by Tom Holt
“That’s grand,” the old man said, picking the biscuits off the floor and dusting them on his cuff. “You be sure to give my regards to your mother. She must be very proud of you.”
Mr Gogerty shuffled a little on his pinnacle of seat. “I’ll do that,” he said. “What I wanted—”
“You heard about the Carpenter Library?” The old man’s crinkled face became terribly grave. “Wasn’t that a dreadful thing?”
“I was there this morning,” Mr Gogerty said. “That’s one of the reasons—”
“Burned to the ground,” the old man went on, shaking his head sadly (and the light from the bare bulb danced on the shiny apex of his bald head). “All those wonderful books, all gone. Irreplaceable, most of them. Makes you wonder who’d do such a thing.”
“Yes,” Mr Gogerty said, so firmly that the old man looked up, as though he’d just remembered Mr Gogerty was there. “Like I was saying,” he continued, “that’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
The old man nodded. “Not just a social call, then.”
“No.”
“Drink your tea, it’s getting cold.” The old man folded his hands in his lap and sighed. “Just think of it,” he said, “the Carpenter Library, gone for ever. I used to spend hours in there when I was studying for my exams.”
Which would have been sixty years ago at least, and the Carpenter had only been built for fifteen, but it was that sort of library. “Me too,” Mr Gogerty said. “I’ll miss the place, that’s for sure. But—”
“You’ll be wanting to use upstairs, then.”
The old man was looking straight at him, and Mr Gogerty had forgotten how bright his eyes could be, when he wanted them to. He nodded. “The Yellow Pages,” he said. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
He said it lightly, as though the request was a mere formality, which it wasn’t. In theory, access to the Spielmann Webb Archive, of which the bright-eyed old man was the guardian and curator, was restricted to the most eminent leaders of the profession, and even they had to submit a written request for permission to the General Ethical Council. Just turning up and asking to see the archive could result in being shown the door (bearing in mind where the door was, no laughing matter). On the other hand, the curator had been to school with Mr Gogerty’s mother.
“Well,” the old man said, “I don’t know.”
Mr Gogerty crushed his pride down into his boots. “Please, Uncle Theo.”
A long sigh. “I guess so,” the old man said. “Just mind you don’t go telling anybody or you’ll get me in trouble. And drink your tea.”
Ten minutes later, Mr Gogerty stepped out of the door in the cloud into the waiting helicopter, shut the door, waved goodbye to the shiny head floating in apparently thin air and told the pilot to take him home.
The pilot looked at him. “You just—”
Mr Gogerty nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And yes, you could tell someone. But who’d believe you?”
He spent the entire flight home staring at the turned-up page of his notebook, on which was written an address. From time to time he glanced at his watch and asked the pilot if he could go a bit faster.
“You’re in a hurry,” the pilot said eventually.
“That’s right,” Mr Gogerty replied. “Got to get to the dry cleaners before it shuts.”
CHAPTER NINE
“We can’t do this,” Polly said, while Don wrecked a perfectly valid MasterCard. “It’s against the law. It’s burglary.”
Don straightened up and looked at his card. “There I’d venture to disagree with you,” he said. “The reason we can’t do this is because it’s difficult. The legal aspect, well, obviously that’s where you’d tend to focus, it being your chosen field of endeavour and all.” He sighed. “Here, lend me your credit card, would you? I’m getting the hang of this, but…”
“Certainly not.” She looked nervously up and down the corridor. “Suppose somebody comes,” she said. “We’ll be in all sorts of trouble.”
“We’re already in all sorts of trouble,” Don replied grimly, putting his murdered MasterCard back in his wallet. “Murder and mucking about with the dark arts, for starters.” He sighed again. “It looks so easy in films,” he said. “You just ease the corner of the card into the latch, and then click and you’re in.”
“Try using magic,” Polly said.
He gave her a filthy look. “I’ll pretend you meant that sarcastically,” he said. “Oh come on. It’s just a crappy Chinese Yale rip-off; it shouldn’t be a problem. If underprivileged kids from dead-end estates with no GCSEs can do it, it can’t be difficult, surely. Here, give me a nail file, that might do it.”
“I haven’t got a nail file.”
He scowled at her. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “You’re a girl, of course you’ve got a nail file. Otherwise, what would you spend all day sitting at your desk filing your nails with?”
“Have you tried turning the handle?”
He made a vulgar noise. “I suppose I could try drilling the lock off,” he said. “Only that’d make a hell of a racket, and—”
“No,” she said. “Think. He hears you crashing about, right, so—”
“I wasn’t crashing about,” Don retorted. “I wasn’t doing anything.”
“So,” she went on calmly, “he decides to nip downstairs and ask you to stop. In which case…” She reached past him and took hold of the door handle. “Since he’s only planning on being out for a minute or so, wouldn’t he just put the door on the latch, rather than locking it?”
She twisted the handle and the door swung open. “There,” she said.
“Oh.”
“We’re in,” Polly said, “and since we haven’t forced our way in, strictly speaking it’s not burglary, just civil trespass. Well, come on.”
