The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

“Probably not in your case, but it’s certainly worth a try.”

He nodded reflectively. He responded well to straight talking, so I tried a different approach.

“Gavin, how did you turn out to be such a nasty piece of work?”

He shrugged. “I could blame my parents, but that’s just whiny victim bullshit. Some people are just naturally unpleasant. I’ve known for a long time that I’m something of a shit. I tried for years to hide it, but it never worked, so in the end I decided to just go with it, and see where it led me. What’s your excuse?”

We just laughed this time at his impertinence, and, surprisingly, he laughed, too.

“Okay,” he said, “what’s the deal tomorrow? Do I conveniently reveal my soft underbelly for that toe-rag Friday to gut, or do I run?”

“We don’t know,” said Landen, “but Friday is at this moment attempting to find out more. He thinks there might have been sixteen Destiny Aware ex-timeworkers and not fifteen.”

“How will that make a difference?”

“Someone may know something that we don’t. For it to be murder, then there has to be a motive. Without that, he can’t kill you.”

“So I should do nothing?”

“If you can.”

There was a pause.

“Why are you here anyway?” asked Landen. “Shouldn’t you be in school or breaking windows or pushing over grannies or something?”

“I’m a freelance mathematician,” he said loftily, “offering my unique services to those either too stupid or too lazy to work it out for themselves. Do you want to see something seriously batshit cool?”

“Okay.”

He took a grubby piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it to reveal a three-digit number. Landen and I stared at it for a moment.

“It’s an even prime number,”1 he announced. “It’s been lying there unnoticed since the dawn of math, and I found it. Archimedes, Euclid, Gauss, Fermat, Newton—they all missed it. How dumb were they?”

Landen and I were staring at the number. The thing was, now that he mentioned it, he was right—the number was prime and was even.

“That’s incredible,” I murmured. “Does anyone else know about this?”

He folded up the paper and put it back in his pocket. “No. I’m still studying the implications, since it renders two of Euclid’s axioms entirely fallacious. Much of the planet’s mathematics will have to be completely restructured.”

“Then you’re good? Really good?” asked Landen.

“Good? I’m the best. Euclidean, Riemannian, polytrop, differential, twenty-seven-dimension mapping, Advanced Nextian geometry and ev

en Expectation-Influenced Probability. Tuesday did the groundwork, but I took it further.”

Landen and I exchanged glances. This sounded promising.

“What about a value for Uc?” I asked.

“Ah!” he said with a smile. “The ever-illusive Unentanglement Constant. I’ve been doing some initial work that looks promising, but I was distracted by the need to expand and catalog my collection of pornographic magazines.”

“How long would it take?” asked Landen.

“Alphabetically, about a week. If I do it by my favorites, then a lot longer.”

“Not the porn, the Unentanglement Constant.”

“Oh. A workable solution to Uc? About a month.”