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The office
was an immense disappointment for him. On television shows, posh college Dons
always had real wooden floors, real fires, surrounded themselves with great
ancient books and lots of exotic things collected from darkest Africa and deep
in the Amazon jungle, but there was none of that here. The office was a small
square of linoleum with a school desk, a couple of grey metal filing cabinets
and a print of Lake Windermere hanging crooked on the wall.
“Bum,”
whispered the Postman to himself. He
glanced back down the corridor. It was quiet as a morgue, so he slipped into
the office and pressed the door closed behind him.
On the
desk, opened, was a large folder of writing and drawings; he took a quick look
at it. Mostly it was meaningless to him,
foreign languages and strange beasts. He
lifted one page and turned to another, more of the same, then another and
another.
He was
about to turn away when he spotted something in the corner of the page. Just
crossing the margin was a clear sketch of a Tiger. It was leaping over
something, but he found it difficult to define what it was. It could be just a
stone but it looked more animated than that.
There was a sentence scribbled beneath in a language he didn’t
know. That’s one of the languages I
don’t know, he thought to himself, and then added, one of all the languages
apart from English that I don’t know. He
spelt out the letters with his finger, Curabitur adipiscing ultio de signifero.
He
turned away from the stack of files on the desk and was about to give up when
he spotted a sheet of paper sitting on its own on the seat of the office
chair. He picked it up. It was
immaculately hand written. ‘Dear James, I hope you find everything in
order in your office. I’ve left Professor Hancock’s most recent notes out for
you, the rest are in his (now your) rooms, first door, second floor of the
Chester wing, but of course you know that. If you have any questions my door is
always open. D.’
He carefully put the letter down where he
had found it and made his way to the door.
“Fingerprints!” he shouted. “Oh
dear.”
He rushed back to the letter. He quickly brushed it with his hand. “Oh that’s only gonna to make it worse.” He blew on it, but realised that was no good
either. “I’ll have to burn it.”
He brought the letter over to the wastepaper
basket and using his Zippo lighter set the corner of it on fire. When the fire
had spread sufficiently through the page he dropped it into the wastepaper
basket and turned his attention to the large bungle of files on the desk which
he had also handled.
“Bugger,” he said to himself. “I’ll have to
steal them and burn them somewhere else, in the woods.” He mind raced through various resulting
permutations of his fingerprints being found in this obscure Professor’s
office. A thought seeded in the back of
his mind, it stayed there for five milliseconds not yet strong enough to
override his thoughts of arson upon the files, but soon it sprouted and
blossomed, ‘Wait a minute,’ it said, ‘why would a little-known almost-Oxford
professor even bother checking his mail for fingerprints.’
“Ah,” said the Postman to himself, “I’m
being silly again, aren’t I.”
He sighed. At least only the letter got
destroyed and not this mammoth pile of important historic notes. He turned around to see the flames from the
wastepaper basket lick their way up the partition wall and spread like ….. emmm
…. fire!
“FIRE!” he screamed as the college alarms
went off.
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