The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [298]
1982, volume CLXI
I DISCUSSED THE RUDIMENTS of breakfast with ibb and obb the following morning. I told them that cereal traditionally came before the bacon and eggs, but that toast and coffee had no fixed place within the meal; they had problems with the fact that marmalade was almost exclusively the preserve of breakfast, and I was just trying to explain the technical possibilities of dippy egg fingers when a copy of The Toad dropped on the mat. The only news story was about some sort of drug-related gang warfare in Reading. It was part of the plot in Caversham Heights and reminded me that sooner or later—and quite possibly sooner—I would be expected to take on the mantle of Mary as part of the Character Exchange Program. I had another careful read of the précis, which gave me a good idea of the plot chapter by chapter, but no precise dialogue or indication as to what I should be doing, or when. I didn’t have to wonder very long as a knock at the door revealed an untidy man wearing a hat named Wyatt.
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly, apologizing for the misrelated grammatical construction almost immediately, “Wyatt is my name, not the hat’s.”
“I kind of figured that,” I replied.
Wooden and worn with use, he was holding a clipboard.
“Oh, bother!” he said in the manner of someone who had just referred to George Eliot as “he” in a room full of English professors. “I’ve done it again!”
“Really, I don’t mind,” I repeated. “What can I do for you?”
“You’re very kind. As a Character Exchange Program member, I would like to ask you to get yourself into Reading.” He stopped and his shoulders sagged. “No, I’m not the Character Exchange Program member—you are. And you need to get into Reading.”
“Sure. Do you have an address for me?”
Dog-eared and grubby, he handed me a note from his clipboard.
“Don’t worry,” I said before he could apologize again, “I understand.”
His condition was almost certainly permanent, and since I didn’t seem to care that much, he regained some confidence.
“Despite the ten-year demolition order hanging over us,” he continued, “you should try and give it your best. The last Character Exchanger didn’t take it seriously at all. Had to send him dusty and covered in asphalt on the road out of here.”
He raised an eyebrow quizzically.
“I won’t let you down,” I assured him.
He thanked me, and small, brown and furry, the man with the hat named Wyatt raised it and vanished.
I took Mary’s car and drove into Reading across the M4, which seemed as busy as it was back home; I used the same road myself when traveling between Swindon and London. Only when I was approaching the junction at the top of Burghfield road did I realize there were, at most, only a half dozen or so different vehicles on the roads. The vehicle that first drew my attention to this strange phenomenon was a large, white truck with Dr. Spongg Footcare Products painted on the side. I saw three in under a minute, all with an identical driver dressed in a blue boilersuit and flat cap. The next most obvious vehicle was a red VW Beetle driven by a young lady, then a battered blue Morris Marina with an elderly man at the wheel. By the time I had drawn up outside the scene of Caversham Heights’ first murder, I had counted forty-three white trucks, twenty-two red Beetles and sixteen identically battered Morris Marinas, not to mention several green Ford Escorts and a brace of white Chevrolets. It was obviously a limitation within the text and nothing more, so I hurriedly parked, read Mary’s notes again to make sure I knew what I had to do, took a deep breath and walked across to the area that had been taped off. A few uniformed police officers were milling around. I showed my pass and ducked under the Police: Do Not Cross tape.
The yard was shaped as an oblong, fifteen feet wide and about twenty feet long, surrounded by a high redbrick wall with crumbling mortar. A large, white SOCO tent was over the scene, and a forensic pathologist, dictating notes into a tape recorder, was kneeling next to a well-described corpse.
“Hullo!” said a jovial voice