Free The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise by Julia Stuart

the back of her head. She then walked to one of the shelves and returned with a box containing a hand-blown glass eye purported to have belonged to Nelson, and another made of porcelain, which,according to its accompanying label, was used by a fourteenth-century Chinese emperor whenever he slept with his favourite mistress. After showing them to her colleague, Valerie Jennings, who had started to smell the rank breath of boredom, asked: “Fancy a game of marbles?”
    Hebe Jones was certain of winning, particularly as she was prepared to suffer the indignity of lying flat on the office floor to execute a shot. She had honed her skills as a young child on the cool, tiled floors of the house in Athens, and her talent flourished when the Grammatikos family moved to London when she was five, despite the challenge of carpeting. Her ability to win even blindfolded led to the widespread belief that her expertise was due to exceptional hearing, rather than the more obvious explanation that she was peeking. She subsequently claimed to be able to hear the talk of infants still in the womb, and mothers from the Greek community, who were more ready to believe such ability existed in one of their own, presented their swollen abdomens to the girl to learn the first utterances of their child. After demanding absolute silence, she would sit, one ear pressed against the protruding umbilicus, translating the squeaks, whistles, and centenarian groans with the fluency of a polyglot.
    “No, thanks,” Hebe Jones nevertheless replied, turning over the prosthesis in her hand. “Look. It’s concave. And anyway, that poor man’s eye has rolled around enough of London as it is.”
    After sealing up the box with brown tape, kept on the inflatable doll’s wrist by mutual agreement following one too many disappearances, Hebe Jones added Mr. Kjeldsen’s address and dropped the package into the mailbag with thewarm glow of victory. As she looked around her desk for the next task, her eyes stopped at the urn. Feeling a stab of guilt for having ignored it since its arrival, she turned the wooden box round in her hands and ran a finger over the brass nameplate bearing the words “Clementine Perkins, 1939 to 2008, RIP” in an elegant script. She tried to imagine the woman whose remains had been travelling around the Underground, but felt even greater pity for the person who had mislaid them. Hoping to find something to help her trace Clementine Perkins’s relatives, she decided to look up her entry in the national register of deaths.
    “I’m just popping out to the library,” she announced, standing up. And within minutes, Hebe Jones and her turquoise coat were gone.
    Valerie Jennings watched her turn the corner and immediately regretted not having asked her to bring back a Chelsea bun from the high street bakery. Despite her patronage, she had long lamented their offerings, and had once even boycotted the establishment when she noticed two French tourists looking into its windows and discussing whether its wares were for the purpose of plugging holes. But eventually she relented, defeated by patriotism and necessity.
    After labelling a yellow canoe, she took hold of one end and dragged it through the office, shuffling backwards in her flat black shoes, uttering a string of profanities. Eventually, she managed to slide it onto the bottom shelf of the nautical section. Standing up, she arched her back, then made her way to the original Victorian counter and noted down the shelf number in an inscrutable code in one of the ledgers.
    It was the only office in the whole of London without acomputer, the introduction of which the two women had refused with a steadfast obstinacy. When, five years earlier, they were informed that the unfathomable machines were to be installed, both immediately offered their resignation with the freaky concurrency of twins. Then, like two circus curiosities, they demonstrated their encyclopedic knowledge of every item stored