Overtime Tom Holt

by Overtime (lit)

  The door opened and Guy came in with a tray. It contained a glass of water, a dry biscuit and a handful of seedless currants.

  'There's a man outside,' he said, 'claims he's from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, wants an interview. I told him to get lost.'

  Blondel drank half the water and nibbled the edge of the biscuit. 'He was probably telling the truth, actually,' he said. 'Still, I don't much care for reporters. Silly of me, I know, and they're only doing their job, but -'

  'Job nothing,' Giovanni interrupted. 'We've done an exclusive deal with the FT.'

  'Never mind,' Blondel said. 'Now, if it'll take your mind off worrying, we can run through the programme. Will that make you feel any better?'

  Giovanni nodded. He'd grown his fingernails for two years just to be ready for tonight, and he'd finished them already.

  'Well,' Blondel said, 'we'll start off with Purgator

  Criminum, something with a bit of go to it; then we'll have Ma Joie, follow that up with a couple of numbers from the GB-'

  'Which ones?'

  'I thought Estuans Intrinsecus, followed by Imperator Rex Grecorum. Or do you think that's wise, after what happened at Antioch?'

  'Don't worry about that,' Giovanni reassured him, 'I've brought in the whole of the Knights Templar to cover security. First sign of any trouble, they'll be out, dead and excommunicated.'

  Blondel shrugged again. 'Nothing to do with me,' he said. 'Then I thought we'd do the rest of the White Album stuff, finish off with Mihi Est Propositum, and have the break there. That sound OK?'

  Giovanni nodded. 'That's good,' he said. 'That way we'll sell a hell of a lot of peanuts in the interval. So what about the second half?'

  'Pretty straightforward,' Blondel said. 'We'll do all the new material there.'

  'New material?' Guy interrupted. 'You mean you've written more songs since you...'

  Blondel grinned. 'I like to keep my hand in,' he said, 'just for fun. So I reckon we might as well do Greensleeves, Molly Malone, Shenandoah, Au Pres De Ma Blonde, Liliburlero and The Bonnie Banks of-'

  'Hang on,' Guy said.

  Blondel wrinkled his nose. 'Maybe you're right,' he said, 'not Loch Lomond. Don't know what I was thinking of. How about Swing Low Sweet Chariot?'

  'Ever since Blondel ... retired,' Giovanni explained, 'he's written under a nom de plume.'

  'What's that?'

  'Anonymous.'

  Guy closed his eyes and then opened them again. 'What, all of them?' he asked.

  Blondel made a tiny movement with his shoulders. It might have been wincing. 'Pretty well,' he said.

  'Did you write Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major?' Blondel nodded. He did not speak.

  'And Frankie and Johnny?'

  Blondel's head dipped, just perceptibly. 'Really?'

  Blondel nodded again and smiled; or at least he lifted the curtain of his lips on a set of clenched teeth.

  'Gosh,' Guy said. He seemed to experience an inner struggle, as perhaps between hero-worship and extreme embarrassment. 'Er, can I have your auto -Blondel gave him a cold look.

  'I also,' he said, 'wrote -'

  'It's not for me,' Guy went on, 'it's for my -'

  Western Wind When Wilt Thou Blow, Silent Night and The Vicar of Bray,' Blondel went on. He signed the envelope-back that Guy had thrust at him without comment. 'Anyway,' he added, after a while, 'that ought to do for tonight. And of course we can finish up with L'Amours Dont Sui Epris. End up with something they can hum on the way home, you know.'

  'You didn't write -'

  'No,' Blondel snapped, 'certainly not. Look, unless anyone's got anything important they want to talk about, I really am going to try and get a nap now. All right?'

  'Anything you say,' Guy said. He folded the envelope carefully and put it away. Even then, he felt he had to add something. You don't meet a seminal genius every day, after all.

  'Mr Blondel,' he said, 'I take my hat off to you.'

  'So long as it's your own hat,' Blondel replied sleepily, 'that's fine by me. Shut the door behind you when you go.'

  Guy did so. By this time, Giovanni had disappeared to have another tearing row with the electricians. The man from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had retired to the bar, and was probably trying to coax a story out of the PR people in an attempt to scoop the Tres Riches Heures Du Duc De Bern. There was nothing, Guy decided, that he could usefully do; which meant he had time to go and find something to eat. Now that was a good idea.

