‘I did something a bit silly,’ announced Mycroft quite suddenly, looking down and smoothing the soft grass with his palm.
‘How silly?’ asked Polly, mindful of the precariousness of the situation.
‘I burned the Chuzzlewit manuscript.’
‘You did what?’
‘I said—‘
‘I heard. Such an original manuscript is almost beyond value. Whatever made you do a thing like that?’
Mycroft sighed. It was not an action he had taken upon himself lightly.
‘Without the original manuscript,’ he explained, ‘major disruption of the work is impossible. I told you that maniac removed Mr. Quaverley and had him killed. I didn’t think he’d stop there. Who would be next? Mrs. Gamp? Mr. Pecksniff? Martin Chuzzlewit himself? I rather think I might have been doing the world a favour.’
‘And destroying the manuscript stops this, does it?’
‘Of course; no original manuscript, no mass disruption.’
She held his hand tightly as a shadow fell across them both. ‘Time’s up,’ said Felix8.
I had been right and wrong over my predictions regarding Acheron’s actions. As Mycroft told me later, Hades had been furious when he discovered that no one had taken him seriously, but Mycroft’s action in destroying Chuzzlewit simply made him laugh. For a man unused to being hoodwinked, he enjoyed the experience. Instead of tearing him limb from limb as Mycroft had suspected, he merely shook him by the hand.
‘Congratulations, Mr Next.’ He smiled. ‘Your act was brave and ingenious. Brave, ingenious but sadly self-defeating. I didn’t choose Chuzzlewit by chance, you know.’
‘No?’ retorted Mycroft.
‘No. I was made to study the book at O-level and really got to hate the smug little shit. All that moralising and endless harking on about the theme of selfishness. I find Chuzzlewit only marginally less tedious than Our Mutual Friend. Even if they had paid the ransom I would have killed him anyway and enjoyed the experience tremendously.’
He stopped talking, smiled at Mycroft and continued:
‘Your intervention has allowed Martin Chuzzlewit to continue his adventures. Todger’s boarding house will not be torched and they can continue their unamusing little lives unperturbed.’
‘I am glad of that,’ replied Mycroft.
‘Save your sentiments, Mr Next, I haven’t finished. In view of your actions I will have to find an alternative. A book which unlike Chuzzlewit has genuine literary merits.’
‘Not Great Expectations’?’
Acheron looked at him sadly.
‘We’re beyond Dickens now, Mr Next. I would have liked to have gone into Hamlet and throttled that insufferably gloomy Dane, or even skipped into Romeo and Juliet and snuffed out that little twerp Romeo.’ He sighed before continuing. ‘Sadly, none of the Bard’s original manuscripts survive.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps the Bennett family could do with some thinning…’
‘Pride and Prejudice!?’ yelled Mycroft. ‘You heartless monster!’
‘Flattery will not help you now, Mycroft. Pride and Prejudice without Elizabeth or Darcy would be a trifle lame, don’t you think? But perhaps not Austen. Why not Trollope? A well-placed nail-bomb in Barchester might be an amusing distraction. I’m sure the loss of Mr Crawley would cause a few feathers to fly. So you see, my dear Mycroft, saving Mr Chuzzlewit might have been a very foolish act indeed.’
He smiled again and spoke to Felix8.
‘My friend, why don’t you make some enquiries and find out the extent of original manuscripts and their whereabouts?’
Felix8 looked at Acheron coldly.
‘I’m not a clerk, sir. I think Mr Hobbes would be eminently more suitable for that task.’
Acheron frowned. Of all the Felixes only Felix3 had ever contradicted a direct order. The hapless Felix3 was liquidated following a very disappointing performance when he hesitated during a robbery. It had been Acheron’s own fault, of course; he had tried to endow Felix3 with slightly more personality at the expense of allowing him a pinch of morality. Ever since then he had given up on the Felixes as anything but loyal servants; Hobbes and Dr Mьller had to be his company these days.
‘Hobbes!’ shouted Hades at the top of his voice. The unemployed actor scuttled in from the direction of the kitchens holding a large wooden spoon.
‘Yes, sire?’
Acheron repeated the order to Hobbes, who bowed and withdrew.
‘Felix8!’
‘Sir?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble, lock Mycroft in his room. I dare say we will have no need of him for a couple of weeks. Give him no water for two days and no food for five. That should be punishment enough for disposing of the manuscript.’
Felix8 nodded and removed Mycroft from the hotel’s old lounge. He took him out into the lobby and up the broad marble staircase. They were the only ones in the mouldering hotel; the large front door was locked and bolted.
Mycroft stopped by the window and looked out. He had once visited the Welsh capital as a guest of the Republic to give a talk on synthesising oil from coal. He had been put up in this very hotel, met anyone who was anyone and even had a rare audience with the highly revered Brodyr Ulyanov, octogenarian father of the modern Welsh Republic. It would have been nearly thirty years ago, and the low-lying city had not changed much. The signs of heavy industry still dominated the landscape and the odour of ironworks hung in the air. Although many of the mines had closed in recent years, the winding gears had not been removed; they punctuated the landscape like sentinels, rising darkly above the squat slate-roofed houses. Above the city on Morlais hill the massive limestone statue of John Frost looked down upon the Republic he had founded; there had been talk of moving the capital away from the industrialised South but Merthyr was as much a spiritual centre as anything else.
They walked on and presently came to Mycroft’s cell, a windowless room with only the barest furniture. As he was locked in and left alone, Mycroft’s thoughts turned to that which troubled him most: Polly. He had always thought she was a bit of a flirt but nothing more; and Mr Wordsworth’s continued interest in her caused him no small amount of jealous anxiety.
25. Time enough for contemplation
‘I hadn’t thought that Chuzzlewit was a popular book, but I was wrong. Not one of us expected the public outcry and media attention that his murder provoked. Mr Quaverley’s autopsy was a matter of public record; his burial was attended by 150,000 Dickens fans from around the globe. Braxton Hicks told us to say nothing about the LiteraTec involvement, but news soon leaked out.’
Commander Braxton Hicks threw the newspaper on the desk in front of us. He paced around for a bit before collapsing heavily into his chair.
‘I want to know who told the press,’ he announced. Jack Schitt was leaning on the window frame and watching us all while smoking a rather small arid foul-smelling Turkish cigarette. The headline was unequivocaclass="underline"
Chuzzlewit death: SpecOps blamed It went on to outline specifically how ‘unnamed sources’ within Swindon SpecOps had intimated that a botched ransom payment had been the cause of Quaverley’s death. It was arse about face but the basic facts were correct. It had placed Hicks under a lot of pressure and caused him to overspend his precious budget by a phenomenal amount to try to discover Hades’ whereabouts. The spotter plane that Bowden and I had pursued had been found a burned-out wreck in a field on the English side of Hay-on-Wye. The Gladstone full of the counterfeit money was close by along with the ersatz Gainsborough. It hadn’t fooled Acheron for one second. We were all convinced that Hades was in Wales but even political intervention at the highest level had drawn a blank—the Welsh Home Secretary himself had sworn that they would not knowingly stoop to harbour such a notorious criminal. With no jurisdiction on the Welsh side of the border, our searches had centred around the Marches—to no avail.