(1992) Prophecy Read Online Free PDF Page A

heldin. Own London house plus inadequate income. Separated. Chain-smoker not interested in star signs. Any offers?’
    ‘ NICE BOTTOM washes quite regularly, clever 28 and tailormade for the beautiful young London career woman. One only remaining. A giveaway at 24p …’
    ‘ FEMALE SEEKS eccentric to delight in. Midlands. Box …’
    She wondered what sort of people put these ads in. Whether they were like herself. Or whether they were desperate. Maybe it was all in code. She glanced across the page and read down the ‘Eye Need’ column.
    ‘ DESPAIRING STUDENT urgently needs funds to continue education. Genuine. Thanks. Box …’
    Then a headline in another column caught her attention: ‘ GIRL WITH DOUBLE BASS ! Are you the girl who was struggling down the platform of King’s Cross Station carrying a double bass, on Friday, 10th August, catching a train to Eboracum? I am the man who helped you. I’d like to see you again.’
    Frannie looked at the advertisement in disbelief, thinking for a moment she must have imagined it.
Eboracum
. The Roman name for York. She had mentioned it to the man and he had understood it.
    She read through the ad again, feeling strangely disconcerted. Yet a tiny pulse of excitement beat deep inside her. There might have been other girls struggling with other double basses down that platform. But not going to
Eboracum
.
    ‘Jesus!’ she blurted out in excitement, and then felt slightly foolish. A brake of caution suddenly applied itself in her mind and she wondered for a moment if she was the butt of some elaborate joke. She bit her lip and looked up at the ceiling, and then around her.
    Then she read the ad once more. It had to be her!Had to be. A grin spread across her face as if she was sharing the joke with the man she had met. Of all the tens of thousands of people reading this ad, it was for her, her alone. And she had seen it.
    She tried to recall the man’s face, but it was hazy. The intense stare of his blue eyes, the resemblance to Harrison Ford. The warmth in his face, in his voice. The strange way the boy had looked at her. The ginger curls, the freckles; the serious, tear-stained face.
    She remembered the humour in the man’s face as he had spoken to her. The pulse of excitement beat again, more strongly. Crazy; she could remember that sudden thrill of attraction, could feel it now. It was like that sometimes; you met a total stranger and you immediately clicked, as if you were soul mates.
    Frannie dug her pen out of her bag, took her diary out again and wrote down the box number of the advertisement, then the address of the magazine.
    It was only as she closed her diary that the doubts began. As if there was something not quite right, that she had not yet spotted. The big snag. She shrugged them off, read the ad again, and grinned again. She was still smiling ten minutes later as she walked through into the dentist’s surgery.
    When she got back to the Museum, complete with two new fillings, Penrose Spode was seated at his desk with the quiet demeanour of a statue of Buddha. And the same aura of benign domination. He was her colleague and they shared an office.
    Like most of the offices in the building, it was taller than it was wide, the walls on all four sides lined floor to ceiling with books and catalogues. The word-processor terminals and digital telephones on each of theirancient wooden desks looked incongruous, as if they were stage props that had been put on the wrong set.
    Their desks faced each other: Spode’s, like himself, immaculate; the stacks of paper laid out in careful geometric asymmetry in contrast to the post-nuclear-holocaust appearance of her own desk. Spode sat very erect, his chest indented, the knot of his lichen-coloured tie protruding the same distance as his Adam’s apple; his black hair drawn smooth and flat like sealskin; his eyes small and myopic behind lenses like magnifying glasses and frames the size of protective goggles; his closed