Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Read online

  On Monday afternoon Richard phoned Reg.

  “Reg!” he said. “Your phone is working. Congratulations.”

  “Oh yes, my dear fellow,” said Reg, “how delightful to hear from you. Yes. A very capable young man arrived and fixed the phone a little earlier. I don’t think it will go wrong again now. Good news, don’t you think?”

  “Very good. You got back safely then.”

  “Oh yes, thank you. Oh, we had high excitement here when we returned from dropping you off. Remember the horse? Well he turned up again with his owner. They’d had some unfortunate encounter with the constabulary and wished to be taken home. Just as well. Dangerous sort of chap to have on the loose, I think. So. How are you then?”

  “Reg . . . The music—”

  “Ah, yes, I thought you’d be pleased. Took a bit of work, I can tell you. I saved only the tiniest, tiniest scrap, of course, but even so, I cheated. It was rather more than one man could actually do in a lifetime, but I don’t suppose anybody will look at that too seriously.”

  “Reg, can’t we get some more of it?”

  “Well, no. The ship has gone, and besides—”

  “We could go back in time—”

  “No, well, I told you. They’ve fixed the phone so it won’t go wrong again.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the time machine won’t work now. Burned out. Dead as a dodo. I think that’s it, I’m afraid. Probably just as well, though, don’t you think?”

  On Monday, Mrs Sauskind phoned Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency to complain about her bill.

  “I don’t understand what all this is about,” she said. “It’s complete nonsense. What’s the meaning of it?”

  “My dear Mrs Sauskind,” he said, “I can hardly tell you how much I have been looking forward to having this exact same conversation with you yet again. Where shall we begin today? Which particular item is it that you would like to discuss?”

  “None of them, thank you very much, Mr Gently. I do not know who you are or why you should think my cat is missing. Dear Roderick passed away in my arms two years ago and I have not wished to replace him.”

  “Ah, well, Mrs Sauskind,” said Dirk, “what you probably fail to appreciate is that it is as a direct result of my efforts that—if I might explain about the interconnectedness of all—” He stopped. It was pointless. He slowly dropped the telephone back on its cradle.

  “Miss Pearce!” he called out, “kindly send out a revised bill, would you, to our dear Mrs Sauskind. The new bill reads ‘To: saving human race from total extinction—no charge.’ ”

  He put on his hat and left for the day.

  . . . to be continued

  Gallery Books

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Douglas Adams

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  First Gallery Books trade paperback edition October 2014

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-8299-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-4061-1 (ebook)

  PRAISE FOR DOUGLAS ADAMS’S

  “With a skewed imagination and an ironic wit, Douglas Adams romps through modern life’s paranoias and absurdities. Adams affirms his standing as one of England’s top exporters of irreverence.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Admirers of Adams will know to expect mad occurrences, and they won’t be disappointed. Fans of Monty Python will enjoy this hilarious, zany satire of TV commercials, police investigations, the folly of neglecting one’s refrigerator, the tragic lack of pizza delivery in London—and guilt.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Like all of Adams’s books, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is very funny. . . . Intriguing . . . extraordinarily clever.”

  —United Press International

  “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is silly and spooky, with a power to evoke grandeur and solemnity that Adams hasn’t shown before. . . . A great read.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Amid a horde of imitators . . . Douglas Adams stands out, an eccentric master in a field of giggly schoolboys. . . . The writing is vintage Adams, witty and unexpected.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Wild and woolly . . . chock-full of action, jokes, fake red herrings.”

  —Booklist

  “Quite a merry chase, witty and humorous . . . The characters are exceptionally well crafted, especially Gently.”

  —Washington Times

  “Wonderfully funny and insightful.”

  —Indianapolis News

  “Wonderfully entertaining, juxtaposing the mundane with the ridiculous, taking the unimaginable and making it obvious . . . the plot sparkles, scenes vibrate, the dialog is snappy. . . . The roller-coaster ride Adams provides is worth the ticket.”

