by Mike Ashley
“Inspector Heighway! Inspector Heighway, sir!”
The shouting was coming from outside the door of the tavern. Heighway sipped his beer and waited for the sergeant to enter, but the door remained closed. Instead, the shouting seemed to be moving along the outside of the tavern towards a nearby window, and showed no signs of stopping. If anything, it was becoming more agitated.
“Inspector Heighway! Sir!”
Sighing, the inspector stood up and crossed to the window, which was closed and shuttered against the heat, the noise and (most particularly) the smell of the city. Unlatching it, he thrust the stout wooden shutters outwards, catching Raasay neatly on the forehead in mid-shout.
“Inspector HeighwOUCH!” yelled the sergeant.
“For the sake of the gods, man!” muttered the inspector. “You obviously know I’m in the tavern. Why don’t you just come in?”
“Can’t do that, sir. My Uncle Billy . . . erm, I mean, Superintendent Weird has ordered me not to go into taverns during working hours, sir.”
“I know that, Raasay, but I’m ordering you to come in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Raasay took a hesitant step towards the door, then halted, locked into immobility as his brain struggled to sort out the conflict caused by two contrasting commands from his superior officers. Heighway watched with fascination for a moment before taking pity on the sergeant.
“Raasay, listen. The superintendent ordered you to stop drinking in taverns while on duty. He didn’t say you couldn’t come in to deliver a message, or whatever you’ve come down here for.”
“Coo, yes, sir,” said Raasay, brightening. “I’ll be right in, sir.”
He trotted off towards the tavern’s door, and Heighway went back to his seat. To be honest, he felt responsible for the trouble Raasay had got into. He was painfully aware that the sergeant had developed a touch of hero-worship and had started imitating many of his habits, convinced that they would help him become as good a detective. But whereas a few lunchtime beers relaxed Heighway and helped him to think, Raasay usually got so relaxed that he couldn’t stand up and needed to be carried back to the police station to sleep if off under his desk.
Heighway drained his tankard and looked up as his sergeant sidled uneasily across to the table.
“Inspector Heighway, sir . . .”
“The superintendent wants me back at the station right away.”
“. . . The superintendent wants you back at the station right away, sir.”
There was a pause, and then a look of awe began to spread across Raasay’s broad face like the tide creeping in across a long, flat beach.
“It wasn’t that difficult to work out, man!” Heighway told him. “After the bollocking you got last week, the only thing that could have forced you within fifty yards of a tavern is a direct order from the superintendent himself.”
The sergeant flinched at the memory, and Heighway wasn’t too surprised. Only the fact that he was the superintendent’s nephew had enabled the sergeant to hold on to his job (and to a couple of other things, for anyone else who had thrown up all over Sergeant Hogman’s boots would have been singing falsetto in the police choir by now).
“Come on,” Heighway continued, “we’d better get back and see what your Uncle Billy wants. Let’s hope I’m not in too much trouble, eh?”
Clapping the sergeant jovially on the shoulder, he led the way out of the tavern.
Half an hour later, the inspector was feeling anything but jovial. They had found Superintendent Weird in his office, but after a quick (and unusually benign) “Dragged you out of the pub again, have we?” to Heighway, he had gestured to a chair, ordered Raasay to “go and do something useful, like topping yourself” and had then followed the sergeant out, leaving the inspector to become more and more apprehensive.
It was his superior’s air of quiet preoccupation that Heighway had found unsettling. Usually, the superintendent had an in-your-face, no-nonsense manner that was, at best, forthright and, at worst, downright insulting. But today there was an untypical thoughtfulness about him that Heighway found deeply worrying. Something was seriously wrong, and the inspector could only hope that it was nothing he had done.
By the time the superintendent returned ten minutes later, Heighway had convinced himself that he was about to be fired. He fidgeted in his chair as Weird sat down behind his desk, and waited for the blow to fall. But his boss seemed to be having trouble in getting started.
The seconds piled up into minutes as the superintendent sat staring into space, all the while tapping unrhythmically with one fingernail on the desk’s polished surface. And then, all at once, he spoke.
“Avago, we’ve got a problem,” he said. Heighway blinked, taken aback at the rare use of his first name. Whatever this was about, it was very serious indeed.
“I’m putting you on the case,” the superintendent went on, “because it calls for qualities that none of my other officers possess.” He paused and looked at Heighway quizzically. “How can I phrase this without hurting your feelings? Well, let’s put it this way. You may be an uncooperative miserable old git who drinks far too much, but you’re a talented uncooperative miserable old git who drinks far too much.”
“Don’t worry about sparing my feelings, sir,” muttered Heighway. “Give it to me straight.”
“And you’re honest. Well, for a policeman, anyway. I can trust you, as long as it’s not to do with keeping away from taverns. And you’ve got brains in your head.”
“Thank you . . .”
“Let’s hope you manage to keep them there.”
“What?”
The superintendent smiled humourlessly.
“Somebody,” he said, “is murdering my best officers. Three have died in two days. I want you to find the murderer before he finds you. Or anyone else. Or, more importantly, me.”
