The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [80]
“Where are you going?” asked Bowden.
“The shooting range,” I replied, “and I may be some time.”
22.
The Waiting Game
To Hades, the loss of every Felix brought back the sadness of the first Felix’s death. On that occasion it had been a terrible blow; not only the loss of a trusted friend and colleague in crime, but also the terrible realization that the alien emotions of loss he had felt betrayed his half-human ancestry, something he abhorred. It was little wonder that he and the first Felix had got on so well. Like Hades, Felix was truly debased and amoral. Sadly for Felix, he did not share any of Hades’ more demonic attributes and had stopped a bullet in the stomach the day that he and Hades attempted to rob the Goliath Bank at Hartlepool in 1975. Felix accepted his death stoically, urging his friend to “carry on the good work” before Hades quietly put him out of his pain. Out of respect for his friend’s memory he removed Felix’s face and carried it with him away from the crime scene. Every servant expropriated from the public since then had been given the dubious honor not only of being named after Acheron’s one true friend, but also of wearing his features.
MILLON DE FLOSS
—Life after Death for Felix Tabularasa
BOWDEN PLACED the ad in the Swindon Globe. It was two days before we all sat down in Victor’s office to compare notes.
“We’ve had seventy-two calls,” announced Victor. “Sadly, all inquiries about rabbits.”
“You did price them kind of low, Bowden,” I put in playfully.
“I am not very conversant in matters concerning rabbits,” asserted Bowden loftily. “It seemed a fair price to me.”
Victor placed a file on the table. “The police finally got an ID on that guy you shot over at Sturmey Archer’s. He had no fingerprints and you were right about his face, Thursday—it wasn’t his own.”
“So who was he?”
Victor opened the file.
“He was an accountant from Newbury named Adrian Smarts. Went missing two years ago. No criminal record; not so much as a speeding fine. He was a good person. Family man, churchgoer and enthusiastic charity worker.”
“Hades stole his will,” I muttered. “The cleanest souls are the easiest to soil. There wasn’t much left of Smarts by the time we shot him. What about the face?”
“They’re still working on that. It might be harder to identify. According to forensic reports Smarts wasn’t the only person to wear that face.”
I started.
“So who’s to say he’ll be the last?”
Victor guessed my concern, picked up the phone and called Hicks. Within twenty minutes an SO-14 squad had surrounded the funeral parlor where Smarts’s body had been released to his family. They were too late. The face that Smarts had been wearing for the past two years had been stolen. Security cameras, unsurprisingly, had seen nothing.
The news of Landen’s upcoming wedding had hit me pretty badly. I found out later that Daisy Mutlar was someone he met at a book signing over a year earlier. She was pretty and beguiling, apparently, but a bit overweight, I thought. She had no great mind either, or at least, that’s what I told myself. Landen had said he wanted a family and I guessed he deserved one. In coming to terms with this I had even begun reacting positively to Bowden’s sorry attempts to ask me out to dinner. We didn’t have much in common, except for an interest in who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I stared across the desk at him as he studied a small scrap of paper with a disputed signature scrawled upon it. The paper was original and so was the ink. The writing, sadly, was not.
“Go on, then,” I said, recalling our last conversation when we were having lunch together, “tell me about Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford.”
Bowden looked thoughtful for a moment.
“The Earl of Oxford was a writer, we can be sure of that. Meres, a critic of the time, mentioned as much in his Palladis Tamia of 1598.”
“Could he have written the plays?” I asked.
“He could have,” replied Bowden. “The trouble is, Meres also goes onto list many of Shakespeare’s plays and credits Shakespeare with