  —Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

  “Adams has a literate, thought-provoking style, and his sharp commentary evokes many chuckles. Adams also has a wild imagination. . . . Gently is a wonderful character.”

  —Providence Sunday Journal

  “Brilliant . . . as funny as anything Adams has done in the past . . . The web which Adams spins is pure magic. . . . hilarious.”

  —Inside Books

  “Douglas Adams is an extremely amusing fellow, clever as a whip to boot. He thinks up the most interesting and oddball sorts of things, and he fits all the pieces together into a ripping good read. . . . You are won over by the sheer pleasure with which he goes about filling up his weird little universe. . . . The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is a lot of fun.”

  —Philadelphia City Paper

  For Jane

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE HARDCOVER EDITION of this book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh II and an Apple LaserWriter II NTX. The word-processing software was FullWrite Professional from Ashton Tate. The final proofing and photosetting was done by the Last Word, London SW6.

  I would like to say an enormous thank you to my amazing and wonderful editor, Sue Freestone.

  Her help, support, criticism, encouragement, enthusiasm and sandwiches have been beyond measure. I also owe thanks and apologies to Sophie, James and Vivian, who saw so little of her during the final weeks of work.

  1

  IT CAN HARDLY be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”

  Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their desi
gns.

  They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

  Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy noise, Kate Schechter stood and doubted.

  All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered from doubt. She was not a superstitious person, or even a religious person, she was simply someone who was not at all sure she should be flying to Norway. But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either. All the trouble with the tickets, finding a next-door neighbor to look after the cat, then finding the cat so it could be looked after by the next-door neighbor, the sudden leak in the roof, the missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected death of the next-door neighbor, the pregnancy of the cat—it all had the semblance of an orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had begun to assume godlike proportions.

  Even the taxi driver—when she had eventually found a taxi—had said, “Norway? What you want to go there for?” And when she hadn’t instantly said, “The aurora borealis!” or “Fjords!” but had looked doubtful for a moment and bitten her lip, he had said, “I know. I bet it’s some bloke dragging you out there. Tell you what, tell him to stuff it. Go to Tenerife.”

  There was an idea.

  Tenerife.

  Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.

  She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry tangles of traffic and thought that however cold and miserable the weather was here, that was nothing to what it would be like in Norway.

  Or, indeed, at home. Home would be about as icebound as Norway right now. Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of steam bursting out of the ground, catching in the frigid air and dissipating between the glacial cliff faces of Sixth Avenue.

  A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the course of her thirty years would reveal her without any doubt to be a New Yorker. For though she had lived in the city very little, most of her life had been spent at a constant distance from it: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Europe, and a period of distracted wandering around South America five years ago following the loss of her newly married husband, Luke, in a New York taxi-hailing accident.

  She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them. That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a table staring at red paper napkins for wasn’t real pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it.

  London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn’t grasp this simple principle? For some odd reason it was the one frustration she could never learn simply to live with and accept, and about once a month or so she would get very depressed, phone a pizza restaurant, order the biggest, most lavish pizza she could describe—pizza with an extra pizza on it, essentially—and then, sweetly, ask them to deliver it.

  “To what?”

  “Deliver. Let me give you the address—”

  “I don’t understand. Aren’t you going to come and pick it up?”

  “No. Aren’t you going to deliver? My address—”

  “Er, we don’t do that, miss.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Er, deliver.”

  “You don’t deliver? Am I hearing you correctly?”

  The exchange would quickly degenerate into an ugly slanging match which would leave her feeling drained and shaky, but much, much better the following morning. In all other respects she was one of the most sweet-natured people you could hope to meet.

  But today was testing her to the limit.

  There had been terrible traffic jams on the motorway, and when the distant flash of blue lights made it clear that the cause was an accident somewhere ahead of them Kate had become more tense and had stared fixedly out of the other window as eventually they had crawled past it.