The lifeless body of Constable “Fingers” Zaglin of the Department of Interrogation lay on the flagstoned floor of one of the gloomy basement torture chambers where it had been discovered. Even in the dim, flickering light of the single burning torch wedged into a nearby sconce, it was plain that his death had not been easy, for his body was contorted and twisted, and his face was resting in a pool of vomit.
Heighway grimaced and looked away, feeling his own stomach threatening to rebel. Behind him, Superintendent Weird was pacing restlessly up and down, occasionally pausing to examine one of the unpleasantly sharp implements that rested on a table beside the interrogation chair. Nearby, Sergeant Hogman leaned against the wall, looking ill. Shock had drained his skin of what little colour it had contained, and the muscles beneath the pendulous jowls had sagged completely. His face looked like a wax mask that had been left too close to a fire.
Taking the torch in his hand, Heighway lifted it from the sconce and examined the corpse reluctantly. The eyes were wide and staring, but there were no signs of wounds to the body that he could see. The vomit contained what appeared to be a mixture of raisins, nuts and oats.
“So what’s he been eating, then?” Heighway muttered. “Horse food?”
“No, that’s muesli,” said Hogman. “It’s good for you. Fingers swore by it. Ate it every morning.”
“Doesn’t seem to have done him much good.” Heighway raised the torch again, scanning the stone floor around the body. In the dim light he could just make out a series of faint but familiar chalk marks.
“I see the police pathomancer’s been down here, then,” he added, straightening.
“Yes,” nodded the superintendent. “Madam Min had a look at him half an hour ago.”
Heighway scowled. Although the witches and wizards of the Pathomancy Department undeniably came up with useful information on occasion, he couldn’t help feeling that there must be a more scientific method of examining a corpse than drawing a pentangle around it, muttering an incantation and scattering a bit of fresh chicken-blood about.
“So what conclusions did the mad old bat come to?”
“The Chief Pathomancer,” he said, giving Madam Min her official title, “has provided us with important information.”
“Has she, now?”
“Yes. She succeeded in making contact with Constable Zaglin’s spirit. She says he was poisoned.”
“Brilliant. Who’d have thought it?” Heighway wedged the burning torch back into its sconce and turned his back on Zaglin’s corpse. “I don’t suppose she was able to tell us who did the poisoning?”
“Well, no. Min said the spirit was extremely agitated. Apparently it turned up in the afterlife only to discover a lot of other spirits with one finger missing that wanted a word with it. She says she might find out more when it’s had time to calm down a bit.”
“How long will that take?”
“Ah.” Suddenly the superintendent couldn’t meet Highway’s gaze. “About two hundred years, apparently.”
“You what?”
“Madam Min says time is different in the afterlife.”
“With respect, sir, Madam Min is a complete basket case!”
“She happens to be an extremely powerful and talented witch.”
“Then she’s a wicca basket case.”
“That’s enough, inspector!”
“Sorry, sir.” Heighway rubbed at his face with his hands, wondering where to start. He felt tired and stale. “I’ll get Raasay to start questioning everyone in the station. Did they see anything unusual, when did they last see Zaglin, that sort of thing. And I suppose I’d better have a look at the other two victims as well.”
Once again, the superintendent seemed to be having problems in meeting Heighway’s gaze.
“Er, that might be . . . difficult,” he mumbled.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Well . . . Sergeant Vaedrl and Constable Matsaran were both single men with no next of kin, dedicated to the job . . . you know how it is when someone has no life outside the force.”
“They become our responsibility then, don’t they, sir? We give them a proper send-off, an official funeral and all that stuff . . .”
“Yes, yes, yes . . . in theory, laddie, in theory . . .” The superintendent was twisting his fingers together nervously and had the air of an eight-year-old who has just been caught using his father’s best sword on the cat. “But all that costs money, and it’s difficult enough already trying to stretch the budget to cover everything. I mean, you have to realize that in their case there was no one left to care what happened to them. And it’s not as if we knew they’d been murdered then . . .”
“What’s happened to their bodies?”
“. . . Because Vaedrl died at home, you see. You know how much he drank, we assumed it was natural causes. And then we thought Matsaran must have had some kind of fit. It was only when we found Zaglin today that I realized they’d all died in exactly the same way . . .”
“Sir! What’s happened to the bodies?”
Superintendent Weird sighed heavily. He was looking about as happy as an orc in a tavern at closing time.
“I asked Sergeant Dendril of Race Relations to . . . dispose of them,” he muttered.
“Dendril?” exclaimed Heighway, unbelievingly. “By the gods, you know what he’ll have done with them, don’t you, sir? He’ll have sold them to one of his orc contacts! And you know what that means!”
The superintendent nodded tiredly.
“Only too well,” he muttered. “Only too well.”
“So what we’re saying here,” Heighway continued, “is that vital evidence, in the shape of the first two bodies in a murder investigation, has almost certainly been skinned, boned, diced and marinaded, and is probably at this very moment being served up in some seedy orc restaurant as the dish of the day?”
“That’s about the size of it,” agreed the superintendent.
“Good grief!”
