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Snell paused and
coughed politely.
'I shouldn't waste too much sympathy on the one-dimensionals, Thursday. You'll run yourself ragged and there really isn't the time or resources to recharacterise them into anything more interesting.'
'Mr Snell, sir?'
It was a young man in an expensive suit, and he carried what looked like a very stained pillowcase with something heavy in it about the size of a melon.
'Hello, Alfred!' said Snell, shaking the man's hand. 'Thursday, this is Garcia – he has been supplying the Perkins & Snell series of books with intriguing plot devices for over ten years. Remember the unidentified torso found floating in the Humber in Dead among the Living? Or the twenty-year-old corpse discovered with the bag of money bricked up in the spare room in Requiem for a Safecracker?
'Of course!' I said, shaking the technician's hand. 'Good intriguing page-turning stuff. How do you do?'
'Well, thank you,' replied Garcia, turning back to Snell after smiling politely. 'I understand the next Perkins & Snell novel is in the pipeline and I have a little something that might interest you.'
He held the bag open and we looked inside. It was a head. More importantly, a severed head.
A head in a bag?' queried Snell with a frown, looking closer.
'Indeed,' murmured Garcia proudly, 'but not any old head-in-a-bag. This one has an intriguing tattoo on the nape of the neck. You can discover it in a skip, outside your office, in a deceased suspect's deep-freeze – the possibilities are endless.'
Snell's eyes flashed excitedly. It was the sort of thing his next book needed after the critical savaging of Wax Lyrical for Death.
'How much?' he asked.
'Three hundred,' ventured Garcia.
'Three hundred?!' exclaimed Snell. 'I could buy a dozen head-in-a-bag plot devices with that and still have change for a missing Nazi gold consignment.'
Garcia laughed. 'No one's using the old "missing Nazi gold consignment" plot device any more. If you don't want the head you can pass – I can sell heads pretty much anywhere I like. I just came to you first because we've done business before and I like you.'
Snell thought for a moment.
'A hundred and fifty.'
'Two hundred.'
'One seven five.'
'Two hundred and I'll throw in a case of mistaken identity, a pretty female double agent and a missing microfilm.'
'Done!'
'Pleasure doing business with you,' said Garcia as he handed over the head and took the money in return. 'Give my regards to Mr Perkins, won't you?'
He smiled, shook hands with us both, and departed.
'Oh, boy!' exclaimed Snell, excited as a kid with a new bicycle. 'Wait until Perkins sees this! Where do you think we should find it?'
I thought in all honesty that 'head-in-a-bag' plot devices were a bit lame, but being too polite to say so, I said instead:
'I liked the deep-freeze idea, myself.'
'Me too!' he enthused as we passed a small shop whose painted headboard read: Backstories built to order. No job too difficult. Painful childhoods a speciality.
'Backstories?'
'Sure. Every character worth their salt has a backstory. Come on in and have a look.'
