The Vacant Casualty Page 16

  Bradley began to growl threateningly.

  ‘. . . We could be in a science fiction novel,’ explained Sam, ‘for all I know.’

  ‘That would be fun,’ said Horace.

  ‘Shut up or I’ll smash your face in,’ said Bradley.

  Horace looked at Sam and saw a trickle of blood coming from his hairline, following his recent beating. He shut up.

  After another glowering look at Sam, Bradley got out of the car and came round to his door. ‘Here we go again,’ said Sam, hoping that if he got another bash to the head at least it would knock him out. Bradley ejected him from the vehicle and pointed up at the sky.

  ‘A science fiction novel,’ he said. ‘So you’re saying a flying saucer would appear right now?’

  ‘Not a flying saucer,’ said Sam. ‘No one believes in flying saucers these days. More like some sort of heavily armoured spacecraft, or perhaps an enormous mother ship. Like that one . . .’

  Bradley let go of Sam, sending the writer crashing to the floor again as he, and all the people in the square, looked up and saw a huge dark shape fill the sky.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ABOVE THEM in the sky was something that at first glance looked to the detective (who lacked any other frame of reference) like a mile-long carburettor. Its main difference in appearance from this common piece of machinery was in the circular orange lights that glowed from its sides, and perhaps in the thousand smaller white specks glimmering from its millions of windows. Spiky, hundred-yard-long antennae extended from the front, and the whole structure was a sequence of giant spheres, hexagons and cuboid structures attached to each other by triangulated scaffolds through which ran spiralling supply pipes and walkways as wide as roads. The surface was of some dark, hard matt substance that hardly reflected light but gleamed meagrely, and the impression it struck on all the humans who gazed up at it was one of stupefied horror and awe. All voices fell silent; the helicopters scooted away across the trees to safety. The soldiers pointed their rifles upwards, useless as ants staring up at a tree about to fall.

  There came one giant, glaring note from an instrument within the spacecraft like an intergalactic foghorn, a frightening blast that blew out all the windows and sent a gust through the square, leaving all the humans clutching their ears. Then a narrow spindly shaft of glittering light flickered down and widened to a spotlight upon the cobblestones.

  ‘BEHOLD!’ thundered a voice. ‘The one and only Zaltor the Merciless!’

  There was a blinding flash and suddenly there in front of them, standing in the spotlight, was a strange creature in a white space suit. It seemed humanoid, with pale skin and wild red curly hair that sprouted from the back of its head in a sort of ginger halo. Behind it stood another figure with a notepad.

  ‘Behold,’ said the creature, coughing politely, and reading from a flimsy piece of foolscap he held in front of him. ‘For I am Zaltor the Merciless, Lord of the Seven Moons. I am here to demand from you, citizens of Naxi-Mori-Dolli-Phumofillimoltimollibosss (often referred to as Percy for short), that you deliver unto us the Gem-laden Sword of Shlorb. Or we’ll be really cross. And when I say really cross, I mean really cross.’ Finishing what was on the sheet, he looked up and coughed modestly. ‘It’s a bit on the nose as pronouncements go, but there you are, name of the game, really. Er . . . Why are you all looking at me like that?’

  Sam looked around him. Everyone else seemed speechless with terror and/or in the process of having a stroke.

  ‘Er . . .’ he piped up timidly. ‘We’re not actually the, er, the citizens of . . . Where did you say?’

  ‘The risk with talking to aliens,’ Sam thought, ‘is that you really don’t know how they’re going to react.’ He half expected to be zapped into a small pile of ash, but instead Zaltor blinked three times and said: ‘Naxi-Mori-Phumos. Did I say it right?’

  ‘Not if you meant to say “Earth”. This is Earth.’

  Zaltor waited a beat, then turned round and said to his underling, ‘Earth? We’re on fucking Earth? We’re not even in the right galaxy, Chris. Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Maybe I got the coordinates wrong,’ said the second alien, looking at his notepad.

  ‘Yeah, I’m guessing you fucking did get the coordinates wrong, you dungwit! That’s right, I said “dungwit”! And I’m not taking it back. Earth!’ He spat the last word in disgust, as they both looked up into the spotlight and twiddled buttons on their watches.

