“Well!” said Joffy as we shut the door. “How about that? Mum’s after a bit of Teutonic slap and tickle!”

  I raised an eyebrow and stared at him.

  “I hardly think so, Joff. Dad doesn’t turn up that often and intelligent male company can be hard to find.”

  Joffy chuckled.

  “Just good friends, eh? Okay. Here’s the deal: I’ll bet you a tenner Mum and the Iron Chancellor are doing the wild thing by this time next week.”

  “Done.”

  We shook hands and with Emma, Hamlet, Bismarck and my mother thus engaged, I asked Joffy to look after Friday so I could slip out of the house to get some air.

  I turned left and wandered up Marlborough Road, looking about at the changes that two years’ absence had wrought. I had walked this way to school for almost eight years, and every wall and tree and house was as familiar to me as an old friend. A new hotel had gone up on Piper’s Way, and a few shops in the Old Town had either changed hands or been updated. It all felt very familiar, and I wondered whether the feeling of wanting to belong somewhere would stay with me or fade, like my fondness for Caversham Heights, the book in which I had made my home these past few years.

  I walked down Bath Road, took a right and found myself in the street where Landen and I had lived before he was eradicated. I had returned home one afternoon to find his mother and father in residence. Since they hadn’t known who I was and considered—not unreasonably—that I was dangerously insane, I decided to play it safe today and just walk past slowly on the other side of the street.

  Nothing looked very different. A tub of withered Tickia orologica was still on the porch next to an old pogo stick, and the curtains in the windows were certainly his mother’s. I walked on, then retraced my steps and returned, my resolve to get him back mixed with a certain fatalism that perhaps ultimately I wouldn’t and the thought that I should prepare myself. After all, he had died when he was two years old, and I had no memories of how it had been, but only of how things might have turned out had he lived.

  I shrugged my shoulders and chastised myself upon the morbidity of my own thoughts, then walked towards the Goliath Twilight Homes, where my gran was staying these days.

  Granny Next was in her room watching a nature documentary called Walking with Ducks when I was shown in by the nurse. Gran was wearing a blue gingham nightie, had wispy gray hair and looked all of her 110 years. She had got it into her head that she couldn’t shuffle off this mortal coil until she had read the ten most boring books, but since “boring” was about as impossible to quantify as “not boring,” it was difficult to know how to help.

  “Shhh!” she muttered as soon as I walked in. “This program’s fascinating!” She was staring at the TV screen earnestly. “Just think,” she went on, “by analyzing the bones of the extinct duck Anas platyrhynchos, they can actually figure out how it walked.”

  I stared at the small screen where an odd animated bird waddled strangely in a backwards direction as the narrator explained just how they had managed to deduce such a thing.

  “How could they know that just by looking at a few old bones?” I asked doubtfully, having learned my lesson long ago that an “expert” was usually anything but.

  “Scoff not, young Thursday,” replied Gran. “A panel of expert avian paleontologists have even deduced that a duck’s call might have sounded something like this: ‘Quock, quock.’ ”

  “ ‘Quock’? Hardly seems likely.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she replied, switching off the TV and tossing the remote aside. “What do experts know?”

  Like me, Gran was able to jump inside fiction. I wasn’t sure how either of us did it, but I was very glad that she could—it was she who helped me not to forget my husband, something at one time I was in a clear and real danger of doing thanks to Aornis, the mnemonomorph, of course. But Gran had left me about a year ago, announcing that I could fend for myself and she wouldn’t waste any more time laboring for me hand and foot, which was a bit of cheek really, as I generally looked after her. But no matter. She was my gran, and I loved her a great deal.

  “Goodness!” I said, looking at her soft and wrinkled skin, which put me oddly in mind of a baby echidna I had once seen in National Geographic.

  “What?” she asked sharply.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You were thinking of how old I was looking, weren’t you?”

  It was hard to deny it. Every time I saw her, I felt she couldn’t look any older, but the next time, with startling regularity, she did.

  “When did you get back?”

  “This morning.”

  “And how are you finding things?”

