‘You’re looking for me and you’re on the right floor,’ I said, glad that I had had plenty of experience of academics in the past.
‘I am?’ he said with great surprise, as though he had long ago accepted that he would always end up in the wrong place.
‘Special Operative Thursday Next,’ I said, holding out a hand for him to shake. He shook it weakly and tried to raise his hat with the hand that was holding the briefcase. He gave up and tipped his head instead.
‘Er—thank you, Miss Next. My name is Dr Runcible Spoon, Professor of English Literature at Swindon University. I expect you’ve heard of me?’
‘I’m sure it was only a matter of time, Dr Spoon. Would you care to sit down?’
Dr Spoon thanked me and followed me across to my desk, pausing every now and then as a rare book caught his eye. I had to stop and wait a number of times before I had him safely ensconced in Bowden’s chair. I fetched him a cup of coffee.
‘So, how can I be of assistance, Dr Spoon?’
‘Perhaps I should show you, Miss Next.’
Spoon rummaged through his case for a minute, taking out some unmarked students’ work and a paisley-patterned sock before finally finding and handing me a heavy blue-bound volume.
‘Martin Chuzzlewit,’ explained Dr Spoon, pushing all the papers back into his case and wondering why they had expanded since he took them out.
‘Chapter nine, page 187. It is marked.’
I turned to where Spoon had left his bus pass and scanned the page.
‘See what I mean?’
‘I’m sorry, Dr Spoon. I haven’t read Chuzzlewit since I was in my teens. You’re going to have to enlighten me.’
Spoon looked at me suspiciously, wondering if I was, perhaps, an impostor.
‘A student pointed it out to me early this morning. I came out as quickly as I could. On the bottom of page 187 there was a short paragraph outlining one of the curious characters who frequent Todger’s, the boarding house. A certain Mr Quaverley by name. He is an amusing character who only converses on subjects that he knows nothing about. If you scan the lines I think you will agree with me that he has vanished.’
I read the page with growing consternation. The name of Quaverley did ring a bell, but of his short paragraph there appeared to be no sign.
‘He doesn’t appear later?’
‘No, Officer. My student and I have been through it several times. There is no doubt about it. Mr Quaverley has inexplicably been excised from the book. It is as if he had never been written.’
‘Could it be a printing error?’ I asked with a growing sense of unease.
‘On the contrary. I have checked seven different copies and they all read exactly the same. Mr Quaverley is no longer with us.’
‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ I murmured.
‘I agree.’
I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and several links between Hades, Jack Schitt and the Chuzzlewit manuscript started to form in unpleasant ways in my mind.
The phone rang. It was Victor. He was at the morgue and requested me to come over straight away; they had discovered a body.
‘What’s this to do with me?’ I asked him.
As Victor spoke I looked over at Dr Spoon, who was staring at a food stain he had discovered on his tie.
‘No, on the contrary,’ I replied slowly, ‘considering what has just happened here I don’t think that sounds odd at all.’
The morgue was an old Victorian building that was badly in need of refurbishment. The interior was musty and smelt of formaldehyde and damp. The employees looked unhealthy and shuffled around the confines of the small building in a funereal manner. The standard joke about Swindon’s morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma. This rule was especially correct when it came to Mr Rumplunkett, the head pathologist. He was a lugubrious-looking man with heavy jowls and eyebrows like thatch. I found him and Victor in the pathology lab.
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 practising speeches to the forensic pathologists’ annual dinner-dance.
‘I have in front of me a male European aged about forty with grey 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 boot.’
‘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 5 June 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 realisation that he was no longer in his own play.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Nobody knows. He was taken for questioning by two unspecified SpecOp’s 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 specialised in collecting stories about the sea and Glubb specialises in telling tales of precisely that. Even Bulge’s name spelt backwards reads “Eglub”, a close enough approximation to Glubb to make us think he made it up himself He sighed. ‘I suppose you think that’s incredible?’