The Vacant Casualty Page 15

  ‘Percival? DI Bradley to Sergeant Percival?’

  There wasn’t even the beat of a pause. The reply came crackling through at once.

  ‘Pshhhhft. Percival here.’

  ‘We are now to regard the entire population of Mum-ford as suspects. This is a town at war. And we are at war with it.’

  ‘Pshtshhht. Understood.’

  ‘They have tried to cover up a murder. They tried to kill a police officer once, and are now trying again. Get everyone. I mean EVERYONE! I want this town surrounded!’

  ‘Keep your bloody hands on the wheel!’ shouted Sam.

  But it was too late. The lane opened up, the overhanging trees vanished, and all of a sudden they were careening across the middle of the square, braking hard but still doing upwards of seventy. Then sixty, fifty . . . But the shops on the other side were approaching rapidly. They turned, skidded, both cars forming a pirouette and their tyres ther-dududding over the cobbles. Sam crouched and pulled his hands over his head, seeing the pink painted shopfront of Mrs Stainwetting’s Teae Shoppe loom above him.

  Then there was a crash. He pulled his hands ever more tightly over his head, expecting falling glass to cut through them, and thinking all sorts of thoughts at once: that he’d never play ‘Moonlight Sonata’ again; that being able to play ‘Moonlight Sonata’ had never really got him anywhere in the first place, and his energies might have been better invested elsewhere; that he had never been in a fulfilling relationship; that the previous fact probably had at least in part something to do with his lifestyle and he really ought to sort himself out if he came through this; that by sorting himself out he meant cutting down to nothing stronger than smoking weed and drinking port; that there must be a small chance he’d get a sexy scar out of this car crash; that he had never found a satisfactory answer to the impenetrable mystery of why Fritz Lang had made two film noirs back to back in the mid-1940s with such similar plots and with an almost identical cast (Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea); that there must be a chance he would get cut in half and still be awake to see his own guts spilling about the place.

  Then he passed out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT MUST HAVE been some time before he woke again. As he came round he expected to find himself peering up into familiar but withered faces telling him that he had been in a coma for sixty years, or to be feeling around for an amputated limb. But the fact that he was upside down and felt his face pressed against a cold marble floor signalled to him that he had not been urgently whisked to hospital, or tended to and mended by educated and loving hands.

  He rolled on his side, then got up. The detective’s car was sticking in through the plate-glass window of the tea shop. Sam had been thrown clear, attracting to the surface of his clothes a certain amount of broken glass and whipped cream, and to the rest of his body a number of new and unexpected aches. He rested against the counter and ate a chocolate eclair, first taking certain shards out of it. Then he lit a cigarette, climbed over the wreckage and walked into the square.

  The sight that greeted him was, to his mind, out of a

  Paul W. S. Anderson movie. Which may not be a universal analogy, so the author will elucidate.

  Helicopters were flying above, armed troops marching in formation over the south side of the square, and the denizens of Mumford were to a man, woman and child lined up in front of the Town Hall with their arms behind their heads. Searchlights flitted across the paving stones from hovering gunships.

  Ahead of him was a figure he recognized and so he stumbled forward, only to be suddenly surrounded by SWAT officers, assault rifles at their shoulders, their voices screaming for him to get on the ground. He did so, and welcomed the relief from his aching legs and back, and the cold of the stone beneath his cheek.

  ‘Wait, wait!’ shouted a voice, running closer. ‘That’s my partner. Let him go! Help him up!’

  Rough, gloved hands grabbed Sam beneath the armpits and hoisted him reluctantly to his feet. He found himself face to face with Bradley.

  ‘You okay?’ asked the detective.

  ‘It’s you,’ Sam said weakly. ‘I thought I was in the film Minority Report or something. Or that short story by Ray Bradbury, what’s it called . . .’

  ‘Snap out of it, man!’ shouted Bradley, giving him a slap. ‘We’ve got our miscreants. It was the whole town, as you said. Everyone’s the murderer.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Sam, struggling to make himself heard above the beating of the rotor blades in the air above, the loudhailers shouting orders to troops all around and the heavy grinding of the tank tracks as they moved through the streets, crushing the cobbles beneath their weight.

