The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [153]
I passed him the manuscript to have a look at, and he chuckled to himself. But Hathaway34 was having none of it.
“And what of that?” returned Hathaway34 angrily. “In Julius Caesar there are plenty of clocks striking the hour, yet they weren’t invented until much later. I think Shakespeare introduced the Range Rover in much the same way; a literary anachronism, that’s all!”
I smiled agreeably and backed towards the door.
“We’d like you to come in and file a report. Let you look at some mug shots; see if we can find out who pulled this.”
“Nonsense!” said the woman loftily. “I will seek a second opinion, and if necessary, a third and a fourth—or as many as it takes. Good day, officers!”
And she opened the door, shooed us out and slammed it behind us.
“One born every minute,” muttered Bowden as we walked to the car.
“I’d say. Well—that’s interesting.”
“What?”
“Don’t look now, but up the road there is a black Pontiac. It was parked outside the SpecOps building when we left.”
Bowden had a quick glance in their direction as we got into the car.
“What do you think?” I asked when we were inside.
“Goliath?”
“Could be. They’re probably still pissed off about losing Jack Schitt into ‘The Raven.’ ”
“I refuse to lose any sleep over him,” replied Bowden, pulling into the main road.
“Me too.”
I looked in the vanity mirror at the black automobile four vehicles behind.
“Still with us?” asked Bowden.
“Yup. Let’s find out what they want. Take a left here, then left again and drop me off. Carry on for a hundred yards and then pull up.”
Bowden turned off the main road and into another narrow residential road, dropped me off as instructed, sped on past the next corner and stopped, blocking the street. I ducked behind a parked car, and sure enough, the large black Pontiac swept past me. It drove round the next corner and stopped abruptly when it saw Bowden and started to reverse. I tapped on the smoked glass window and waved my badge. The driver stopped and wound down the window.
“Thursday Next, SO-27. Why are you following us?” I demanded.
The driver and passenger were both dressed in dark suits and were clean-shaven. Only Goliath looked like this. Goliath— or SpecOps. The driver looked blankly at me for a moment and then launched into a well-practiced excuse.
“We seem to have taken a wrong turning, miss. Can you tell us the way to Pete and Dave’s Dodo Emporium?”
I was unimpressed by their drab cover story, but I smiled anyway. They were SpecOps as much as I was.
“Why don’t you just tell me who you are? We’ll all get along a lot better, believe me.”
The two men looked at one another, sighed resignedly and then held up their badges for me to see. They were SO-5, the same search & containment that hunted down Hades.
“SO-5?” I queried. “Tamworth’s old outfit?”
“I’m Phodder,” said the driver. “My associate here is Kannon. SpecOps-5 has been reassigned.”
“Reassigned? Does that mean Acheron Hades is officially dead?”
“No SO-5 case is ever completely closed. Acheron was only the third most evil criminal mind on the planet, Miss Next.”
“Then who—or what—are you after this time?”
It seemed that they preferred asking questions to answering them.
“Your name came up in preliminary inquiries. Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?”
“What do you mean, odd?”
“Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.”
I thought for a moment.
“No.”
“Well,” announced Phodder with an air of finality, “if it does, would you call me at this number?”
I took the card, bade them goodbye and returned to Bowden.
We were soon heading north on the Cirencester road, the Pontiac nowhere in sight. I explained who they were to Bowden, who raised his eyebrows and said:
“Sounds ominous. Someone worse than Hades? That’ll take some doing.”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it? Where are we heading now?”
“Vole Towers.”
“Really?” I replied in some surprise. “Why would someone as eminent and respectable as Lord Volescamper get embroiled in a Cardenio scam?