The Eyre Affair

worked his way steadily upwards to being number three on the planet’s most-wanted list.’

‘Who’re number one and two?’

‘I don’t know and I have been reliably informed that it’s far better not to know.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘I’ll call you. Stay alert and keep your pager with you at all times. You’re on leave as of now from SO-27, so just enjoy the time off. I’ll be seeing you!’

He was gone in an instant, leaving me with the SO-5 badge and a thumping heart. Boswell returned, followed by a curious Paige. I showed them both the badge.

‘Way to go!’ said Paige, giving me a hug, but Boswell seemed less happy. After all, he did have his own department to think about.

‘They can play very rough at SO-5, Next,’ said Boswell in a fatherly tone. ‘I want you to go back to your desk and have a long, calm think about this. Have a cup of coffee and a bun. No, have two buns. Don’t make any rash decisions, and just run through all the pros and cons of the argument. When you’ve done that I would be happy to adjudicate. Do you understand?’

I understood. In my hurry to leave the office I almost forgot the picture of Landen.

4. Acheron Hades

‘… The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts—and let’s face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field—is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good—and we all know how rare that is…’

Acheron Hades. Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit

Tamworth didn’t call that week, nor the week after. I tried to call him at the beginning of the third week but was put through to a trained denialist who flatly refused to admit that Tamworth or SO-5 even existed. I used the time to get up to date with some reading, filing, mending the car, and also—because of the new legislation—to register Pickwick as a pet rather than a wild dodo. I took him to the town hall where a veterinary inspector studied the once-extinct bird very carefully. Pickwick stared back forlornly, as he, in common with most pets, didn’t fancy the vet much.

‘Plock-plock,’ said Pickwick nervously as the inspector expertly clipped the large brass ring around his ankle.

‘No wings?’ asked the official curiously, staring at Pickwick’s slightly odd shape.

‘He’s a Version 1.2,’ I explained. ‘One of the first. They didn’t get the sequence complete until 1.7.’

‘Must be pretty old.’

‘Twelve years this October.’

‘I had one of the early Thylacines,’ said the official glumly. ‘A Version 2.1. When we decanted him he had no ears. Stone deaf. No warranty or anything. Bloody liberty, I call it. Do you read New Splicer?’

I had to admit that I didn’t.

‘They sequenced a Stella Seacow last week. How do I even get one of those through the door?’

‘Grease its sides?’ I suggested. ‘And show it a plate of kelp?’

But the official wasn’t listening; he had turned his attention to the next dodo, a pinkish creature with a long neck. The owner caught my eye and smiled sheepishly.

‘Redundant strands filled in with flamingo,’ he explained. ‘I should have used dove.’

‘Version 2.9?’

‘2.9.1, actually. A bit of a hotchpotch but to us he’s simply Chester. We wouldn’t swap him for anything.’

The inspector had been studying Chester’s registration documents.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, ‘2.9.15 come under the new Chimera category.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not enough dodo to be dodo. Room Seven down the corridor. Follow the owner of the pukey, but be careful; I sent a quarkbeast down there this morning.’

I left Chester’s owner and the official arguing together and took Pickwick for a waddle in the park. I let him off the lead and he chased a few pigeons before fraternising with some feral dodos who were cooling their feet in the pond. They splashed excitedly and made quiet plock plock noises to one another until it was time to go home.

Two days after that I had run out of ways to rearrange the furniture, so it was lucky that Tamworth called me. He told me he was on a stakeout and that I needed to join him. I hastily scribbled down the address and was in the East End in under forty minutes. The stakeout was in a shabby street of converted warehouses that had been due for demolition two decades before. I doused the lights and got out, hid anything of value and locked the car carefully. The battered Pontiac was old and grotty enough not to arouse suspicion in the grimy surroundings. I glanced around. The brickwork was crumbling and heavy smears of green algae streaked the walls where the down pipes had once been. The windows were cracked and dirty and the brick wall at ground level was stained alternately with graffiti or the sooty blackness of a recent fire. A rusty fire escape zigzagged up the dark building and cast a staccato shadow on the potholed road and several burnt-out cars. I made my way to a side door according to Tamworth’s instructions. Inside, large cracks had opened up in the walls and the damp and decay had mixed with the smell of Jeyes fluid and a curry shop on the ground floor. A neon light flashed on and off regularly, and I saw several women in tight skirts hovering in the dark doorways. The citizens who lived in the area were a curious mix; the lack of cheap housing in and around London attracted a cross-section of people, from locals to down-and-outs to professionals. It wasn’t great from a law-and-order point of view, but it did allow SpecOps agents to move around without raising suspicion.

I reached the seventh floor, where a couple of young Henry Fielding fanatics were busy swapping bubble- gum cards. ‘I’ll swap you one Sophia for an Amelia.’

‘Piss off!’ replied his friend indignantly. ‘If you want Sophia you’re going to have to give me an Airworthy plus a Tom Jones, as well as the Amelia!’

His friend, realising the rarity of a Sophia, reluctantly agreed. The deal was done and they ran off downstairs to look for hub-caps. I compared a number with the address that Tamworth had given me and rapped on a door covered with peeling peach-coloured paint. It was opened cautiously by a man somewhere in his eighties. He half hid his face from me with a wrinkled hand, and I showed him my badge.

‘You must be Next,’ he said in a voice that was really quite sprightly for his age. I ignored the old joke and went in. Tamworth was peering through some binoculars at a room in the building opposite and waved a greeting without looking up. I looked at the old man again and smiled.

‘Call me Thursday.’

He seemed gratified at this and shook my hand.

‘The name’s Snood; you can call me Junior.’

‘Snood?’ I echoed. ‘Any relation to Filbert?’

The old man nodded.

‘Filbert, ah yes!’ he murmured. ‘A good lad and a fine son to his father!’

Filbert Snood was the only man who had even remotely interested me since I left Landen ten years ago. Snood had been in the ChronoGuard; he went away on assignment to Tewkesbury and never came back. I had a call from his commanding officer explaining that he had been unavoidably detained. I took that to mean another girl. It hurt at the time but I hadn’t been in love with Filbert. I was certain of that because I had been in love with Landen. When you’ve been there you know it, like seeing a Turner or going for a walk on the west