by Mark Lingane
He carefully placed her belongings back into her handbag and tried to make her look untampered with. He scouted around the area, looking for places a sniper could hide, but all he found were a few cigarette ends. They could be from anyone. He took one just in case. He made his way to a nearby derelict and forlorn phone box with a worn Coke sign hanging limply on one chain above it celebrating the joys of a carbonated cola-based life. He gritted his teeth and called the police, thus continuing the eons old ballet of eternal sibling rivalry starring the dual leads of resentment and contempt that police chiefs and private detectives have reserved for each other. It probably stretched back to the cavemen.
“Look, Harman,” said Joshua, “there’s something weird about this. Try and be subtle, just this once.”
“Listen, Richards, don’t tell me how to do my job. You’re dealing with a crack troop of highly trained professionals who have specific skills based in the finer arts of public relations, unlike yourself, who fails to fall into any of those categories.”
“Crack troop! Are you insane? I’ve seen your motley crew full of malevolence and indolence. Listen, a lady has been shot here with no identification or anything. You and I know the implications of being caught without ID. To make the situation worse, I think I’m the only person who knows anything about her. So alerting anyone to the fact could bring danger my way. So do something right for once and be quiet about it.”
He hung up and walked back down toward the jetty.
Joshua put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He waited next to Ruth Friday’s body. The waves were lapping gently against the jetty supports. It was, all things considered, quite a tranquil place. He should come here more often. He started to make frosted smoke rings in the chill air with his breath. His mind, given the idle opportunity, reran the events of what, on all reasonable accounts, was his death. The event must have been a hallucination or something similar. In fact, the more he thought about it the less real it seemed. Yet it had seemed real at the time.
He recalled the last fragments of the event as it slipped quickly from his mind. It had started with the feeling of his head being squashed then being mentally flipped at right angles. Then he was shot and had died. This, of course, seemed a little ridiculous now. Maybe he had heard the shot that killed Ruth Friday, thought it had hit him and, in all the excitement, gone into shock and imagined he was dead. Yes, that made a bit of sense. The shot nailed Friday and killed her. Yes, that all made sense. Then why hadn’t he seen her standing at the end of the jetty before she was shot?
He looked out to sea and watched the glittering lights of the ships as they sailed past the port. After about ten minutes a single figure in a trench coat appeared at the rim of the illuminated circle supplied by the jetty light.
“Richards?” whispered the voice in low, secretive tones. His eyes darted around the darkened shore.
“Yes?”
“I’m from the police, here to look at the case.”
“Ah, yes. The victim’s lying here,” Joshua replied in low, secretive tones. He indicated the bundle of body at his feet.
“Right you are, then,” said the policeman in chirpy and decidedly less secretive tones.
He turned around and waved an arm at the general blackness behind him. It suddenly burst into life with blue and red lights flashing. A crazed fleet of police cars screamed toward the jetty, sirens wailing. A helicopter rose over the warehouses with a huge spotlight sweeping over the area. The first of the cars screeched to a halt yards away from Joshua. The passenger door swung open and a pair of heavy black boots emerged. The boots belonged to Harman and where they went he followed, less than a step behind.
“Do you actually know, I mean really know, the meaning of subtlety?” bellowed Joshua over the thrashing helicopter blades and wailing sirens.
Harman smiled his mirthless grimace.
Joshua looked around the gray, windowless room. The deeply cut grooves in the walls and floor made the entire room look as if it was constructed from huge and soulless steel slabs. The fluorescent tubes, with the mandatory flashing one, flooded each corner of the room. It was a time-lock room. Anyone who spent any amount of time in here would lose all appreciation of the passing of time. They could be here for hours, weeks or days and have no idea if it was day or night outside.
Harsh steel chairs and a table were bolted to the floor, and the fixtures were matched by the steel jaw of Manber, the young detective who was waving his finger at Joshua. Severe cream-colored hair—offset by a strawberry complexion obtained only through extreme frustration—highlighted the fact that he was a stop-or-I’ll-bang! kind of detective. A tie was making a valiant attempt to strangle his thick bull neck. Harman was resting against the doorway, partially visible behind the other detective’s huge body.
The berating from the detective slowly sank through to Joshua’s conscious. “Screw you,” he answered. It didn’t really matter what he had been asked.
“Screw yourself.” Detective Manber went crimson.
“Moron!”
“Sock sucker!” Manber was seething, his jaw clenched and eyebrows rammed together in a strict frown.
“What does that even mean?” Joshua protested.
“If you two have finished your witty repartee,” Harman said, looking from Richards to the junior detective and back, “then we can get on and try to solve something.”
“The guy’s a creep!” remonstrated the junior detective.
“This is true, but I think I remember reading somewhere, even creeps get rights,” Harman reminded him.
Joshua stuck his tongue out at the junior detective.
“Richards, stop provoking him. Why does this happen every time with you? We bring you in, and you, in record time, seem to alienate every single junior I have. Next I’ll be importing them especially for you.”
“You should give me a better quality of moron with which to cross swords,” Joshua said.
