprouts was wholesale killing.
Instead of killing in kitchens and hallways Tom’s small revolutionary army started killing in corridors and stairwells. They killed sprouts as they were about to enter people’s homes and they killed them as they were just leaving. And the suspects involved showed great imagination in their use of weapons. A former car mechanic used a tyre lever, a former entertainer used a juggler’s Indian club, and a retired serviceman who had been injured in one of Blair’s Wars used his spare artificial leg to great effect. But it was the recruitment of a former ten-pin bowling alley proprietor which helped most. He produced a large stash of unwanted skittles which turned out to be perfect, in both weight and size, for killing sprouts. The uniformity of the weapons made it easier for new suspects to be trained, and evening classes were organised where tyro-killers could practise their whirling and smashing. (Until they destroyed them all they used a collection of dress shop mannequins as practice targets.)
Tom’s army killed income tax inspectors, value added tax inspectors, health and safety officers and planning officers. They killed sprouts who marched into homes demanding to measure windows, search for labels or inspect the Telescreen. They killed officious bureaucrats who clutched books of rules like rednecked Christian fundamentalists clutch bibles. They killed anyone working for EUDCE. And they discovered that killing, like crochet and most other things, becomes easier the more you do it. They were equal opportunity killers. They killed Christian sprouts, Muslim sprouts, Jewish sprouts, Buddhist sprouts, Episcopalian sprouts, Atheist sprouts and Agnostic sprouts. They killed fat, female sprouts; thin, male sprouts; fat, male sprouts and thin, female sprouts. They killed with due regard for the legislation demanding equality for all. They were multicultural killers. They killed white sprouts, brown sprouts, black sprouts and grey sprouts. No one wearing the uniform of a sprout was spared solely because of his colour, race, creed or ethnicity. In that, if that alone, the killing abided by the laws of EUDCE.
Gentle, quiet, sensitive people who would have thought twice about killing a mouse found themselves carving notches on their skittles.
Chapter 45
The killing was surprisingly easy to organise.
The sprouts, full of conceit and self-satisfaction, were, on the whole, still unsuspicious. It wasn’t too difficult to catch them unawares. And finding assassins wasn’t difficult either. Tom put Dalby and Gladwys in charge of recruiting killers while he supervised the purchase of bicycles and the building of trailers for transporting terracotta. Naturally, having the bicycles and the trailers made it easy to move the bodies around.
Dalby and Gladwys stuck to recruiting people over fifty for several reasons.
First, only the older suspects seemed in the slightest bit interested in doing anything to improve their lives. It was only the older suspects who remembered
life as it had been in days before the creation of the European Superstate and who realised, therefore, that it was perfectly possible to live in a world where there was more freedom and fewer rules than the world created by EUDCE.
Second, only the older suspects were strong enough, and quick witted enough, to spot an opportunity (and to take advantage of the opportunity) to down a sprout with a single blow. And only older suspects had the presence of mind to work out what to do with the body afterwards. Younger suspects, who had never faced any real challenges, who had been fast-tracked through the final days of a deteriorating and now non-existent educational system which existed to meet political targets (and therefore ensure that politicians and teachers all received their bonuses), and who had been brought up to believe everything they heard and saw on the Telescreen, were virtually incapable of original thought.
‘Most of today’s kids seem to think they’re entitled to a life full of answers without ever having to wake themselves up long enough to wonder what the questions might be, let alone to ask them,’ said Dalby. ‘They all have expectations which would embarrass royal princes.’
The one big problem they had lay in moving the sprouts from the places where they’d been turned into bodies, to the place where they would be embalmed and fitted inside their terracotta suits. This was potentially the most dangerous part of the whole exercise, even though Tom’s fleet of bicycles and trailers made it practicable. There was always the risk that a sprout would inspect a trailer and find a body. It would be difficult to explain.
Strangely, it was Tom’s aunt who (more by accident than design, it is true) made it possible for them to move bodies around without fear of being stopped by the sprouts.
She was towing a trailer full of fresh clay to the studio when she was stopped and arrested by two sprouts who knew nothing about the project. They took her to a local police station. Several hours after her disappearance, a frantic Tom eventually found her. He spoke to Dorothy who immediately insisted on being allowed to telephone Sir Czardas.
‘The whole project is abandoned,’ she said. ‘We’re all walking out and going home.’
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ cried Sir Czardas, terrified and already imagining his new future checking out faded labels on grey underwear. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘The police have arrested one of our cyclists,’ said Dorothy, who didn’t have to fake her fury. ‘How can I possibly move clay to my studio if the police are going to interfere all the time?’
Sir Czardas was almost comically apologetic. He promised to have the two policemen transferred to sentry box duty outside the Scottish Regional Parliament. He promised to have them transported to Africa. He promised to have them handed over to the Americans so that they could be hung, shot or electrocuted or all three. ‘I’m having a bad day,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make it any worse. My seventh wife is giving me a hard time because there are three Lady Czardas Tsastskes in existence and the latest one met one of the previous ones while shopping and she wants me to do something about it. What can I do? Moreover, she’s constantly worrying about who to invite to her 21st birthday party. I’m on my seventh marriage, and sometimes I wonder if the problem might be me. But in my position I can’t afford self-doubts. Do you think there’s any chance whatsoever that we can sort this out without you walking away from the project?’
‘I just want to be able to have my clay delivered without interference,’ said Dorothy, calmer now. She had almost (but most definitely not quite) laughed during Sir Czardas’s pitiful revelations.
