Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next 2)

'About Cardenio. Someone blabbed to the press. Vole Towers is besieged by news channels as we speak. Lord Volescamper has been yelling at Victor about one of us talking.'

'Wasn't me.'

'Nor me. Volescamper has turned down fifty million quid for it already – every impresario on the planet wants to buy the rights for first performance. And get this – you've been cleared by SO-1 of any wrongdoing. They thought that since Kaylieu was shot by SO-14 marksmen yesterday morning then you might have been right after all.'

'Big of them. Does this mean my leave is over?'

'Victor wants to see you as soon as possible.'

'Tell him I'm ill, would you? I have to go to Osaka.'

'Why?'

'Best not to know. I'll call you.'

I replaced the receiver and Mum gave me some cheese on toast and a cup of tea. She sat down at the other side of the table and flicked through a well-thumbed copy of last month's Femole – the one with me in it.

'Any news from Mycroft and Polly, Mum?'

'I got a card from London saying they were fit and well,' she replied, 'but they said they needed a jar of piccalilli and a torque wrench. I left them in Mycroft's study and they'd vanished by the afternoon.'

'Mum?'

'Yes?'

'How often do you see Dad?'

She smiled. 'Most mornings. He drops by to say hello. Sometimes I even make him a packed lunch—'

She was interrupted by a roar that sounded like a thousand tubas in unison. The sound reverberated through the house and set the teacups in the corner cupboard rattling.

'Oh, Lordy!' she exclaimed. 'Not mammoths again!' And she was out of the door in a flash.

And a mammoth it was, in name and stature. Shaggy and as big as a tank, it had walked through the garden wall and was now sniffing suspiciously at the wisteria.

'Get away from there!' yelled my mother, searching around for a weapon of some sort. Wisely, the dodos had all run away and hidden behind the potting shed. Rejecting the wisteria, the mammoth delicately pulled up the vegetables in the vegetable plot one by one, stuffed them into its mouth and munched slowly and deliberately. My mother was almost apoplectic.

'Second time this has happened!' she yelled defiantly. 'Get off my hydrangeas, you … you … thing!' The mammoth ignored her, emptied the entire contents of the ornamental pond in one go and clumsily trampled the garden furniture to matchwood.

'A weapon,' announced my mother, 'I need a weapon. I've sweated blood over this garden and no reactivated herbivore is going to have it for dinner!'

She disappeared into the shed and reappeared a moment later brandishing a yard broom. But the mammoth had little to fear, even from my mother. It did, after all, weigh almost five tons. It was used to doing exactly what it pleased. The only good news about the invasion was that it wasn't the whole herd.

'Giddout!' yelled my mother, raising the broom to whack the mammoth on its hindquarters.

'Hold it right there!' said a loud voice. We turned. A SpecOps officer had hopped over the wall and was running towards us.

'Agent Durrell, SO-13,' he announced breathlessly, showing my mother his ID. 'Spank the mammoth and you're under arrest.'

My mother's fury switched to the SpecOps agent.

'So he eats my garden and I do nothing?'

'Her name is Buttercup,' corrected Durrell. 'The rest of the herd went to the west of Swindon as planned but Buttercup here is a bit of a dreamer. And yes, you do nothing. Mammoths are a protected species.'

'Well!' said my mother indignantly. 'If you did your job properly then ordinary law-abiding citizens like me would still have gardens!'

We looked around at the garden, which looked as though it had been the target of an artillery bombardment. Buttercup, her voluminous tum now full of Mum's vegetable patch, stepped over the wall and scratched herself against an iron streetlamp, snapping it like a twig. The lamp standard dropped heavily on the roof of a car and popped the windscreen. Buttercup let out another almighty trumpeting, which set off a few car alarms, and in the distance there was an answer. She stopped, listened for a bit and then happily lumbered off down the road.