A Short Factual Inquiry

Chapter One: Three Hundred a Week

There were, according to the spreadsheet Neil Dockery trusted more than most of his relatives, one thousand one hundred and four pubs in Britain where people argued on a Tuesday about things he had written on a Monday.

He liked to think about that when the work got heavy. Somewhere in Carlisle a man in a fleece was saying *I'm telling you, it's Mercury*, and being wrong, and being wrong because Neil had built a trap for him out of eleven carefully chosen words. Somewhere in Plymouth a team called Quizteama Aguilera was scoring a point off the top of a woman's head and cheering like they'd cured something. Neil made that happen. Three hundred questions a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for the Bartholomew Quiz Syndicate, from a box room in a rented first-floor flat above a shuttered carpet showroom in Ludworth, which was a town in the middle of England that people mostly drove through on their way to somewhere with a coastline.

He had rules. He had them written on an index card Blu-Tacked to the wall above his monitor, because he believed in standards, and because the Blu-Tack had been there so long it had left a grey bruise on the paintwork and moving the card would have exposed it.

RULE ONE: A question must be losable.

RULE TWO: A question must be *nearly* winnable. The best question is the one where a table of six argue for ninety seconds and then write down the wrong answer with total confidence.

RULE THREE: No trick spellings. Trick spellings are for cowards.

RULE FOUR: Never ask anything you have to explain afterwards. If it needs a paragraph, it's an essay, not a question.

RULE FIVE: You are not the star. Nobody has ever come home from a quiz and said the questions were marvellous.

Rule Five was the one he'd written last and believed least.

It was twenty past four on a Tuesday in October and Neil had done two hundred and forty-one questions, which was ahead of schedule, and he was working on a round about bridges when he heard the fridge.

He knew the fridge the way a mother knows a cry. There was the normal open — a brief, honest, in-and-out, one item. And then there was the other one, the long open, the browse, the door held wide while a man stood in the cold light with his hands on his hips reviewing his options like a general.

"Mick."

"Working!" came the shout back. "Don't mind me!"

"Mick, there was a ham."

A pause of exactly the wrong length. "There was."

Mick Grindley was forty-four, divorced since February, and had been sleeping on Neil's sofa bed since March on a rolling arrangement that had once had the words *couple of weeks* in it. He had been a driving instructor, then a man who sold conservatories, then a man who was between things, which was the longest and most comfortable of his careers. He was tall, cheerful, entirely without malice, and wrong about a truly extraordinary number of things, all of which he was prepared to defend to the last man.

Neil came out of the box room. Mick was at the counter, constructing something in profile, layered, structurally ambitious.

"That's my ham," said Neil.

"It's *the* ham," said Mick. "Communal ham. It was in the communal fridge."

"There is no communal fridge. There's a fridge, and there's me, and there's a man on my sofa."

"Sofa bed," said Mick, with dignity, and licked mustard off his thumb. "Right, quiz night. I've been thinking about tactics."

"You haven't."

"I have. Geography. I feel we're weak on geography."

"We are not weak on geography."

"Capitals," said Mick. "Capitals is where quizzes are won and lost."

Neil put both hands flat on the counter, which was what he did instead of screaming. "Say Canberra."

"I'm not saying Canberra."

"Say it. Once. As a favour to me."

"I've been to Australia, Neil."

"You've been to Dubai airport."

"Which is on the way," said Mick, "and I spoke to a fella in the queue, an Australian fella, and he said, and I remember this, he said, *Sydney, mate.* Now. You can have your atlas. I've got a primary source."

Neil went back into the box room and wrote four questions about bridges with a force that made the keyboard sound personal.

At six o'clock he did the thing he had done every Tuesday for four and a bit years, which was open the hardback notebook on the shelf above his desk and bring it up to date.

The Ledger was A4, black, hard-backed, with the year 2009 written on the first page in the handwriting of a twenty-two-year-old. It contained, in columns, every argument Neil Dockery had won since then. Date. Opponent. Subject. Witnesses. Method of resolution. Outcome. There were four thousand three hundred and eighteen entries. He had gone back with a ruler in 2014 and standardised the earlier ones, which had been sloppy.

He wrote:

*14 Oct. M. Grindley. Capital of Australia (again). Witnesses: none. Resolution: reference work offered, declined. WIN (conceded by refusal to engage).*

He totted the column. Then, because he was a man who liked a subheading, he turned to the back section, where a separate tally ran on its own pages, and looked at it the way other people look at photographs.

*R. SHAW — 1,441 / 96.*

One thousand four hundred and forty-one to ninety-six. Since their second date, which had been in a Wetherspoon's in Derby, and had involved a disagreement about whether tomatoes were berries. He had never dressed it up. He had shown it to her, in year one, the way you'd show someone a stamp collection, and she had laughed for a long time and said, "You keep score," and he had said, "Everyone keeps score. I write mine down," and she had stopped laughing slightly before he expected.

He closed the Ledger. He got his coat.

The Fettered Goose sat at the bottom of Sowerby Street with its back to the river and its front to a bus stop nobody used. It had a carpet with a pattern that had been chosen to hide things and was now doing that job for the fourth decade running. It had a snug behind a glass partition with eight etched geese on it, six of them fettered and two of them, due to a Victorian error, simply standing about. It had Angela Doughty behind the bar, who had run it for nineteen years and who had a laminated sign by the optics that said NO PHONES ON THE POOL TABLE, THIS INCLUDES YOURS.

