The Woman Who Died a Lot

  In this way those in the room told of their differing destinies, and we offered as many encouraging noises as we could, although the practical help this afforded was questionable. The last person to speak was Gavin Watkins.

  “I might be unique in this room,” he said in a loud, clear voice, “in that according to my summary, I would not have been a distinguished member of the ChronoGuard. After an early career helping to map the twenty-fifth century, I see that my later career seems to consist mostly of disciplinary hearings and suspensions. Bored and in need of cash due to an expensive Precambrian tourism habit, I accept a hefty bribe in 2028 to undertake an illegal eradication.”

  “What sort of bribe?” said someone.

  “A Titian—The Battle of Cadore.”

  “You hate Titian,” said someone else. “You’d have had nowhere to hang it.”

  “I change my mind and grow to love him, apparently,” said Gavin, “and I guess I must have had somewhere to hang it . . . moron.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Jimmy-G soothingly, “this won’t happen, and what’s more, it won’t happen twenty-four years from now. Go on, Gavin.”

  “Right. Well, I was caught—we all were, of course—and spent two years in an enloopment facility before being released due to a technicality. Not a great career, but better than what I get now. Friday Next will murder me in three days’ time!”

  There was a sharp intake of breath as he said it, and he glared at Friday.

  “Why are you going to kill me, Friday? Because I insulted your mum and sister?”

  Friday took a deep breath and stood up to face Gavin.

  “I don’t know. I have no real motive. But you can stop me. Take a random Tube ride. You can be anywhere on the planet in under six hours. If I can’t find you, it won’t happen.”

  “As soon as my destiny papers arrived, my parents put me on the Deep Drop to Sydney,” said Gavin. “I checked in under a false name to a crappy motel near Dame Edna International. I even hid in the cupboard. My summarization papers hadn’t changed—you were still due to kill me. So I came home. If I was going to be murdered, I’d rather it happened near family and friends.”

  “Friends?” said Shazza.

  “Family then. Body repatriations are pricey these days, and they always seem to go astray.”

  “I’m not going to kill you,” said Friday.

  “You will,” said Gavin, “and what’s more I know for a fact you won’t get away with it.”

  “It’s Tuesday night,” returned Friday, “and I’ve got sixty-six hours to figure out a way to bend the eventline.”

  “Maybe the eventline did bend,” said Shazza thoughtfully. “It’s possible that once you were in the hotel cupboard, your Letter of Destiny changed to say you survived. You probably then wondered why you had flown all that way to hide in a cupboard, but as soon as you returned, so did your death.”

  Everyone fell silent at this. Shazza was right. It was entirely possible that the eventline was vibrating like a rubber band and that what was written on the Letters of Destiny right now was not what had been on them even ten seconds ago.

  “Okay, then,” said Friday, “I need to find a way of permanently changing our destinies. Right now things don’t look very good.”

  There was silence after this, and Jimmy-G thought it a good time to call the meeting to an end and to meet again the same place next week, unless the smiting went ahead, in which case he’d let everyone know. The small party dispersed without much talk; the proceedings had been pretty joyless. Gavin glared at us both as he filed out, and as Jimmy-G walked up to speak to us, I noted Mr. Chowdry pulling his cell phone out of his pocket as he turned to leave.

  “That was seriously strange,” said Friday as we walked back to the car. Shazza was with us, as she and Friday were going to have a drink together to see if any of their future spark could be preignited, and Jimmy-G was with us because his car was parked next to ours.

  “Time-travel stuff generally is.”

  “No,” said Friday, “I mean murderously seriously strange.”

  “In what way?”

  “Didn’t you notice?” he asked, and when I said I didn’t, he counted out the people at the group on his fingers. “Only three of us die seemingly natural deaths. I’m murdered in 2041, as are Shazza and Bendix, Miranda, Joddy and Sarah. The other six die in ‘unexplained’ deaths, all of them in 2040. Can you see a pattern?”

  “None of us live beyond February 2041,” said Shazza in a quiet voice.

