'Is cheese still overpriced?' I asked my mother.
'Criminal!' she muttered. 'Over five hundred per cent 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 post-traumatic 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 £5,000 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 door frame 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, its wingtip feathers splayed as it reached the bottom of a downstroke. A motorcyclist on the road was balancing, impossibly still, and passers-by were now as stiff and unmoving as statues – even Pickwick had stopped in mid-waddle. Time, for the moment at least, had frozen. I knew only one person who had a face that could stop the 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 blonde 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 ponytail held tight with a flower hair tie. I noted with a certain detached amusement that there was a lucky gonk attached to the trigger guard and that the stock was covered with pink fur. Dad looked younger than me but he was instantly recognisable. The odd nature of the time business tended to make operatives live nonlinear lives – every time I met him he was a different age.
'Hello, Dad.'
'You were correct,' he said, comparing the woman's frozen 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 stared at me for a moment and 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 comparing the pictures with 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 is 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 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 as 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 timeline 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 in talking anyway, so I bade him goodbye, 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 as I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn't looking forward to her death at my hands. 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.'
1 picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page expose 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 teatime, something I got her to promise before she had fully realised the implications of nappy changing and saw 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 DH82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.
Hamlet came down to breakfast, followed, after a prudent gap, by Emma. They bade each other good morning in such an obvious way that only their serious demeanour kept me from laughing out loud.
'Did you sleep well, Lady Hamilton?' asked Hamlet.
'I did, thank you. My room faces east for the morning light, you know.'
'Ah!' replied Hamlet. 'Mine doesn't. I believe it was once the boxroom. It has pretty pink wallpaper and a bedside light shaped like Tweetie-pie.
Not that I noticed much, of course, being fast asleep – on my own.'
'Of course.'
'Let me show you something,' said Mum after breakfast.
I followed her down to Mycroft's workshop. Alan had kept Mum's dodos trapped in the potting shed all night and even now threatened to peck anyone who so much as looked at him 'in a funny way'.
'Pickwick!' I said sternly. 'Are you going to let your son bully those dodos?'
Pickwick looked the other way and pretended to have an itchy foot. To be honest she couldn't control Alan any more than I could. Only half an hour previously he had chased the postman out of the garden with an angry plink-plink-plink noise, something even the postman had to admit 'was a first'.
Mum opened the side door to the large workshop and we entered. This was where my Uncle Mycroft did all his inventing. It was here that he had demonstrated, among many other things, translating carbon paper, a sarcasm early warning device, Nextian geometry and, most important to me, the Prose Portal – the method by which I first entered fiction. Mother was always nervous in Mycroft's lab. Many years ago he had developed some four-dimensional paper, the idea being that you could print on the same sheet of paper again and again, isolating the different over-printings in marginally different time zones that could be read by the use of temporal spectacles. By going to the nanosecond level, a million sheets of text or pictures could be stored on one sheet of paper in a single second. Brilliant – but the paper looked identical to a standard sheet of A4, and it had been a long, contentious family argument that my mother used the irreplaceable prototype to line the compost bucket. It was no wonder she was careful near his inventions.
'What did you want to show me?'
She smiled and led me to the end of the workshop. There, next to my stuff, which she had rescued from my apartment, was the unmistakable shape of my Porsche 356 Speedster hidden beneath a dustsheet.
'I've run the engine every month and kept it MOTed for you. I even took it for a spin a couple of times.'
She pulled the sheet off with a flourish. The car still looked slightly shabby after our various encounters, but just the way I liked it. I gently touched the bullet holes that had been made by Hades all those years ago, and the bent front wing where I had slid it into the River Severn. I opened the garage doors.
'Thanks, Mum. Sure you're all right with the boy Friday?'
'Until four this afternoon. But you have to promise me something.'
'What's that?'
'That you'll come to my Eradications Anonymous group this evening.'
'Mum—!'
'It will do you good. You might enjoy it. Might meet someone. Might make you forget Linden.'
'Landen. His name's Landen. And I don't need or want to forget him.'
'Then the group will support you. Besides, you might learn something. Oh, and would you take Hamlet with you? Mr Bismarck has a bee in his bonnet about Danes because of that whole silly Schleswig-Holstein thingummy.'
I narrowed my eyes. Could Joffy be right?
'What about Emma? Do you want me to take her, too?'
'No. Why?'
'Er, no reason.'
I picked up Friday and gave him a kiss.
'Be good, Friday. You're staying with Nana for the day.'
Friday looked at me, looked at Mum, stuck his finger up his nose and said: 'Sunt in culpa qui officia id est laborum?'
I ruffled his hair and he showed me a bogey he had found. I declined the present, wiped his hand with a hanky, then went to look for Hamlet. I found him in the front garden demonstrating a thrust-and-parry sword fight to Emma and Pickwick. Even Alan had left off bullying the other dodos and was watching in silence. I called out to Hamlet and he came running.
'Sorry,' said the prince as I opened the garage doors, just demonstrating how that damn fool Laertes gets his comeuppance.'
I showed him how to get into the Porsche, dropped in myself, started the engine and drove off down the hill towards the Brunei Centre.
'You seem to be getting on very well with Emma.'