Don hadn’t really known what to expect. The plan had seemed obvious back at Polly’s office: go round to the vanished guitar player’s flat and look for clues, anything that might give them a starting point for figuring out how to get him back. Later, while he was delaminating credit cards on the lock, it had occurred to him that he was working on movie logic, rather than the stuff that applied in the real world. In a film you’d go round to the victim’s flat and there the next big clue would be, sitting waiting for you, on a bed of wild rice with saffron and rocket garnish. In reality there was absolutely no reason to suppose that there’d be anything useful here, or, even if there was, that they’d stumble across it and recognise it for what it was in the course of a hurried and cursory search.
“You know what,” Polly was saying. “It’s almost as bad as your place.”
He resented that. The vanished guitar player’s flat was a mess, a tip, a pig heap. There were unwashed-up plates and empty beer cans on practically every flat surface, discarded clothes on the floor, bits of half-dismantled electronic appliances just left lying with their guts hanging out in skeins, a TV set left negligently on standby (thereby directly contributing to the deaths of countless baby polar bears in the rapidly defrosting Arctic) and an expensive electric guitar apparently dropped on the floor and left for dead. Also, he could have pointed out, the walls were a different colour.
“Clues,” he said. “Find clues.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know, do I?” He looked round desperately. “It could be anything.”
“Such as?”
He pleaded with the universe for inspiration. “An address book,” he said. “Look for an address book.”
There didn’t seem to be one. Socks, yes. Underwear of all kinds, enough to fill a museum or, more appropriately, a silage clamp. No little black book, however.
“People don’t use address books any more,” Polly pointed out. “He’d have all that stuff on his phone or his computer. Besides, what were you planning on doing? Phoning his mother?”
“That’s an idea,” Don replied, picking up an empty milk carton with finger and thumb and dropping it on top of the crammed-full waste-pa
per basket. “We’ll have a look on his computer; there might be something there.”
Polly pulled a face. “You can do that,” she said. “I’m going to look in the bedroom.”
He waited till she was out of the room. Then he sat down on a chair, pulled a single hair from the top of his head and spat on it. For a second or two nothing happened. Then the hair started to grow, longer and thicker, until it was a brown tube about the size of a washing-up liquid bottle. He dropped it, and it fell on the floor, rolled a little way, sprouted arms, legs and a head, and sat up.
“Greetings,” it said.
“Keep your voice down,” Don hissed urgently. “Listen, my sister’s in the next room. If she knew I was using magic, I’d never hear the last of it.”
The hair nodded its curiously vague-featured head. “Understood,” it whispered. “How may I be of service?”
Don looked at it with a certain degree of awe. “It works, then.”
The hair smiled at him; at least a mouth appeared in the curved plane of its face, and its edges twitched upwards. “Of course,” it said.
“It was in a book,” Don said, “when I was a kid, and I always thought, Hey, that’d be so cool.” He frowned. “Anyway, you’re here now. Search the flat.”
“At once,” the hair replied. “Search it for what, exactly?”
“Clues.”
“Consider it done. Clues to what?”
(At which point he thought, Magic’s really just another kind of technology, really. You think it’s the answer, but instead it’s only another lot of bloody stupid questions.) “Clues to what happened to the man who used to live here,” he whispered, as patiently as he could.
“Please define ‘clue.’ ”
Something you haven’t got. “Forget it,” he sighed. “Um. Stand by.”
The hair creature froze, neither stirring nor breathing. Don picked it up and put it on the table, hoping that when Polly came back, she’d assume it was an ornament. It looked just sufficiently naff to pass for one.
“Nothing in there apart from vintage laundry,” Polly said, shutting the bedroom door behind her. “Why don’t men ever wash anything until it actually starts to ferment? Oh hell,” she added, staring at the front door, which was opening.
Don just had time to step in front of the hair creature (he wasn’t quite sure why it was so important; he only knew the thing mustn’t be seen) as a young woman in a dark business suit walked in, caught sight of them both and stopped dead in her tracks.
She didn’t scream, which was nice. Instead she frowned as though they somehow didn’t make sense. Then she put down her briefcase and said, “Who the devil are you?”
“We’re friends of…” Don suddenly remembered he didn’t know his victim’s name. “The man who lives here,” he added. “We, um, let ourselves in.”
“Like hell you are,” the woman said briskly. “Don’t move. I’m calling the police.”
It was her tone of voice more than anything – the scorn, the distaste, rather than fear or panic. At the back of his mind Don thought, I could send her away, just like I did with the guitar player. After all, she’s such a snotty bitch, who’d miss her? And the terrible thing was, he’d actually drawn in the breath and tensed the mental muscle before he realised what he was about to do. He cancelled the operation just in time, but the effort made him choke and grab at his throat, so much so that the woman looked at him sharply and said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he gasped. “Caught my breath the wrong way, that’s all.”
The woman frowned. “Stay there,” she said. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”
She headed for what was presumably the kitchen, at which point Polly hissed, “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Quickly.”
But he shook his head. “Clue,” was all he managed to get out, because he started coughing.
“Don’t be stupid, she’s going to call the police.”
Valid point, but he chose to disregard it. “It’s all right,” he said, one of his all-time most stupid remarks given the context, but before Polly could say anything further, the woman came back with a glass of water.
