The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [597]
42.
Explanations
State Funeral Attracts World’s Leaders
Millions of heartbroken citizens of England and the most important world leaders arrived in Wigan yesterday to pay tribute to President George Formby, who died two weeks ago. The funeral cortege was driven on a circuitous route of the Midlands, the streets lined with mourners, eager to bid a final good-bye to England’s President of the past thirty-nine years. At the memorial service in Wigan Cathedral, the new Chancellor, Mr. Redmond van de Poste, spoke warmly of the great man’s contribution to world peace. After the Lancashire Male Voice Choir sang “With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock,” accompanied by two hundred ukuleles, the Chancellor invited the Queen of Denmark to sing with him a duet of “Your Way Is My Way,” something that “might well serve to patch the rift between our respective nations.”
Article in The Toad, August 4, 1988
It was touch and go for a moment,” said Landen, who was sitting by my hospital bed holding my hand. “There was a moment when we really didn’t think you’d make it.”
I gave a wan smile. I had regained consciousness only the day before, and every movement felt like daggers in my head. I looked around. Joffy and Miles and Hamlet were there, too. “Hi, guys.”
They smiled and welcomed me back.
“How long?” I asked in a whisper.
“Two weeks,” said Landen. “We really thought . . . thought—”
I gently squeezed his hand and looked around.
Land divined my thoughts perfectly. “He’s with his grand-mother.”
I raised a hand to touch the side of my head but could feel only a heavy bandage. Landen took my hand and returned it to the sheet.
“What . . . ?”
“You were astonishingly lucky,” he said in a soothing tone. “The doctors say you’ll make a full recovery. The caliber was quite small, and it entered your skull obliquely; by the time it had gone through, most of the energy was gone.” He tapped the side of his head. “It lodged between your brain and the inside of the skull. Gave us quite a fright, though.”
“Cindy died, didn’t she?”
Joffy answered. “Looked to be improving, but then septicemia set in.”
“They really loved one another, you know, despite their differences.”
“She was a hit woman, Thursday, a trained assassin. I don’t think she regarded death as anything more than an occupational hazard.”
I nodded. He was right.
Landen leaned forwards and kissed my nose.
“Who shot me, Land?”
“Does the name ‘Norman Johnson’ mean anything to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “The Minotaur. You were right. He’d been trying to slapstick me to death all week—steamroller, banana skin, piano—I was a fool not to see it. Mind you, a gun’s hardly slapstick, is it?”
Landen smiled.
“It had a large BANG sign that came out of the barrel, as well as the bullet. The police are still trying to make sense of it.”
I sighed. The Minotaur was long gone but I’d still have to be careful. I turned to Landen. There was still something I needed to know.
“Did we win?”
“Of course. You pegged a foot closer than O’Fathens. Your shot has been voted Sporting Moment of the Century—in Swindon, at any rate.”
“So we aren’t at war with Wales?”
Landen shook his head and smiled. “Kaine’s finished, my darling—and Goliath has abandoned all attempts to become a religion. St. Zvlkx does indeed work in mysterious ways.”
“Are you going to tell me?” I said with a wan smile. “Or do I have to beat it out of you with a stick?”
Joffy unfolded the picture of St. Zvlkx and Cindy’s fatal pianoing on Commercial Road, the one from the Swindon Evening Globe that Gran had given me.
“We found this in your back pocket,” said Miles,
“And it got us to thinking,” continued Joffy, “exactly where Zvlkx was heading that morning and why he had the ticket for the Gravitube in his bedroom. He was cutting his losses and running. I don’t think even Zvlkx—or whoever he was—believed that Swindon could