Little People by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online Page A

in the morning but can’t seem to drift off to sleep. Eventually you do nod off around a quarter to five and then you sleep like a log from the petrified forest, right through the alarm, and wake up to find it’s three hours later than you wanted it to be and you’ve snored away the time you needed for the job in hand that needed the early start – in this case, inspecting my traps without being seen. I finally rolled out of bed around 10.30 to find the house infested with family and the way through the French windows barred by guardian cousins and aunts, as effective an obstacle as any triple-headed giant hound or fire-breathing dragon. I swore under my breath and settled down to grind my way through another slice of unmitigated family Christmas.
    My luck was in, though, just for once; at three o’clock in the afternoon they all buggered off to watch some God-awful musical on the television giving me a glorious window of opportunity for a little supernatural nature study. As soon as the coast was clear, I slipped out through the French windows to inspect my saucers.
    The first one, a complete blank. No sign that anything had been near it, no foot- or paw-prints in the mud, no decrease in the carefully noted milk level or evidence of nibbling on the soggy sludge the bread had become. A similar lack of anything to report from saucers two and three. How depressing , I thought. As I went to check the fourth saucer I’d more or less given up hope of finding anything, which meant that I very nearly missed it: a little speck that at first sight I took to be a small shred of fallen leaf, or something equally useless. Just as well I looked again, though, just to be sure, because it wasn’t a leaf after all.
    It was the butt of a tiny roll-up.

CHAPTER THREE
    I fished the tiny, sodden fag end out of the milk with my fingertip and stood staring at it for quite some time, all security considerations temporarily forgotten. Y uck , I thought.
    But it was evidence, something tangible (squelchy, but tangible). Couldn’t modern forensic science scan fag ends for saliva traces and extrapolate the smoker’s DNA, age, sex, race, religious beliefs, favourite Humphrey Bogart film? Sure, it was very small indeed and the milk probably hadn’t helped any, but if they could put people in jail for life on the basis of a single strand of polyester from a snagged cardigan, a genuine cigarette end ought to be enough for a complete reconstruction of the elven genome.
    Get real , I told myself. What were you planning to do, anyhow? Barge your way into the science labs at Cambridge University, yelling, ‘This tiny blob of disgusting white mush will prove that elves exist?’ I took in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. I had enough proof to convince one person – myself. The rest of the world was going to need something a bit more substantial.
    At this point, it occurred to me that I’d been standing in full view in the middle of a restricted area for several minutes; not smart at all, since the only thing standing between me and probable discovery were the singing and dancing skills of a cast of veteran Hollywood troupers. I closed the forefinger and thumb tightly on the fag end, threw myself on the ground and rolled sideways into the cover of a dense patch of bolted spinach.
    I stayed put for as long as I could bear to, but quite apart from the cramp and the small inquisitive insects crawling up my trouser leg there was the issue of how long it’d take for my absence to be noted and remarked on. A curious thing, that: none of my family ever seemed to have much use for my company, but the absence of it seemed to give tremendous offence. Slowly and carefully I crawled out of the spinach jungle, checked for obvious signs of observation, and scuttled back indoors as fast as I could go.
    Luck was with me for once, and I made it to my room without being intercepted. First order of priority was