The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [615]
“Polly finished Love Among the Begonias for you,” I said.
“Ah,” he replied, “maybe I’ve come back to haunt that loathsome cow Farquitt.”
“If that were the case, you’d be over at her place doing the wooo-wooo thing and clanking chains.”
“Hmm,” he said disdainfully, “that doesn’t sound very dignified.”
“How about some last-minute inventing? Some idea you never got around to researching?”
Mycroft thought long and hard, making several bizarre faces as he did so.
“Fascinating!” he said at last, panting with the effort. “I can’t do original thought anymore. As soon as my brain stopped functioning, that was the end of Mycroft the inventor. You’re right: I must be dead. It’s most depressing.”
“But no idea why you’re here?”
“None,” he said despondently.
“Well,” I said as I got up, “I’ll make a few inquiries. Do you want Polly to know you’ve reappeared in spirit form?”
“I’ll leave it to your judgment,” he said. “But if you do tell her, you might mention something about how she was the finest partner any man could have. Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”
I snapped my fingers. That’s how I wanted to describe Landen and me. “That was good—can I use it?”
“Of course. Have you any idea how much I miss Polly?”
I thought of the two years Landen had been eradicated. “I do. And she misses you, Uncle, every second of every day.”
He looked up at me, and I saw his eyes glisten.
I tried to put my hand on his arm, but it went through his phantom limb and instead landed on the hard surface of the workbench.
“I’ll have a think about why I might be here,” said Mycroft in a quiet voice. “Will you look in on me from time to time?” He smiled to himself and began to tinker with the device on the workbench again.
“Of course. Good-bye, Uncle.”
“Good-bye, Thursday.”
And he slowly began to fade. I noticed as he did so that the room grew warmer again, and within a few more seconds he had vanished entirely. I retrieved the bag of Welsh cash and walked thoughtfully to the door, turning to have one last look. The workshop was empty, dusty and forgotten. Abandoned as it was when Mycroft died, six years before.
3.
Acme Carpets
The Special Operations Network was instituted in 1928 to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. Amongst the stranger departments were those that dealt with vampires (SO-17), time travel (SO-12), literary crime (SO-27) and the Cheese Enforcement Agency (SO-31). Notoriously secretive and with increased accusations of unaccountability and heavy-handedness, 90 percent of the ser vice was disbanded during the winter of 1991–92. Of the thirty-two departments, only five were retained. My department, the Literary Detectives, was not among them.
The name Acme Carpets was a misnomer, to be honest. We didn’t just do carpets—we did tiles, linoleum and wooden flooring, too. Competitive, fast and reliable, we had been trading in Swindon for ten years, ever since the SpecOps divisions were disbanded in ’92. In 1996 we moved to bigger premises on the Oxford Road trading estate. If you needed any sort of floor covering in the Swindon area, you could come to us for the most competitive quote.
I pushed open the front doors and was surprised that there was no one around. Not that there was a lack of customers, as Mondays before ten were generally pretty light, but that there was no staff—not even in the office or skulking next to the spotlessly clean complimentary-tea area. I walked to the back of the store, past quality rolls of carpet and a varied selection of samples piled high on the light and spacious showroom floor. I opened the heavy swinging doors that led to the storerooms and froze. Standing next to a pile of last year’s sample books was a flightless bird about four feet high and with an unfeasibly large and rather nastily serrated beak. It stared at me suspiciously with two small black eyes. I looked around. The stockroom staff were all dutifully standing still,