  I brought her up to date with current events. She made “tuttutting” noises when I told her about Hamlet and Lady Hamilton, then even louder “tut-tut” noises when I mentioned my mother and Bismarck.

  “Risky business, that.”

  “Mum and Bismarck?”

  “Emma and Hamlet.”

  “He’s fictional and she’s historical—what could be wrong about that?”

  “I was thinking,” she said slowly, raising an eyebrow, “about what would happen if Ophelia found out.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, and she was right. Hamlet could be difficult, but Ophelia was impossible.

  “I always thought the reason Sir John Falstaff retired from policing Elizabethan drama was to get away from Ophelia’s sometimes unreasonable demands,” I mused, “such as having petting animals and a goodly supply of mineral water and fresh sushi on hand at Elsinore whenever she was working. Do you think I should insist Hamlet return to Hamlet?”

  “Perhaps not right away,” said Gran, coughing into her hanky. “Let him see what the real world is like. Might do him good to realize it needn’t take five acts to make up one’s mind.”

  She started coughing again, so I called the nurse, who told me I should probably leave her. I kissed her good-bye and walked out of the rest home deep in thought, trying to work up a strategy for the next few days. I dreaded to think what my overdraft was like, and if I was to catch Kaine I’d be better off inside SpecOps than outside. There were no two ways about it: I needed my old job back. I’d attempt that tomorrow and take it from there. Kaine certainly needed dealing with, and I’d play it by ear at the TV studios tonight. I’d probably have to find a speech therapist for Friday to try to wean him off the Lorem Ipsum, and then, of course, there was Landen. How do I even begin to get someone returned to the here-and-now after they were deleted from the there-and-then by a chronupt official from the supposedly incorruptible ChronoGuard.

  I was jolted from my thoughts as I approached Mum’s house. There appeared to be someone partially hidden from view in the alleyway opposite. I nipped into the nearest front garden, ran between the houses, across two back gardens and then stood on a dustbin to peak cautiously over a high wall. I was right. There was someone watching my mother’s house. He was dressed too warmly for summer and was half hidden in the buddleia. My foot slipped on the dustbin, and I made a noise. The lurker looked around, saw me and took flight. I jumped over the wall and gave chase. It was easier than I thought. He wasn’t terribly fit, and I caught up with him as he tried rather pathetically to climb a wall. Pulling the man down, I upset his small duffel bag, and out poured an array of battered notebooks, a camera, a small pair of binoculars and several copies of the SpecOps-27 Gazette, much annotated in red pen.

  “Ow, ow, ow, get off!” he said. “You’re hurting!”

  I twisted his arm, and he dropped to his knees. I was just patting his pockets for a weapon when another man, dressed not unlike the first, came charging out from behind an abandoned car, holding aloft a tree branch. I spun, dodged the blow, and as the second man’s momentum carried him on, I pushed him hard with my foot, and he slammed headfirst into a wall and collapsed unconscious.

  The first man was unarmed, so I made sure his unconscious friend was also unarmed—and wasn’t going to choke on his blood or teeth or something.

  “I know you’re not SpecOps,” I observed, “because you’re both way too crap. Goliath?”

  The first man got slowly to his feet and was looking curiously at me, rubbing his arm where I had twisted it. He was a big man, but not an unkindly-looking one. He had short dark hair and a large mole on his chin. I had broken his spectacles; he didn’t look Goliath, but I had been wrong before.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Next. I’ve been waiting for you for a long long time.”

  “I’ve been away.”

  “Since January 1986. I’ve waited nearly two and a half years to see you.”

  “And why would you do a thing like that?”

  “Because,” said the man, producing an identity badge from his pocket and handing it over, “I am your officially sanctioned stalker.”

  I looked at the badge. It was true enough; he was allocated to me. All 100 percent legit, and I didn’t have a say in it. The whole stalker thing was licensed by SpecOps-33, the Entertainments Facilitation Department, who had drawn up specific rules with the Amalgamated Union of Stalkers as to who is allowed to stalk whom. It helps to regulate a historically dark business and also grades stalkers according to skill and perseverance. My stalker was an impressive Grade-1, the sort who are permitted to stalk the really big celebrities. And that made me suspicious.