  ‘I didn’t say everyone did it,’ said Sam. He could see Bradley was struggling to hear him and so he beckoned him over to a nearby shop that was open – a pharmacy that had been given the improbable title of Ye Olde Cure-iosity Shoppe (Chemist). They stepped through the broken windows and made their way to the back of the shop.

  ‘I’ve got bad news for you,’ said Sam, sitting down.

  Bradley didn’t seem able to concentrate. He kept answering queries from the radio on his belt and giving further invasive orders for the town to be searched and cut off. Looking around himself in dismay, Sam suddenly saw this as a great opportunity, the kind he had never had before. Bradley was still distracted as Sam searched along the shelves. He took effervescent vitamin supplements, aspirin, paracetamol, ibuprofen, hangover cures, extract of milk thistle, chewing gum, Lockets, children’s cough syrup (for nostalgia’s sake) and anything else he could find, until his pockets were full. Then he saw a kettle in the back room, boiled it and made himself a cup of extra-strength flu remedy, which not only tasted nice but was always good for getting a bit high.

  ‘So,’ said Bradley, finally switching off his radio set. ‘Oh, thanks,’ he said, accepting a cup of Lemsip. ‘What’s the news?’

  ‘I hadn’t finished,’ said Sam. ‘I told you I hadn’t finished running through the various options for who’s done it!’

  ‘But we’ve got all the old ladies. Five cars found with bashes on them, and when we’ve interviewed everyone we’ll be able to tie them all together.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Sam. ‘But we haven’t solved Terry’s disappearance, have we? I haven’t told you the next in the sequence of people who might have done it.’

  ‘You mean there’s more?’

  ‘Of course there is! Come on, follow me . . .’ With the windows blown out, the chemist’s shop was not much quieter than the street. Holding his mug, Sam walked forward through the rubble of the front window and studied the suspects all lined up. They looked as if they were ready to be shot, which sent a chill down his spine. He spotted a nearby police car and walked towards it, hoping there at least it would be quiet enough to talk without feeling one’s head was about to explode. Bradley was dawdling, talking on his radio again, and Sam took this opportunity to dart over to the car wreck he had crawled out from and search around in it until he found the rum bottle. Unbroken.

  ‘A victory,’ he whispered. ‘Another victory for me against the universe. Fuck you, world!’ He realized that he must still be a little bit high as he raised the bottle to the sky and attracted not only the attention of everyone from the town, but also the thirty or so armed officers who happened to be milling about, and half a dozen concealed snipers, the red aiming spots of whose rifles suddenly appeared on his chest.

  He waved his arms over his head in surrender.

  ‘Okay,’ he said slowly. ‘Sorry, nothing to worry about, I’m DI Bradley’s partner.’ The red spots vanished and the SWAT team wandered off, looking for other targets, and Sam returned to the car, plucking his cup of Lemsip from the roof and getting in the back, wondering if there were any health implications about mixing these things together.

  ‘Hello, old bean,’ said a familiar voice.

  Sam already had the rum bottle almost to his lips and turned his head somewhat comically towards t
he man next to him, in the awareness of having been caught out. He heard a laugh.

  ‘You go ahead. I’m not in a position to suggest that’s inappropriate, even if I wanted to. Look . . .’ It was Horace, holding up his hands, which were handcuffed together.

  Sam took a good long swig of the rum, then handed it over to the prisoner and sipped his hot drink.

  ‘It was me driving that car behind you. Terribly glad you weren’t badly hurt,’ said Horace.

  ‘But we saw you driving off ages before that.’

  ‘In the wrong direction. I was stoned out of my mind. I woke up in a little lane ages later and decided to race it back.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Sam. ‘We’re not very grown up, are we?’

  ‘No,’ said Horace, looking down. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I wasn’t being posh by using the first person plural, Horace,’ said Sam. ‘I meant both of us. We’re not very grown up.’

  ‘It’s true,’ admitted the aristocrat.