  ‘Oh, er, sorry about that,’ said Zaltor the Merciless. ‘Do carry on. Is this a party? Well, have a good time.’

  Then he zapped back into space with a scarcely audible blip.

  Everyone looked around, dazed, at one another for a moment before the yellow glittering spotlight shone back down again on exactly the same spot. Zaltor once more flickered into being in front of them.

  ‘Wait a minute . . . Earth,’ he said. ‘You created Spaghetti Carbonara, right?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ said Sam.

  ‘And cricket? And the cryptic crossword?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Cracking!’ said Zaltor. ‘Keep up the good work, and see you in a thousand years. Toodle-pip!’

  There was another flash of light, Zaltor disappeared again, there came another deafening blast from the foghorn and the spaceship blinked out of the sky.

  Bradley looked at Sam. ‘Metafiction, you say?’

  Sam shrugged, then looked around. ‘What’s that sound?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the ship,’ said Bradley, ‘flying off.’

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ said Sam, concerned. ‘It seemed to just blip off to another galaxy. Can you hear that rumbling?’

  ‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Bradley.

  ‘I think it’s coming from the Hill. Hey, look! That didn’t used to be there.’

  Sam pointed to one corner of the square. ‘Wasn’t that where Yeay Thee Olde Curiosity Tea Shoppe used to be? Now there’s just a huge towering pile of rubbish!’

  But Bradley wasn’t listening. Sam’s mention of the Hill had brought to his attention the one avenue to do with Fairbreath’s disappearance that they hadn’t had an answer to. He marched over to where the townspeople were being guarded at gunpoint. The members of the Parish Council had huddled together, as though they were having an ad hoc meeting. The mayor saw Bradley coming and piped up.

  ‘Oh it’s you, Bradley, you utterly brainless bumhole! What is the bloody meaning of arresting my butler in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Shut it, fatso, or I’ll knock your teeth out!’

  The mayor then saw Sam and recalled what had happened to him shortly before the interruption of Zaltor the Merciless. He shut up.

  ‘Why was Terry Fairbreath interested in the Hill? What is it that you’re trying to keep secret about it?’

  They all looked at each other nervously. None of them wanted to be the first to speak.

  ‘The Hill?’ piped up Horace, who had come over to watch. ‘You should have asked me. It’s full of shit.’

  Bradley elbowed him in the stomach so forcefully he doubled up and collapsed over, clutching his belly with his handcuffed hands. ‘No, I mean it, it’s literally full of rubbish,’ he said from the ground.

  ‘God damn it, be quiet, Horace!’ shouted Lord Selvington. ‘Or I’ll jolly well cut off your allowance!’

  ‘Whoop de doo,’ said Horace.

  ‘Go on,’ said Bradley. ‘Tell us about the Hill?’

  ‘Well, after the Second World War the town was impoverished, and there was this landfill site a few miles away. We were offered a lot of money to have it put here. The town used the money to start doing itself up, becoming a picture-perfect tourist trap.’

  ‘So where did the rubbish go?’

  ‘Under the Hill. Twenty million tonnes of it. They just turfed it over and pretended it wasn’t there. If anyone found out then the town would lose its reputation.’

  ‘Is it just me,’ said Sam, pointing to the same corner of the square
as before, ‘or is that pile substantially bigger than it was a few moments ago?’ But no one was listening to him.

  ‘Terry started hearing about the old murders that had happened, got interested and they bumped him off.’

  ‘No!’ shouted Selvington. ‘It’s not true! He was poking around, yes – but there’s nothing to find. I swear it. Those murders were solved and the perpetrators caught.’

  ‘Shut it, you toilet!’ shouted Bradley.

  ‘Er, guys . . .’ said Sam.

  ‘I’m arresting you all on suspicion of murder. On SUSPICION . . . of . . .’ Bradley was finding it hard to be heard beneath a background roaring noise. ‘Of . . . MURDER!’

