by Heide Goody
Big cake! mouthed Cesar with an idiot grin.
“Yes,” said Polly. “I wanted to get her something for the big day.”
“Don’t worry yourself about that.”
“She’s seven,” Polly said to Chesney.
“Let’s not bother the nice man,” said Erin. “We’ll leave you in peace.”
Cesar gave her a wave. As they left, Chesney told her someone would come and do the admin and arrange an induction. And then the three of them were gone. It was her, alone, in the simple and modest apartment.
“Induction,” she muttered. “Like I’ve just joined some sodding cult.”
She stood in the little lounge but didn’t know what to do there, so she stood in the little bedroom. The shelf beside the window was empty but for an ornamental snow globe. Inside it was a little scene. A frozen lake with a bare tree leaning over it. On the ice, two skating figures executed in poorly detailed plastic. A boy and a girl. Polly gave it a shake. Snow swirled round the silent scene.
She looked at her new home.
“This is it then,” she said and, because that didn’t seem to quite encapsulate it, added an emphatic “Shit!” for good measure.
2
“Regional support and dispersement.”
Sam Applewhite sat up, nearly tipping herself from her office chair in the process. She had been on hold to DefCon4’s head office for fifteen minutes before her call was picked up. This was possibly a new record for speed.
“Hi, this is Sam Applewhite, Skegness,” she said. “I need some help with the tasks on my app.”
“This is regional support and dispersement,” came a woman’s voice. “You need technical support.”
“Wait, wait, don’t hang up,” she said, sensing the woman’s hand drifting to the disconnect button. “I don’t think there’s a problem. I just have a problem with this task.”
DefCon4, an amorphous national corporation that had started out as a security cash transportation firm before branching out into ‘we’ll do anything as long as you pay us’ territory, directed its staff through its own bespoke phone app. Sam’s day was controlled by a series of messages dropped onto her calendar by mysterious agents at some other office.
“It says I need to collect a mammoth.”
“Pardon?”
Sam looked at her phone and read out the task in full. “Twenty-fourth of November. Pick up mammoth specimen from Professor Springer at Humber College of Sciences and transport to LRPC research centre. Specimen is not permitted to defrost. Consult training course C11B43 for temperature-controlled transport, blah, blah, blah.”
“Mammoth?”
“Well, yes, that was my thought. Mammoth?”
“And it definitely says mammoth?”
“I maybe wonder if the admin at head office who entered the details had…”
“Had what?”
“I don’t know. Succumbed to a medical emergency and fallen face-first on their keyboard.” There was no other logical explanation.
She’d already used the keyboard of the desktop computer to test her theory. Falling on the keys to spell mammoth wasn’t easy to picture when she looked at where the keys were placed.
“I also tried it on my phone to see if it was an autocorrect thing.”
“And?”
“It’s fine. It even suggests a jaunty elephant emoji to accompany it.”
The kettle in the corner of the office clicked off and Sam went to pour herself a hot chocolate. Crappy autumn days called for hot chocolate.
“Mutton specimen?” suggested the woman.
“Mammary specimen?” Sam countered, stirring the cup.
“Mammal specimen?”
“It doesn’t sound much better.”
The woman made a thoughtful noise. “Maybe you should ask your office administrator. They could look into it.”
“Yes,” said Sam. “However, Niamh our administrator isn’t here.”
“Well, when she gets back…”
“I think she’s off ill. That’s what I was told.”
“And are you expecting her back soon?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Never met her.”
“Oh, you’re new?”
“Eight months into the job.”
“Long term sick, I see. Your regional manager should be able to deal with it.”
“Bob Newitt. Yeah, he’s not here either. Not a hundred percent sure if he ever started.”
“The previous manager?”
“Left before I arrived. I think.”
“Perhaps one of your colleagues knows who’s covering in their absence.”
Sam looked round the room. Four desks, all empty apart from hers. Well, one of the desks had a little name plaque on it for a Doug Fredericks. There had also been a cactus on the desk, which she had called Doug. Doug had been the closest thing she’d had to a colleague. His nameplate remained, but the cactus standing in for an actual human had met an unfortunate (and unlikely) end when it was rammed down the throat of a violent intruder. Sam liked to think Doug had sacrificed himself to save her, but she missed their chats. She would get another plant one day. She was sure Doug would understand.
“Well, I suppose you will have to go to this—”
“Humber College of Sciences.”
“—and collect whatever it is. Do you have something to collect it in?”
“Well, that brings me to another matter,” said Sam. “We’ve had a parcel arrive.”
“We?”
“I. I had a parcel arrive.”
She looked at the big delivery box resting on one of the empty desks. Next to it, surrounded by polystyrene packing chips, was the box’s contents. Another box.
“I’ve got a box here, one of those oversized picnic box things. It says ‘Human organs in transit’ on the side.”
“Oh,” said the woman, interested. “What’ve you got that for?”
