of glass-topped tables and chrome-legged neo-Bauhaus chairs, there were long wooden tables and the shattered remains of benches. The floor was covered in straw and bodies. A small dog was sniffing a pool of fresh blood with evident delight. Apart from the dog, he seemed to be the only living creature on the premises.
Fun, he thought. No, not really.
One of the bodies, a huge man in a leather jerkin, groaned and twitched slightly. Probably not a good idea to be the first thing he saw when he woke up.
At the far end of the room was a long wooden counter, with smashed jars and bottles on top. Sitting on the floor with his back to the counter was another enormous man in a leather jerkin. He was fast asleep, which was probably just as well, since someone had seen fit to pin him to the bar with two knives, driven through the fleshy parts of his ears.
Time to leave; but in order to do that, he needed –
One of the dead men had a moneybag on his belt. Theo hesitated for a moment, then knelt down and, feeling morally inferior to an investment banker cashing his bonus cheque, pried open the drawstring and helped himself to a handful of small silver coins. When he stood up again, he saw a small, round woman walking past him holding a broom. She didn’t seem to have noticed the dead people. She was humming.
He watched her walk to the counter, hitching up her skirt as she stepped over a couple of bodies along the way, and start sweeping broken crockery off the bar top. He thought for a moment, then made his way to the counter and cleared his throat.
The woman looked up and smiled. “Yes, dear?”
“Excuse me,” Theo said, “but have you got any doughnuts?”
She nodded, stooped and produced a tray of doughnuts from under the bar. “Farthing each,” she said. “You’re not from around here.”
“No.”
“On your holidays?”
Somewhere below him and to his right, someone groaned horribly. “Yes.”
She nodded. “You’ll be here for the flower-arranging festival, then.”
“That’s right.” He spread the plundered coins out on the bar top. “Is that enough?”
“What for?”
“A doughnut.”
She smiled at him and took one coin. “Where are you from, then?”
“South.”
“Ah.” That appeared to be all the explanation she needed. “While you’re here, be sure to see the pig fighting. Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the market square.”
“I’ll make a point of it.” His hand, his visible right hand, stretched out towards the nearest doughnut.
“We don’t get many southerners,” the woman was saying. Then she frowned and looked at him. “You remind me of someone, you know.”
“Really.” His fingertip made contact with the doughnut, in roughly the manner shown on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was slightly sticky, and he could feel individual grains of sugar.
“That’s right. There was a young chap used to come in here a while back, looked just like you. Only he wasn’t from the south. Easterner, he was.”
“Well, then,” Theo said. “Our family’s lived down south for ninety-six generations.”
“Max, his name was.”
Theo snatched his hand away as though the doughnut was red-hot iron. “Max?”
She nodded. “Funny name. I guess that’s why it stuck in my mind. Max as in maximum, you see, and him being so skinny.”
There are hundreds of thousands of people called Max in the real universe, Theo thought, and no reason to suppose it’s not exactly the same here. But his brother had been so thin, he was practically two-dimensional. “When did you see him last?”
“Now you’re asking.” She frowned and squidged her eyelids together; you could practically see the white mice running round inside the little wheel. “Can’t say for sure. We get lots of people in here, you know.”
Quite, Theo thought, and by the looks of it, most of them leave in wheelbarrows. A horrible thought struck him. “Was he – I mean, did he die here?”
The frown deepened, until you could’ve hidden a small elephant in it. “Don’t think so,” she said; but her tone of voice suggested a verdict on the balance of probabilities, rather than beyond reasonable doubt. “It can get a bit boisterous in here sometimes. You know, lads larking about.”
The man pinned by his ears to the bar groaned, as if in confirmation. “But this Max character. He—”
“No, I’m pretty sure he made it,” she said. “Because I remember Big Con – that’s him there, bless him,” she went on, nodding in the direction of a crumpled bag of bones near the