by John Grant
I could go on.
Once upon a time all these forgettable individuals actually had an independent existence, even if you couldn't tell them apart from each other any more than I'd been able to distinguish Dave Knuckle's discards in my hoppers.
It was wasteful.
Decades ago the Authorities, during one of their periodic spurts of cost-cutting, realized this. Down-sizing was the zeal of the day. Why expend effort hiring individuals for the bit parts, why have to put out the cash for the undertaker's bills when people could be found on the unemployment queues who'd be only too eager to accept zero wages in exchange for board, lodging ... and immortality? Oh, sure, they'd have to accept being murdered every once in a while, but they wouldn't be dead long before being revived, given a different name, maybe a fresh wig, a new home to live in, a new role and probably a new spouse or lover.
Acting in conjunction with the Anti Blood Sports League, the Authorities founded Cadaver-in-the-Offing.
And hired me.
Yes, I suppose you're probably still wondering about me. Frankly, the less said about me the better. I had my own reasons for coming to work in Cadaver-in-the-Offing, but presumably the law-enforcement agencies of various obscure Middle European countries have forgotten all about me by now – which was one of the reasons why I was contemplating resigning my post, that day in the midst of the overlong Indian Summer.
Or maybe they haven't. That's one of the reasons I won't resign quite yet.
The other? All will become clear, Tonstant Weader.
So let's just say no more than that it's my job to take the ... the secondary products of the detectives' industry and ... and mend them.
That's all you need to know.
Other than that, let my past be an obscurity and my present something only dimly perceived; let me be a faceless and nameless cipher.
~
"Hello, Victor," said the Clerk wearily when finally he answered the telephone. He packed decades' worth of disdain into those two words: just because Cadaver-in-the-Offing couldn't continue to function without my services – or those of another like me – doesn't mean that people are courteous to me. Oh, no: far from it. Most of them avoid me like the plague, and, whenever they're forced to deal with me, look at me like they've just trodden in something the cat's done.
Tell you the truth, I prefer it that way.
I explained my problem. For once I knew that I had his attention. I could hear the click of his keyboard in the background as he checked up on what I'd been telling him.
"Yes," he said at last. "I have the entry here on screen in front of me ... Dukes ... Even Mightier ... inscrutable ... magician. Hum. Ho. He is – was – part of a case for Inspector Romford."
"The one with the pipe, the puppies, the paunch and the passion for peppermints?"
"The very same. Big in the library market. Would be even bigger if it weren't for the difficulties he had kicking his crack habit. Hm ... he was supposed to have solved this case by now – it's just a short story. It was one of his stage rivals did it – The Mighty Thrombosis – on account of the wife, Zelda. The Mighty Thrombosis's wife, that is. Usually the wife in a Romford case."
Even though the Clerk couldn't see me I held up a hand to stem the flow of words. "That's all as might be," I said, "but the fact of the matter is that I'm still a body short of my quota."
"Don't suppose you've got even the, harrumph, severed hand?"
"Not so much as a bleeding fingernail. I told you, I checked the hopper proper."
"Well, it's not my responsibility – I don't deal with the detailed stuff, as you know."
"I know."
In other words, the Clerk thought this was likely to be a knotty problem, and the quicker he got his rear covered the better.
"Delegate, boy, delegate," he said. "That's my motto. Eh?"
"I know."
He was going to dump me in it and leave me to sink or swim.
"Tell you one thing, though," he added, then paused. "This indeed sounds like" – and I could almost hear the drums roll – "A Case For Inspector Romford!"
The phone went dead.
~
Quite how Inspector Romford's inability to solve A Case For Inspector Romford could be A Case For Inspector Romford was a logical tangle that part of me was trying to unravel as I ambled up Curving Lane towards the center, if the village could be said to have such a thing, of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. It was about lunchtime, and so Romford would certainly be in the Heart & Sickle, drinking brown ale and keeping an ear open for clues. It's an old technique and can be effective. The sole disadvantage is that the brown ale tends to mean the clues, though gathered, go astray again.
I found him at a table in the corner, nursing a pint. Beside it was a whisky chaser. I raised my eyebrows.
"Needed a drop of the hard stuff," he said, seeing the direction of my gaze. "Don't mind telling you, whossname, that I'm bamboozled."
With the accent on the middle syllable, I thought, but I said nothing.
"Right there in front of my eyes it was done," he continued, "bold as brass and twice as natural. I thought I had it all sewn up within minutes, but it wasn't to be. Mark my words, there's more to this case than meets the hand."
I must have looked puzzled, because he added, leaning forwards confidentially towards me, "I would have said 'eye' but the hand's quicker, see?"
I said I saw.
"Bleeding conjurers, prestidigitators, stage magicians, illusionists, call them what you will," he mumbled through the froth on the top of his beer.
Pulling the wooden chair scrapingly back over the slate floor of the Heart & Sickle's snug, I asked him what he meant.
And he explained.