  A section of the audience was having trouble finding its seat.

  'This,' it said, 'is Row 8765, right?'

  'Yes,' said the usher, 'but -'

  'And this is a ticket, right?'

  'Looks like one,' the usher admitted, 'but -'

  'Read me,' said the section of the audience, 'what it says on the ticket.'

  'Row 8765 Seat 3654,' said the usher, 'but -'

  'Thank you,' said the section of the audience. 'Now, if you'll kindly throw out the man who's sitting in my seat, I can take the weight off my foot and sit down, and you can go and do something else.'

  But he's got a ticket too, the usher would have said, if he hadn't met the full force of the section of the audience's eye. As it was, he said, 'Yes, sir,' and shortly afterwards, 'You, out of it.' This remark was addressed, as it happened, to the music critic of the Oceanian, whose great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had booked the seat five hundred years in advance and left it in his will, together with strict instructions to his descendants to devote themselves solely to preparing themselves for this event.

  'Thank you,' said the section of the audience, as the music critic of the Oceanian was carried away on an improvised stretcher. 'You can go now.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  The section of the audience turned to the two men sitting beside him. They looked identical; not surprisingly.

  'Pity,' he continued, 'we could only get two tickets. I don't like having to pull rank like that, let alone use a forged ticket. Bad form. Still, I didn't want you two to miss the fun.'

  His two companions nodded. Simultaneously. With one voice they said, 'Thanks.'

  The section of the audience waved a deprecating hand.

  'That's all right,' he said. 'Now then, let's have a look at the programme. Oh good, he's doing Mihi Est Propositum. I remember at the Orleans gig of '88 ...'

  Guy wasn't having the best of luck. The bar was packed, the hot dog stall had been stripped down to bare wood within thirty seconds of opening, and he found when he reached the front of the queue that the candy-floss, at ST125 a go, was beyond his means. He was beginning to feel decidedly peckish.

  He walked along the front of the stage, trying not to trip over the various serpentine bunches of wires, heading for the electricians' staff canteen. With luck there might be a cheese roll or so over there. Electricians of this particular type were outside his immediate knowledge, but the rules of their guild never change; if these electricians were anything like the ones they'd had in the 1940s, they never moved a step without an adequate supply of cheese rolls. Stale, usually, and with bits of translucent yellow rind on the exposed edges of the cheese; but edible, within the broad meaning of the term.

  He stopped. In the middle of one of the middle rows there was a man who was only half there.

  Guy's mother had taught him three guiding rules of civilised behaviour, and his ability to forget them was a pretty effective gauge of his efficient functioning as a human being in the real world. They were:

  (1) Don't push in queues.

  (2) Don't talk with your mouth full.

  (3) Don't stare.

  As to the first; if he'd ever paid any heed to it, he'd still be standing in line in the sub-post office at the end of Garner Street waiting to buy ten first-class stamps for the cards for Christmas 1931. As to the second; as matters stood at present, chance would be a fine thing. And as to the third; well, the possibility of men who were only half there had obviously not been within his mother's contemplation when sh
e formulated the rule. He stared.

  The man - he could see him very clearly indeed, although he was quite some way off - didn't seem at all put out about being only fifty per cent present. He was laughing at a joke or something similar, and his hand was extracting peanuts from a packet balanced precariously on his one knee. Peanuts!

  Guy wrenched his mind away from thoughts of peanuts. There were plenty of odd-looking people in the audience - the party sitting in the front row were not the sort of thing Guy had ever come across outside the Saturday morning Buck Rogers serial - but none as odd as ... The man was split neatly and precisely down the middle. The dividing line ran down across his forehead, followed his nose down through his lips and chin, bisected his neck and continued down his shirt front. Guy felt a strong urge not to find out what the man looked like viewed in right profile.

  'I'd better tell Blondel,' he said to himself.

  He turned and walked up the stage towards the small door in the back, which led to the dressing rooms; and would undoubtedly have reached his destination, woken Blondel, told him what he'd seen and so changed the course of past and future history, if only he hadn't caught sight of an unfamiliar figure holding a heaped plate of individual pork pies flitting like a shadow through the wings. He changed course abruptly and followed.