  “A Grade-1?” I queried. “Should I be flattered? I don’t suppose I’m anything above a Grade-8.”

  “Not nearly that high,” agreed my stalker. “More like a Grade- 12. But I’ve got a hunch you’re going to get bigger. I latched on to Lola Vavoom in the sixties when she was just a bit part in The Streets of Wootton Bassett and stalked her for nineteen years, man and boy. I only gave her up to move on to Buck Stallion. When she heard, she sent me a glass tankard with THANK YOU FOR A GREAT STALK, LOLA etched onto it. Have you ever met her?”

  “Once, Mr. . . .” I looked at the pass before handing it back. “De Floss. Interesting name. Any relation to Candice?”

  “The author? In my dreams,” replied the stalker, rolling his eyes. “But since I’d like us to be friends, do please call me Millon.”

  “Millon it is, then.”

  And we shook hands. The man on the ground moaned and sat up, rubbing his head.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “He’s not my friend,” said Millon, “he’s my stalker. And a pain in the arse he is, too.”

  “Wait—you’re a stalker and you have a stalker?”

  “Of course!” laughed Millon. “Ever since I published my autobiography, A Stalk on the Wild Side, I’ve become a bit of a celebrity myself. I even have a sponsorship deal with Compass Rose™ duffel coats. It is my celebrity status that enables Adam here to stalk me. Come to think of it, he’s a Grade-3 stalker, so it’s possible he’s got a stalker of his own—haven’t you heard the poem?”

  Before I could stop him, he started to recite:

  “. . . And so the tabloids do but say,

  that stalkers on other stalkers prey,

  and these have smaller stalkers to stalk ’em

  and so proceed, ad infinitum. . . .”

  “No, I hadn’t heard that one,” I mused as the second stalker placed a handkerchief to his bleeding lip.

  “Miss Next, this is Adam Gnusense. Adam, Miss Next.”

  He waved weakly at me, looked at the bloodied handkerchief and sighed mournfully. I felt rather remorseful all of a sudden.

  “Sorry to hit you, Mr. Gnusense, “ I said apologetically. “I didn’t know what either of you were up to.”

  “Occupational hazard, Miss Next.”

  “Hey, Adam,” said Millon, suddenly sounding enthusiastic, “do you have your own stalker yet?”

  “Somewhere,” said Gnusense looking around, “a Grade-34 loser. The sad bastard was rummaging through my bins last night. Passé or what!”

  “Kids—tsk,” said Millon. “It might have been de rigueur in the sixties, but the modern stalker is much more subtle. Long vigils, copious notes, timed entry and exits, telephoto lenses.”

  “We live in sad times,” agreed Adam, shaking his head sadly. “Must be off. I said I’d keep a close eye on Adrian Lush for a friend.”

  He stood up and shambled slowly away down the alley, stumbling on discarded beer cans.

  “Not a great talker is old Adam,” said Millon in a whisper, “but sticks to his target like a limpet. You wouldn’t catch him rummaging through dustbins—unless he was giving a master class for a few of the young pups, of course. Tell me, Miss Next, but where have you been for the past two and a half years? It’s been a bit dull here—after the first eighteen months of you not showing up, I’d reduced my stalking to only three nights a week.”

  “You’d never believe me.”

  “You’d be surprised what I can believe. Aside from stalking I’ve just finished my new book, A Short History of the Special Operations Network. I’m also editor of Conspiracy Theorist magazine. In between pieces on the very tangible link between Goliath and Yorrick Kaine and the existence of a mysterious beast known only as Guinzilla, we’ve run several articles devoted entirely to you and that Jane Eyre thing. We’d love to do a piece on your uncle Mycroft’s work, too. Even though we know almost nothing, the conspiracy network is alive with healthy half-truths, lies and supposition. Did he really build an LCD cloaking device for cars?”

  “Sort of.”

  “And translating carbon paper?”

  “He called it rossetionery.”

  “And what about the Ovinator? Conspiracy Theorist devotes several pages of unsubstantiated rumors to this one invention alone.”