~
The previous night had seen a grand gala at St Boniface's Church Hall, beside Dead Man's Crossroads in the middle of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. The Barchester Bugle had been full of it for weeks. It was a rare honor for a conjurer so internationally prominent as The Mighty Thrombosis to treat a place as small as Cadaver-in-the-Offing to one of his performances, but his mother came from hereabouts and he wanted to try out a few new tricks in front of an unimportant audience, so to here he'd come.
ONE NIGHT ONLY
An Informal Evening with
THE MIGHTY THROMBOSIS
the advertisements and handbills had said. And under that there was further news:
ably supported by
Helsinki's Most Dazzling Acrobatic Troupe
The Family Brød
"The Seven Deadly Finns"
Mrs. Romford had booked tickets at once for herself and the Inspector, telling him that he'd just have to juggle his duty hours to accommodate her wishes. He'd made a song and dance about the difficulties of disrupting his schedule, but in fact he'd been glad enough to go: ever since he'd first dropped a hidden pack of cards as a child he'd been fascinated by the whole charisma of stage magic – the greasepaint, the ethereally beautiful assistants, the mystery, the spectacle, and the whole participatory game whereby the audience knew it was being hoodwinked yet believed in magic all the same. And at least it wasn't Shakespeare; Mrs. Romford had gone off Shakespeare in a big way ever since a certain distressing occurrence during a performance of Julius Caesar.
So when his day's labors were over he changed into his second-best tweed suit, checked his mobile phone was working in case of emergencies ("There'd better be no emergencies," he'd growled at fresh-faced Sergeant Mutton), made sure he'd got plenty of tobacco and peppermints in his pocket for the walk home, and set off with his wife for the Church Hall.
They were among the first to arrive. The Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake had laid out the hard wooden chairs in neat rows from the front of the hall to the back, but so far only a handful of people were there to sit on them. Ignoring each other's protestations, the Romfords strode determinedly down the central aisle to settle themselves firmly as near to the middle of the front row as possible.
This was their big night out, an
d they wanted to miss nothing.
They weren't to be disappointed, although the magic they would see would not be quite of the kind they expected.
Romford chewed steadfastly on the stem of his dead pipe for what seemed like hours as the Hall filled slowly up. He recognized most of the people there, of course: Mrs. Dora Griggs of Griggs House, still in mourning for the death of young Clarence; Dr. Smithee, the bluffly reliable GP who had played such a hand in that case; Donald Glover, who ran the garage ... all the noteworthies of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, in short, each of them looking as eagerly anticipatory as he himself.
At last it was time for the lights to dim.
A hissy recording of a fanfare split the air.
The silence throbbed.
Mrs. Romford opened a packet of peanuts.
Someone sneezed.
Breath was bated.
And the curtain jerked open to reveal the Seven Deadly Finns standing in a triangle atop each other, poised on tiptoe – particularly difficult, Romford thought, for the three load-bearers on the bottom, but they showed no signs of strain – and with their arms outstretched, fingers pointing towards the wings. They were dressed in silver lamé suits, and the even teeth in their uniformly broad smiles glistened and gleamed every bit as much as the suits.
The recording lurched into something by Strauss, and the topmost Finn tumbled forward in a somersault to land perfectly at the very front of the stage. The audience applauded as if this were the greatest thing they'd ever seen, and then the performance started in earnest.
Bodies flew all over the stage in a blur of lamé and an endless confusion of stray limbs. Every now and then the Finns would stop in some multi-bodied contortion, and the watchers took this as their cue for yet another round of applause. Romford, hands still, thought around the stem of his pipe that team acrobats must have to bath a lot, what with constantly having to stuff their faces up each other's ...
Mrs. Romford interrupted his reverie. "Aren't they grand?" she whispered.
"Very grand," he agreed.
"You should steer clear of celery seeds when you're pregnant," she added significantly, then turned back to her peanuts.
Baffled, Romford carried on watching the spectacle.
The Family Brød's performance was far too short or far too long, depending on the way you looked at it. So far as Romford was concerned, he was glad when it was finally over: sounds, patterns and the inevitable bursts of applause made him feel as if someone had been using his head as a punchbag. Rather like when Mrs. Romford put Wagner on the CD player.
There was a short interval, during which they drank warm orange squash from Mrs. Romford's thermos and ate their sandwiches, and then the lights dimmed once again.
If the tension had been palpable before the Family Brød's performance, now it was as if you could have grabbed handfuls of it from the air and used it for chewing gum. Romford's knuckles whitened around his pipestem. Mrs. Romford dropped her crême caramel and it lay unnoticed at her feet. The silence was like an encaged beast, pacing the confines of its hated cell, until ...
Blue lightning coruscated over the audience's heads and a blast of thunder shook the floor. One moment the stage curtain was there; the next it was replaced by a blaze of brilliant illumination that almost blinded Romford. A flock of snow-white doves appeared from nowhere and circled cacophonously around the ceiling. Somewhere in the midst of the melee there was a haunting strain of music that could have been Egyptian, could have been Korean, could have been just the tape had stretched.
There was a sudden puff of green smoke in the middle of the stage, and out of it stepped the cadaverously imposing figure of The Mighty Thrombosis. He threw his arms wide as if to welcome himself to the proceedings; the inside of his full-length cloak was golden with, embroidered on it, white doves in representation of those that still wheeled and whirled above.
