Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “Fair enough,” I allowed, sipping my own tea. I had to admit that it wasn’t great, but my visitor didn’t know that, “but I still can’t believe that anyone is actually interested in me.”

  “And there’s that modesty again,” she complained.

  “But it’s not at all fake,” I insisted.

  “No,” she admitted with a smile, “I’m beginning to see that. So, will you tell me your story?”

  “Does this approach work a lot?” I was curious.

  “Every time.”

  “Then I wouldn’t want to break your perfect record now, would I?”

  “No,” she agreed, “You wouldn’t.”

  So, I told her everything. Well, not everything. I left out the part about the Lego-loving spectre in the workshop, but I told her everything else. In fact, I told her a lot more than I had ever told anyone else. Most people don’t want to know about loss and grief. They are only interested in the fun and the parties and the jokes and the scandals. Brenda, though, listened to it all. She didn’t take any notes, but her smartphone was placed on the table and I would have been shocked if she hadn’t had some voice recording software running. Even then, I’m not sure that she would have needed it. She interrupted rarely and the questions that she asked were insightful and confirmed that she had not only been listening to my story, but understanding it as well.

  “You know what,” she said suddenly. “I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry?”

  I was and I realised that, for only the second time that I could remember, I had lost virtually a whole day without noticing.

  “There’s a nice French place in town,” I suggested.

  “Do they deliver?” she enquired.

  “Deliver? No. They’re French,” I pointed out.

  “Well, anybody who delivers will be fine,” she decided. “I don’t want to lose the flow here.”

  So, we carried on through dinner, delivered in tinfoil dishes with white card lids. They were nothing as elegant as the boxes that you always see on American television. I don’t know if it’s really like that, having never visited the States, but Joanna had been a sucker for American sitcoms.

  As we ate, and drank, Brenda started to talk as much as she listened. By this time, I had brought my story pretty much up to date, so we moved onto other subjects; family, children, art, politics. The conversation meandered down many blind alleys and we were happy to let it. I had not felt this comfortable in the presence of another person in a long time.

  “It’s late,” Brenda decided at length, “and I have to get a bus back into town.”

  I laughed, something that I had done often during the evening. “You may come from a big city where the buses and trains run all night, but this is rural Buckinghamshire and the buses rarely run during the day.”

  I didn’t mention that most of the people around this part of Buckinghamshire would never have been caught using something as prosaic as public transport.

  “No buses?”

  “I can call you a taxi if you’d like,” I offered.

  “Would you like to call me a taxi?” she countered.

  “I don’t have any spare rooms,” I said. This was not quite true because the house had several spare rooms now that the children were gone, but none of them were ready to receive guests.

  “Would you need a spare room?” she enquired.

  “Are you propositioning me?” I asked, this being the only, and inexplicable, conclusion that I could come to.

  “Could I be any less subtle?”

  “I’m sorry,” I apologised. “It’s a been a while and I don’t know how any of this works anymore.”

  “Well I do,” she told me with absolute certainty, “and the answer is yes, I am propositioning you. Is that a bad thing?”

  “No, not at all,” I told her and I wasn’t lying. Brenda was an older woman, but her looks had not deserted her and the confidence with which she wore them made them stand out even more. She was striking and any unattached man, even of a younger age, would have looked twice. Also, and this was important, she was completely unlike Joanna, who had been taller, slimmer and less fussy about her appearance.

  “There is one thing first,” she stalled me, and I wondered if I had wandered into another one of her tactics. “I have to see it.”

  “See what?”

  “The piece you’re working on,” she told me.

  “Um, OK,” I said hesitantly.

  “Is there a problem?” she enquired as though the question was of no interest to her, but I wasn’t fooled.

  “I don’t usually show my works in progress to anyone,” I lied. Well, I didn’t lie, because the works in progress that I had were ordinary kits and nobody was interested in those. The works she was interested were never in progress, as far as I was concerned anyway. I didn’t know if there was going to be anything in the workshop to show her. This morning, and for the past few days, I had been looking at a full-size representation of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, but now… I had no idea.

  “You’ll most likely be disappointed,” I warned her, but she seemed even more excited and intrigued.

  “You do like to keep a girl in suspense, don’t you?”

  “You have no idea,” I replied and we walked down the hallway to the workroom.

  “You’ll just have to wait a minute,” I told her when we got to the door.

  “You don’t have to tidy up for me,” she said with a warm smile.

  “It’s not that; the light switch is on the other side of the room. I wouldn’t want you to fall and break a leg.”

  I descended the three steps that led from the house to the floor of the workshop with the familiarity of long practice. I didn’t need to see them to be able to use them. I walked around the edge of the workshop with confidence born out of long practice. The sculptures that appeared never spilled out over the centre of the room, leaving enough room to walk around them. Once I reached the main workshop door, I flipped the switch and the room was flooded with fluorescent brightness.

  Which was reflected right back.

  I would like to report that Brenda said something along the lines of ‘Oh, my word’, but the truth was that she uttered a rougher phrase that approximated to what I hoped I was going to do a short time later.