'Who?' asked Hamlet, unconvincingly vague.
'Lady Hamilton.'
'Oh, her. Nice girl. We have a lot in common.'
'Such as—?'
'Well,' said Hamlet, thinking hard, 'we both have a good friend called Horatio.'
We motored on down past the magic roundabout and I pointed out the new stadium with its four floodlighting towers standing tall among the low housing.
'That's our croquet stadium,' I said, 'thirty thousand seats. Home of the Swindon Mallets croquet team.'
'Croquet is a national sport out here?'
'Oh yes,' I replied, knowing a thing or two about it since I used to play myself. 'It has evolved a lot since the early days. For a start the teams are bigger – ten a side in World Croquet League. The players have to get their balls through the hoops in the quickest possible time, so it can be quite rough. A stray ball can pack a wallop and a flailing mallet is potentially lethal. The WCL insist on body armour and perspex barriers for the spectators.'
I turned left into Manchester Road and parked behind a Griffin-6 Lowrider.
'What now?'
'Haircut. You don't think I'm going to spend the next few weeks looking like Joan of Arc, do you?'
'Ah!' said Hamlet. 'You hadn't mentioned it for a while so I'd stopped noticing. If it's all right with you, I'll just stay here and write a letter to Horatio. Does "pirate" have one "t" or two?'
'One.'
I walked into Mum's hairdresser. The stylists looked at my hair with a sort of shocked numbness until Lady Volescamper, who along with her increasingly eccentric mayoral husband constituted Swindon's most visible aristocracy, suddenly pointed at me and said in a strident tone that could shatter glass:
'That's the style I want. Something new. Something retro – something to cause a sensation at the Swindon Mansion House Ball!'
Mrs Barnet, who was both the chief stylist and official gossip laureate of Swindon, kept her look of horror to herself and then said diplomatically:
'Of course. And may I say that Her Grace's boldness matches her sense of style.'
Lady Volescamper returned to her Femole magazine, appearing not to recognise me, which was just as well – the last time I went to Vole Towers a hell beast from the darkest depths of the human imagination trashed the entrance lobby.
'Hello, Thursday,' said Mrs Barnet, wrapping a sheet around me with an expert flourish, 'haven't seen you for a while.'
'I've been away.'
'In prison?'
'No – just away.'
'Ah. How would you like it? I have it on good authority that the "Joan of Arc" look is set to be quite popular this summer.'
'You know I'm not a fashion person, Gladys. Just get rid of the dopey haircut, would you?'
'As madame wishes.' She hummed to herself for a moment, then asked: 'Been on holiday this year?'
I got back to the car a half-hour later to find Hamlet talking to a traffic warden, who seemed so engrossed in whatever he was telling her that she wasn't writing me a ticket.
'And that,' said Hamlet as soon as I came within earshot, making a thrusting motion with his hand, 'was when I cried: "A rat, a rat!" and killed the unseen old man. Hello, Thursday – goodness, that's short, isn't it?'
'It's better than it was. C'mon, I've got to go and get my job back.'
'Job?' asked Hamlet as we drove off, leaving a very indignant traffic warden, who wanted to know what happened next.
'Yes. Out here you need money to live.'
'I've got lots,' said Hamlet generously. 'You should have some of mine.'
'Somehow I don't think fictional kroner from an unspecified century will cut the mustard down at the First Goliath – and put the skull away. They aren't generally considered a fashion accessory here in the Outland.'
'They're all the rage where I come from.'
'Well, not here. Put it in this Tesco's bag.'
'STOP!'
I scr
eeched to a halt.
'What?'
'That, over there. It's me!'
Before I could say anything Hamlet had jumped out of the car and run across the road to a coin-operated machine on the comer of the street. I parked the Speedster and walked over to join him. He was staring with delight at the simple box, the top half of which was glazed; inside was a suitably attired mannequin visible from the waist up.
'It's called a Will-Speak machine,' I said, passing him a carrier bag. 'Here – put the skull in the bag like I asked.'
'What does it do?'
'Officially it's called a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton,' I explained. 'You put in two shillings and get a short snippet from Shakespeare.'
'Of me?'
'Yes,' I said, 'of you.'
For it was, of course, a Hamlet Will-Speak machine, and the mannequin Hamlet sat looking blankly out at the flesh-and-blood Hamlet standing next to me.
'Can we hear a bit?' asked Hamlet excitedly.
'If you want. Here.'
I dug out a coin and placed it in the machine. There was a whirring and clicking as the dummy came to life.
'To be, or not to be,' began the mannequin in a hollow metallic voice. The machine had been built in the thirties and was now pretty much worn out. 'That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind—'
Hamlet was fascinated, like a child listening to a tape recording of their own voice for the first time.
'Is that really me?' he asked.
'The words are yours – but actors do it a lot better.'
'—or to take arms against a sea of troubles—'
'Actors?'
'Yes. Actors, playing Hamlet.'
He looked confused.
'—That flesh is heir to—'
'I don't understand.'
'Well,' I began, looking around to check that no one was listening, 'you know that you are Hamlet, from Shakespeare's Hamlet?
'Yes?'
'—To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream—'
'Well, that's a play, and out here in the Outland, people act out that play.'
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