The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [474]
“Hello, Dad.”
“You were correct,” he said, comparing the woman’s rigid features with those on a series of photographs, “it’s an assassin, all right.”
“Never mind that for the moment!” I cried happily. “How are you? I haven’t seen you for years!”
He turned and stared at me. “My dear girl, we spoke only a few hours ago!”
“No we didn’t.”
“We did, actually.”
“We did not.”
He stopped, stared at me for a moment and then looked at his watch, shook it and listened to it, then shook it again.
“Here,” I said, handing him the chronograph I was wearing, “take mine.”
“Very nice—thank you. Ah! I stand corrected. Three hours from now. It’s an easy mistake to make. Did you have any thoughts about that matter we discussed?”
“No, Dad,” I said in an exasperated tone. “It hasn’t happened yet, remember?”
“You’re always so linear,” he muttered, returning to his job comparing the pictures to the assassin. “I think you ought to try and expand your horizons a bit—Bingo!”
He had found a picture that matched my assassin and read the label on the back.
“Expensive hit woman working in the Wiltshire-Oxford area. Looks petite and bijou but as deadly as the best of them. She trades under the name ‘The Windowmaker.’ ” He paused. “Should be Widowmaker, shouldn’t it?”
“But I heard that the Windowmaker was lethal,” I pointed out. “A contract with her and you’re deader than corduroy.”
“I heard that, too,” replied my father thoughtfully. “Sixty-seven victims—sixty-eight if she was the one that did Samuel Pring. She must have meant to miss. It’s the only explanation. In any event, her real name is Cindy Stoker.”
This was unexpected. Cindy was married to Spike Stoker, an operative over at SO-17 whom I had worked with a couple of times. I had even given him advice on how best to tell Cindy that he hunted down werewolves for a living—not the choicest profession for a potential husband.
“Cindy is my assassin? Cindy is the Windowmaker?”
“You know her?”
“Of her. Wife of a good friend.”
“Well, don’t get too chummy. She tries and fails to kill you three times. The second time with a bomb under your car on Monday, then next Friday at eleven in the morning—but she fails and you, ultimately, choose for her to die. I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but like we discussed, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“What bigger fish to fry?”
“Sweetpea,” he said, giving me his stern “Father knows best” voice, “I’m really not going to go through it all again. Now I have to get back to work—there’s a timephoon brewing in the Dark Ages, and if we don’t sort it out, we’ll be picking anachronisms out of the time line for a century.”
“Wait—you’re working at the ChronoGuard?”
“I’ve told you all about this already! Do try and keep up—you’re going to need all your wits about you over the next week. Now, get back to the house, and I’ll start the world up again.”
He wasn’t in a very chatty mood, but since I would be seeing him later and would find out then what we had just discussed, there didn’t seem a lot of point to talking anyway, so I bade him good-bye, and as I walked up the garden path, time returned to normal with a snap. The pigeon flew on, the traffic continued to move, and everything carried on as usual. Time had stopped so completely that everything my father and I had talked about occupied no time at all. Still, at least this meant I wouldn’t have to be constantly looking over my shoulder if I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn’t looking forward to her death. Spike would be severely pissed off.