“Great Scott! You’re right. I never did finish the final chapter of Love Among the Begonias.”
In retirement Mycroft had spent his time writing romantic novels, all of which sold surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that he had attracted the lasting enmity of Daphne Farquitt, the indisputable leader in the field. She fired off an accusatory letter accusing him of “wanton” plagiarism. A barrage of claims and counterclaims followed, which ended only when Mycroft died. It was so venomous, in fact, that conspiracy theorists claimed he was poisoned by crazed Farquitt fans. We had to publish his death certificate to quell the rumors.
“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, and behind the Dyatrima was a stocky figure in an Acme Carpets uniform, a man with a large, brow-ridged head and deeply sunken brown eyes. He had a lot in common with the Paleocene anomaly that faced me-he, too, had once been extinct and was here not by the meanderings of natural selection but from the inconsiderate meddling of a scientist who never stopped to ask whether if a thing could be done, that it should. His name was Stig, and he was a reengineered neanderthal, ex-SO-13 and a valued colleague from the old days of SpecOps. He’d saved my butt on several occasions, and I’d helped him and his fellow extinctees to species self-determination.
“Don’t move,” said Stig in a low rumble. “We don’t want to hurt it.”
He never did. Stig saw any renegade unextinctees as something akin to family and always caught them alive, if possible. On the other hand, chimeras, a hodgepodge of the hobby sequencer’s art, were another matter-he dispatched them without mercy, and without pain.
The Diatryma made a vicious jab toward me; I jumped to my left as the beak snapped shut with the sound of oversize castanets. Quick as a flash, Stig leaped forward and covered the creature’s head with an old flour sack, which seemed to subdue it enough for him to wrestle it to the floor. I joined in, as did the entire storeroom staff, and within a few moments we had wrapped some duct tape securely around its massive beak, rendering it harmless.
“Thanks,” said Stig, securing a leash around the bird’s neck.
“Salisbury?” I asked as we walked past the rolls of Wilton shag and cushioned linoleum in a wide choice of colors.
“Devizes,” replied the neanderthal. “We had to run for eight miles across open farmland to catch it.”
“Did anyone see you?” I asked, mindful of any rumors getting out.
“Who’d believe them if they did?” he replied. “But there’re more Diatrymas-we’ll be out again to night.”
Acme Carpets, as you might have gathered, was just the cover story. In truth it was the old SpecOps under another name. The ser vice hadn’t really been disbanded in the early nineties-it just went underground, and freelance. All strictly unofficial, of course. Luckily, the Swindon chief of police was Braxton Hicks, my old divisional boss at SpecOps. Although he suspected what we got up to, he told me he would feign ignorance unless “someone gets eaten or something.” Besides, if we didn’t mop up all the bizarrer elements of modern living, his regular officers would have to, and Braxton might then have a demand of bonus payments for “actions beyond the call of duty.” And Hicks loved his bud get almost as much as he loved his golf. So the cops didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them.
“We have a question,” said Stig. “Do we have to mention the possibility of being trampled by mammoths on our Health and Safety Risk-Assessment Form?”