“Well,” said Sam. “I have two theories. One is that it’s empty, and that at some point I’m going to be asked to do transplant organ delivery for DefCon4. Or mammoth specimens. Whatever. I hope it’s not actual organs. I should tell you that’s not something I plan to get into. For one, I don’t have anywhere to store organs here.”
“I’d be surprised if you did.”
“My second theory is that the box does indeed contain human organs in transit.”
“Have you looked?”
“No, and I don’t want to. I am not going to be held responsible for the state of whatever’s inside.”
“I could try and find out for you,” said the woman.
“That’s lovely,” said Sam. “But it doesn’t help me understand what this actual task is—” She stopped. The woman had already put her on hold.
“Damn it all,” she said to herself. She would have said it louder if there was anyone to hear. She missed Doug.
Her phone buzzed. Another call coming through. It was her friend, Delia.
“Morning,” said Sam.
“He’s been murdered,” said Delia.
“What?”
“Definitely murdered.”
As conversation openers went, it was a unique one. Maybe it was a morning for odd conversations. “Murdered?” said Sam.
“I know it sounds silly, but it’s true.”
“Sorry,” said Sam. “Who?”
“Drumstick!” said Delia, as though it was the most self-evident thing in the world.
Sam tried to process this.
“I need you to come over with your stuff and, you know, solve it,” said Delia.
Sam tried to process this as well. She could just about make the leaps of logic to make sense of her friend’s words. Delia ran a junk shop in the town and, against all odds, was the most recent winner of Skegness and District Businessperson of the Year. She was also one of the few friends Sam had made since returning to the town.
“I’ve got to go to this college in the next hour but I…” She stopped herself. “Of course, I’l
l come over.” There was little else a friend could say. She hung up and prepared to leave.
“Right, mammoth transportation,” she said. With no better container to use, she opened the ‘Human organs in transit’ box. It was deep, with a weighty lid and a solid plastic carrying handle. It was – thankfully, naturally – empty. Assuming she had to move something frozen, and hoping it wasn’t a whole mammoth, this would probably do.
She recalled images of whole mammoth carcasses being dug up from the Siberian tundra or some such place. A dead mammoth, even one crushed and squished by centuries in the ice, would not be going in the back of her tiny Italian work van.
“And I’m not even going to bother trying to download the frozen goods training,” she told Doug’s nameplate. “I’ll just end up spending an hour fighting the logon system and the company network.”
The decision to completely ignore the frozen goods training was a pragmatic one, based on her knowledge of DefCon4’s labyrinthine IT systems and nonsensical documentation. Besides, if the training suggested more advanced equipment was needed than this box, she would not be able to requisition it either. The requisition of equipment was a workflow process requiring sign-off by the most senior local person. That she was the most senior local person (and therefore not permitted to authorise her own requests) had proven to be an immovable blocker that she’d never found a way past.
With an empty box, a pick-up address and more wishful thinking than confidence, she set out for the day.
* * *
Delia’s house was a ten minute drive through town and out the other side. Skegness: the jewel in the crown of the flat and featureless Lincolnshire coastline. The largest seaside resort for a hundred miles in either direction. A lurid kaleidoscope of amusement arcades, fairgrounds, deckchairs, donkeys, and fish and chips. Even on a cold morning, people were already out on the promenade, wrapped up snugly. To an individual, they were either in search of a morning fix of caffeine, sugar or alcohol, or taking a bracing walk along the front to justify one.
Delia’s house was a small semi-detached on the outskirts of town, with a crop of abandoned toys in the front garden and the world’s smallest poultry farm in the back. Sam parked her three-wheeler Piaggio on the driveway and rang the doorbell.
When Delia answered the door, Sam could see she had been crying. Not a lot, but she’d been crying.
“Hey,” said Sam and hugged her.
From inside came the sound of playfully squabbling children’s voices trying to compete in volume with a television turned up loud.
“Come see the crime scene.” Delia smiled briefly and with difficulty, to show she was joking, or at least trying to.
Sam picked her way through a hallway littered with shoes, dropped coats, bags of partially emptied shopping and the other detritus of a young family struggling to get its act together. The back garden was long and narrow. Halfway down, a run had been constructed from old pallets and wire fencing, and a tall turkey padded about inside. It cocked a beady eye at Sam as they approached.
“Twizzler’s okay?”
Delia nodded and wiped her nose with a tissue. “He’s down. He knows something is up.”
“Christmas,” said Sam to herself because she couldn’t help it.
“Twizzler was always the quiet one. Never up to greet the dawn. I think Drumstick thought he was meant to be a cockerel.”
“And where is Drumstick?”
Delia gestured to the other side of the garden path. A black bin liner had been laid over a mound on the earth. Sam crouched and flicked it aside. The turkey was laid on its back, its eyes half-lidded. There was dried blood in the creases of its knobbly head.
“You found him like this?”
“No, he was in the run. But I couldn’t leave him there. Have I contaminated the crime scene?”
Sam looked up at Delia and said, as kindly as possible, “I don’t actually tend to do turkey murders, Delia.”
