One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [22]
It’s true that I may have looked a bit New Agey, but I didn’t really need this. Bolstered by my earlier claim to be the real Thursday, I decided to try the same here.
“The name’s Thursday Next,” I said, waving my shield. The reaction was electric. He choked on his afternoon tea and crumpet and, in his hurry to get to his feet, nearly woke a large and very hairy Sasquatch who dozed in a wicker chair a little way down the veranda.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed the genre rep. “Please excuse me. The name’s Bilderberg. Roswell Bilderberg. My office is your office. Hey!” He kicked the foot of the Sasquatch, who opened one eye and stared at him indifferently. “Thursday Next,” hissed Roswell, nodding in my direction.
The Sasquatch opened his eyes wide and jumped to his feet. “I was nowhere near the Orient Express that evening,” he said hurriedly, “and even if I was, I had nothing against Mr. Cassetti—isn’t that right, Roswell?”
“Don’t drag me into your web of deceit,” replied Roswell out of the side of his mouth, still smiling at me. “Now, how can we help you, Miss Next? Pleasure or business?”
“Official business,” I said as the Sasquatch nonchalantly picked up a set of snowshoes and sneaked guiltily away.
“What sort of official business?” asked Roswell suspiciously. “We’ve heard that the Council of Genres was planning on moving us across to Juvenilia as part of a secret cross-BookWorld plan to marginalize those genres that don’t toe the official line. And if we didn’t comply, we would all be murdered in our sleep by government assassins who can drip poison into your ear down a thread—if such a thing is possible, or even likely.”
As far as I knew, no such plans were afoot. But you didn’t live in Conspiracy for long without imagining all sorts of nonsense. Not that Conspiracy always got it wrong. On the few occasions they were correct, a rapid transfer to Nonfiction was in order—which threw those who were left behind into something of a dilemma. Being in Fiction meant a wider readership, something that Nonfiction could never boast. Besides, a conspiracy theory that turned out to be real wasn’t a theory anymore, and the loss of wild uncorroborated speculation could be something of a downer.
“I’m working with JAID—the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department.”
“Ah!” he replied, suddenly realizing what I was here for. “The Lola incident. I believe that Commander Herring is already up there. Can I stress at this time that we will afford Jurisfiction’s representatives all possible help and assistance?”
It was all he could say, really. No one wanted to fall afoul of Jurisfiction or the Council of Genres. This was Fiction. There were skeletons in everyone’s closet.
“It came to earth nine hours ago,” he said as we walked past two faked moon landings, three UFO abductions and a grassy knoll. “It bounced on a pamphlet regarding the notion that Diatrymas are being bred by the Goliath Corporation to keep people out of the New Forest, then landed on a book outlining the somewhat dubious circumstances surrounding the death of Lola Vavoom.”
With Sprockett following at a discreet distance, we took a shortcut through a field of crop circles, passed a laboratory covertly designing infectious diseases for population control, moved aside as a white Fiat Uno drove after a black Mercedes, then entered the subgenre of Lola Vavoom Suspicious Death. Roswell pushed open the swinging doors of a concrete multistory car park that opened directly onto the tenth floor, and standing next to a large lump of tattered wreckage the size of a truck were two men. I didn’t recognize the more disheveled of the two, but the older, wiser and clearly the boss was someone I did recognize: Regional Commander Herring of the BookWorld Policing Agency.
He was very much a hands-on type of administrator. He had no staff, carried all his notes in his head and was one of the few people who still jumped from book to book rather than taking a taxi or public transport. He was a BGH-87 character type. Male,