  There, on the floor of the workshop, was an alpine village, complete with ski slope, fir trees, ice skaters and cattle that had been brought down from the high pastures. There were a lot of white bricks to reflect to the lights and a lot of blue translucent ones that sparkled like the ice they were supposed to represent. I hadn’t been aware that I owned that many white bricks.

  “Do you like it?” I asked, though I couldn’t imagine any way that she wouldn’t. The sculpture was so perfect that I couldn’t imagine any fan of Lego not loving it. I loved it and I was supposed to have built it.

  “It’s magnificent,” she breathed, descending the steps and walking around the scene to better examine it. “I mean, it is glorious. You know, more people should see this.”

  “It will go on the website like all the others,” I said. That meant that it would get a global audience.

  “No, I mean really see it,” she said, unable to take her eyes of the scene, taking in all the tiny details that were as impressive in their own way as the overall scale of the thing. “In the brick, as it were. These should be on display.”

  “On display?”

  As if I could. The models were gone overnight as completely as they came. How could I possibly put them on display, knowing that they could disappear at any second? How could I have slept?

  “A conversation for tomorrow,” she decided, breaking her gaze from the snowy spectacle and taking my hand. “Tonight, you can take me to bed and build me a stairway to heaven.”

  “I know I’ve been out of the dating scene for a while, but even I know how cheesy that line is.”

  We both laughed.

  “And you’d only known her since yesterday?” Charlie Porter asked.


  Unlike his last visit, giving advice on security measures, DC Porter was present in my house on official business. I confirmed his knowledge with a wordless nod.

  “And she stayed the night?” he asked again, both slightly impressed and slightly disbelieving the fact.

  “Yes, and it’s OK to be surprised at that because I sure as hell was,” I assured him.

  “She was a reporter?”

  I had already been through all of this with lower-ranked officers, but knew well enough that every fact was going to be checked, checked and checked once more before the police left the house.

  “From America,” I confirmed. “She wrote for a Lego magazine, well the Lego magazine, actually. Probably sold as many copies around the world as The Times.”

  “Are you kidding me?” that was a fact that he absolutely did not believe.

  “Check them out online. Their subscription numbers are pretty big.”

  “And she was here because you build Lego models?” he repeated another question from earlier.

  “Apparently, I have some notoriety amongst the community,” I said tiredly.

  “The community?”

  “Lego fans,” I made it simple for him. I knew what his reaction was, though he hid it well, because I had felt pretty much the same way when I started looking into the hobby at the start that now felt like aeons ago. “There’s a worldwide community of them with websites and forums and magazines and conventions and stuff.”

  “Like the sci-fi conventions?”

  “Fewer costumes.”

  He nodded his head, not really knowing what to say to that. Instead, he turned to what he did know, which was policing.

  “It seems pretty clear what happened here. You were asleep upstairs. She sneaked down to get a look at your workshop without you around and slipped on the stairs. I am so sorry…”

  ‘How unlucky does a man have to be to have two women die on him?’ was what he was thinking. The thought was so loud that I could almost hear it. The looks on the faces of some of the other police officers as they poked around and glanced in my direction clearly conveyed the same thought.

  By killing them, was the obvious answer, but Joanna had died of cancer, which was verifiable and not an obvious modus operandi for a murderer. The circumstances of this death were equally as tragic and equally unspectacular. A woman comes down in the night. She is unfamiliar with the layout of the place and is sneaking about, probably looking for a scoop, and loses her footing on the stairs. There are only three of them, but she wasn’t expecting there to be any. Her head hits the edge of the wall on the way down and then the stairs themselves after. Her skull is crushed and death is instantaneous.

  A tragic accident, nothing more.

  Except that I had been the one who found her. Waking up from a refreshing sleep, I had found the bed empty of all but me. Throwing on my robe, I had called her name, thinking she might have gone to the bathroom. After that, when she did not reply, I thought maybe she had gone down into the kitchen to make breakfast, so I followed that path. The door to the workshop was open. I never leave the door to workshop open, so I looked in, expecting to find her entranced by the snowy scene once again.

  Only there was no snowy scene. Where the alpine village had been, there now stood the figure of a gorgon with startling yellow eyes, menacing a cowering Greek soldier holding up a protective shield.

  And on the floor, lying with her head on the bottom stair and her limbs spread out in ungainly, unnatural positions on the floor, was Brenda.

  The shock was momentary, but complete. I then jumped down to check on her, but it was obvious that I did not need to. Her chest did not rise and fall. There was no pulse that I could find and her skin had a greyish pallor that suggested she had been like this for a while. It was even possible that she had come down here as soon as I fell asleep, which was several hours previously.

  I called the ambulance straight away, knowing that it was pointless and sat on the floor near to the bottom of the steps, cradling the handset of the phone to my chest.

  That’s how I saw it. It was nestling beneath the bottom step, almost out of sight. I reached down and pulled it out into the light. It was a brick, but not an ordinary brick. This one had an axle through it and a wheel attached.

