“I have a—a certain network of agents,” said Aziraphale, after a while. “Spread across the country. A disciplined force. I could set them searching.”
“I, er, have something similar,” Crowley admitted. “You know how it is, you never know when they might come in handy … ”
“We’d better alert them. Do you think they ought to work together?”
Crowley shook his head.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said. “They’re not very sophisticated, politically speaking.”
“Then we’ll each contact our own people and see what they can manage.”
“Got to be worth a try, I suppose,” said Crowley. “It’s not as if I haven’t got lots of other work to do, God knows.”
His forehead creased for a moment, and then he slapped the steering wheel triumphantly.
“Ducks!” he shouted.
“What?”
“That’s what water slides off!”
Aziraphale took a deep breath.
“Just drive the car, please,” he said wearily.
They drove back through the dawn, while the cassette player played J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor, vocals by F. Mercury.
Crowley liked the city in the early morning. Its population consisted almost entirely of people who had proper jobs to do and real reasons for being there, as opposed to the unnecessary millions who trailed in after 8 a.m., and the streets were more or less quiet. There were double yellow no-parking lines in the narrow road outside Aziraphale’s bookshop, but they obediently rolled back on themselves when the Bentley pulled in to the curb.
“Well, okay,” he said, as Aziraphale got his coat from the back seat. “We’ll keep in touch. Okay?”
“What’s this?” said Aziraphale, holding up a brown oblong.
Crowley squinted at it. “A book?” he said. “Not mine.”
Aziraphale turned a few of the yellowed pages. Tiny bibliophilic bells rang in the back of his mind.
“It must have belonged to that young lady,” he said slowly. “We ought to have got her address.”
“Look, I’m in enough trouble as it is, I don’t want it to get about that I go around returning people’s property to them,” said Crowley.
Aziraphale reached the title page. It was probably a good job Crowley couldn’t see his expression.
“I suppose you could always send it to the post office there,” said Crowley, “if you really feel you must. Address it to the mad woman with the bicycle. Never trust a woman who gives funny names to means of transport—”
“Yes, yes, certainly,” said the angel. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them on the pavement, picked them up, dropped them again, and hurried to the shop door.
“We’ll be in touch then, shall we?” Crowley called after him.
Aziraphale paused in the act of turning the key.
“What?” he said. “Oh. Oh. Yes. Fine. Jolly good.” And he slammed the door.
“Right,” mumbled Crowley, suddenly feeling very alone.
TORCHLIGHT FLICKED IN THE LANES.
The trouble with trying to find a brown-covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of a ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn’t.
It wasn’t there.
Anathema tried every method of search she could think of. There was the methodical quartering of the ground. There was the slapdash poking at the bracken by the roadside. There was the nonchalant sidling up to it and looking out of the side of her eye. She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.
It didn’t.
Which meant, as she had feared all along, that it was probably in the back of a car belonging to two consenting cycle repairmen.
She could feel generations of Agnes Nutter’s descendants laughing at her.
Even if those two were honest enough to want to return it, they’d hardly go to all the trouble of finding a cottage they’d barely seen in the dark.
The only hope was that they wouldn’t know what it was they’d got.
AZIRAPHALE, LIKE MANY Soho merchants who specialized in hard-to-find books for the discerning connoisseur, had a back room, but what was in there was far more esoteric than anything normally found inside a shrink-wrapped bag for the Customer Who Knows What He Wants.
He was particularly proud of his books of prophecy.
First editions, usually.
And every one was signed.
He’d got Robert Nixon,16 and Martha the Gypsy, and Ignatius Sybilla, and Old Ottwell Binns. Nostradamus had signed, “To myne olde friend Azerafel, with Beste wishes”; Mother Shipton had spilled drink on