Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “Further than that,” Phipps pointed out. “The internet is global.”

  “Any kid using the internet is old enough to know that there’s no Father Christmas,” Clarke said.

  “Or to find the Santa porn, at least.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Clarke said with feeling.

  “I’m not sure which is the more shocking,” Phipps said, starting up the next set of stairs, “that you don’t believe in Santa or that you watch ‘This Morning’.”

  “Not my choice,” she told him before thinking about it.

  “OK,” he replied, letting the significance of her comment pass by unremarked upon, or the significance as he believed it to be. He stopped on the second landing and became briskly official. “The report came from the first-floor resident. She heard some loud noises and called it in. There may have been some history of parties.”

  Clarke nodded her understanding of the subtext in his report. The reporting party probably called in more to complain about the noise than to report a fear for welfare.

  “Door was locked,” Phipps continued, “and there was no response to knocking. It probably would have been left there, but one of the responders saw that.”

  Clarke looked down to the base of the door, where he was pointing, and saw the dark stain of congealed liquid. She had attended enough scenes of death to recognise it as blood, but she also knew that there were a lot of things that looked like blood in the right lighting.

  “The attending officers forced the door and here we all are,” Phipps concluded.

  “The door was locked from the inside?” Clarke queried.

  “And the key was still in the lock,” Phipps confirmed.

  “So Beecham knew his killer well enough to let them in,” Clarke considered.

  “Or they entered and left another way,” Phipps proposed.

  “Any sign of that?” Clarke asked.

  “I’m not willing to commit myself one way or another on that,” Phipps said, uncharacteristically not meeting her gaze. Instead, he raised the elasticated hood of his own forensic onesie over his head and opened the door.

  The room’s floor was a mess. People who don’t deal with crime scenes or medical emergencies have no real idea of just how much a human body can leak. She wrinkled her nose against the combined smells of spilled blood, brains, urine and faeces. Beecham had known that his death was coming and both his bladder and bowels had let go.

  The blood spill had reached the door, but only at its furthest extremity and so the officers could step onto dry floor space without disturbing the pool.

  “Shut the door behind you,” a similarly-attired ERU officer said a second before Phipps did just that.

  Of all the investigators in the Evidence Recovery Unit, the one Clarke least wanted to see had been assigned. “Hello Peter.”

  “Welcome, Sherlock,” the investigator said from his kneeling position over by the sash window on the far side of the room. “Come to solve this little sealed room mystery, have you?”

  “There’s no such thing, no matter how much the crime writers like them,” she replied dismissively. “Whoever did it came in and went out.”

  “Clearly,” the forensics man agreed, “but the mystery is how. The door was locked from the inside with the key still in the lock and, whilst they’re not locked, all the windows have catches on the inside with no sign of any tampering. They can’t be closed again from the outside.”

  “No such thing as a sealed room,” Clarke insisted. She didn’t bother to question his assertion that the windows hadn’t been tampered with and couldn’t be closed from the outside. Despite her dislike for the man personally, Peter Finney was about as accomplished a scenes of crime officer (in the old parlance) as the Force employed. “It’s just a trick.”

  “Maybe, but it’s a hell of a trick. Show her the prints.”

  Clarke looked interrogatively at Phipps, physically restraining herself from repeating the last word. She didn’t want to give the forensics man the satisfaction.

  “Over here,” Phipps said and walked over to a fireplace set with cracked tiles that had not been white in quite some time.

  Clarke joined him and looked down at the floor there. There were a couple of well-defined boot prints that were, quite indisputably, sooty.

  “You’re telling me the killer came down the chimney?” the Senior Investigating Officer fixed the DI with a disapproving stare.

  “I’m telling you nothing,” Phipps denied.

  “You been up on the roof?” Clarke asked.

  “No, why?”

  “To look for reindeer droppings,” she suggested, adding sternly, “To look for signs of entry, or more likely signs to show that’s how the killer closed up the room after him. Some kind of thread running from the window catch up the chimney to the roof, or maybe from the key in the door.”

  “That’s reaching a bit, isn’t it?” Finney asked happily. “Besides which, that chimney is too narrow for anyone to get through who didn’t feature in the ‘X-Files’ and is stopped up anyway. Hence sealed room mystery. There’s also that.”

  He pointed to the door through which she had entered. Clarke turned around to look. Daubed across the wall in what looked suspiciously like the same liquid that covered so much of the floor was a single, surprising word.

  “Naughty?”

  “Well, at least they sent a detective who can read,” Finney said harshly.

  “So we have an anti-Father Christmas protestor, apparently murdered with an axe...”

  “An ancient axe,” Finney interrupted.

  “Excuse me?” this time, she couldn’t resist the question.

  “The axe is old, very old, ancient in fact,” the ERU officer revealed.

  “And exactly how do you know that? Are you an expert in axe manufacturing now?” Clarke demanded.

  “Cecilia, you’re breaking my...”

  “I really wouldn’t finish that line if I were you,” Clarke warned him.

  “... balls,” Finney amended. “The head’s got a date on it.”