"Greetings from the world of the unknown," the figure intoned. "People will tell you that what you see tonight is mere trickery, but in truth it is a lifting of a veil – the veil that lies between our humdrum lives and the magical kingdom, where truth is falsehood and falsehood truth."
As if to prove the point, he pulled out a cauliflower from behind his ear.
The audience gasped.
Smiling and nodding briefly in acknowledgement, the Mighty Thrombosis proceeded to yank a string of the flags of all nations from behind the other.
The applause was deafening.
The Mighty Thrombosis bowed more deeply this time, then looked to his left, focusing the audience's attention on the emergence from the wings of a statuesque blonde wearing about three carats of gold and very little else. She too bowed, her unbound hair falling in front of her like a bolt of yellow gauze.
And then the serious magic began. Packs of cards turned into flocks of wrens; baseball bats turned, mid-juggle, into spitting kangaroos; streamers turned into bunches of chrysanthemums complete with little plastic tags displaying the watering instructions. (At this point Romford checked his pipe nervously to make sure it hadn't turned into anything.) A casket with the beautiful assistant gagged and padlocked inside it was pierced by swords, cut in half with a chainsaw and finally incinerated using a flamethrower, and yet she stepped out of the ashes unscathed. The Mighty Thrombosis himself took an iron bar that had been tested for authenticity by half a dozen randomly selected beefy members of the audience and bent it easily into a passable imitation of his own signature. A bucket of water was covered with a red cloth and then, when the cloth was removed, was seen to have become a perfect representation in miniature of the Niagara Falls – whose waters continued to flow despite the fact that there was no visible water supply.
After an hour or more The Mighty Thrombosis spoke again, for the first time since his brief introduction.
"And now, ladies and gentleman ... and others" – there was a little ripple of tamed laughter – "for the finale to my act. Many false magicians the world over have perfected the illusion of pulling a rabbit from a top hat, but I – I, The Mighty Thrombosis – am the only one to use genuine magic to perform the same feat ... and with, not a rabbit, but a live tyrannosaurus rex!"
There was a roll of drums and the luscious assistant, bearing a perfectly ordinary-seeming black opera hat, insinuated herself across the stage by dint of muscles that Romford had never even known existed.
The Mighty Thrombosis took the hat with a grave little nod of thanks and, using both hands, held it aloft.
Silence fell.
He turned it this way and that, showing the entirety of his audience that it was indeed empty. He flipped open its lid so that they could see right through it. He pressed it flat and then straightened it out again. He pulled a revolver from his trouser pocket and fired a couple of shots through it. There could be no doubt about it: the thing was as empty as an Aberdeen street on a flag day.
Again the drums rolled as with his right hand he held the hat out in front of him, so that the audience could see it was well clear of his body. With his free hand he waved a blue-spotted handkerchief so that everyone could see that it, too, was guileless. Next he lowered the handkerchief down over the upturned aperture of the hat.
Pause.
Then, every eye glued on his hand, he slowly drew away the handkerchief.
The assistant simpered but was ignored.
Dragging out the seconds for dramatic effect, The Mighty Thrombosis reached into the hat and produced ...
... a severed hand.
Someone screamed. Blood dripped. The gorgeous assistant collapsed pneumatically, unnoticed by all save Romford, who was sitting forward in his seat, staring intently.
The Mighty Thrombosis himself looked utterly aghast. "This ... this was not ... intended to happen ..." he stuttered in an Essex accent, quite unlike the voice he had earlier projected.
Then the curtains closed swiftly.
It was the first orthodox event since the start of the wonder show.
~
; "I was on my mobile phone immediately, as you can guess," said Romford, looking pointedly at his empty glass. Obediently I picked it up, went to the bar and replenished it with Old Peculier. Once we were settled again he looked up at me; his hands were clenching and unclenching.
"Sergeant Mutton had lads there within seconds – the Hall's just round the corner from the nick, as you know. Even before they'd got there I'd had the staff seal the whole place up. A mouse could have got out of there without our knowing about it, but not a very fat mouse."
He took a ruminative gulp.
"The Mighty Thrombosis – Albert MacGregor as he really is – was still standing on the stage looking at the thing when we got him," he continued. "Hadn't even gone to help his assistant up off the floor – Missus R had to do that."
"Whose hand was it?" I said.
"That was, of course, a problem – but not such a problem as we'd have thought it might be." Another gulp. "Thrombosis – MacGregor – told us hisself. There was a ring on its finger that he recognized: made out of cast bronze and showing a dragon eating its own tail."
"Yes?"
"He said he'd recognize that ring anywhere, and his wife – his assistant – confirmed it as soon as she was feeling properly herself again."
"And?"
"The hand was that of The Even Mightier Spongini – a.k.a. Gerald Dukes – the greatest of all MacGregor's rivals. There was some palaver in the upper – inner, I s'pose – echelons of the Magic Circle five years back, you may have read about it in the newspapers, MacGregor claiming Dukes was stealing the secrets of his tricks, in particular something called The Collapsible Hippogryph, you know the sort of thing. The two men hated each other's guts. And there was more to it than that."