“He sounds like one of those educated people,” Manber said. “Right poof, if you ask me.”
“Look, junior,” Harman said, “I feel that we’ll achieve little with that kind of attitude. So, either stop getting wound up by Lord Fido here or leave.”
“OK. I’ll just breathe in and …” Manber moved into some form of pseudo-meditation pose.
Joshua whispered loudly, “Calm blue oceans, calm blue oceans. I’m a tree. I’m a tree, floating free in the wind.”
“Why, you little …” The junior lunged forward.
Joshua deftly jumped out of his seat and his assailant crashed into the wall. Joshua quickly sat down again behind the small metal desk in the center of the room. The junior detective, somewhat dizzy, staggered to his feet and dusted himself off. He gave Joshua a dark look and was about to leap at him once more when Harman coughed.
“All right. That’s enough. You,” Harman said, indicating the junior detective, “out.”
“But—”
“No buts, Manber, just sounds of you buggering off.”
Harman sat down on the other side of the desk and waited for the door to close. He flicked the power switch to the off position on the huge tape recorder situated between himself and Joshua.
“Does this mean this is all off the record?” Joshua asked.
“No. The room’s still bugged but it usually makes the interrogated feel more at ease.”
“Sly bastards, aren’t you?”
“Lots of sly crooks out there, Richards. Currently, from where I sit, you look like one of them.” Harman rustled in his pockets and pulled out a crumpled cigarette package. He flicked the lid and offered one across the table. “Smoke?”
“No, I just run really fast.”
“Yeah. Ha-ha. What’s the story on this?” Harman pulled out his notebook and leafed through its pages. “Ruth Friday, you called her.”
“It’s simple. She comes to my office and tells me there’s this extortion thing happening by some guys. She wants me to be some kind of b
odyguard. Calls to say the meeting’s been changed to this new location. I turn up—early, mind you—and she’s dead by the time I get there.”
“Early?”
“Yeah, you know. That means before you were meant to show up.”
“Ha-ha. You as a bodyguard?”
“Yeah,” Joshua replied smugly.
“Ha-ha.”
“Tell me, Harman, why didn’t she call you for protection? Seems to me she had no confidence in your motley lot.”
“Police protection is just an old wives’ tale from a long time ago. We’re here to get the bad guys after they’ve done the bad stuff. That means you, and now.”
“Hey, you got no proof.”
“It’s only a matter of time.”
“You got no cause.”
“It’s early days, but all this cash she was meant to be carrying, what if she was carrying it and you just said she wasn’t? You could’ve killed her for it then bought yourself a nice place in the country. Seems like a perfect fit,” he concluded.
“So where is it now? I’ve only been here and at the jetty. Surely it would be on my person.”
“Nah, you had plenty of time to hide it somewhere around the docks. We got guys looking for it now. As I said, early days.”
“You’re dreaming. Anyway, you said I’m not under arrest. I’m here to help proceedings because of my hugely benevolent personality.”
“Your what?”
“Because I’m a helpful kinda guy, Harman. Helpful. Comprende?”
Harman raised his finger and pointed at Joshua’s nose. “Remember, Richards, you only got rights until I say no more.” Harman reclined into his chair and put his cigarette in his mouth. His eyes streamed as smoke poured over his face and made him squint.
9
TREV CLIPPER WAS THE coroner for the city’s police force. He felt no nausea or gastronomic uneasiness at the sight of any part of a dead person’s body. In fact, he was often seen walking around his laboratories in his little blue plastic apron wrapped around his fine suits with his small hacksaw in one hand and some poor dead soul’s inner organ in the other. He was also often seen running down the corridor after some hastily retreating detective, saying, “No, wait, if you just look at this little bit here,” pointing to some unmentionable part of some still palpitating organ, “and notice how it’s pumping out blood yet green slime is oozing out this one.”
For years he thought it was his aftershave.
Clipper had seen many things in his life, and had tried to show them to many people who had seen half of many things and a lot of the bathroom. This one was perplexing him. He stood back from the corpse and folded his arms. He stepped forward and raised his little hacksaw. He lowered it, and took another step back. He didn’t know what to do. He stepped forward again. Then back again. This was worse than learning to waltz.
He sighed and pushed his safety glasses—taped in the middle with one lens missing—back up the sweating bridge of his nose. This was nonsense, he told himself. These things don’t just happen. He stepped forward again, carefully examined the body for the tenth time, raised his little hacksaw, screamed and stepped away. He walked over to his desk, which was covered with human organs, and picked up a hand, ready to dial.
“Errg,” he said, and threw it back on the desk.
He sat down heavily in his chair and in one sweep of his arm cleared several livers and intestines in jars out of his way. He picked up the phone and dialed. While it was ringing he took a long thin object and chewed pensively on its end. He took it out of his mouth and went to doodle on his notepad.
When Harman answered the phone all he heard was someone gagging as though trying to spit a horrible taste out of their mouth.
“I tried to get here as soon as I could,” Harman said as he burst heroically through the door. He took in the scene around him and noticed Clipper, a disturbing shade of purple, sitting in the middle of the room with a bucket by his side.
