Blonde Bombshell Read Online Free PDF

changed her mind. Ouch, she thought; and by then the unicorn had gone.
    Slowly and grimly she hobbled over to where the unicorn had been standing. Clearly perceptible hoofprints in the leaf-mould, not to mention the pile of entirely tangible (though preferably only with rubber gloves) evidence directly in front of her. Well, she thought. It must be my birthday, and someone’s finally figured out what to give to the girl who’s got everything.
    A unicorn.
    Or a white horse genetically altered to grow a horn out of its nose. A sufficiently devious mind and the technical and scientific resources of a superpower; could it be done? She thought about it, equations streaming through her mind like salmon leaping a waterfall, and reckoned that yes, it probably could. Or you could get hold of an ordinary white horse and stick a horn on its face with glue. But why would you want to do a thing like that?
    Her phone rang. “Hello? Ms Pavlov?”
    “Dieter. What is it?”
    “You tried to reach me.”
    She looked down at the unicorn poo, golden brown and steaming under a rapidly formed quilt of opportunist flies. “Forget it,” she said. “Doesn’t matter.”
    “I got a call from Denise,” Dieter said. “You should be at the launch party. They’re waiting for you.”
    It was a beautiful day. She’d felt like a walk in the woods. Apparently, the universe had decided to punish her for playing truant by sending her unicorns. “Send a helicopter,” she said.
    While she waited for it to arrive, a bird sang in the canopy overhead. It was a freelance bird, not a company employee or a client or a journalist looking for an exclusive interview, and it didn’t have to sing for her, but it did. She smiled. In spite of the unicorn, she suddenly felt strangely, overwhelmingly happy — which was odd, since by rights she should be a quivering heap of jangled nerves. Not every day you hallucinate members of the medieval bestiary.
    But it wasn’t a hallucination. Figments of the imagination don’t shit in the woods. And if they do, their shit doesn’t smell so confoundedly realistic. Therefore, it was a unicorn. Unicorns don’t exist, therefore it was a plain old horse messed about with to make it look like a unicorn. Therefore, somebody had done that to a plain old horse, presumably for a reason. Plausible reasons? To give Lucy Pavlov a scare and make her think she was seeing things. Who’d do a thing like that? Someone who doesn’t like Lucy Pavlov. Is there such a person, anywhere in the whole wide world? This time yesterday, she’d have had no hesitation in answering no, of course not. Apparently, though, she’d have been wrong. An enemy, she thought, how intriguing. Never had one of them before.
    I think.
    Think; not know. She tried to burrow back into her memory, but it was like trying to eat her way through a twelve-metre drift of cold custard. At school, maybe. Everybody has enemies at school.
    The bird stopped singing. I can’t remember being at school, she realised.
    She must have been, because everybody was. Also, she knew all about school, about hard plastic chairs and looking out of the window in double chemistry and queuing up in the cafeteria and locker rooms and not running in corridors; about best friends and neglected homework assignments, shirts deliberately not tucked into waistbands, the way water tastes when poured from an aluminium jug. She had a library of images she could’ve wandered through for hours. The thing was, she wasn’t in any of them.
    That, and unicorns too. The helicopter arrived, swaying the tops of the pines; a panel slid back and a chair on a rope slowly descended, like the Indian rope trick in reverse. Not long after that she was hundreds of metres up in the air, with the forest below her, a vague blur seen through a window. The onboard console played “Rhapsody in Blue” for her. It wasn’t quite the same as the bird, but she appreciated it anyway.
    I have an enemy, she told herself.