Swallowing, Monk stared at her. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I just-for a moment there, I forgot…”
“That I’m not her?” Reg snorted. “Well. I suppose if I squint hard, and twist my head upside down, Mister Clever Clogs, I could see that might be some kind of compliment.”
Mister Clever Clogs. Ambushed by unexpected emotion, Monk blinked out of the window. The other Reg had called him that all the time, being sarky. But this was the first time…
Reg gave him another great whack on the back of the head. “Just so you know a therapeutic concussion is still on the cards!”
“Bugger it, Reg!” he protested. “I really wish you wouldn’t do that!”
“Tell me the plan and I’ll stop,” she said, sniffing. “All of it, mind you. Not the edited highlights.”
As plans went, he was pretty proud of this one. Especially considering his lack of janitorial experience. But Reg?
“That’s your plan?” the bird said, once he’d finished explaining. “Draft a geriatric door-opener to totter about what’s technically foreign soil slapping hexes in places you hope won’t get noticed, so you can slink in afterwards using your highly dubious counter-hexes and rummage through the privy paperwork of important men who don’t give a fat rat’s fart if your name ends with Markham? That’s your plan?”
Squashed as far away from Reg as he could get, which wasn’t anywhere near far enough, Monk cleared his throat. “Ah… yes? Yes, that’s it. Pretty much. Although I’m not sure slink is the right word. And I don’t see that it’s fair to call Dodsworth geriatric, either, when you-”
“Hell’s bells, you mad bugger! You don’t need me to concuss you, it’s clear as mud you’re concussed already!”
“Look-Reg-”
The bird flapped her wings like a scarecrow in a storm. “Don’t you Look, Reg me, you daft-you demented-I can’t believe you’d-without even discussing it? What raving loony let you out of the lab?”
“Blimey, Reg,” he said, deflated. “All right, so as plans go it might be a little bit tatty round the edges, but I didn’t think it was as hopeless as that.”
More dramatic wing flapping. “Ha! Says the man who thought opening a portal into another dimension was a nifty thing to do on a wet afternoon!”
Well, that was just plain mean. “All right!” he said hotly. “If you’re so bloody clever, Reg, if you’re such a janitoring mastermind, how would you go about uncovering secret information about the people on the Splotze-Borovnik wedding list when you don’t have a single solitary reason to go barging in asking pointed questions? Eh? Come on, then. Enlighten me. I am all ears.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry?” He leaned sideways. “What was that? I didn’t quite catch your answer, seems I’m a bit deaf from all that shouting and wing flapping. Or maybe it’s the concussion I didn’t realise I had. You’d do what, exactly?”
Reg looked down her beak at him. “Ha ha. Very witty. You’ll be the toast of your cell block in the Ott prison, I’m sure.”
“No, sorry, I still can’t seem to find the plan in that delightfully snarky reply.”
“Now you look here, Mister Markham!” said Reg, with a truly formidable rattle of tail feathers. “It’s all very well you jumping onto your high horse and waving your little fists about like a toddler in a tantrum, but that won’t undo the fact that what you’re proposing is ridiculously dangerous. I don’t care how much of a bloody thaumaturgical genius you are, or how many windows doddering Dodsworth left open for you, or what kind of clever hexes you’ve got stuffed down your unmentionables, you cannot go swanning about a foreign embassy as though you owned the bloody place. Being a Markham might save you out here, but in there-” She pointed her wing towards the embassy. “-you’re a nothing and a nobody and when they catch you they’ll hang you as a spy.”
“ When they catch me?” Monk shook his head. “Your faith is heartwarming, Reg. Look! I’m going to shed a tear.”
“You’ll shed more than tears when they’ve got you standing against a wall with a loaded First Grade staff pointed at your warm heart!” she snapped.
“I thought you said they’d hang me.”
“Hang you-shoot you-set you on fire! What difference does it make? The point is, sunshine, you’ll be dead!”
Monk slumped until his knees knocked the jalopy’s polished walnut dashboard. “Blimey, Reg. You really know how to take the fun out of things.”
With a softer tail rattle, the dreadful bird hopped down to his knee and fixed him with the sternest of stares. “You silly boy, this was never about fun. That’s always been your problem, Mister Markham. You’ve spent most of your life giggling as you skate over the thin ice. And because you’re a Markham, and a genius, and useful to the right sort of people, time and again you get away with blue murder.”
Appalled, Monk felt his heart thud. What is this? First Aylesbury, now the bird… “You make me sound like-like Errol Haythwaite!”
“No, no,” she said, impatient. “Errol Haythwaite’s a pillock. You’re just careless. And thoughtless. You get carried away.”
“In other words, I’m a tosser!” he said, still appalled. “I think that’s a bit bloody harsh. You don’t seem to realise, Reg, that working in Research and Development means I get told things. Dreadful things you’ll never read about in the Ottosland Times, or are even whispered about beyond our four walls. And then I get told, Toddle off, Mister Markham, and just make sure that doesn’t happen. So I toddle off and I bend the Laws of Thaumaturgics until you’d hardly recognise them and I come up with a way to make sure that doesn’t happen. Whatever the that is my superiors have stumbled across this week, at any rate. Next week they’ll stumble across something else, you can bet your next bowl of mince on it, Reg, and I’ll be expected to dream up some other outlandish hex or ridiculous gadget that’ll save us, yet again. Because I’m Monk Markham, aren’t I, and that’s what I do! So if I get a bit carried away giggling while I’m skating on your thin ice, well, I think even you’ll agree that giggling’s better than screaming!”
Reg blinked at him. “I never said you don’t make a valuable contribution to the causes of peace and international freedom, sunshine,” she said more kindly. “But if you’re looking for a bird who’ll hold her tongue when she sees a man merrily tripping down the wrong path, well, don’t look at me.”
“Look, Reg, you might be right,” he said. “This plan of mine might be the wrong plan. But it’s the best I can come up with on short notice. Sir Alec just tossed this wedding list thing into my lap and sauntered away. He’s like Uncle Ralph and the rest of them, he assumes I can pull a thaumaturgical rabbit out of my hat at a moment’s notice, every time. And so I have to, don’t I? Bloody Gerald’s up to his grimoire-enhanced eyebrows in trouble and he’s got my sister and my-my friend with him. I can’t leave them twisting in the wind.”
Reg looked down her beak again. “No. You can’t. But make no mistake-you breaking into foreign embassies using dubious thaumaturgics is a recipe for disaster.”
Monk thudded his head against the closed driver’s side window. “Then what am I s’posed to do?”
“You let me break into the foreign embassies for you,” Reg said promptly. “If your enterprising butler has left a suitably unimportant window open I can fly in and snoop about, and if anyone sees me it’ll be Oh dear, look at the poor little birdy, let’s shoo it outside.”
Oh, lord. “And what if there’s a closed door between you and the room with the information in it? What if what we’re looking for is stuck in a drawer? What then?”
“Well, sunshine, what I lack in opposable thumbs I make up for with guile and cunning,” said the bird. “And I expect you’ve got some clever hexwork stuffed down your drawers that’ll sort out any inconveniences like locks and closed doors and stuck drawers and what have you.”