  “Right,” said Friday. “I’m the last to die—three days before HR-6984 is scheduled to strike the earth. No one lives long enough to be killed by the meteorite that’s hurtling our way.”

  “Does that mean the HR-6984 will definitely happen?” asked Shazza.

  “It means we can’t prove it won’t,” said Friday, “since none of us live beyond it.”

  “Why would anyone want to murder someone just before everyone is about to die anyway?” asked Jimmy-G. “It raises vindictiveness to a whole new level.”

  They all looked at one another in a confused and dejected manner. It must be like having an itch and not being able to scratch it. Nevertheless, I thought I should be a mother rather than a colleague, so I said the first thing that came into my head. “Fish and chips, anyone?”

  21.

  Wednesday: Library

  The Hotel Bellvue was squeezed disagreeably between the M4, the Swindon tannery and the city’s main electrical substation, hence the name it was popularly known by: the Substation. It was the last place one would book a room, even if hygiene weren’t an issue, and it seemed to exist only to give other hotels a benchmark for failure. Indeed, the Substation had managed to wrestle Clip-Joint magazine’s coveted Five-Bedbug rating from its only competitor in the southeast: the equally grimy Bastardos, in Reading.

  Josh Candle, Ten Places Not to Visit in Wessex

  “Good morning,” said Duffy as I walked into the office. “Did the car find you okay?”

  “Eventually.”

  “If you want a different pickup address, we’d appreciate it if you would give us more notice. It helps the Special Library Services to ensure that your route is safe.”

  “I understand,” I said, “and I’m sorry. I was called to the Substation Hotel this morning. It was . . . um . . . family business.”

  I wasn’t going to tell him we’d discovered Krantz—or what remained of him.

  “Mrs. Duffy and I spent our honeymoon there. The hum and crackle of the electrical substation was . . . restful.”

  “It sounds very romantic.”

  “When we want to rekindle that flame,” continued Duffy, “we leave an orbital sander running in the basement. Hums just like a five-hundred-KVA transformer. If we want to hear the crackle of morning dew on the insulators, we have Gizmo play with a cellophane wrapper.”

  “I’m so hoping Gizmo is a dog.”

  “A pug.”

  “Duffy?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Do people usually attack the chief librarian as he or she is driven in?”

  I was alluding to an incident when someone fired two shots at our vehicle as we pulled off the Magic Roundabout. The vehicle was bulletproofed, but even so.

  “Usually, ma’am. The 720 percent increase in library loans caused by the government’s New Book Duty has caused a three-day delay on library-book availability. When the citizens can’t get the books they want, they often vent their fury at the person in charge.”

  This was, sadly, all too true—and not just about simple loans. Only a month previously, an all-new 007 book was written by that author with a beard whose name I can never remember. James Bond Fundamentalists argued that this was “a grave and heinous affront to the oeuvre” and warned that if the library stocked it, they would sit outside in silent protest, stroking white cats and thinking fiendish thoughts. And if that had no effect, they would riot. They did, and two people, six cats and three Diana Rigg impersonators lost thei
r lives.

  “Do you want to see the Goliath representative first, or shall I make him wait for an hour to show your utter contempt for him and his company?”

  This would be Lupton Cornball, whom I had met yesterday at the Finis.

  “I’ll see him first.”

  The phone rang. I reached out, but Duffy beat me to it. “Hello?” he said. “Office of the chief librarian.” He listened for a moment than looked at me. “I’ll ask.”

  He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Detective Smalls wants to talk to you. She’s on the way up.”

  “Smalls? Okay, her first, then Goliath. Oh, and I’d like to talk to Councilor Bunty Fairweather. She’s in charge of fiscal planning and smite-avoidance policy. They’ve an alternative Anti-Smite plan cooking, and I want to find out what it is.”

  “She’s your two-o’clock. Shall I push her up to your eleven-thirty?”

  “Is that straight after Goliath?” I asked, glancing at the clock. “No, Mrs. Jolly Hilly, the insane Enid Blyton fundamentalist is after Goliath. Bunty is after them.”

  “Do I have to talk to insane people?”

  “You’re a librarian now. I’m afraid it’s mandatory.”

