The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [165]
My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored. “It would be much more remarkable,” he would say, “if there weren’t any coincidences.”
I stepped into the Skyrail car and pulled the emergency lever. The neanderthal operator looked at me curiously as I jammed a foot in the open door of his driver’s cubicle. I hauled him out and thumped him on the jaw before handcuffing him. A few days in the cooler and he would be back to Mrs. Kaylieu. The group of women in the Skyrail sat silent and shocked as I searched him and found—nothing. I looked in the cab and his sandwich box but the carved-soap gun wasn’t there either.
The well-heeled woman who had earlier been so keen to jab the driver with her umbrella was now full of self-righteous indignation:
“Disgraceful! Attacking a poor defenseless neanderthal in this manner! I shall speak to my husband about this!”
One of the other women had called SpecOps-21 and a third had given the neanderthal a handkerchief to dab his bleeding mouth. I uncuffed Kaylieu and apologized, then sat down and put my head in my hands, wondering what had gone wrong. All the women were called Irma Cohen, but none of them would ever know it; Dad said this sort of thing happens all the time.
“You did what?” asked Victor, a few hours later at the Litera Tec office.
“I punched a neanderthal.”
“Why?”
“I thought he had a gun on him.”
“A neanderthal? With a gun? Don’t be ridiculous!”
I was in Victor’s office with the door closed—a rarity for him. I had been arrested, charged, processed—and delivered under guard to Victor, who vouched for me before I was released. I would have been indignant had I not been so confused. And I was sorry for Kaylieu, too—I had knocked out one of his teeth.
“If the gun had been there it would have been carved from soap,” I continued. “He wanted SO-14 to kill him. But that’s not the half of it. The intended victim was me. If I had journeyed on the Skyrail it would have been Thursday in the body bag, not Kaylieu. I was set up, Victor. Someone manipulated events to try and bump me off with a stray SpecOps bullet—maybe that was their idea of a joke. If it hadn’t been for Dad taking me out I’d be playing a harp by now.”
Victor had been staring out of the window, his back to me.
“And there were the crossword clues—!”
Victor turned and walked back to his desk, picked up the paper and read the answers outlined in green.
“Meddlesome, Thursday, Goodbye.”
He shrugged.
“Coincidence. I could make any sentence I wanted from any other clues just as easily. Look here.”
He scanned the answers for a moment.
“Planet, Destroyed, Soonest. What does that mean? The world’s about to end?”
“Well—”
He dumped my arrest report in his out tray and sat down.
“Thursday,” he said quietly, staring at me soberly, “I’ve been in law enforcement for most of my life and I will tell you right now there is no such offense as ‘attempted murder by coincidence in an alternative future by person or persons unknown.’ ”
I sighed and rubbed my face with my hands. He was right, of course.
“O-kay,” he sighed. “Take my advice, Thursday. Tell them you thought the neanderthal was a felon, that he reminded you of the bogeyman—anything. Mention any unauthorized ChronoGuard shenanigans and Flanker will have your badge as a paperweight. I’ll write a good report to SO-1 about your work and conduct so far. With a bit of luck and some serious lying on your behalf, maybe you can get away with a reprimand. For goodness sake, didn’t you learn anything from that bad time junket on the M1?”
He got up and rubbed his legs. His body was failing him. The hip he’d had replaced four years ago needed to be replaced. Bowden joined us from where he had been running the copied pages of Cardenio