The Eyre Affair

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?’

‘Not at all,’ I replied, thinking of my own experiences with Rochester, ‘but are you absolutely sure he fell into Dombey and Son?

‘What do you mean?’

‘He could have made the jump by choice. He might have preferred it—and stayed.’

Victor looked at me strangely. He hadn’t dared tell anyone about his theories for fear of being ostracised, but here was a respected London LiteraTec nearly half his age going farther than even he had imagined. A thought crossed his mind.

‘You’ve done it, haven’t you?’

I looked him straight in the eye. For this we could both be pensioned off.

‘Once,’ I whispered. ‘When I was a very young girl. I don’t think I could do it again. For many years I thought even that was a hallucination.’