  ‘You have to act up to the role, and get used to being the Earl of Cheltenham.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Horace.

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘Not strictly accurate, once again. I got a call half an hour ago.’

  ‘Another promotion?’

  He nodded sadly. ‘Dear second-cousin-thrice-removed Philomina.’ With handcuffed hands he awkwardly doffed the homburg that he was wearing at rather a jaunty angle (the only angle to wear it, Sam expected he would say), and clutched it to his heart, gazing heavenwards with a noble air.

  ‘Old?’ Sam asked.

  He nodded happily.

  ‘Distant?’

  Once again Horace gaily signalled that this was indeed the case. ‘Couldn’t be more distant. New Zealand, South Island. Shacked up with a lumberjack over there, the randy old biddy.’

  ‘I feel a quote is in order about how the Lord takes us when he feels it is right.’

  ‘Yes,’ he reflected, ‘but then, that’s probably balls. She was killed by a falling tree that showed certain signs of having been tampered with by a chainsaw. Naughty hubby was after her inheritance.’

  ‘So what does that make you?’

  ‘Duke of Rochester. Fancy a line?’

  ‘No, come on . . .’ said Sam, wondering whether he could have smuggled drugs past his arresting officer, and then reflecting he almost certainly could. But taking drugs while in a police car seemed to him to be perhaps beyond innocent fun, and possibly straying into the area of actually asking for trouble. A little pouch of white powder was offered to him.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he thought, licking his finger and dabbing it so that it was frosted all over with crystals. ‘But we’ll all be dead one day,’ was ever the answering thought, and so he sucked the acrid powder from his finger and chased its sickening taste down his throat with a large gulp of rum.

  ‘By the way, do you remember asking me about an ogre?’ said Sam.

  Horace suddenly looked suspicious. ‘This wasn’t some dreadful children’s book you were pitching to me, was it, in the hope that I’d send it on to my publisher?’

  ‘No, it bloody wasn’t! A real ogre. Or as real as a – well, whatever. You asked me if I’d seen one. We ran into him.’

  ‘Oh!’ said the aristocrat, jerking up in his seat.

  ‘Literally,’ added Sam, wishing, parenthetically, that the occasional and accurate use of this word still had the power it deserved, and adding, just to make his point, ‘I practically stuck my hand up his bum. And Detective Einstein over there tried to brain him with a mashie. Or a niblick, or whatever it was. This white stuff does make you talkative, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It has that effect.’

  ‘But my question was, if you knew about this bloody great mystical creature roaming the woods, why didn’t you warn us?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know for sure, did I? I saw it myself a couple of months back when I was out foraging for mushrooms.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

  ‘Magic mushrooms. I’d hidden my stash somewhere in the woods to prevent Mother from getting her hands on it again – she posts some dreadful shit on Twitter when she’s high. Supporting House of Lords reforms, that sort of thing. But I was high as a goose when I buried it, and I couldn’t find the stuff sober, so got tooty again and went out looking for it in that state. I thought he was a hallucination, but then as I drove away, he took a bite out of the old jalopy the size of a dinner plate that was still there in the morning. So I got sort of confused. Now I come to mention it, he did seem a touch on the dangerous side. How did you escape?’

  ‘Well, when he was in the middle of trying to turn us both into human tartare, a hole opened up on the side of the hill and swallowed him whole.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder if it would be easier to get to the bottom of all this if one was a bit more sober some of the time,’ confessed Horace.

  ‘That is possibly true,’ agreed Sam, peering out of the window at the town square, which was to his eyes bright-lit with neon lights and zigzagged in zany ways upon his retinas. ‘So you’ve no idea where the damned thing came from?’

  ‘The school, I expect,’ said Horace. ‘I don’t know how these thickos fail to notice it, but it’s obviously a school that teaches witchcraft of some sort. Anyway, I’m very sorry for your trouble, and glad you’re safe. But . . . A hole, you say – and it opened up just like that. Another one!’

  ‘There have been others?’

