The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [76]
Mr. Rumplunkett didn’t acknowledge my entrance, but just continued to speak into a microphone hanging from the ceiling, his monotonous voice sounding like a low hum in the tiled room. He had been known to send his transcribers to sleep on quite a few occasions; he even had difficulty staying awake himself when practicing speeches to the forensic pathologists’ annual dinner dance.
“I have in front of me a male European aged about forty with gray hair and poor dentition. He is approximately five foot eight inches tall and dressed in an outfit that I would describe as Victorian . . .”
As well as Bowden and Victor there were two homicide detectives present, the ones who had interviewed us the night before. They looked surly and bored and glared at the LiteraTec contingent suspiciously.
“Morning, Thursday,” said Victor cheerfully. “Remember the Studebaker belonging to Archer’s killer?”
I nodded.
“Well, our friends in Homicide found this body in the trunk.”
“Do we have an ID?”
“Not so far. Have a look at this.”
He pointed to a stainless-steel tray containing the corpse’s possessions. I sorted through the small collection. There was half a pencil, an unpaid bill for starching collars and a letter from his mother dated June 5, 1843.
“Can we speak in private?” I said.
Victor led me into the corridor.
“It’s Mr. Quaverley,” I explained.
“Who?”
I repeated what Dr. Spoon had told me. Victor did not seem surprised in the least.
“I thought he looked like a book person,” he said at length.
“You mean this has happened before?”
“Did you ever read The Taming of the Shrew?”
“Of course.”
“Well, you know the drunken tinker in the introduction who is made to think he is a lord, and whom they put the play on for?”
“Sure,” I replied. “His name was Christopher Sly. He has a few lines at the end of act one and that is the last we hear of him . . .”
My voice trailed off.
“Exactly,” said Victor. “Six years ago an uneducated drunk who spoke only Elizabethan English was found wandering in a confused state just outside Warwick. He said that his name was Christopher Sly, demanded a drink and was very keen to see how the play turned out. I managed to question him for half an hour, and in that time he convinced me that he was the genuine article—yet he never came to the realization that he was no longer in his own play.”
“Where is he now?”
“Nobody knows. He was taken for questioning by two unspecified SpecOps agents soon after I spoke to him. I tried to find out what happened but you know how secretive SpecOps can be.”
I thought about my time up at Haworth when I was a small girl.
“What about the other way?”
Victor looked at me sharply.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever heard of anyone jumping in the other direction?”
Victor looked at the floor and rubbed his nose. “That’s pretty radical, Thursday.”
“But do you think it’s possible?”
“Keep this under your hat, Thursday, but I’m beginning to think that it is. The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning. Have you read Dickens’s Dombey and Son?”
“Sure.”
“Remember Mr. Glubb?”
“The Brighton fisherman?”
“Correct. Dombey was finished in 1848 and was reviewed extensively with a list of characters in 1851. In that review Mr. Glubb was not mentioned.”
“An oversight?”
“Perhaps. In 1926 a collector of antiquarian books named Redmond Bulge vanished while reading Dombey and Son. The incident was widely reported in the press owing to the fact that his assistant had been convinced he saw Bulge ‘melt into smoke.’ ”
“And Bulge fits Glubb’s description?”
“Almost exactly. Bulge specialized in collecting stories about the sea and