  “Seriously?” Phipps demanded, leaning down over the shrouded body. He moved the cover slightly so that he could examine the weapon that was still in place, embedded into Simon Beecham’s destroyed skull. “Well, I’ll be damned, so there is. ‘361AD’.”

  “So some crackpot with a penchant for 4th Century axes comes in here, kills Mr Christmas-spoiler-merchant over there and sets it up to look like Santa did it?” Clarke shook her head despairingly, “The press is going to have a field day with this.”

  Her relationship with reporters, especially those from the tabloid gutter end of the market, was tetchy at the best of times and she was going to be faced with them a lot on this case, she could see.

  “House to house underway?” she queried.

  “Yes ma’am, though most of the locals are hanging around the cordon at the moment,” Phipps confirmed.

  “CCTV?”

  “Not promising, but there is a 24-hour newsagents on the corner that might have something.”

  “Phone?”

  “Bagged up and on its way to HTCU,” Phipps reported. “It’s fingerprint locked, but high tech’ll get the contacts off so that we can start ringing around. Tomorrow, we’ll hit the college and see about friends and family.”

  “Have you got anything else useful for me?” Clarke asked Finney.

  “Well I’ve not found a signed confession if that’s what you’re after,” the ERU man said.

  “As if it was ever that simple,” the DCI complained.

  “We have this,” Phipps produced a small evidence bag containing a pocket notebook about half the size of the ones that police officers still carried. The book was opened to the first page and the only entry was Simon Beecham’s name with a line through it and followed by the word ‘naughty’.

  Clarke sighed heavily. “Is this...”

  “Tagged and logged,” Finney confirmed smugly, watching her check the numbered plastic seal.
“No usable fingerprints. You can take it and see if the handwriting boys can come up with anything.”

  “Thanks very much,” Clarke said with heavy irony and pushed the evidence bag through the elasticated hole in her onesie into the pocket of her jacket underneath.

  “You could start arresting people called Kringle,” Finney offered.

  “Try and come up with something to tell us who really did this because I don’t want to have to go in front of the press and announce that the man who didn’t believe in Father Christmas was killed by Father Christmas,” Clark replied testily. She put on her best Groucho Marx voice, “Because everyone knows there ain’t no sanity clause.”

  “I don’t think that it was Groucho who said that,” Phipps said with a frown.

  “Like you would know,” she complained.

  “Well, he didn’t get it from the impression,” Finney promised.

  Clarke shot him a withering glance and then stepped carefully back over the pool of blood and other bodily matter so she could exit the room. Once outside, she started to breathe a little more deeply. Phipps followed her expectantly.

  “OK, looks like all the lines of enquiry are underway and you’ve got everything under control,” she observed. Checking on that was her main role as the Senior Investigating Officer. “I’ll head home to catch a shower and then go into the office to write up the review and start looking over the preliminaries.”

  “Yes, Boss,” Phipps said.

  “And if you happen to find something in Finney’s work to make a disciplinary case out of then that would be a bonus,” she joked, sort of.

  “That’s not likely,” the DI pointed out.

  “True enough. See you in the office later.”

  She headed off down the stairs, stripping off the horrible coveralls as she went. They were supposed to be disposable and so weren’t strong enough to resist her determined efforts. She dumped it into the waste bag by the front door and then composed herself before slipping back out into the night.

  For once, she was lucky and the TV networks hadn’t picked up on the situation yet. That was surprising since everyone outside the house must have tweeted or posted images online by now. The outside broadcast vans would be turning up any minute, though, so she nodded to the officer by the cordon once again and headed back to her car.

  Her house wasn’t far from the office in which her team was stationed, so it wouldn’t cost her much time to swing by and take a shower. Those forensic overalls were horrible and made her sweat just by putting them on. Being at the scene of such a bloody and violent event also made her feel contaminated and she needed the shower to get rid of the feeling.

  “Shelley!” she called out as she dropped her bag and keys onto the sideboard, but the house had been in darkness when she arrived, apart from the motion-sensing light over the front door. She remembered that her daughter had mentioned being out at some Christmas party or other. She considered calling her, or sending a text, but it was bad enough in her daughter’s eyes that she was a cop and the resulting loss of street cred from having her mother check up on her would be something that she would punish Cecilia for, and for a long time. She still hadn’t forgiven her mother for breaking up with her dad and that was almost ten years ago now.

  Out of habit, Clarke looked at the post on the sideboard. Taking it from the doorstep and putting it there was about the only chore that her daughter undertook on a regular basis. There wasn’t any actual post in the bundle anyway. It was the usual mix of leaflets from local takeaways and attempts from Virgin Media to get her to sign up to fibre broadband, all with added sprigs of holly and comical reindeer with red noses.

  Bloody Christmas! she thought to herself. As if the crap songs, cheesy bloody movies and rampant commercialism wasn’t enough to contend with, now it came with its own attendant psychos. The whole thing ought to be banned. Maybe Simon Beecham had been right about that.