Delia tucked a strand of her untidy hair behind her ear. “But you can, can’t you? You’ve got equipment and stuff.”
“I’m hardly CSI: Poultry Division.”
“You think this is funny?”
Sam tutted, at herself. “No. I don’t. It’s just … animals die, don’t they? It could have been a fox, or a stoat, or even a cat.” She looked at the size of the bird. “Okay, maybe not a cat.”
Delia was shaking her head. She lifted a length of wood from the borders. It had a dark red mark on it and an obvious splatter pattern. “A fox? With a plank?”
“Maybe it fell over accidentally. Was it windy last night?”
“It was leaning by the back door.”
The back door was twenty feet from the turkey run. That would have to be some wind.
Sam glanced around at the house, the side gate, the trees of the neighbour’s garden visible over one fence, the second and third floor apartments of the retirement village visible over the other. “Not a fox. Not an accident.”
“No,” agreed Delia firmly.
“But who would want to murder a turkey?”
3
As she unpacked her things, Polly Gilpin intermittently watched the women from her bedroom window. It gave her a clear view of the garden. It was the principal view from her apartment. The garden was littered with toys, muddied and abandoned things. She could imagine the kinds of children who lived there – delightful wild tearaways with uncombed hair and jam-smeared mouths. Children as children should be.
She looked at the photos of Jack and Iris, her great nephew and great niece, which she’d placed on the dressing table. School photos; rigid, formal.
There was something energetic and urgent about the women’s manner. The one with untidy blonde hair seemed fraught, on edge. The other one – younger, more measured – was striding about keenly observing this and that. Maybe she was looking for something lost. Dropped keys perhaps.
Polly was tempted to open the window to try to hear them, but she suspected the distance was too great, and the autumn wind would whip away the sound and blow unpleasantly into the apartment. The lives of people outside Otterside retirement village were distant things now, inaccessible.
Deciding she would inevitably have to go and explore this new world of hers, Polly put on a vibrant pink cardigan (chosen to dispel her mood and the gloom of the season) and, with the one book she had brought with her under her arm, went out.
“A little bird tells me that you’re Polly Gilpin,” said a voice beside her as she walked down the stairs. A man had fallen into step with her, roughly her age, a square-jawed man in a hat.
“Why would a bird tell you that?” she said, stiffly. “Seems a rather boring thing for a bird to tell you.”
He laughed. It was a rough, throaty laugh, like at some point he’d had a heavy smoking habit. “Birds are bloody stupid, ain’t they?” he said. “Tweet bloody tweet.” He had a southern accent, estuary English maybe, Tweet bladdy tweet.
They’d reached the bottom floor. He turned to face her with such confidence she felt compelled to mirror him. His hat was a black trilby with a striped band round it. He was handsome in a rough sort of way, although any facial symmetry was countered by a fading strawberry birthmark on his upper cheek. Polly didn’t care about birthmarks, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about men who wore hats indoors.
“Course I know you’re Polly Gilpin,” he said. “What I’m trying to do, in my humble way is introduce myself and ask if you’d like to take a walk around the gardens with me this morning.”
She frowned. “But I hardly know you,” she said honestly.
“Hence the introductions and the walk around the gardens.” He smiled with a set of nice white teeth that were quite possibly his own.
“But why?” she said.
He nodded at the book she carried. “Cos the alternative is just sitting and reading.”
“I like books.”
“As do I, as do I. More of a papers man meself. But even lady bookworms might like a b
it of variety. Besides, the doctor says I got to do ten thousand steps a day, and I don’t like doing them alone.”
She was still doubtful.
“Don’t worry, princess,” he said. “I’m not one of them sexual predators or nothing. Chance’d be a fine thing. They’ve got me on so many prostate tablets, Little Strawb’s been knocked into a permanent coma.”
“Strawb?” she said.
He grinned again. A seventy-something with teeth as good as his would take every opportunity to show them. He held out his hand. “Mike Fisher, but my friends call me Strawb.”
She took his hand and shook. “Strawb because...?” she said without meaning to.
He poked the large birthmark. “That’s right. Funny. Most people never notice.”
4
Sam considered the possibilities in the death of Drumstick.
DefCon4, despite what Delia or her dad might say, did not do murder investigations. DefCon4 had contracts with various police forces for crime scene evidence management, appropriate adult and medical services for people in custody, prisoner transportation and post-release offender management, but it generally left the crime-solving to actual police officers. However, Sam had watched enough detective shows to pick up some basics.
“Means. Motive. Opportunity.”
“I think the means is fairly obvious,” said Delia, gesturing to the plank.
“The murder weapon, yes,” Sam replied. “But there was also the means of getting in.”
She paced the garden and inspected the fence. Despite the general air of chaos about Delia’s home, the garden was secure and the fences high. An athletic individual could haul themselves over, although the slatted garden fences would potentially break under the weight of an adult. The only other ways into the garden were through the house or the garden gate.
Sam inspected the gate. There was a bolt on the inside, with a latch handle of hooped iron. It was currently unlocked. “You bolt this gate?”