‘That’s no problem,’ insisted Sir Czardas. He promised that he would give orders that none of Dorothy’s bicyclists, or their trailers, would be disrupted by the police. The bicyclists would, he said, be given special passes entitling them to cycle through police cordons, barriers, barricades and, if appropriate, rings of fire.
Dorothy said she thought this would be OK as long as Sir Czardas got the passes sent round within the hour.
The passes were on Dorothy’s desk within forty five minutes.
And after that the bicyclists were able to move bodies around just as easily as they were able to move clay around, which is to say that they were able to move it around without any interference whatsoever. Indeed, several of the bicyclists reported that they had been saluted by sprouts, much in the way, said Tom, that motorists had been saluted by RAC and AA patrols back in the 1950’s.
Chapter 46
‘There is a small problem,’ said Sir Czardas. He felt nervous even bringing it up.
‘What’s that?’ demanded the Chief Commissioner. ‘We’ve sorted out our bonuses for the year haven’t we?’
‘We have,’ agreed Sir Czardas.
‘And approved them?’
‘We did that too.’
‘So what else can there be?’ she demanded. Her most recent personal assistant had just retired and the Chief Commissioner was impatient. She had a trio of possible replacements waiting outside to be interviewed. Two of them looked particularly attractive. Boyish but elfin. She wondered if she might perhaps just hire them both. It would be easier than making a decision. Then if one turned out to be more acceptable she could keep that one and get rid of the other.
‘We seem to have misplaced a number of sprouts recently,’ said Sir Czardas.
‘Oh, not that nonsense again,’ said the Chief Commissioner dismissively. ‘You’ve got a real bee in your bonnet about this,’ she added, forgetting that she had originally been the one to bring the matter up.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ said Sir Czardas. ‘But I thought I ought to mention it. Another three hundred went missing last week. I’ve been told that there are rumours.’
The Chief Commissioner looked up. ‘What sort of rumours?’ she demanded. She didn’t like rumours that she hadn’t initiated or didn’t control.
‘Some of the recruiters tell me that they’re having difficulty hiring new replacement sprouts in Poland.’
The Chief Commissioner stared in disbelief.
‘I know it sounds unlikely,’ agreed Sir Czardas, who had grown to believe that anyone with half a brain would give what cerebral tissue they had left to become a sprout. ‘But that’s what I’m hearing.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m told that they seem afraid that they too might disappear,’ he added.
‘Oh what absolute rubbish!’ said the Chief Commissioner who hated inconvenient or unpleasant truths and simply could not believe that EUDCE employees could be frightened of anything. Fear was something EUDCE used as a weapon; it wasn’t something they had to deal with themselves. ‘I can’t bear this sort of nonsense. We have far more important things to worry about.’
‘Yes, Chief Commissioner,’ agreed Sir Czardas who had not survived in his present position without knowing when to say ‘yes’ and when to say ‘no’.
‘And I don’t want this sort of rumour spreading!’
‘No, Chief Commissioner.’
‘Ring up the boss of the BBC and tell him that on no account is any of this nonsense to be broadcast on the Telescreen. If sprouts hear any of this they will be dispirited and disillusioned. If suspects hear it they’ll lose all faith in our invulnerability. And if the people in Brussels hear this sort of thing they’ll be very upset,’ said the Chief Commissioner. She paused and looked at Sir Czardas as though she were looking at him over reading spectacles. ‘And quite disapproving.’
‘Yes, Chief Commissioner.’
‘Do you hear what I’m saying? Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Chief Commissioner,’ said Sir Czardas, who did on both counts.
‘We’ll just import more replacement sprouts from Turkey. There are plenty over there who’ll jump at the chance to better themselves. We’ll give them a signing on bonus. I’ll ring someone in Brussels.’
Sir Czardas nodded his understanding, acceptance and approval.
The Chief Commissioner waved a hand dismissively. ‘You can go now.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Send in the f
irst of the three girls waiting outside.’
Chapter 47
The Chief Commissioner was playing the harp. Or, rather, she was attempting to play it. In truth, she couldn’t read music and couldn’t play the harp. But she had decided that her image would benefit from a little mild eccentricity. So, she had confiscated a harp from a former member of a major orchestra and then hired the harpist as her tutor. Every morning, between 11 a.m. and 11.30 a.m. she had harp lessons. The rest of the time the harp stood in the corner of her office, a constant reminder to everyone who entered that the office’s occupant had character. Occasionally, the Chief Commissioner would sit at her harp and pretend that a visitor had interrupted an impromptu recital. This allowed her to pose as an artiste, and enabled her to make her visitor aware that she (or he) was interrupting something important.
‘When I came in this morning there were only two guards at the front door,’ said the Chief Commissioner. ‘There should be four.’
‘There should,’ agreed Sir Czardas. ‘But unfortunately, our personpower situation is a little stretched at the moment. According to the latest report I’ve had there are another four hundred sprouts missing this week.’ He paused, looking for a way to soften the news. ‘Taken unofficial leave, I expect,’ he added, hoping to ingratiate himself by offering what he suspected would be the Chief Commissioner’s own response.
The Chief Commissioner looked at him suspiciously. ‘Are you being funny?’
‘No, no, not at all,’ said Sir Czardas very quickly.
‘Good, good,’ said the Chief Commissioner. She stared at the ceiling, plucked a couple of harp strings and looked thoughtful. ‘And if there is any unhappiness, dissatisfaction, call it what you will, then our new planned celebration will dispel that, don’t you think?’
‘Celebration?’ asked Sir Czardas, nervously wondering if he’d missed something.
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