  ‘A few years ago a semi-detached house vanished into a hole that suddenly appeared at the top of the town, near the base of the hill. It was never really investigated, they had it all hushed up. Terry Fairbreath was terribly interested in all this, I seem to recall.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Sam. ‘Here, Bradley’s coming over.’

  ‘Better hide the old snort.’

  ‘No, give him some. He could do with it. But don’t mention you knew the ogre was out there – that might be a bit of a sore spot.’

  Bradley got into the car.

  ‘Want some drugs?’ asked Horace.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ the policeman asked, whipping the proffered packet out of his hand and examining the contents.

  ‘Uh, nobody. Well, we met before. And then I nearly killed you earlier, and you arrested me. That’s why I’m in your car, at least.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. You,’ said Bradley, dunking his nose into the crystals. ‘Can you keep your posh mouth shut for ten seconds while I talk to Tinker Bell over there on the other seat?’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Horace said cheerily, for which he received a slap.

  ‘I said shut,’ said Bradley. Horace nodded dumbly.

  Sam leant forward and offered the bottle of alcohol. The detective partook largely of it and then once more of Horace’s powder, the latter so much so that on receiving his packet back, Horace stared at its emptiness with outrage for a moment and articulated several violent oaths without using his vocal cords. Sam felt a pride at Bradley’s new attitude swell in his heart.

  ‘So tell me,’ said the detective.

  ‘There are other solutions,’ Sam said. ‘Not just that everyone did it.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Well, now,’ said Sam. ‘I would say “please don’t overreact” but I suppose we’re past the point where that would be a helpful request. If it’s not the butler, and not the detective, and it wasn’t everyone acting in collusion, then . . .’ Sam reflected an instant too late that this new Bradley, this monster who was a creation of his, would not respond to what he was about to say. He had to finish the sentence.

  ‘In my experience of crime novels, which you are asking about,’ said Sam, ‘it could be the narrator.’

  Bradley didn’t even say a word. He opened his car door, got out, walked round, opened Sam’s door, yanked him out (spilling his drink) and slammed his head four times against the bonnet.

  ‘Don’t fuck me around!’ he shouted. ‘You’re holding out on me!’

  ‘I’m n
ot!’ yipped Sam, his face squished against the police car. ‘It’s a clever ending if the innocent-seeming narrator turns out to have done the murder.’

  Bradley yanked on his arm and spun the young man round. He looked at him, and saw that Sam was being honest and was trying to be helpful. He grabbed a handful of his T-shirt and lifted him off his feet.

  ‘What the FUCK does “it could be the narrator” mean?’

  ‘It depends if we are characters in a novel that is written in the first or third person. Guessing that it’s third person, then the narrator is of course the murderer in every whodunnit ever written. And even if they were a first-person narrator, we wouldn’t be able to tell who it is.’

  ‘Meaning what, in relation to my inquiry?’ asked the detective.

  ‘Okay,’ admitted Sam. ‘Meaning that that remark wasn’t any use to you at all. It’s meaningless.’

  Bradley let him go so he smacked into the cobblestones, and rubbed his arse as he got up.

  ‘I was only trying to give you a list of potentials,’ said Sam pathetically, as the world spun counter-clockwise.

  Bradley pointed to the car door. Sam got in and Bradley walked back round to his front seat.

  ‘So what else is there?’

  ‘Okay. As you can imagine, we’ve exhausted the conventional solutions. If you really want to know, the next idea would be that we aren’t in a murder inquiry at all.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Occam’s razor. Follow the evidence to the least unlikely solution: we’ve got no body, so there was no murder. Terry’s out there somewhere, still alive. Maybe he’s run off because of tax problems, or had a fall and got amnesia. Maybe he killed himself.’

  ‘No way!’ said Bradley. ‘I’m following my intuition, just as you told me to. I can feel in my gut there’s been a murder here and I’m going to find my way to the heart of this.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Sam, somewhat hopelessly. ‘What else can I say?’

  ‘Give me the next solution you can come up with.’

  ‘These solutions are from fiction, you understand? Right, well, here goes. I’ve eliminated all the conventional ones. Maybe it’s metafiction. Or a genre mash-up . . .’