It helped. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Look, I’ll be honest with you. We lied. We’re not actually friends of…”
“Kevin. My brother,” she added. “And I know you aren’t. I know all Kevin’s friends.”
“We’re not burglars,” Polly said.
“No.” The woman took the empty glass and put it down. “I suppose you aren’t; you’re far too disorganised. So what are you doing here?”
The best lies are made with real truth. “I live in the flat downstairs,” Don said. “This is my sister, by the way. I’m Don and she’s Polly. We came to, um, complain about the noise.”
The woman raised both eyebrows. “But he’s not here,” she said. “Therefore, not making any noise.”
“Polly’s a solicitor,” Don said. “I brought her along to—”
The woman turned and looked at Polly. “You’re a solicitor?”
“Well, yes.”
“So am I,” the woman said. “Rachel Briggs.” She shot out a hand, which Polly warily shook. “What firm?”
Lawyers, Don thought. Here we are burgling her brother’s flat, and she’s networking. Polly, meanwhile, had got her inferiority-complex face on. “Actually,” she said, “I’m more sort of in-house at the moment. I’m a conveyancer with—”
“Snap,” the woman said. “I’m with BRHD, don’t know if you’ve heard of them.”
For a moment it was as though Polly had been turned off at the mains. Movement drained out of her, and Don wondered if she was about to have some sort of fit. “BRHD,” she repeated.
“Blue Remembered—”
“No, you’re not,” Polly said.
It was a plain statement, no attitude, no offence intended. Offence was, however, most definitely taken. “What did you just say?”
“You don’t work for Blue Remembered Hills,” Polly said. “I’m sorry,” she added with just a hint of vitality, enough to make you decide that, on the balance of probabilities, she was most likely still alive. “But you just don’t.”
The woman opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Polly shook her head. “I know,” she said. “I’m with BRHD. I’m sure I’d have noticed you by now if you worked there.”
There had been a time, many years ago, when Don had had a girlfriend who liked long country walks. Fortunately for both parties it hardly lasted any time at all and no permanent damage was done, but there’d been one occasion when they’d been trudging through a huge dismal sort of forest thing, and Don had put his foot down on what looked like perfectly sensible, ordinary ground and it had turned out to be mud, about three feet deep, and his leg had vanished into it up to the knee, so he’d staggered a bit, and then his other leg went in even deeper, and there he was, suddenly, comprehensively and quite gratuitously stuck, with not the faintest idea of what to do next. “Excuse me,” he said. “What did you just—”
They ignored him, of course. “That’s silly,” the woman said eventually. “Listen, my office is on the third floor, two down from the lift. Next door to me—”
“Duncan Sharp,” Polly said quietly, “and next to him, the gents’ toilet. And there’s a green filing cabinet in the corner of the room, and the runner of the middle drawer’s bent, so you have to sort of shunt it to get it to shut. Only it’s not your office, it’s mine.”
The two women were staring at each other, so they didn’t notice Don flinch when something tapped him on the shoulder.
“Not now,” he hissed. “I’m busy.”
“Very sorry,” the hair whispered back. “I just wondered if I could be of any assistance.”
“Shh.”
“Of course.”
“The carpet’s green,” Polly said eventually. “Or it was once. Now it’s a sort of pale toothpaste colour, and it’s all scuffed up round the doorway because the door drags a bit on its
hinges. Also, there’s a damp patch a bit like Wales on the wall just above the window.”
“What were you doing in my office?”
“I work there,” Polly said wretchedly. “Sorry, but it’s true. Isn’t it, Don? You’ve been in there.”
The woman sniffed savagely. “Don’t be bloody stupid,” she said. “That’s my office; I work there. I’ve been there eighteen months. Ask anybody in the building.”
Polly detected a potential straw and grasped at it. “What times do you work? I mean, they’ve never told me there’s a night shift, but—”
“Nine to five-thirty,” the woman snapped back. “Look, I don’t know who either of you are, why you’ve been stalking me or what you think you’re doing in my brother’s flat, but it’s starting to creep me out, and I think it’s time I called the—”
Three seconds of dead silence. Then Polly asked, in a terrified voice, “Don, what did you just do to her?”
“Nothing,” Don replied. “Honestly. She just stopped dead. I’m as surprised as you are.” He leaned forward a little and peered at her. “She’s not breathing,” he said. “That’s bad, isn’t it? Maybe we should—”
Now Polly was like it too. In fact the similarity was so strong, he felt a strange urge to stand them side by side and fill the intervening space with books. He turned round slowly and scowled at the hair-creature, which was smiling respectfully at him.
“What’ve you done?” he demanded.
“Profound apologies,” the hair said, “but I felt it might be helpful to pause linear development in the t axis of the space/time continuum for a short while, to give you an opportunity to gather your thoughts and decide on a plan of action. I hope that wasn’t too presumptuous of me.”
Don felt like he was trying to do quadratic equations in his head after six pints of Guinness. “What was that about the space/time continuum?”
The hair did its funny little cartoon smile. “I stopped time,” it said. “Just for a minute or two.”
“You did that?”