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.”
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.”