  ‘GUYS!’ shouted Sam, grabbing Bradley’s sleeve. ‘We’ve got to go!’ He pointed at the pile of rubbish in the corner, which was now not only substantially more massive than before, but visibly growing. ‘I think the noise of the spaceship must have affected it. It’s bursting!’

  ‘Shit!’ said Bradley.

  ‘Literally,’ said Horace. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that.’

  The rubbish spilled out onto the square now like rapid lava from a nearby volcano, falling in cascading waves in the centre and oozing around the edges.

  ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to say this,’ said Sam. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’

  ‘Okay, let’s go!’ Bradley shouted to the soldiers, and their commanding officer waved them away to the south corner of the square, the townspeople running with them. As they all ran, however, the road collapsed in front of them and a poisonous gust of rancid air spilled out in a dark cloud. Many screamed and fell back. The major, taking his eyepatch off, yodelled at the sky, having apparently now gone mad for real. The soldiers shouted urgently into their walkie-talkies as another terrible rumble and roar came down from the mountainside. A massive sprouting stream of garbage spewed out from a fresh hole, high as a tsunami, and engulfed the street leading from the north of the square.

  The helicopters came thumping across the rooftops and hovered above them.

  ‘Hurry!’ shouted Bradley and Sam, and the soldiers waved their arms furiously. Rope ladders were dropped from six different aircraft, and with agonizing slowness the old people started to climb, encouraged with shouts from the soldiers.

  The noises, infernal burpings and explosions continued to come. The abbey was shattered into a pile of stones, and the houses on the north side of the square were sucked down from inside and crumpled, falling inwards and disappearing completely.

  ‘I’m not satisfied,’ shouted Bradley into Sam’s ear. ‘we’ve not solved the case!’

  ‘Okay, but can we talk about it later?’ Sam shouted back. Then a thought struck him. ‘Oh my God!’ he shouted. ‘What about the children at the school?’

  The pair exchanged a terrified look before Bradley’s expression cleared and he pointed into the sky. There, buzzing between the helicopters and darting in and around the tops of the roofs, were a hundred or so children, flying on broomsticks.

  There was so much to take in at once that Sam didn’t have time to question what this meant – and now it was his and Bradley’s turn to jump on the rope. The soldiers had mounted onto other craft that rose ahead of them and as his foot left the cobblestones the detective felt them tremble beneath him. When he had a firm grip he looked down and saw the stones all shaking and chattering, before the pattern dissolved and only churning mud was left. A fast-moving pool of slurry spread across the surface of the square, as fast as a breaking wave, a hellish odour rising from it.

  The helicopter lifted up, just as the few remaining walls of houses were flooded, and shattered on the impact, or a second later were overcome with trash. As the chopper rose, banked and sped towards distant safety, the last traces of the town disappeared under the tidal wave of shit.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE SMALL FLEET of helicopters (and broomsticks) hugged the treeline as it crossed miles of clear countryside touched only by early-morning sunshine. For a moment all the children were out of sight and as he gazed into the rising sun, it felt to Sam like this madness was all imagined, and he wondered whether this would make for the television pilot he had always wanted to write.

  ‘No,’ he thought, ‘the budget would be way too high.’ He looked at Bradley, and realized that for him the case was really still unresolved. ‘I forgot to tell him about the other kind of detective novel,’ he reflected, ‘the kind where the case remains unsolved and sticks in the detective’s mind for years on end, becoming an obsession with him. Oh, well.’

  They were set down at an army base some twenty miles south that had been put on emergency. Ambulances were there, ready for those suffering from injuries, panic and (in seven instances) mild heart attacks. There was one sight which had haunted them all as they had risen into the sky from the doomed town and that was the cordoned area in the east end of the square, where Bradley had put the granny mafia under armed watch. This had become cut off at the last minute and none of the grannies had survived.

  ‘Good,’ said Bradley. ‘Serves the fuckwits right.’

  The survivors were given blankets and taken into the mess hall, where hot drinks and soup were offered them in cups. After several dozen loud complaints, the soup and tea were replaced by ‘medicinal’ brandy from the store, which was ladled out into tin cups and some time after that, the ancient crowd was subdued into sad and quiet conversations, or sleep.