  Charlie believed that Brenda had come down the stairs and slipped on them, not knowing they were there, but she had known they were there. She had come down them only the night before. It was possible that she had forgotten, but it was not likely. The brick in my hand told another story. Brenda had indeed come down in the night, possibly to look at the sculpture and possibly to search for a juicier story than I slept with brick builder. She had known that the stairs were there and she had simply stepped down them, but when her foot should have come down onto the floor of the workshop, it had come down onto a platform, a platform constructed of plastic bricks with little wheels attached. The platform had shot out from under the weight of her foot and she had gone down, exactly as if she had slipped on the stairs.

  Of course, there was no evidence of this. The bricks were all back in their drawers, completely broken up. Except for the one I held in my hand. Somebody, something, wanted me to know what had happened. Even if the police would never believe it and couldn’t have proved it if they did, I would know.

  I gripped the brick hard enough to leave impressions in my palm from the sharp corners.

  “We’ll come down at once,” Jennifer offered, echoing Michael’s sentiment from the call I had made to him earlier, to inform him of what had happened, at least as far as the police were reporting it. I had to call them and tell them because they would have found out soon enough from the press coverage. The idea of a (very) minor local celebrity having two women die on him was too much for the local tabloids to ignore and it would probably make the national press under headlines involving puns on the words ‘lego’ or ‘brick’. The fact that we had slept together on the same day that we met would make the story irresistible to the tabloids. Sex and death sold so many more newspapers than actual news did.

  “No, no, don’t do that,” I warned her off, just as I had Michael. “It’s a bit of a circus round here at the moment and you don’t need that. I’m fine. Really, I am. Well, I’m OK anyway. When everything dies down, I’ll come and see you for a while. I promise.”

  “You promise? You really promise?”

  “I really do,” I assured her, not meaning a word of it.

  I made a conscious effort to sink into drink after Brenda’s death. It seemed to work for other people, but for me it merely gave me horrible hangovers and visions of Joanna ravaged by pain and cancer and Brenda sprawled at the foot of that trio of stairs. Even so, I persevered.

  I gave the manager free rein in running the business, pulling out of it altogether. There were no more new lighting kits designed and we didn’t take on any more bespoke commissions, though the kits already marketed continued to sell well. There were no more photographs on the website, either. Whatever was built inside that workshop remained unseen, by myself as well as the general public. I did not set a foot inside that workshop for almost three months.

  I was done with plastic building blocks.

  They, however, were not done with me.

  I was slumped over the table in the kitchen when the phone call came in. I picked up the handset in that room as much by learned instinct as for any other reason. I hadn’t answered many other calls in a while, letting the machine take them instead and then deleting the messages without listening to them. I still kept up my Skype dates with Jennifer, but, like most drunks, I was crafty at keeping my condition from her. She was a busy woman anyway, so it wasn’t as hard as it might have been.

  The voice at the other end of the line was calm and cultured, but still carried enough of a twang for me to identify it as American. He introduced himself as Holliday Wilson and declared himself to be a friend of Brenda’s. He spoke of his upset at hearing of her death and offered his commiserat
ions, which I took even though I had no right to them at all.

  “I wondered,” he started and I knew that we had come to the real point of the call at last, “if Brenda had time enough to discuss our proposal with you, before her passing.”

  “Proposal?” I asked and could think only of her telling me that yes, she was propositioning me.

  “Brenda had two reasons for coming to see you,” Holliday continued. “The first was, of course, to write about you, but her second was to make a proposal to you about your art.”

  “My what?” I asked, not having the faintest clue what he was talking about. I didn’t own any paintings.

  “Your sculptures,” he explained, “in Lego. You see, I own a number of art galleries across the United States. We exhibit artworks in many and varied media, both conventional and a little more outré. I asked Brenda to broach the idea of you bringing your sculptures to tour across the country. I already have interested sponsors and I could guarantee to make it worth your while. I thought that we might dedicate the tour to Brenda’s memory.”

  I didn’t know if he was serious about that or whether he was simply using the death of his so-called friend to prevent a business opportunity from getting away.

  “Oh, that proposal,” I dimly recalled her mentioning something about letting the public see the sculptures, but one of the few good things about drinking too much is that many of the brain cells that are killed by the alcohol are ones that manage memory. “Yes, she did bring the subject up, in a general sort of a way.”

  “And what were your thoughts?” Mr Wilson asked carefully.

  “I didn’t get much chance to think about it, you know, before…”

  “Oh yes, of course,” Holliday apologised. “I wonder if you would give the matter some thought now.”

  “Yes, I will. I will give it some very serious thought indeed,” I promised him and hung up. I didn’t take any details from him, but I didn’t know what day of the week it was, or even what time it was, so I was hardly thinking straight about it anyway.

  I would have liked to have stormed into the workshop, but that option was no longer open to me, so I wove in there instead on unsteady feet. There was nothing in the centre of the room when I entered and the space there looked bare and alien to me. I made sure that there was nothing at the bottom of the stairs as I went down into the room. To be fair, my balance was shot enough that it was still a risky act anyway.