And on Tuesdays it had the quiz, and on Tuesdays it had The Unreliable Narrators.

They sat where they always sat, in the snug, under the darts trophy that the pub had won in 1987 and never mentioned again. Christine Padmore was already there with her knitting, which was navy, enormous, and had been in progress for months. Hassan Iqbal arrived at twelve minutes past seven with his tie loosened and the smell of the phone shop on him, which was hot plastic and hand sanitiser.

"Evening," said Hassan. "Christine, what is that?"

"A cardigan."

"For who?"

"A person," said Christine, and turned the row.

Christine Padmore was sixty-one, had worked thirty years in the payroll department of a company that made industrial flooring, and knew more about football than anybody Neil had ever met. Not opinions. Facts. Scorelines, scorers, attendances, referees, the year the away kit went yellow. She had never once in four years volunteered a single detail about her own life, and Neil had never once asked, because he had understood their arrangement to be strictly about points.

Big Ian tapped the mic, which fed back, as it always did, and said, "Right, quiz. Nine teams. Usual rules. No phones, and I can see you, Ricky."

The teams that night: The Unreliable Narrators; Cerebellum & Sons; Norfolk 'n' Chance; The Quizzly Bears; Agatha Quiztie; Trivia Newton John; Two Pints and a Packet of Crisps; The Bee Gees Wax; and a team of four teenagers who had called themselves Team Team and looked like they'd wandered in for the toilets.

Cerebellum & Sons had the table by the fire, which they always had, because they arrived at six. Roger Hebden sat at the head of it in a gilet, with a mechanical pencil and a small clipboard, and he raised the pencil to Neil in greeting like a fencer.

"Neil."

"Roger."

"Ready for a hiding?"

"Statistically," said Neil, "no."

Cerebellum & Sons had come second at the Fettered Goose one hundred and sixteen times. Roger had once had it out with Big Ian for eleven minutes over whether a moon counted as a planet in the context of the question as asked. Roger sold conservatory blinds, which was a fact Neil kept about him for warmth.

The quiz went the way it always went. Round one, general knowledge, eight out of ten. Round two, music, seven, because there was a 2019 chart question Neil regarded as sewage. Round three, sport, ten out of ten, and Christine didn't put down the knitting for any of it; she just said the answers to the table in a low flat voice like someone reading out a shopping list — *Villa, ninety-four, second leg, Petrescu* — and Hassan wrote them down.

Ruby came in at half past eight, still in green, hair flat where the earpiece had been. She'd finished at eight after a twelve-hour shift and she came in and sat down next to Neil and put her forehead against his shoulder for about a second and a half, which was a lot from Ruby.

"All right," she said.

"Bad one?"

"Everton Road. Bloke on the roof of the bookies." She took a long drink of his drink. "He came down. He came down because he wanted his dinner, in the end. He'd been up there four hours and then he smelled the chip shop."

"That's good."

"It's the best thing that's happened to me all week." She looked at the answer sheet. "Are we winning?"

"We are ahead."

"Same thing."

"It really isn't."

Ruby Shaw was thirty-five and did not need pub quizzes. That was the thing Neil could never quite get comfortable on. She spent her days kneeling on wet pavements with her hands inside other people's emergencies, making decisions in four seconds that were correct or were not correct in ways that mattered, and then she came to the pub and got told that actually the plural of octopus, since it comes from Greek rather than Latin, is properly octopuses or, if you insist, octopodes, and never octopi.

Which is what happened, at twenty to nine, over the picture round, because she said *octopi* about a photograph of an octopus.

"Octopuses," said Neil.

"Right."

"It's Greek, not Latin, so the -i plural doesn't—"

"Neil."

"I'm only saying, if it comes up—"

"It won't come up. It's a picture of an octopus. I said a word about it in a pub." She wasn't angry. That was the trouble with Ruby; you never got the shouting that would have let you be the reasonable one. "Dad said octopi."

"Well."

"Don't *well*."

Vic Shaw had died eight days earlier, on a Monday morning, in the chair he sat in, with the racing on. Sixty-nine. Ruby had been on shift. She had heard the address come over and had known it, and had not been the crew sent, and had driven there afterwards in her own car with her hi-vis still on and had sat in the front room with her mum for six hours.

The funeral was Friday.

"Friday," she said, at the end of the night, in the car park, in the cold, with her hands in her sleeves. "Half eleven at St. Botolph's, then the Goose after. Angela's doing sandwiches. You'll be there."

"Obviously I'll be there."

"You'll be there," said Ruby, "and you'll be quiet."

"When am I not quiet?"

She looked at him for slightly too long, in the orange light, and then she laughed, sort of, and got in her car, and Neil went home and wrote eleven more questions before bed because he was ahead of schedule and liked to stay there.

On the way past the shelf he opened the Ledger and added, in his small square hand:

*14 Oct. R. Shaw. Plural of octopus. Witnesses: C. Padmore, H. Iqbal, M. Grindley. Resolution: correction accepted without counter-argument. WIN. R.S. 1,442 / 96.*