Free One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde

nearby, the misshapen lump seemed to be a room from a house somewhere. It had landed on the asphalt covering of the car park and cracked the surface so badly that the textual matrix beneath the roadway was now visible. The battered section had landed upside down just behind Lola Vavoom’s Delahaye Roadster, which had prevented her from reversing too quickly from her parking place, breaking through the barriers and falling eighty feet to her death. It had always been a suspicious accident, but nothing untoward was ever found to suppose it wasn’t just that—an accident.
    “Will this take long, dahling?” asked Lola, who was dressed in tight slacks and a cashmere sweater with a pink scarf tied around her hair. Her eyes were obscured by a pair of dark glasses, and she was casually sitting on the trunk of her car smoking a small Sobranie cigarette.
    “As long as it must,” I said, “and I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
    “Do your best, dear,” she intoned patronizingly, “but if I’m not dead in mysterious circumstances by teatime, someone is going to have some serious explaining to do.”
    I turned my attention to the wreckage. Spontaneous breakups were uncommon but not unheard of, and it was JAID’s job to try to find the cause so that other books wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Losing a cast of a thousand or more was not just a personal tragedy, but expensive. When a book-club edition of War and Peace had disintegrated without warning a few years ago as it passed over Human Drama, all those within the debris field were picking brass buttons and lengthy digressions out of their hair for a week. The JAID investigator assigned to the case painstakingly reconstructed the book, only to find that a batch of verbs had been packed incorrectly at the aft expansion joint and had overheated. Punctuation lock had no effect, and in a last desperate attempt to bring the book under control, the engineers initiated Emergency Volume Separation. A good idea, but undertaken too quickly. The smaller and lighter Epilogues could not alter course in time and collided with Volume Four, which in turn collided with Volume Three, and so forth. Of the twenty-six thousand characters lost in the disaster, only five survived. Verb quality control and emergency procedures were dramatically improved after this, and nothing like it had happened since.
    “It seems to be a bed-sitting room of some variety,” murmured Sprockett as he peered inside the large lump of scrap. “Probably ten pounds a week—furnished, naturally.”
    “Naturally.”
    “Are we looking for anything in particular?”
    “An International Standard Book Number,” I said, “an ISBN. We need to know what the book is and where it came from before we can start trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s sometimes harder than it seems. The wreckage is often badly mangled, widely scattered—and there are a lot of books out there.”
    We stepped into the upside-down bed-sitting room, all its contents strewn around inside. It was well described, so it was either a popular book given depth and color by reader feedback, or pre-feedback altogether. The room hadn’t been painted for a while, the carpets were threadbare, and the furniture had seen better days. It might seem trivial, but it was these sorts of clues that allowed us to pinpoint which book it was from.
    “Potboiler?” I suggested.
    “It’s from HumDram if it is,” replied Sprockett as he picked up a torn Abbey Road album. “Post-1969, at any rate.”
    We searched for half an hour amongst the debris but found no sign of an ISBN.
    “This book could be any one of thousands,” said Sprockett.
    “ Millions .”
    With nothing more to see here, we stepped back outside the bed-sitting room, and I laid a map of the BookWorld on the hood of Lola’s car and marked where the section had been found. This done, I called in Pickford Removals, and within twenty minutes the bed-sitting room had been loaded onto the back