2. Gad’s Hill
‘… There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth’s future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back towards a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one…’
My pager had delivered a disconcerting message; the unstealable had just been stolen. It was not the first time the Martin Chuzzlewit manuscript had been purloined. Two years before it had been removed from its case by a security man who wanted nothing more than to read the book in its pure and unsullied state. Unable to live with himself or decipher Dickens’s handwriting past the third page, he eventually confessed and the manuscript was recovered. He spent five years sweating over lime kilns on the edge of Dartmoor.
Gad’s Hill Palace was where Charles Dickens lived at the end of his life, but not where he wrote Chuzzlewit. That was at Devonshire Terrace, when he still lived with his first wife, in 1843. Gad’s Hill is a large Victorian building near Rochester which had fine views of the Medway when Dickens bought it. If you screw up your eyes and ignore the oil refinery, heavy water plant and the ExcoMat containment facility, it’s not too hard to see what drew him to this part of England. Several thousand visitors pass through Gad’s Hill every day, making it the third-most popular area of literary pilgrimage after Anne Hathaway’s cottage and the Brontes’ Haworth House. Such huge numbers of people had created enormous security problems; no one was taking any chances since a deranged individual had broken into Chawton, threatening to destroy all Jane Austen’s letters unless his frankly dull and uneven Austen biography was published. On that occasion no damage had been done, but it was a grim portent of things to come. In Dublin the following year an organised gang attempted to hold Jonathan Swift’s papers to ransom. A protracted siege developed which ended with two of the extortionists shot dead and the destruction of several original political pamphlets and an early draft of Gulliver’s Travels. The inevitable had to happen. Literary relics were placed under bullet-proof glass and guarded by electronic surveillance and armed officers. It was not the way anyone wanted it, but it seemed the only answer. Since those days there had been few major problems, which made the theft of Chuzzlewit all the more remarkable.
I parked my car, clipped my SO-2y badge into my top pocket and pushed my way through the crowds of pressmen and gawkers. I saw Boswell from a distance and ducked under a police line to reach him.
‘Good morning, sir,’ I muttered. ‘I came as soon as I heard.’
He put a finger to his lips and whispered in my ear: ‘Ground-floor window. Took less than ten minutes. Nothing else.’
‘What?’
Then I saw. Toad News Network’s star reporter Lydia Startright was about to do an interview. The finely coiffured TV journalist finished her introduction and turned to us both. Boswell employed a neat sidestep, jabbed me playfully in the ribs and left me alone under the full glare of the news cameras.
‘—of Martin Chuzzlewit, stolen from the Dickens Museum at Gad’s Hill. I have with me Literary Detective Thursday Next. Tell me, Officer, how it was possible for thieves to break in and steal one of literature’s greatest treasures?’
I murmured ‘Bastard!’ under my breath to Boswell, who slunk off shaking with mirth. I shifted my weight uneasily. With the enthusiasm for art and literature in the population undiminished, the LiteraTec’s job was becoming increasingly difficult, made worse by a very limited budget.
‘The thieves gained entrance through a window on the ground floor and went straight to the manuscript,’ I said in my best TV voice. ‘They were in and out within ten minutes.’
‘I understand the museum was monitored by closed-circuit television,’ continued Lydia. ‘Did you capture the thieves on video?’
‘Our enquiries are proceeding,’ I replied. ‘You understand that some details must be kept secret for operational purposes.’
Lydia lowered her microphone and cut the camera. ‘Do you have anything to give me, Thursday?’ she asked. ‘The parrot stuff I can get from anyone.’
I smiled. ‘I’ve only just got here, Lyds. Try me again in a week.’
‘Thursday, in a week this will be archive footage. Okay, roll VT.’
The cameraman reshouldered his camera and Lydia resumed her report.
‘Do you have any leads?’
‘There are several avenues that we are pursuing. We are confident that we can return the manuscript to the museum and arrest the individuals concerned.’
I wished I could share my own optimism. I had spent a lot of time at Gad’s Hill overseeing security arrangements, and I knew it was like the Bank of England. The people who did this were good. Really good. It also made it kind of personal. The interview ended and I ducked under a SpecOps Do Not Cross tape to where Boswell was waiting to meet me.
‘This is one hell of a mess, Thursday. Turner, fill her in.’
Boswell left us to it and went off to find something to eat.
‘If you can see how they pulled this one off,’ murmured Paige who was a slightly older and female version of Boswell, ‘I’ll eat my boots, buckles and all.’
Both Turner and Boswell had been at the LiteraTec Department when I turned up there, fresh from the military and a short career at the Swindon Police Department. Few people ever left the LiteraTec division; when you were in London you had pretty much reached the top of your profession. Promotion or death were the usual ways out; the saying was that a LiteraTec job wasn’t for Christmas—it was for life.
‘Boswell likes you, Thursday.’
‘In what sort of way?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘In the sort of way that he wants you in my shoes when I leave—I became engaged to a rather nice fellow from SO-3 at the weekend.’
I should have been more enthusiastic, but Turner had been engaged so many times she could have filled every finger and toe—twice.
‘SO-3?’ I queried, somewhat inquisitively. Being in SpecOps was no guarantee you would know which departments did what—Joe Public were probably better informed. The only SpecOps divisions I knew about for sure below SO-12 were SO-9, who were antiterrorist, and SO-1, who were Internal Affairs—the SpecOps police; the people who made sure we didn’t step out of line.
‘SO-3?’ I repeated. ‘What do they do?’
‘Weird Stuff.’
‘I thought SO-2 did Weird Stuff?’
‘SO-2 do Weirder Stuff. I asked him but he never got round to answering—we were kind of busy. Look at this.’
Turner had led me into the manuscript room. The glass case that had held the leather-bound manuscript was empty.
‘Anything?’ Paige asked one of the scene-of-crime officers.
‘Nothing.’
‘Gloves?’ I asked.
The SOCO stood up and stretched her back; she hadn’t discovered a single print of any sort.
‘No; and that’s what’s so bizarre. It doesn’t look like they touched the box at all; not with gloves, not a cloth—nothing. According to me this box hasn’t been opened and the manuscript is still inside!’ I looked at the glass case. It was still locked tight and none of the other exhibits had been touched. The keys were kept separately and were at this moment on their way from London.