  It goes without saying that the pork pie carrier was Pursuivant, and that he wasn't wearing a hat.

  Guy made a muffled grunting noise and tried to move his feet. Pointless.

  Out of either irony or compassion, they had stopped his mouth with a ham and watercress club sandwich of phenomenal proportions; too thick to bite through without the use of one's hands, at any rate. His tongue could sense the presence of tomato, cucumber and (he felt sure) green peppers and English mustard. He gave up grunting and tried growling instead.

  No chance of being heard, of course; not with that noise going on out there. To be sure, it wasn't an unpleasant noise - it was Blondel singing the big numbers from the White Album, and on a number of occasions Guy would have stopped struggling and sat open-mouthed with admiration if it hadn't been for the club sandwich - but what with the amplification and the acoustics and Blondel's natural power of voice projection, the likelihood of anybody hearing his frantic oinking noises, or wishing to leave the music and come and investigate if they did, were pretty well minimal. He was stuck.

  Being a realist, therefore, he stopped making a noise and tried thinking instead. The only conclusion which ensued, however, was the feeling that contemplation was probably overrated as against, for example, escaping from tight knots or eating. The thinking made his head hurt, especially on the lower left back where whoever it was had hit him, and he packed it in. The only thing left to do was to sit still and stare at the heaped plate of sausage rolls which some sadist had left on the straight-backed chair opposite.

  In the auditorium, Blondel was launching into yet another popular favourite. Guy stretched out his hands, which were tied firmly behind his back, and groped to see if his fingers could encounter anything sharp and useful. No such luck; only what felt, to Guy at least, like a plateful of cheese sandwiches.

  Then the door opened and a man came tiptoeing in. Guy froze (not that that made a vast amount of difference in the circumstances, but he was always one to show willing) and watched.

  The man's eyes clearly hadn't got used to the nearly complete darkness in the room (whatever sort of room it was) and quite soon he barked his shin on something, swore quietly and stopped to rub himself. Then he lit a cigarette lighter, and found himself staring straight at Guy.

  'Mnnnnnnnn,' Guy said, tersely.

  'Who are you?' the man replied, thereby demonstrating a complete absence of all the qualities that Guy had hoped to find in him.

  'Mnnn,' he explained. 'Mnnnn mnnnn mnn mnn inn.'

  'What?'

  By the light of his cigarette lighter, the man appeared to be of medium height, thirtyish, with scruffy long hair, dressed in a sports jacket, an open-necked shirt, light blue baggy trousers and white canvas shoes. He wore spectacles and had the kind of face you'd expect to register bewildered surprise no matter what you said to it. Guy shook his head, causing the club sandwich to oscillate wildly.

  'Has someone tied you up?' the man said.

  'Mnn,' Guy replied with studied irony. 'Mnnn mnn mnnnn.'

  'Here,' the man said, 'this is my card, I'm with BBC television. My name's Danny Bennett.'

  'Mnn.'

  The man thought for a moment, and then said, 'Would it help if I took that sandwich out of your ...? Right, fine, hold on.'

  'Thank you,' Guy replied. 'Now get these ropes off me, for crying out loud.'

  'Ropes?'

  'The ropes with which my hands are tied behind my back,' Guy said. He remembered something his mother had told him, many years ago. 'Please,' he added.

  'Sure, sure,' the man said. He picked up a bread knife -someone has been using that to make sandwiches, Guy reflected - and started to saw at the ropes.

  'I'm covering this concert,' the man said, 'for the North Bank Show. Perhaps you could explain something for me. When is this?'

  'Ouch,' Guy replied, 'that was my -'

  'Sorry,' the man said. 'Only my producer said I was to get in the car and not ask daft questions, and when I got here my calendar watch was reading 35th March 2727. I reckoned -sorry - that it must have gone funny so I reset it, and now it says 43rd August 1364. And not only that, but -'

  'What's a calendar watch?' Guy asked.

  'Don't worry about it,' Guy added quickly. 'Look, if you could just hurry up with these ropes ...