  The house was so quiet with her daughter not at home that she caught the faint scrabbling sound straight away. For a moment, she couldn’t make out where it was coming from, but then she dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out the evidence bag. On the open page, the previous writing was gone and in its place was a new name: Cecilia Clarke.

  There was a bang that almost caused her to drop the notebook. The gas fire that had sat in the defunct fireplace since the central heating had been put in had toppled over onto the hearth.

  More scratching came from the notebook and, as she watched, the word ‘naughty’ scribbled itself alongside her name.

  From inside a chimney that had been blocked up for at least seven years, a sooty cloud started to sift down...

  The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. and the Spiders from Mars

  “Spiders,” I muttered unhappily, rolling away from the hole through which I had been peering. “Why did it have to be spiders?”

  Alexei Borodin, supplier of security system design schematics and all-round small cog in the local criminal machine, leaned over me to look down into the hole. “That is one big-assed spider.”

  I doubt that he had actually used the Russian phrase for ‘big-assed’, assuming that there even was such a thing. I’d bought my translation potion from a backstreet provider of such products and it had been giving results of questionable quality for a couple of days. I had been surprised when the waiter in a low-price, but respectable, bistro had advised me to place my baklava into a position that, whilst not anatomically impossible, would have been very, very uncomfortable. I had also been surprised when the receptionist at the cheap car hire place had informed me that all their vehicles were one hundred percent clean and existential. This being Russia, the latter was at least possible. Working undercover sometimes meant that you couldn’t organise access to the high-quality resources that I was used to obtaining from Qoppa Branch.

  “What is it made of?” my criminal accomplice asked and I was wreathed in the fumes of cheap tobacco and expensive vodka. His financial priorities, at least, were clear.

  “What colour is it?”

  “Blue, I think,” he suggested, though the low level of illumination in the cellars below our vantage point made him uncertain.

  “Araneae Caerulus Magna,” I concluded, dragging up (and probably mangling) the official parazoological term from some past briefing. Or perhaps it came up in a conversation with Veronika, but that was still too painful an option to consider. “The Big Blue Widow. That ‘big-assed spider’ is one of the fabled Crystal Spiders of Mars.”

  “Doesn’t look all that fabled to me,” Alexei pointed out, watching the very real and equally alive creature moving about in the space below.

  “No,” I agreed, “and I also saw a Ruby Spitter, an Emerald Facet Funneller and a Diamond Giant in there as well.”

  “Are they dangerous?” he inquired.

  “Only if you’re averse to dying,” I told him.

  “Ah. Death. I am allergic to this, I think.”

  “You and me both. And it’s not a nice way to go either. They spin unbreakable crystalline webs around you and then inject you with an organic acid that liquefies your internal organs. They can then drink you from the inside out.”

  Even the low light of the evening, I could see that he had paled significantly. I didn’t judge him for that.

  “OK. Let’s not do that,” he decided.

  “No, let’s not.”

  “And they’re really from Mars?” that had impressed him, at least.

  “No, of course they’re not really from Mars,” I snapped.

  He looked upset.

  “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,” I said and felt an unaccountable urge to repeat myself, which I manfully resisted. Instead, I let him down as gently as I could, “Actually, they’re from Albania, but nobody’s going to be terrified by bedroom tales of the Spiders from Albania. They were named the Spiders of Mars because they were first encountered guarding a temple dedicated to the Roman god of war.”

  “Wh
o’s the Roman god of war?”

  I looked at him sideways to make sure that he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t.

  “Mars.”

  “Oh,” he nodded as realisation trickled down through his brain and leaked into the expression on his face. “So, what comes now? What’s the plan? Do you even have a plan?”

  “Of course, I’ve got a plan,” I objected. “Don’t I always have a plan?”

  “That has not previously been shown to be the case, no.”

  I decided not to challenge his perception on that, not least because the evidence was stacked in his favour. I didn’t let it bother me too much, though. It was considered just as important for a street agent of the United Nations Department for the Enforcement and Apprehension of Demons to be able to think quickly on his feet (or, following one tragic case, his flippers) as it was for him to be able to plan operations with military precision. We had precise military tacticians for that, after all. A plan was a lovely thing to have right up until the point where you ran into an unforeseen obstacle such as, for example, a quartet of near-mythological giant spiders with carapaces as hard as diamond. In the case of the Araneae Diamanti Magna, the carapace was made of actual diamond.

  “Clearly, my previous plan of sneaking in through the cellars is no longer viable,” I said, stating the obvious. “In light of our large friends down there.”

  “I don’t have any friends that look like that,” Alexei objected.

  “Don’t be so shallow,” I chided him. “Judging the poor creature by its looks. For all you know, it might be quite lovely.”

  “That one has a human spine dangling from its long teethy bits,” he complained, the translation potion glitching over the Russian word for mandibles. To be fair, that probably wasn’t a word that was much needed by the average Moscow street crook. “The ribcage is still attached.”

  “That we can judge by,” I allowed. “These were not on the list of security measures you provided.”

  “That’s not my fault,” Alexei said defensively. “Pitrov must have updated his security.”