One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [89]
“I have no idea.”
“You’ll tell us eventually. A few hours of Green Fairy will loosen your tongue.”
“Goliath wouldn’t last twenty minutes inside fiction,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced. If this “Jack Schitt” was even half as devious as the one written about, we were in big trouble. Thursday had spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that the Goliath Corporation didn’t get into fiction, either to dump toxic waste, use the people within it as unpaid labor or even just to find another market to dominate and exploit.
I said nothing, which probably was all he wanted to know. It was rotten luck that he’d been the one to figure me out. The real Thursday had once imprisoned the so-called Jack Schitt within Poe’s “The Raven,” so here was a man with some experience of being in the BookWorld.
“What’s your name, then?” I asked. “If not Jack Schitt?”
“It was a ridiculous name, not to mention insulting,” he snorted. “I’m Dorset. Adrian Dorset.”
25.
An Intervention
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Adrian Dorset?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure at all.”
“What’s your name, then?”
“You’re not as smart as her, are you? Of course it’s Dorset. I think I know my own name.”
“The Adrian Dorset who wrote The Murders on the Hareng Rouge?”
He looked surprised for a moment. “The worthless scribblings of a man who was fooling himself that he could write. It was following the death of Anne, but I don’t expect you’d know anything about that, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Anne was my wife,” he said. “Head of the Book Project. She was on board the Austen Rover’s inaugural journey. Thursday told me what had happened to her and what she’d done before she died. I don’t blame Thursday. Not anymore. Revenge is for losers, cash is the winning currency. I burned the book a month ago. I didn’t need it anymore. I’m over her.”
He looked down at his feet, and I suddenly felt sorry for him.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
He said very little for the rest of the journey, and I watched out the window as the English countryside zipped beneath us at breathtaking speed; we had nothing as fast as this in the BookWorld—not even in Sci-Fi, where they were a lot more conservative than they made out. As we approached Liverpool and the Tarbuck International Travelport, the traffic became more intense as other bullet gondolas joined the induction rail and clumped around for a while before moving off in separate directions. At all times the small, bullet-shaped craft, each no bigger than a bus, kept well spaced from one another, moving apart and together as congestion dictated.
The intercom buzzed, and Dorset picked it up, looked at me, then said, “Security override seventeen,” before listening for a while and then saying, “Bastards. Very well.”
“Problems?”
“Nothing to worry your sweet fictional head about.”
We glided to a halt on Platform 24 at Tarbuck International. The doors hissed open, but we didn’t move, and a few minutes later a small, meek-looking man arrived. He was wearing a dark suit and a bowler hat, and he was carrying a small briefcase. When he spoke, his voice was thin and reedy, and his nose was red from a recent cold.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Meakle,” said my captor, without getting up.
“Good afternoon,” said