“No,” I said, “you’ll ruin the carpet. Do it outside.”
The goblin opened his eyes wide and stared at me in shocked amazement, then started to babble on about an “influential uncle” who would “do unpleasant things” if he “went missing.”
“Just kidding,” I added. “Let him go.”
“Are you sure?” asked Sprockett. “I can make it look like a shaving accident.”
“Yes, I’m sure. You,” I said, jabbing a finger at the goblin, “are a disgrace. Place a single toe in my series again and I’ll make you wish you’d never been written.”
Sprockett took his foot off the goblin, and it ran to the window, paused on the sill for a moment, made an obscene gesture and then ran off. That was the trouble with being stuck in Fantasy—too many goblins, spells, ogres, wizards, elves and warlocks. I reckoned it frightened readers off.
“So,” I said, locking the window after the goblin, “what’s the deal?”
“I was reappraising the condition of the wreckage from the debris field.”
He showed me the Triumph Bonneville’s exhaust pipe. It had been folded almost in half by the impact. He pointed to a small patch on the chrome. There was a slight mottling about four inches long and an inch wide.
“A fault in the manufacturing?” I suggested.
“But it wasn’t manufactured,” said Sprockett. “It was written . It should be perfect—better than any real motorcycle.”
“You asked me in here to show me an imperfection on a Bonneville exhaust?”
“There’s more. I found this orange inside the bed-sit. Here.”
He tossed the orange across, and I noticed that this also had a slight mottling on the side. He then showed me similar imperfections on a Polaroid camera, a toaster, a half-eaten sandwich and a plastic bath duck. Then I got it.
“The mottling,” I said slowly. “They are— were—ISBNs. Are you trying to tell me someone has removed all identification marks from this book?”
He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. All doubts were off. This wasn’t an accident. Someone had hacked into the novel’s source code to delete the ISBN in order to cover his tracks and ensure that no one found out which book had been destroyed or why. The epizeuxis worm and now this. We didn’t have a crashed book, we had a crime scene. But it wasn’t quite that simple.
“Only Text Grand Central or the Council of Genres would have the power to scrub ISBNs and put together a rhetorical device,” I said. “And while I’m not one to use coarse idioms, someone would have to be connected up the wazoo to pull this off. Have you attempted to find out what the ISBN actually was?”
Sprockett placed a series of photographs on the desk. “I took the liberty of subjecting the marks to a complex series of photographic techniques, which while appearing to have the veneer of scientific reality actually just sounded good. Do you want the full two pages of dull exposition or just the results?”
“Better just give me the results,” I said, looking at my watch. “Whitby will be here any moment for a lunch date.”
“Might I inquire where you are going, ma’am?”
“We thought we’d try the Elbow Rooms.”
“A fine establishment. I meet up with the Hartzel chess player every two weeks there to discuss Matters of the Cog. I’d avoid the lobster.”
“Food poisoning?”
“No, no, not on the menu—at the bar. Very opinionated and apt to lapse into unspeakably dull arthropod-related digressions. But see here.”
He handed me a photograph that was many images superimposed on top of one another. The revealed ISBN was indistinct but legible. I jotted down the number in my notebook.
“Thank you, Sprockett. You’re a star.”
“Madam is most kind.”
I fetched the unimaginatively titled Cheshire Cat’s Complete Guide to All Books Ever Written Everywhere and looked up the ISBN. Our crashed book was from Self-Publishing and titled The Murders on the Hareng Rouge, by Adrian Dorset. I’d never heard of him. But it was Vanity, so I’d hardly be expected to. There was no other information. The ISBN database held only titles, authors, publishers’ details, three-for-two offers, that kind of thing. I looked at the map we had pinned on the wall that charted the book’s final journey. If you extended the line back through Adventure and past the Cliff of Notes, it made landfall in Vanity. We’d never considered such a thing. It must have lifted off there and proceeded in an almost straight line to where the Council of Genres was located, but it had come down over Conspiracy.
I sat, leaned back in my chair and ran through the likely scenarios. It was possible The Murders on the Hareng Rouge was a potential world beater on its way to being published. Jealousies ran deep in the BookWorld, and the possibility of someone in HumDram/Highbrow nobbling the potential competition was quite real. It had happened before; bad Vanity was universally disliked but tolerated in a condescending “yes, well done, jolly good” kind of way, but good Vanity was reviled as the worst kind of upstart.
“Blast,” I said, as a more personal note added itself to the mix. “It explains why I was asked to handle the investigation. No one expected me to find anything.”
Sprockett’s eyebrow pointed to “Bingo.”
“The thought had occurred to me, ma’am. In fact, the precise reason you were selected for this investigation, given your lack of adequacy, has been troubling me for some time.”
I thought about Acheron’s comments with regard to the fact that Carmine was an A-4.
“I so need that sort of comment right now.”
His eyebrow clicked from “Bingo” to “Apologetic.”
“Merely the facts as I see them, ma’am.”
I thought carefully. Part of me—the Thursday part—was outraged over the crime, but the rest of me was more realistic. There were some things that were simply not worth meddling with, and anyone willing to engineer the destruction of an entire book wouldn’t think twice about eliminating me. There were few—if any—characters who couldn’t be replaced.
“Have you told anyone about this?” I asked, and Sprockett shook his head.
“Keep it that way,” I murmured. “I think all we’ve found is what Red Herring wanted me to find: an unprecedented event that is unrepeatable.”
“If asked for an opinion, ma’am,” said Sprockett in an unusually forceful turn of phrase, “I should like to find out who asked Commander Herring to allocate you to this investigation.”
I stared at him. I should like to know, too, but I couldn’t think of a way to frame the question that wouldn’t have me in the trunk of a car heading towards the traditional place to dump bodies, the New Jersey area of Crime.
“This was never meant to be reported,” I said. “This was meant for looking the other way and carrying on with life as though nothing had happened. There was a good reason I was asked to do this, and I will not impugn my lack of competence by being irresponsibly accurate. I have a reputation to uphold.”
It was a hopelessly poor argument, and he and I both knew it. I sat down at my desk and drew a sheet of writing paper from my stationery drawer.
“Permission to speak openly?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say, but I should.”
“It’s not what Thursday Next would have done.”
“No,” I replied, “but then Thursday could deal with this sort of stuff. She enjoyed it. A woman has to know her limitations. If Herring had wanted this accident to be investigated properly, he would have given it to someone else. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe there really are wheels within wheels. Maybe some stuff has to be left, for the good of all of us. We leave crime to the authorities, right?”
“That would certainly seem to be the safe and conventional option, ma’am.”
“Exactly,” I replied. “Safe. Conventional. Besides, I have a series to look after and dignity to be maintained for Thursday. If anything happened to me, as likely as not Carmine would take over, and I’m not convinced she’d uphold the standards quite as I do, what with the goblins and the hyphenating and such.”