  The taxi driver had been bad-tempered when at last he had dropped her off because she didn’t have the right money, and there was a lot of disgruntled hunting through tight trouser pockets before he was eventually able to find change for her. The atmosphere was heavy and thundery, and now, standing in the middle of the main check-in concourse at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, she could not find the check-in desk for her flight to Oslo.

  She stood very still for a moment, breathing calmly and deeply and trying not to think of Jean-Philippe.

  Jean-Philippe was, as the taxi driver had correctly guessed, the reason why she was going to Norway, but was also the reason why she was convinced that Norway was not at all a good place for her to go. Thinking of him therefore made her head oscillate and it seemed best not to think about him at all but simply to go to Norway as if that was where she happened to be going anyway. She would then be terribly surprised to bump into him at whatever hotel it was he had written on the card that was tucked into the side pocket of her handbag.

  In fact she would be surprised to find him there anyway. What she would be much more likely to find was a message from him saying that he had been unexpectedly called away to Guatemala, Seoul or Tenerife and that he would call her from there. Jean-Philippe was the most continually absent person she had ever met. In this he was the culmination of a series. Since she had lost Luke to the great yellow Chevrolet she had been oddly dependent on the rather vacant emotions that a succession of self-absorbed men had inspired in her.

  She tried to shut all this out of her mind, and even shut her eyes for a second. She wished that when she opened them again there would be a sign in front of her saying, “This way for Norway,” which she could simply follow without needing to think about it or anything else ever again. This, she reflected, in a continuation of her earlier train of thought, was presumably how religions got started, and must be the reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts. They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance.

  Kate opened her eyes again and was, of course, disappointed. But then a second or two later there was a momentary parting in a long surging wave of cross Germans in inexplicable yellow polo shirts, and through it she had a brief glimpse of the check-in desk for Oslo. Lugging her garment bag onto her shoulder, she made her way toward it.

  There was just one other person before her in the line at the desk and he, it turned out, was having trouble or perhaps making it.

  He was a large man, impressively large and well-built—even expertly built—but he was also definitely odd-looking in a way that Kate couldn’t quite deal with. She couldn’t even say what it was that was odd about him, only that she was immediately inclined not to include him on her list of things to think about at the moment. She remembered reading an article which had explained that the central processing unit of the human brain had only seven memory registers, which meant that if you had seven things in your mind at the same time and then thought of something else, one of the other seven would instantly d
rop out.

  In quick succession she thought about whether or not she was likely to catch the plane, about whether it was just her imagination that the day was a particularly bloody one, about airline staff who smile charmingly and are breathtakingly rude, about duty-free shops which are able to charge much lower prices than ordinary shops but—mysteriously—don’t, about whether or not she felt a magazine article about airports coming on which might help pay for the trip, about whether her garment bag would hurt less on her other shoulder, and finally, in spite of all her intentions to the contrary, about Jean-Philippe, who was another set of at least seven subtopics all to himself.

  The man standing arguing in front of her popped right out of her mind.

  It was only the announcement on the airport loudspeaker of the last call for her flight to Oslo which forced her attention back to the situation in front of her.

  The large man was making trouble about the fact that he hadn’t been given a first class seat reservation. It had just transpired that the reason for this was that he didn’t in fact have a first class ticket.

  Kate’s spirits sank to the very bottom of her being and began to prowl around there making a low growling noise.

  It now transpired that the man in front of her didn’t actually have a ticket at all, and the argument then began to range freely and angrily over such topics as the physical appearance of the airline check-in girl, her qualities as a person, theories about her ancestors, speculations as to what surprises the future might have in store for her and the airline for which she worked, and finally lit by chance on the happy subject of the man’s credit card.

  He didn’t have one.

  Further discussions ensued, having to do with checks and why the airline did not accept them.

  Kate took a long, slow, murderous look at her watch.

  “Excuse me,” she said, interrupting the transactions. “Is this going to take long? I have to catch the Oslo flight.”

  “I’m just dealing with this gentleman,” said the girl. “I’ll be with you in just one second.”