* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER TWELVE
I SUPPOSE IT WAS stupid of me to expect Scrimgeour to answer the telephone himself: he was, after all, staying as a guest with one or other offshoot of his family. Nonetheless, I was disconcerted when the voice at the other end of the line yapped at me in a foreign tongue.
"Er, I'd like to speak to Agamemnon Scrimgeour, please," I said, as politely as I know how. The voice said something like "ick" or "ack", so, after clearing my throat, I repeated my request. There was a sort of scuffling at the other end, followed by what I could only imagine to be the racket made by a flock of auks being hosed down by a powerful jet of water.
"Hello?" I said.
"Hello?" This new voice was an almost inaudible croak: it was not Scrimgeour. Once again I asked to speak to him. There was a long silence, although it was clear that the croaker was still there, hanging on to the phone, breathing rather heavily. I let half a minute pass before prompting him, or her. Or, knowing Scrimgeour's family, it.
"Are you there?" I asked, loudly, as if I were acting in a bad play.
"Hello?" the croaker recroaked. I sensed that this conversation was going to last a long time, and decided to make myself comfortable.
"Wait there," I commanded. The previous week, for reasons best known to herself, my mother had had the house's one telephone removed to a damp, bare room no bigger than a cupboard, accessible only by clambering through the jungle of gigantic, spiny, poisonous foliage which she thought of as her "conservatory". Peering out of the telephone room into the dripping heat, I wondered where I might find a couple of cushions or pillows upon which to recline. I resolved to head west, towards the long-abandoned nursery. Before I did so, I picked up the telephone again.
"Wait," I repeated, "I'll be back in a couple of minutes."
In truth, some five or six minutes elapsed during my foray to the nursery, in which time I incurred a variety of scrapes, scratches and lacerations from mama's specimens of gruesome flora. Sweat was pouring off me as I collapsed back into the dingy confines of the telephone room, and I dared not dwell upon the maladies to which I would succumb as deadly plant-poisons worked their way into my bloodstream. Hurling my armful of nursery cushions on to the floor, I sank down on them, and picked up the receiver.
"I'm back," I announced.
"Ick?" came the reply.
"Get me Agamemnon Scrimgeour at once!" I cried, "Tell him it's a matter of life and death!"
"Ack?"
Hm. The croaker had obviously given up on me. He, she, or it had at least spoken my own language. I tried out a variety of phrases designed to impress upon my interlocutor that I wished to speak to "the croaking one". Eventually, at my umpteenth attempt, something worked. There was a final "ick", another scuffle, further dousing of auks, and, at last, a different and intelligible voice, a new one again, urgent and interrogatory.
"Hello? Hello? Hello?"
"Ah, hello," I replied, all suave, "May I speak to Agamemnon Scrimgeour please?"
"Which one?"
"What?"
"Which Agamemnon Scrimgeour do you wish to speak to?"
I had had many long talks with Scrimgeour about his family, but he had never let drop that he shared his cognomen with another.
"I didn't know there were two of them," I said.
"Actually, there are eight," came the reply, "Of whom I am one. Now, which one is it you wish to speak to?"
Eight Agamemnons in one family? It didn't bear thinking about. I was so startled that I had difficulty summoning up any distinguishing features of the Agamemnon I knew.
"Ah," I said at last, "The one with a metal plate in his skull."
There was a pause.
"That narrows it down to five of us. At least we have established that you do not wish to speak to me."
I thought for a moment.
"My name is Zoltan Mingbike," I said, using another anagram, but one with which I knew Scrimgeour - my Scrimgeour - would be familiar, "He works for me."
"Wait there," said the Scrimgeour at the other end. I plumped up my cushions and wished I had brought a hefty bottle of Fin de Siecle Moustachio with me. A minute or two later, the Scrimgeour was back.
"There are four Agamemnon Scrimgeours here who claim to work for someone using your name," he said, "Three of whom have metal plates in their skulls." I was astounded. "We're getting there," he continued, encouragingly. I think I have mentioned earlier that my patience is inhuman. However.
"Now look here!" I yelled, "I cannot believe that Zoltan Mingbikes are as common as, as, as Agawhatever Scrimgeours, let alone that they all seem to work for each other! Stop your piddling and get me Scrimgeour this instant!" This was an ill-measured little outburst, as I now realise, and did me not one whit of good with the Scrimgeour to whom I was speaking.
"If, sirrah, you wish to speak to Agamemnon Scrimgeour," he said, "You would do well not to give vent to such rudery. I shall give you ten seconds. If, in that time, you have not apologised, I shall hang up." Such was my frazzlement that I let nine seconds elapse before, sheepishly, I blathered a few sorry mumblings.
