Monk felt his spirits sink. Really? Just like that? The bird was as bad as Uncle Ralph and Sir Alec and the rest of them, taking his powers of genius for granted.
Although, now that he thought about it…
“Could be I do,” he said slowly. “A variation on something Bibbie came up with once. Just-be quiet a moment while I work it out.”
Amazingly, the bird did as she was asked. What a good thing he always carried a few blank hex matrixes with him wherever he went, on the principle that one never knew when a hex might come in handy. It took him a little under an hour to cobble together what he needed, and then rig up his handkerchief into a nifty sling that Reg could carry into the embassy, laden with the hexes he’d brought with him and the ones he’d just devised.
“So you’re clear on all of that?” he asked the bird, once he’d explained which hex did what. “Or d’you want me to run through it again?”
Jumped from his knee down to the jalopy’s front passenger seat, Reg stopped poking her beak through the differently coloured hexes piled onto his handkerchief and gave him a look. “D’you mind? I’m not a doddling geriatric butler.”
“Reg — ” And then Monk bit his tongue. If they got into another argument now they’d probably still be going at it hammer and tongs when the sun came up. “No, of course you’re not. Sorry.” He tied up the corners of the handkerchief, then leaned over to the passenger side of the jalopy and thumped down its window. “There you go. Now for pity’s sake be careful, because you might be more annoying than a pair of trousers full of ants but I bloody well refuse to lose you again.”
Eyes bright, the tricked-up handkerchief with its burden of hexes held firmly in her beak, Reg nodded. “Right,” she said indistinctly. “Now bugger off. I’ll see you back in Chatterly Crescent.”
What? “Reg-”
With a muffled curse, she spat out the handkerchief. “Blimey bloody Charlie, sunshine, must you always quibble? There’s nothing you can do from out here but find a way to bollocks things up, so go home. Do some dusting. You’re always after new experiences, aren’t you? Housework’ll have all the charm of bloody novelty!”
Defeated, Monk sighed. “Fine. I’ll go. Just… don’t hang about, all right? Because the longer you stay in there, the greater the chance of you getting caught.”
“Ha!” she said, and picked up the handkerchief again. “That’ll be the day.”
She hopped up onto the frame of the jalopy’s open window, rattled her tail… and launched herself into the quiet night. Heart thudding, Monk watched until he’d lost her among the shadows, then started the engine and chugged away down the street, towards home.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Nothing suspicious about the Blonkken wedding guests? Or any of the embassy staff? Nothing at all?” Disappointed, Monk slumped in his favourite parlour armchair. “Reg, are you sure?”
Perched on the back of the sofa, the bird looked down her beak at him. “And when have you ever known me not to be sure, sunshine?”
He let the horribly loaded question slide right past them, into oblivion. “Never.”
“Then just you put a sock in it and pour me a brandy.”
Dawn was fast approaching. Though he’d not yet been to bed, it was still far too early for brandy. But the bird’s beak was looking especially pointy and anyway, he had a headache, and nothing was better for headaches than a healthy splosh of fermented peaches. It might not kill the pain, but it swiftly made sure you no longer cared that the top of your head was threatening to explode.
He poured them each a drink and they sipped in sour, contemplative silence.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” he said at last, grumpily considering the bottom of his glass. “It means I have to tell Sir Alec I haven’t saved the day for him.”
“You haven’t saved it yet,” said Reg, with a genteel, alcoholic belch. “There’s still time.”
“Not much. And every hour that passes pushes Bibbie and Melissande and Gerald an hour closer to disaster.”
Reg rattled her tail. “That’s a very glass-half-empty way of looking at the world.”
“Actually, my glass is entirely empty,” he said. “Did you want some more brandy?”
“No,” said the bird. “And neither do you. What you want is a bath and some breakfast. The Sir Alecs of this world are best confronted with a clean face and a full belly.”
She was right. Again. Drat her. So he dragged himself upstairs, bathed, shaved, found some fresh clothes, then staggered back downstairs to fortify himself with coffee and porridge. After that, with the sun risen a decent distance above the horizon, he hauled out his crystal ball and gave Sir Alec the bad news.
Sir Alec was unimpressed and said so, at length.
“Well, honestly, sunshine, what did you expect?” said Reg, strutting to and fro across the kitchen table with an irritatingly derisive look in her eye. “You’ve known him a lot longer than I have and I’m not surprised.”
Monk dumped three teaspoons of sugar into his fresh cup of coffee and stirred so hard he nearly slopped half of it over the side.
“I didn’t say I was surprised.”
“Yes, you did,” Reg retorted. “Not five seconds ago. You said, and I quote, That miserable bastard! I don’t believe it!”
Aggrieved all over again, he thumped his fist to the bench beside the sink. “Yes! Precisely! I’m disbelieving, not surprised! Honestly, to hear him talk you’d think I didn’t give a toss about Gerald and Bibbie and Melissande!”
“Well…” Reg stopped strutting and scratched the side of her head. “To be honest, ducky, I think you’re wrong there. Don’t misunderstand me, I wouldn’t trust that sarky bugger as far as I could spit a hedgehog, but in case you weren’t paying attention, your Sir Alec’s not looking too flash. Seems to me you caught him in a bad moment, is all. Prob’ly he’s got a lot of prickly problems on his plate.”
Remembering the pallid cast to Sir Alec’s drawn face, and the shadows of strain beneath the tired, chilly grey eyes, Monk tossed his teaspoon into the sink. “So I’m s’posed to feel sorry for him now?” Picking up his coffee, he retreated to the nearest chair. “D’you think he’s keeping secrets?”
Reg hooted so hard she nearly fell over. “I don’t know, ducky. Do pigeons poop on statues?”
“I mean secrets about Splotze,” he said, glowering. “I mean do you think something’s gone wrong with Gerald’s mission and he’s not telling me because-because-” But a swiftly rising fear wouldn’t let him finish. “Dammit, Reg. I never should’ve let Bibbie set foot out of this house.”
“I don’t see how you could’ve stopped her, short of trussing the girl like a turkey and shoving her head first into a closet,” said Reg. “Now just you stop carrying on, sunshine. If something has gone arse over teakettle in Splotze, you’d know it. What you need to think about is how to fix that clever clogs door-opening hex of yours so that the bloody door stays open, right? Because tail feathers like mine don’t grow on trees!”
Monk looked at her tail. Thanks to a near-miss on the Blonkken embassy’s second floor, it was now minus three of its extravagantly long brown-and-black feathers.
“Yeah. Right. Sorry about that.”
“As well you should be,” Reg said tartly. “Because I’ll tell you this for nothing, my boy. I won’t be setting so much as a toe inside another embassy if there’s a chance of me flying out of it half-naked!”
He raised his hands in surrender. “I told you, I promise, it won’t happen again. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to brush my teeth then gird my loins to face another day of thaumaturgical adventures in R amp;D. Can you stay out of trouble until I get home?”
Her offended squawking followed him out of the kitchen, up the stairs and into the bathroom, where he scowled at his reflection while scrubbing his teeth. A tremor of worry shuddered through him as he rinsed his toothbrush.
I hope the wretched bird’s right. I hope nothing’s gone wrong in Splotze.
“I don’t know, Gerald,” said Melissande, fiddling with the end of her ribbon-tied, plaited hair. “You paying official sympathy calls? Really that’s something I should take care of myself.”