  “Hmm. Okay, Smalls first, then Goliath, then Hilly, then Bunty.”

  Duffy nodded, made a note on his clipboard and opened the door to admit Phoebe. I smiled agreeably. I didn’t much care for her, but we needed to get along.

  “Detective Smalls,” I said, rising to welcome her.

  “Chief Librarian Next,” she replied, shaking my hand. I gestured her to the sofas.

  “That’s a bit of a mouthful,” I said. “Better call me Thursday.”

  “Then you must call me Phoebe. You’ve recovered well from the attack at the Lobsterhood yesterday.”

  “I got lucky. One of the hinges from the trapdoor embedded itself into an Aeschylus only inches above my head. Coffee?”

  “Thank you.”

  Duffy took the cue and moved silently to the coffee machine while Phoebe looked around her.

  “This is very plush.”

  “Libraries have been monstrously overfunded these past thirteen years,” I said. “The librarians had to take industrial action when the city council threatened to have gold taps put in the washrooms. Mind you, that will all change. I think you’re getting some of our funding.”

  “Fifty million that I know of,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow. Fifty million was a third of our budget. “But we have to fund the Special Library Services out of that,” she added.

  This made it a lot easier—Wexler’s team was expensive.

  “Tell me,” she continued, “do you think Colonel Wexler is mad?”

  “Yes, but in a good way. Got anyone on your staff yet?”

  “A few trigger-happy nutters who were too mentally unstable even for SO-5. I told them to sod off—I want to keep gratuitous violence inside books, where it belongs.”

  “Very wise. Your watch is slow.”

  She looked at me oddly and pulled up her sleeve. The watch was a Reverso—the face was hidden. She flipped it over. “You’re right. How did you know?”

  “I can hear it tick. And it’s ticking slowly. Not important. Anything on the ‘stolen thirteenth-century codex’ question?”

  She pulled out a small pocketbook and turned to a page marked with a rubber band. “Possibly. Out of the eighty-three reported bibliothefts over the past month, only two had the same modus operandi. One in Bath and another in Lancaster. Exactly the same. Torn-out pages, then destroyed, but with the rest of the book left untouched.”

  “Both by St. Zvlkx?”

  “Bingo. The first a gazetteer of taverns in the Oxford area that give credit and the second a list of credible excuses to give your bishop if he thinks you’re misappropriating church funds— neither of them valuable nor particularly rare.”

  “That links the books,” I said, wondering if Jack Schitt had been there on each occasion. “What are your thoughts?”

  “I did some research into St. Zvlkx, and I was struck by a recurring theme in his life.”

  “You mean his stealing, debauchery, embezzlement, drunkenness and the total absence of pastoral care or moral rectitude?”

  “I was thinking more of his meanness. St. Zvlkx was notoriously tight-fisted. It was said that Augustus IV, the ‘Bouncing Bishop’ of Salisbury, joked that his idea of eternity would be dinner with St. Zvlkx and Kevin of Kent, waiting for one of them to pick up the tab.”

  “So?”

  “Zvlkx would never have used fresh vellum in his books, because it would cut into his drinking funds. He probably used secondhand books, dismantled them, scraped the vellum clean and then reused them. It’s only a guess, but I think the thief was looking for palimpsests.”

  I could see what she was getting at. A palimpsest was the ghostly image of the original writing that was just still visible on the reused sheet of vellum. If the writing was from a long-lost book, it would be of inestimable value.

  “Good thought,” I murmured.

  “There’s more.”

  She reached into her bag and brought out a thirteenth-century book wrapped in acid-free paper. She placed it on the coffee table and donned a pair of latex gloves to unwrap it. “This is Lord Volescamper’s copy of St. Zvlkx’s Book of Revealments. It wasn’t one of the books that was vandalized by our mystery book damagers. I had a look under UV light, and I can just see the original text beneath St. Zvlkx’s prophecies. I’m thinking that all St. Zvlkx’s original works were written on recycled vellum.”

  “Any idea of the source book?”

  She smiled. “Let’s see how good you are, Chief Librarian.” She opened the book at a marked page and pushed it across.