  Bradley was not for hanging around, though. There was something on his mind and without delay he seconded a jeep from the army base (which came with a soldier in it, to check he didn’t put it to misuse) and headed back to Fraxbridge as fast as he could. Sam saw him turning on the motor and jumped in the back at the last minute.

  ‘Wait for me!’ he said. ‘I want to come.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Bradley, speeding out of the gate. ‘But there’s no time. Something’s about to go down, I can feel it.’

  They hit a bridge and lifted off for twenty yards, landing with a tremendous smash. The soldier’s rifle went off.

  ‘Whoopsadaisy,’ he said.

  ‘There’s something else, Sam,’ said Bradley. ‘Something you haven’t told me; something you’ve forgotten. I can feel it. You said I ignore the evidence, right?’

  ‘Right. Follow your gut.’

  ‘But you mean the legal evidence, right? The stuff my superintendent would care about.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. You should pay attention to the little stuff, the little signs of wrongdoing that aren’t exactly evidence, but clues.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Bradley repeated, as they tore round a corner. ‘There’s something. Something someone said; something troubling the back of my mind.’

  ‘But we’ve left behind all the suspects at the military base,’ protested Sam.

  ‘The obvious suspects,’ said Bradley. ‘The butlers, all the other residents . . . Something doesn’t fit .’

  They raced down a country lane at approaching three times what Sam would have regarded as a safe speed. His training of Bradley had nearly come to fruition: he was sharing a car with the detective of his dreams, and now he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to. But he was proud of his creation – not to give encouragement now would be like Frankenstein taking a hammer to the monster just as it raised its head.

  ‘You’re right, Detective. You’ve got all the pieces, you just need to put them together. The chances are you’ll puzzle over it and then at the last minute you will be put onto the scent by an apparently innocuous remark by someone else – possibly one that, when you think back over it, comes across as rather shoehorned in. By the way, that last line you said about how something doesn’t fit – that’s perfect. You’re becoming a natural.’

  ‘Well, something doesn’t fit. What is it that’s troubling me? Tell me all the events in the last twenty-four hours.’ He was nearly hitting ninety now, the trees that lined the lane racing past, the light flitting through. The soldier sat quite happily next to hi
m, unperturbed.

  ‘The pub. The landlord . . .’

  ‘Braindead.’

  ‘The grannies . . .’

  ‘Actually dead.’

  ‘The car, the field, the golf clubs, the ogre . . .’

  ‘Almost certainly dead.’

  ‘The driver who picked us up.’

  ‘Again – braindead.’

  Sam thought there was something exciting and fearful about Bradley’s intensity. He himself had been perfectly certain there was no crime to solve, but the detective’s ferocity was starting to make him feel otherwise and causing an uncomfortable cold sensation to rise through him. They tore through a small hamlet that was still asleep, ripped straight over the roundabout in the middle of the road, took a left turning too late and missed the bridge – instead they hit an abandoned truckbed that leant to the ground and formed an improvised ramp, and, hitting it at nearly a hundred, they cleared the stream easily, landing with a resounding crash that made the soldier’s rifle go off again.

  ‘Whoopsadaisy,’ he said once more.

  Bradley angled the jeep through a farm’s back yard, avoiding several chickens before smashing through a bush and hitting the road again. He looked at his watch.

  ‘Fried chicken,’ said Sam.

  ‘Delicious.’

  ‘Horace, the Duke of Rochester.’

  ‘Daft,’ said Bradley.

  ‘The butlers . . .’

  ‘Innocent.’

  ‘The square. The soldiers . . .’

  ‘There is something,’ insisted Bradley.

  ‘The spaceship.’ Sam tried to think laterally. ‘The Tea Shoppe. The cobbles. The drugs . . .’

  ‘Ooh, have you got any drugs?’ asked the soldier.

  ‘No!’ they both said.

  ‘The car, the full moon, the rubbish . . . I can feel it, I’m close . . .’

  The engine started smoking as Bradley reached the edge of Fraxbridge and began emitting flames by the time they hit the high street. He slew to a halt by the side of the street and left it where it stopped, then got out and ran.