Skulduggery Pleasant Read Free

took a little over an hour, and they arrived twenty minutes late. They were led up a flight of creaky stairs to a small office that was too warm to be comfortable, with a large window that offered a wonderful view of the brick wall across the street. Fergus and Beryl were already there, and they showed their displeasure at having been kept waiting by looking at their watches and scowling. Stephanie's parents took the remaining chairs, and Stephanie stood behind them as the lawyer peered at them all through cracked spectacles.
    "Now can we get started?" Beryl snapped.
    The lawyer, a short man named Mr. Fedgewick, with the girth and appearance of a sweaty bowling ball, tried smiling. "We still have one more person to wait on," he said, and Fergus's eyes bulged.
    "Who?" he demanded. "There can't be anyone else; we are the only siblings Gordon had. Who is it? It's not some charity, is it? I've never trusted charities. They always want something from you."
    "It's . . . it's not a charity," Mr. Fedgewick said. "He did say, however, that he might be a little late."
    "Who said?" Stephanie's father asked, and the solicitor looked down at the file open before him.
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    "A most unusual name, this," he said. "It seems we are waiting on one Mr. Skulduggery Pleasant."
    "Well, who on Earth is that?" asked Beryl, irritated. "He sounds like a ... he sounds like a . . . Fergus, what does he sound like?"
    "He sounds like a weirdo," Fergus said, glaring at Fedgewick. "He's not a weirdo, is he?"
    "I really couldn't say," Fedgewick answered, his paltry excuse for a smile failing miserably under the glares he was getting from Fergus and Beryl. "But I'm sure he'll be along soon."
    Fergus frowned, narrowing his beady eyes as much as was possible. "How are you sure?"
    Fedgewick faltered, unable to offer a reason, and then the door opened and the man in the tan overcoat entered the room.
    "Sorry I'm late," he said, closing the door behind him. "It was unavoidable, I'm afraid."
    Everyone in the room stared at him, stared at the scarf and the gloves and the sunglasses and the wild fuzzy hair. It was a glorious day outside, certainly hot the kind of weather to be wrapped up like that. Stephanie looked closer at the hair. From this range, it didn't even look real.
    The lawyer cleared his throat. "Um, you are Skulduggery Pleasant?"
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    "At your service," the man said. Stephanie could listen to that voice all day. Her mother, uncertain as she was, had smiled her greetings, but her father was looking at him with an expression of wariness she had never seen on his face before. After a moment, the expression left him and he nodded politely and looked back to Mr. Fedgewick. Fergus and Beryl were still staring.
    "Do you have something wrong with your face?" Beryl asked.
    Mr. Fedgewick cleared his throat again. "Okay, then, let's get down to business, now that we're all here. Excellent. Good. This, of course, being the last will and testament of Gordon Edgley, last revised almost one year ago. Gordon has been a client of mine for the past twenty years, and in that time, I got to know him well, so let me pass on to you, his family and--and friend, my deepest, deepest--"
    "Yes yes yes," Fergus interrupted, waving his hand in the air. "Can we just skip this part? We're already running behind schedule. Let's go to the part where we get stuff. Who gets the house? And who gets the villa?"
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    "Who gets the fortune?" Beryl asked, leaning forward in her seat.
    "The royalties," Fergus said. "Who gets the royalties from the books?"
    Stephanie glanced at Skulduggery Pleasant from the corner of her eye. He was standing back against the wall, hands in his pockets, looking at the lawyer. Well, he seemed to be looking at the lawyer; with those sunglasses, he could have been looking anywhere. She returned her gaze to Mr. Fedgewick as he picked up a page from his desk and read from it.
    "To my brother Fergus, and his beautiful wife, Beryl,'" he read, and Stephanie did her best to