"Very well. Thank you," said Agamemnon Scrimgeour. "Let us proceed. We are down to a shortlist of three. What else can you tell me about the Agamemnon you wish to speak to?"
"He has a crestfallen air about him." There was a sound of wry chuckling from the other end.
"Oh, so have we all," said the Scrimgeour, "So have we all. It's a family trait."
"I see," I replied, chastened, "Um. I live in a large mansion on the coast. Agamemnon helps me to care for a shattered retainer named Mister Patch. We sometimes play ping-pong of an afternoon."
"Yes?"
"Well isn't that enough?" I asked.
"Do you know his middle name, shoe size, or the width of his girth?"
"Eh?"
"Has he had pulmonary thrombosis?"
"What?"
"I'm sorry. I was codding you. Wait a moment and I'll get him."
While I waited I picked my teeth. After an age, the same bloody Scrimgeour returned to the telephone.
"Hello?"
"Yes yes yes?" I rapped. What was the problem now?
"I'm afraid your Agamemnon has had a little accident," he said, "Apparently, he got trapped in a wind tunnel this morning, and has become temporarily deaf."
I was having none of this. Larding my tones with pomposity, I suggested to the speaker that he could act as an intermediary: his role would be to communicate my words to Agamemnon by sign language, or by writing them down, and, by reversing the process, give me the other side of the conversation.
"Hm," he replied after a pause, "I'm afraid that won't be possible. Your Agamemnon is abed, bandaged and sedated. You see, trapped with him in the wind tunnel was an enormous bittern which, in its panic, injured him rather badly."
"Well, is he half-way conscious?" I demanded.
"Oh yes, the sedatives are only mild ones. But, you see, Aunt Pansy was doing one of her little experiments at the time, and unfortunately a small amount of her nerve gas seeped into the wind tunnel, causing Agamemnon to suffer a complete memory loss. It is truly remarkable, as if his brain has been simply wiped clean. Pansy assures us that luckily, like the deafness, this total amnesia is only temporary." It was a very pretty speech, but it left me at a complete loss. I gnashed my teeth.
"You sound as if you are gnashing your teeth," said the Scrimgeour. "It must be very frustrating for you. However, I do have some good news. Just now, when I went upstairs to check on Agamemnon's condition, I took the opportunity to rifle through the pockets of his smoking-jacket, and came upon a scrunched-up scrap of paper which looks very much like the beginning of a letter. I'm something of a dab hand at anagrams, and at a guess I'd say the letter is addressed to you, Zoltan. Would you like me to read it to you?"
"By all the minnows in the biggest of ponds, yes, yes!" I cried.
"Right. As I say, it's only the beginning of a letter. It stops in mid-sentence, actually, but-"
"Just get on with it!" I roared.
"Keep on like that and I'll have to put mufflers in my ears," said the Scrimgeour. I apologised again.
"Now, let me see. Dear Tolzna, it says, I am having a tremendously exciting little holiday, but not a minute passes without my thinking of you and poor Mister Patch. I know that you are still determined to hunt down that album of his, and I have to concede that to do so may be the only way to reanimate him: lord knows we have tried everything else. Aunt Pansy tells me of a terrific private investigator who is by all accounts a match for the late, great Fig: her name is Matilda Spamclot. When you set me the task of finding a Fig-substitute, I overlooked her because- and that's it, I'm afraid. Does it make any sense to you?"
I thanked him profusely and slammed down the receiver: which was rather foolish of me. I stood there in the sopping heat, feeling all resolute, and consciously setting my jawline into a determined, heroic jut. Then I realised that I didn't have a clue what to do next. How was I to track down Matilda Spamclot? Was she indeed possessed of the same mettle as Fig? Why had the almost insanely thorough Scrimgeour overlooked her? How much would she charge to tackle what appeared to be such a hopeless quest? Even if she succeeded, would my theory prove correct? Would Mister Patch be revivified at the sight of a mouldering album full of fading pre-adhesive postage stampings? My mulling over these questions was interrupted by a hammering at the front door. Without Scrimgeour to do his bit, and assuming that my mother was floating about somewhere in the house fixated on her whims, I hurried down to answer it. Opening the door, I was confronted by a whey-faced young woman in a wheelchair, clutching in her lap a cardboard box barely held together by yards and yards of inexpertly-tied string.
"Hello there," she said in an exhausted voice, "You must be Zinnigmot Blake."
"I am he," I replied, after the briefest of pauses to do a mental anagram-check: I had not heard this one before, but I found it rather pleasing. "And who, might I ask, are you?"
She cleared her throat and spat a gobbet onto the gravel.
"They call me Matilda Spamclot," she announced.
* a novel by frank key *