Heighway turned away and stared down dejectedly at Zaglin’s lifeless body. It was fair enough, he supposed. That was all you were after your spirit had flown the coop – meat on a slab. Why should it matter what happened to the meat? There was no one to miss or to mourn the two dead policemen. They had both been unmarried, with few friends and sad, lonely lives outside the force. But all the same . . .
“Not much of a send-off, is it, sir?” he said, eventually. “Main ingredient in an orc’s lunch. Not quite the ceremony you’d like to mark your passing.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” responded the superintendent, as they turned and walked to the door. “You can get quite stylish service in some orcish restaurants these days. The waiters can be very posh. And they give you a lovely garnish . . .”
Heighway found Sergeant Dendril in his ground-floor office. He was fast asleep in a chair, his feet propped up on his desk, his hands clasped across his stomach, and his wide-open mouth was emitting a sound like a pig snorting through a megaphone. Heighway woke him by the simple expedient of slamming the door hard, at which Dendril made a noise like a pig choking on a couple of cabbages and fell backwards off his chair to disappear behind the desk.
As he waited for the sergeant to pick himself up, Heighway glanced around the office. It wasn’t too difficult to work out that it belonged to the Race Relations boys, for there were souvenirs of all the free races of Midworld scattered about the office. An orcish drinking-skull stood on the desk next to a beautifully-moulded elven wine goblet and a carved-quartz bottle of vlatzhkan gûl*. On top of the filing cabinet was a dwarven helmet that was disfigured by a large dent suspiciously similar in size and shape to a standard-issue police truncheon. And leaning against the wall was a cave-troll’s war club: a swollen lump of rock-hard wood six feet long with a fifteen-inch nail sticking through it.
Heighway smiled to himself nostalgically. Whoever had taken that away from its owner had either been incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. He’d once seen a troll making such clubs by the simple method of holding the nail against the wood with one hand and whacking it hard with the other. And he’d also once seen the body of an orc who’d been punched in the face by an angry cave-troll. His head had been the shape of an ice-cream scoop, and his nose had been sticking out of the back of his skull.
Groaning noises from behind the desk brought the inspector back to the present and he watched with satisfaction as Sergeant Dendril dragged himself upright. The sergeant was an open, cheery man who people instinctively liked and trusted on sight. Which just goes to show how misguided people can be, for Heighway knew that he could trust Dendril about as far as he could throw a hill-giant.
The man was, it had to be said, ideally suited for the task of dealing with the different races that inhabited the teeming city. He got on equally well with them all, partially because of his open, friendly disposition, but mainly because he had an orc’s appetite for alcohol, a dwarf’s appetite for gold and, most especially, an elf’s appetite for sex. Indeed, when it came to race relations, Dendril liked to boast that he’d had relations with members of every intelligent race in Midworld. And several other species as well.
“Inspector Heighway!” the sergeant beamed, sounding as though there was no one he’d rather have seen come into his office. “What a pleasant surprise. Do you know, I was only saying to Constable . . .”
“Cut the crap, Sergeant,” Heighway broke in. “This is a murder inquiry now. Vaedrl and Matsaran . . . you got rid of their bodies. I need to know where they went.”
“Me? What makes you . . .”
“I said cut the crap. The superintendent asked you to dispose of them, and we all know your usual methods of dealing with a nice, fresh corpse.”
“I really don’t know what you mean,” Dendril murmured, carefully reseating himself. His open, smiling face seemed to be saying that he’d just love to help Heighway, if th
ere was only some way that he could.
Heighway sighed.
“You may be unaware,” he said tiredly, “but this afternoon a third officer was murdered. Constable Zaglin.”
“Zaglin, eh?”
“Yes, Zaglin. Sergeant Hogman’s protégé. And the sergeant isn’t feeling too happy about it. He wants to know who’s responsible. In fact, he’s very, very keen to find out, and if he discovers that anyone is withholding information, they’re quite likely to find him paying them a little visit and inviting them to try out his basement entertainment suite . . .”
Heighway paused. Dendril’s smile had started to fall off in large chunks, and his ruddy complexion had turned the unhealthy, pallid colour of a maggot that doesn’t get out of the house much.
“So I’ll just tell him you don’t want to help us, then,” finished the inspector, and turned to open the door.
“No, wait!”
All of a sudden, Dendril’s voice was shrill and filled with panic. Heighway waited, his hand on the doorknob, his features carefully composed into an expression of polite enquiry, while the sergeant tried to wrap himself in the shreds of his dignity. It was like someone trying to wrap themselves in a very tiny flannel when surprised in the bathroom.
“I, er . . . I passed them on to a friend of mine who had kindly offered to, um, to make suitable arrangements for the two dead officers,” Dendril told him.
“This friend of yours wouldn’t happen to be an orc, would he?”
“Why, yes. Chancre is an orc, yes.”
“And he wouldn’t happen to work in an orc restaurant, by any chance?”
“Now you come to mention it, I do believe he did once mention that he was a chef, or something of that nature . . .”
“Which restaurant?”
“The Long Pig Grill-room, on Bile Street.”
“Thank you.”
Heighway opened the door, then paused to look back at Dendril, who was already reaching for the bottle of vlatzhkan gûl with a shaking hand.