  “I don’t know. Some sort of machine for cooking eggs, perhaps? Is there anything you don’t know about my family?”

  “Not a lot. I’m thinking of writing a biography about you. How about Thursday Next: A Biography?”

  “The title? Way too imaginative.”

  “So I have your permission?”

  “No, but if you can put a dossier together on Yorrick Kaine, I’ll tell you all about Aornis Hades.”

  “Acheron’s little sister? It’s a deal! Are you sure I can’t write your biography? I’ve already made a start.”

  “Positive. If you find anything, knock on my door.”

  “I can’t. There’s a blanket restraining order on all members of the Amalgamated Union of Stalkers. We’re not allowed within a hundred yards of your place of residence.”

  I sighed. “All right, just wave when I come out.”

  De Floss readily agreed to that plan, and I left him rearranging his notebook, binoculars and camera and starting to make copious notes on his first encounter with me. I couldn’t get rid of the poor deluded fool, but a stalker just might—might—be an ally.

  3.

  Evade the Question Time

  Perfidious Danes “Historically Our Enemy,” Claims Insane Historian

  “Quite frankly, I was yim-pim-pim appalled,” said England’s leading mad history scholar yesterday. “The eighth-century Danish attack on our flibble-flobble sceptered isle is a story of invasion, subjugation, plunder and exploitation that would remain bleep-bleep-baaaaa unequaled until we tried it ourselves many years later.” The confused and barely coherent historian’s work has been authenticated by another equally feeble-minded academic who told us yesterday, “The Danish invasion began in 786 when the Danes set up a kingdom in East Anglia. They didn’t even use their own names either. They preferred to do their brutal work cowardly hiding beneath the pseudonyms of Angles, Bruts and Flynns.” Further research has shown that the Danes stayed for over four hundred years and were driven home only by the crusading help of our new close friends the French.

  Article in The New Oppressor,

  the official mouthpiece of the Whig Party

  How did Kaine rise so quickly to power?” I asked incredulouslyas Joffy and I queued patiently outside Swindon’s ToadNewsNetwork studios that evening. “When I was here last, Kaine and the Whig Party were all but washed up after the Cardenio debacle.”

  Joffy looked grim and nodded towards a large crowd of uniformed Kaine followers who were waiting in silence for their glorious leader.

  “Things haven’t been good back here, Thurs. Kaine regained his seat after Samuel Pring was assassinated. The Whigs formed an alliance with the Liberals and elected Kaine as their leader. He has some sort of magnetism, and the numbers that attend his rallies increase all the time. His ‘British unification’ stance has had much support—mostly with stupid people who can’t be bothered to think for themselves.”

  “War with Wales?”

  “He hasn’t said as such, but a leopard doesn’t change its spots. He won by a landslide after the previous government collapsed over the ‘cash for llamas’ scandal. As soon as he was in power he proclaimed himself chancellor. His Unreform Act last year restricted the vote to people with property.”

  “How did he get parliament to agree to that?” I muttered, aghast at the thought of it.

  “We’re not sure,” said Joffy sadly. “Sometimes parliament does the funniest things. But he’s not happy just being chancellor. He’s arguing that committees and accountants only slow things down, and if people really want trains to run on time and shopping trolleys to run straight, it could be done only by one man wielding unquestionable executive power—a dictator.”

  “So what’s stopping him?”

  “The President,” replied Joffy quietly. “Formby has told Kaine that if Kaine pushes for a dictatorial election, he will stand against him, and Yorrick knows full well that Formby would win—he’s as popular now as he ever was.”

  I thought for a moment. “How old is President Formby?”

  “That’s the problem. He was eighty-four last May.”

  We fell silent for a moment and shuffled with the queue up to the stage door, had our identities checked by two ugly men from SO-6 and were then ushered in. We took our seats at the back and waited patiently for the show to begin. It seemed hard to believe that Kaine had managed to inveigle his way to the top of English politics, but, I reflected, anything can happen to a fictional character—a trait that Yorrick had obviously exploited to the full.