“They’re not my books,” I told him in an exasperated tone. “I had absolutely no say in their content-for the first four anyway.”
“Those were the ones she liked. The violent ones full of sex and death.”
“Did you come all this way to give me your wife’s analysis of my books?”
“No,” he said, “that was just the friendly breaking-the-ice part.”
“It isn’t working. Is there a floor covering I could interest you in?”
“Axminster.”
“We can certainly help you with that,” I replied professionally. “Living room or bedroom? We have some very hard-wearing wool/acrylic at extremely competitive prices-and we’ve a special this week on underlayment and free installation.”
“It was Axminster Purple I was referring to,” he said slowly, staring at me intently. My heart jumped but I masked it well. Axminster Purple wasn’t a carpet at all, of course, although to be honest there probably was an Axminster in purple, if I looked. No, he was referring to the semi-exotic cheese, one that I’d been trading in only a couple of days ago. Flanker showed me his badge. He was CEA-the Cheese Enforcement Agency.
“You’re not here for the carpets, are you?”
“I know you have form for cheese smuggling, Next. There was a lump of Rhayder Speckled found beneath a Hispano-Suiza in ’86, and you’ve been busted twice for possession since then. The second time you were caught with six kilos of Streaky Durham. You were lucky to be fined only for possession and not trading without a license.”
“Did you come here to talk about my past misdemeanors?”
“No. I’ve come to you for information. While cheese smuggling is illegal, it’s considered a low priority. The CEA has always been a small department more interested in collecting duty than banging up harmless cheeseheads. That’s all changed.”
“It has?”
“I’m afraid so,” replied Flanker grimly. “There’s a new cheese on the block. Something powerful enough to make a user’s head vanish in a ball of fire.”
“That’s a figure of speech for ‘really powerful,’ right?”
“No,” said Flanker with deadly seriousness. “The victim’s head really does vanish in a ball of fire. It’s a killer, Next-and addictive. It’s apparently the finest and most powerful cheese ever designed.”
This was worrying. I never regarded my cheese smuggling as anything more than harmless fun, cash for Acme and to supply something that should be legal anyway. If a cheese that I’d furnished had killed someone, I would face the music. Mind you, I’d tried most of what I’d flogged, and it was, after all, only cheese. Okay, so the taste of a particularly powerful cheese might render you unconscious or make your tongue numb for a week, but it never killed anyone-until now.
“Does this cheese have a name?” I asked, wondering if there’d been a bad batch of Machynlleth Wedi Marw.
“It only has a code name: X-14. Rumor says it’s so powerful that it has to be kept chained to the floor. We managed to procure a half ounce. A technician dropped it by mistake, and this was the result.”
He showed me a photograph of a smoking ruin.
“The remains of our central cheese-testing facility.”
He put the photograph away and stared at me. Of course, I had seen some X-14. It’d been chained up in the back of Pryce’s truck the night of the cheese buy. Owen had declined to even show it to me. I’d traded with him every month for over eight years, and I never thought he was the sort of person to knowingly peddle anything dangerous. He was like me: someone who just loved cheese. I wouldn’t snitch on him, not yet-not before I had more information.
“I don’t know anything,” I said at length, “but I can make inquiries.”
Flanker seemed to be satisfied with this, handed me his card and said in a stony voice, “I’ll expect your call.”
He turned and walked out of the store to a waiting Range Rover and drove off.
“Trouble for us?” asked Bowden as soon as I returned.
“No,” I replied thoughtfully, “trouble for me.”
He sighed. “That’s a relief.”
I took a deep breath and thought for a moment. Communications into the Socialist Republic of Wales were nonexistent-when I wanted to contact Pryce, I had to use a shortwave wireless transmitter at prearranged times. There was nothing I could do for at least forty-eight hours.
“So,” continued Bowden, handing me the clipboard with the list of people wanting quotes on it, “how about some Acme Carpets stuff?”
“What about SpecOps work?” I asked. “How’s that looking?”
“Stig’s still on the case of the Diatrymas and has at least a half dozen outstanding chimeras to track down. Spike has a few biters on the books, and there’s talk of another SEB over in Reading.”
It was getting desperate. I loved Acme, but only insofar as it was excellent cover and I never actually had to do anything carpet-related.
“And us? The ex-Literary Detectives?”
“Still nothing, Thursday.”
“What about Mrs. Mattock over in the Old Town? She still wants us to find her first editions, surely?”
“No,” said Bowden. “She called yesterday and said she was selling her books and replacing them with cable TV-she wanted to watch En gland’s Funniest Chain-Saw Mishaps.”
“And I felt so good just now.”
“Face it,” said Bowden sadly, “books are finished. No one wants to invest the time in them anymore.”
“I don’t believe you,” I replied, an optimist to the end. “I reckon if we went over to the Booktastic! megastore, they’d tell us that books are still being sold hand over fist to hard-core story aficionados. In fact, I’ll bet you that jar of cookies you’ve got hidden under your desk that you think no one knows about.”
“And if they’re not?”
“I’ll spend a day installing carpets and pressing flesh as the Acme Carpets celebrity saleswoman.”
It was a deal. Acme was on a trading estate with about twenty or so outlets, but, unusually, it was the only carpet showroom-we always suspected that Spike might have a hand in scaring off the competition, but we never saw him do it. Between us and Booktastic! there were three sporting-goods outlets all selling exactly the same goods at exactly the same price and, since they were three branches of the same store, with the same sales staff, too. The two discount electrical shops actually were competitors but still spookily managed to sell the same goods at the same price, although “sell” in this context actually meant “serve as brief custodian between outlet and landfill.”
“Hmm,” I said as we stood inside the entrance of Booktastic! and stared at the floor display units liberally stacked with CDs, DVDs, computer games, peripherals and special-interest magazines. “I’m sure there was a book in here last time I came in. Excuse me?”
A shop assistant stopped and stared at us in a vacant sort of way.
“I was wondering if you had any books.”
“Any what?”
“Books. Y’know-about so big and full of words arranged in a specific order to give the effect of reality?”
“You mean DVDs?”
“No, I mean books. They’re kind of old-fashioned.”
“Ah!” she said. “What you mean are videotapes.”
“No, what I mean are books.”
We’d exhausted the sum total of her knowledge, so she went into default mode. “You’ll have to see the manager. She’s in the coffee shop.”
“Which one?” I asked, looking around. There appeared to be three-and this wasn’t Booktastic!’s biggest outlet either.
“That one.”
We thanked her and walked past boxed sets of obscure sixties TV series that were better-and safer-within the rose-tinted glow of memory.
“This is all so wrong,” I said, beginning to think I might lose the bet. “Less than five years ago, this place was all books and nothing else. What the hell’s going on?”