  The man leaned forward and whispered. 'It's OK,' he said, 'you can tell me, I'm a reporter. Is something going on around here?'

  'Yes,' Guy replied.

  The man stared - at least, he stared even more. 'You mean -'

  'It's a ... a plot of some kind,' Guy said. 'And I've got to go and tell someone something terribly important, so if you'd just -'

  'Can I come?'

  Guy turned his head and stared. 'You want to come?' he said.

  'Sounds to me like there's a story in it,' the man replied. 'You know, like a scoop or something.'

  Guy narrowed his eyes for a moment. 'Are you from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle?' he asked.

  'You what? I'm from the BBC.'

  'The BBC,' Guy repeated. 'You mean the British Broadcasting Corporation?'

  'Yes, of course I mean the -'

  'What date was it when you left home this morning?'

  The man gave him a look of almost liquid bewilderment. '5th April 1994,' he replied. 'Look, what is

  'Thank you,' Guy said. 'Have you nearly finished with that rope?'

  'There,' the man answered, 'try that.'

  Guy flexed his arms and felt his hands come free. He dived forward, snatched up the club sandwich from where it had fallen, and ate it, very quickly.

  'That's better', he said. 'You have no idea how much better I feel now.' He grabbed the bread knife and started sawing through the ropes that constrained his ankles.

  'Don't mention it,' the man said. He had reached into his pocket and taken out a notebook. 'Now, then,' he said, 'what's happening?'

  Guy cut the last strand of rope, put down the knife, and levered himself gingerly to his feet. 'Don't worry about it,' he said, 'it's nothing, really. Just a little -' he searched for the right word - 'temporary problem. Soon get it sorted out. Have a sausage roll, they're really good. Really good.'

  'No thanks. Look

  'Suit yourself,' Guy replied, and he tipped the rest of the plateful into his pocket, shoved a jam tart into his mouth, and started to run. The man tried to follow him, but fell over a packing-case, banged his head and passed out.

  This was a pity, because if he hadn't he would have been the only reporter to have witnessed one of the most crucial events in history - in all history, past, present and future. As it was, he came round to find himself fast asleep on a bench in Central Park, with a sore head and a ca
lf-bound copy of Silas Marner in his left hand, where his reporter's notebook had been when he fell over.

  Some people are just plain unlucky.

  Guy ran out of the room into what turned out to be a corridor, stopped and looked both ways. Nothing. Nor any indication of which way he should go. He could hear the music, which seemed to be coming from directly above his head. A great deal of help that was.

  Being one of those people who automatically turns left unless firmly directed to do otherwise, Guy ran down the left branch of the corridor, and so arrived at a glass fire door, which was locked.

  Oh good, he thought, I've always wanted to do this.

  He picked up a nearby fire extinguisher, ate a sausage roll, and attacked. The glass was much tougher than it looked, but not nearly tough enough, and when Guy had quite finished, he reached through, found the bolt on the other side, drew it back and opened the door. Easy.

  Standing on the other side of the door, hands on hips and looking decidedly unfriendly, was La Beale Isoud.

  'There you are,' she said. 'I've been looking for you everywhere.'

  Guy noticed that he was still holding the fire extinguisher, and that he had slightly grazed his hand on the glass. He put the extinguisher down slowly and found a weak smile from somewhere.

  'You have?' he said.

  'Yes,' replied La Beale Isoud. 'You've got to warn Blondel.'

  'Why can't you do it?'

  'What?'

  'You've got the message,' Guy replied. 'You probably know what's going on. You tell him.'

  'Don't be stupid,' La Beale Isoud replied. 'You're supposed to be a man, aren't you?'

  'What's that got to do with -'

  'It's probably dangerous,' said La Beale Isoud, fiercely. 'Are you saying you'd just stand there and leave a defenceless woman to -'

  'All right, all right,' Guy said. 'You tell me how to find Blondel and I'll give him the message.'

  'He's up there,' said La Beale Isoud, pointing to where the sound of someone singing Floret Silva Nobilis, rather well, was coming from, 'on the stage.'

  'Yes,' Guy replied, 'thank you, I had actually worked that one out for myself. How exactly am I supposed to -'