“Trev, you don’t look well,” Harman said.
“He had an accident,” said the young assistant. She was trying not to laugh, but was turning red with the effort.
“Yes, well, you would, wouldn’t you, if you put one of those things in your mouth.” The assistant gave Harman a look so flat it was a speed dip. “You know what I mean. Anyway, thanks for calling me and filling me in on what was going down. I mean happening,” he finished.
“This is not funny,” Clipper said. “I’ve just had a taxing ordeal.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not my choice of snack …”
“I’m not talking about that. I mean the body. Come have a look at this.” He motioned toward the prone figure lying beneath a white sheet, which, Harman noted, had patches of red seeping through.
“I’m not quite sure I need to see the body just yet,” Harman said, his voice filled with uncertainty.
“Nonsense. Stop being a big baby.” Clipper whipped back the sheet, exposing the top half of the body.
Harman, who hadn’t had the speed to look away, slapped his hand over his mouth. His eyes desperately swung from side to side, searching for the bucket that, he noted with relief, was just behind Clipper. Harman made a surprisingly quiet movement to the rear of Clipper and grabbed the bucket just in case. Then he looked in the bucket and knew it wasn’t just in case. He didn’t feel very well. Seeing the bucket contents made his kidneys ache.
“What I first found perplexing was the size of the … has anyone seen my scalpel?” Clipper said.
“Of the what? Size of the what?”
“Ah, here it is. I left it in the kidney. What were you saying?”
“What? You left the scalpel where?”
“In the kidney. Don’t worry, I clean the blade afterwards.”
Clipper grabbed the handle in his fist and wrenched out the blade. He placed it next to the victim’s eye and paused. “I’d like to show you the eyes in more detail, so I’ll remove one for you. You have to be careful with these because once a person dies pressure can build in the back of the socket and if there’s the smallest of releases the eye can sometimes …”
There was a short sucking followed by a pop. Clipper moved deftly to his left and Harman was struck between the eyes by an eye. He screamed. The assistant, who had seen the event, screamed. Clipper, whose nerves weren’t the best, screamed because it seemed like the thing to do.
Clipper breathed deeply and drew himself together. “Look, would everyone calm down.” He glanced around at the other two. “Are we all ready?”
“Yes,” said the other two in a uniting of despair.
“Are we sure there’s going to be no more of these shenanigans?”
“Yes,” said the other two in a uniting of despair. They looked down and shuffled their feet.
“All right. Let’s skip the eye bit and move on to the heart.” Clipper returned his focus to the prone body, opened his mouth to speak, closed it quickly, looked back at Harman then returned to the body.
“It takes about two to three hours to perform this incision properly. Unfortunately we don’t have the time to do it now.” The onlookers exchanged a glance to see if the other knew what was going on. “But here’s a cut I performed earlier.”
Clipper drove his hands into the body’s chest and wrenched the ribcage apart, exposing the still heart and lungs. Harman felt he could handle this. It just looked like that strange casserole his grandmother used to make with liver and giblets and stuff.
“Now, come and examine this,” Clipper said and motioned for Harman to lean over the open cavity. With their heads almost bumping together and in hushed, almost reverent tones, Clipper concluded with, “Watch carefully.”
With a great deal of care that could only come from a hand that was more still than mineral water, Clipper cut a small triangle of muscle out of the facing wall of the heart. “As an advance warning there should be a small trickle that can be quite difficult to see,” he whispered. Harman strained forward. Clipper ever so gently pricked t
he base of the triangle and …
The result was dramatic, to say the least. A geyser of blood shot straight up and Harman, who was just breathing in, as he often did, received a mouthful of blood that left him spluttering on the floor as the blood squirted across his face.
“!” he said.
“You see,” Clipper said, standing up. “Everything’s wrong about this body. The forces inside it seem to be ten times more powerful than in a normal person.”
Harman regained his feet and turned to face Clipper. He wiped his sleeve across his face, leaving a red smear and giving the effect of badly applied lipstick.
“For blood to do that,” Clipper continued, “it would have to be racing around the body at forty times normal speed, and, goddamn it”—he threw his hands in the air—“the person is dead!” He leaned forward onto the tabletop. “I tell you, Harman, this is weird. Weird, I tell you.”
“But what would’ve happened when the body was shot? Surely it would’ve exploded.”
“Ah well, that’s another story.” Clipper turned away to his desk. “I pulled the bullet out earlier. I thought you might like to have a look at it.”
Clipper scrabbled on his desk before handing Harman the offending evidence.
Harman looked at it blankly for a moment and then picked it up out of his palm and rotated it between his fingers. “What is it?”
“It’s the bullet.”
“Well I never. I’ve never seen anything like this before. I wonder how it works.”
“That’s not all that’s weird.” He paused and nodded toward the dead body. “I’ll show you where it was shot.” He pulled down the sheet a little further.
“It’s right in the navel,” exclaimed Harman. “Who could pull off that kind of shot?”
“That’s not all. If you look in the hole it’s made …”
Harman looked closely at the entry point. “It’s all black in there. I can’t see a thing.”