The Real Thing Read Online Free Page A

we’d know all about it. Look.’ Everyone looked. ‘The number is rock steady.’
    Fraser seemed a little downcast at that, Harry noted. More than he would have expected. Can’t win ‘em all mate, he wanted to say.
    Kelly was still staring at the read-out. ‘That is a little odd,’ she finally admitted.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Well, the machine automatically adjusts itself if there is a small drop, to maintain the correct levels. It does vary slightly, just a fraction of a percent, as it self-adjusts.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘It’s rock steady. It’s too rock steady. It should be up and down just a few fractions of a percentage point, but it’s not moving at all.’
    ‘What could cause that?’ Tupai asked.
    ‘Well, either the level just happens to be perfect at the moment, or perhaps there’s a faulty sensor in the machine itself, or even a loose connection here at the control panel.’
    Before she could stop him, Tupai reached over, grabbed a bunch of wires at the rear of the panel and waggled them back and forth.
    ‘Don’t do that!’ she exclaimed, but far too late.
    Instantly, amazingly, in front of their eyes, the numbers on the read-out dropped, quite significantly, then began flickering, up a little, down a little, just as she had described. At that moment the alarm went off with a loud chirruping sound.
    ‘Oh. My. Gosh.’ Kelly Fraser said in three short sentences. ‘Start a shut-down.’ This was to the operator, who looked even more confused and a little panicked.
    Kelly was a model of efficiency. She pulled a radio from her belt and called in a maintenance crew even as she talked to the foreman and organised for the work-load from this production line to be shifted to other lines.
    Harry just stood there and thought of his two sons and didn’t say anything. He did some calculations in his head though. He took the actual sugar level reading and subtracted it from the correct reading to get the difference. Then he multiplied that by a hundred and divided it by the correct reading. He’d come second in his class (in Ireland) at maths.
    The answer came to thirteen and a half percent.

THE TURTLE DOVE
    Bing Statham awoke to find himself on board a quite comfortably sized yacht, the private kind (with engines), not the sailing kind (with sails). The yacht was called the
Turtle Dove
, and you’d have to be very rich to own a boat like that.
    It was well-fitted out, as they say in the boat-building industry, with plush Canadian hardwood panelling, luxurious Turkish carpets, lacy French drapes and Italian designed bunks, which were not only very fashionable, but also very comfortable. In fact, everything on board the boat was very expensive and very stylish. The only thing was, nothing really went well with anything else. The drapes and the carpet competed for your attention, the Italian bunks were at odds with the Canadian hardwood, while the bunks and the drapes just turned their backs and refused to talk to each other at all.
    Bing knew none of this as he slowly emerged from quite a pleasant dream, the details of which he could not remember – but then he never could remember dreams – and threw an arm across the slender, sun-tanned shoulders of Margie Alyssa Statham the third (wife). Except she wasn’t there.
    Some people called Margie a trophy wife, behind his back, and whispers of that had reached his ears. He thought it was very unkind and made her sound like something he would mount on the wall in his study, next to the two stags and the black bear from his younger hunting days. And he would never do that to lovely, lively, sweet, blonde, quite-a-bit-younger-than-him Margie. Although he wouldn’t have minded putting the heads of Olivia and/or Candy, his first two wives, on the wall. Particularly Candy, who had run off with the actor from that soap opera and then turned around and sued Bing for millions of dollars,
and won
!
    It was cosmic justice, in Bing’s mind, when the former wife of the soap opera