  I looked closely. There was some text written sideways beneath St. Zvlkx’s Second Revealment, the one predicting the Spanish Armada, or, as he called it the “Sail of the Century.”

  “It looks like a copy of the Venerable Keith’s Principia Accounticia.” I murmured, and Phoebe was suitably impressed. The Venerable Keith had been a contemporary of St. Zvlkx’s and also the accountant for the bishop of Swindon between 1276 and 1294. The Evadum, as it was known, explained the new science of utilizing loss-making companies to offset tax liability against profit. Monks couldn’t hand-copy them fast enough.

  “There were lots of copies,” I said, “which was probably why St. Zvlkx could buy them up cheap to scrape clean and rebind in order to peddle his own rubbish.”

  “I agree,” said Phoebe, producing another book, this time Zvlkx’s treatise on herbal remedies for “unwonted flaccidity,” A Short Historie of Thyme.

  I stared at the two books. It still didn’t tell us why Jack Schitt and Goliath were destroying parts of worthless thirteen century books, even if they did have palimpsests of almost equally banal titles beneath them. Still, I was seeing the Goliath rep next, so it was possible I could rattle that tree a bit and see what fell out.

  “I know,” said Phoebe, sensing my confusion. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  I picked up the phone, punched a button and asked to be put through to Finisterre.

  “You’re right, it makes no sense at all,” I said to Phoebe. “But at least we know what they’re after. . . . James? Thursday. I’ve got Detective Smalls here, and she’s found a link between the vandalizations. . . . St. Zvlkx books. There have been three including the one at the Lobsterhood. Place the library’s copies under armed guard.”

  I put the phone down, and Smalls got up.

  “I hope I’ve been candid,” she said.

  “Very.”

  “In that case perhaps you can tell me who was in the scriptorium yesterday? I think you’re not telling me everything you know.”

  So I did, which wasn’t much, but Jack Schitt’s presence clearly implicated Goliath, which she didn’t like the sound of. Few people did. Tangling with the Goliath Corporation generally left you in one of two places: inside a wooden box with a grieving
family outside or inside a wooden box under six feet of soil with family wondering where you were. The former was if they didn’t hold a grudge. I’d probably be the latter.

  “Ready for the Goliath rep?” asked Duffy as soon as Phoebe had left.

  My cell phone rang. It was Millon.

  “Give me two minutes,” I said to Duffy. “Millon?”

  “I’m outside the hotel,” he said, “and you were right. The Goliath cleanup squad has just left. Took everything in the back of a van.”

  Millon had tracked Krantz down to the seedy Substation Hotel at three that morning. He’d found Krantz facedown on the floor of Room 27, stone dead and looking pretty dreadful, even for a corpse at the Substation. A quick examination confirmed what Landen had thought—the corpse wasn’t Krantz but his Day Player. Next to him was an empty Tupperware sarcophagus and no sign of any others. He had come here, activated a new Day Player, waited until he was transferred, then left. The room left few clues. We still had no idea what he was doing. But we did know that Krantz had another couple days of life left in him and would be stronger, smarter and fitter. He would be harder to find, too, and, when found, harder to tackle. Still, at least we didn’t have to worry about reporting any of this to the authorities. The Goliath cleaners would have removed all trace of Krantz and, since they were experts, left intact the crusty mat of human hair, spilled beer and dried body fluids that the Substation impudently referred to as “carpet.”

  I thanked Millon, told him to keep looking for the New Krantz and rang off.

  I turned back to Duffy. “Listen, this may sound seriously weird, but I might turn up and not be myself one day, and if that happens, I need you to call my husband on this number and tell him that his wife isn’t who she thinks she is.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s not seriously weird, it’s obscenely weird. How can you not be you, and how am I supposed to know anyway?”

  “Easily. See this tattoo? It’s to remind ourselves that Jenny is a mindworm. Not mine, of course, but my husband’s. I’ll explain about Aornis one day, and if you’re wondering why I have the tattoo on my hand and not Landen’s, I meant to find out this morning but forgot to drop in to Image Ink—again.”