by Paul Collins
There was trouble coming. Rrrk could smell it on his whiskers. He would probably only survive one more winter. One of the young dogs would become the new alpha male. Probably Brr, the biggest and strongest of Urf’s brood. He hated humans. Brr knew what the farmers had done to his father, how they had hung his dead body on the fence line. Rrrk told Urf not to tell him, but females never listened.
Often Rlph came home with bite marks on his rump. Rua was not happy.
‘My pup-brothers said I don’t belong here. I don’t have a white chest like they do.’ Rlph’s chest was marked with a large reddish-brown blotch.
‘Young dogs must learn their place.’
Rrrk cautioned his mate not to interfere. ‘It is the rule of the pack.’
But Rlph was not a dingo. He was a boy.
One day he came racing into the den, Brr chasing behind him. Rlph hid behind Rua’s back legs and covered his face with her tail.
‘What’s wrong?’ Rrrk growled at Brr.
‘He threw a rock at me. Look.’ There was a deep gash in Err’s side.
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Rlph,’ Rrrk said.
‘Here in the desert wounds infect easily.’
‘He was going to bite me. I haven’t got sharp teeth like his to bite back,’ protested Rlph.
‘I haven’t got arms or fingers. He poked me in the eye,’ Brr whined.
That was even worse. A blind dingo would never
SUIVlVe.
‘Go home, Brr, and get your mother to lick the wound clean,’ said Rrrk. ‘I will deal with Rlph.’
There was only one solution, and he had to discuss it with Rua first.
‘The time has come for the young ones to go their separate ways. I need to show you something,’ he said, when Rlph fell asleep. ‘Come with me.’
Rrrk led Rua back to the place where they had found the boy pup. On top of the mound of earth was a bunch of grevillea flowers. They were fresh and Rua buried her nose in their sweet smell.
‘The humans still come here regularly,’ said Rrrk.
‘Sometimes I see them on my dusk patrol. They will be here tomorrow.’
Rua said nothing. She pulled a stick of flowers from the bunch and trotted back to the den, the blooms between her teeth. When Rrrk returned, the den didn’t smell like rabbit anymore.
The next night they took Rlph out with them.
‘Where are we going?’ he complained. ‘It’s too late for hunting and I’m tired.’ He splayed his feet and refused to budge.
Rrrk nipped at his bottom and Rua pushed his legs.
‘All right,’ he said.
Rua and Rrrk settled down low in the spinifex. They motioned to Rlph to lie beside them.
‘What are we waiting for?’ Rlph whimpered. ‘I’m cold.’
‘Shhh,’ Rua said. ‘Someone is coming.’
They came hand in hand, the woman carrying a bunch of flowers. Yellow this time.
‘They look like me,’ Rlph whispered.
Without speaking, the man took the flowers from his wife and laid them on top of the earth mound. Rrrk pushed Rlph forward so hard he yipped in panic. The man turned and pointed. The woman hurried towards Rlph, who was too afraid to move. She picked him up and showed the man the large reddish-brown birthmark on Rlph’s chest. Then she kissed him. Rlph struggled in the woman’s grasp but she held him tight.
Rrrk and Rua stayed hidden in the grass. They watched the man and woman carry Rlph away. Rua sniffed.
‘All pups have to leave eventually,’ said Rrrk.
‘I know. I wonder if we’ll have any more?’ Rua whispered.
‘I hope not,’ snorted Rrrk. ‘I’m too old now. I just want to spend my last year with you.’
‘Silly dog,’ she said and snuffled against him.
Ralph hated the dingo fence but he knew it was necessary if the dingoes were to survive. Sometimes the dingoes managed to push holes through the wire mesh. Other farmers trapped any dingoes found outside the fence and hung the corpses on the wire to frighten those remaining on the other side. Ralph knew dingoes weren’t that stupid.
The government paid Ralph to keep his section of the fence in order. It was the law and the best protection the dingoes had. So Ralph did his repairs late at night when the silver moon cast its shadows across the desert. If he was lucky he would see a dog silhouetted on the ridge. And when he did, he would tip back his head and howl.
One cop, Detective Bromham thought. It’s a crime scene - murder, no less. And how many cops do they send? Just one.
He eased the patrol car to a halt in the only avail able park, two blocks away from the source of the call-out. As the ancient brakes moaned and the engine shuddered, Bromham remembered a time when they used to send a six-man special tactics unit to the site of a domestic disturbance. Those were the days.
But as these disturbances became more common, they started sending these teams only to homicides. When homicides began to happen every other week, they sent cops in pairs instead. One to drive, one to shoot, his former partner had always joked- until his ear was shot off when they interrupted a video-store robbery.
And now, here Bromham was. Old newspapers crunching under his feet as he pushed through the fish stink of the alleyway, protected by nothing more than a Kevlar vest, a taser and a badge. Alone. It could be hours before the forensic team arrived.
He couldn’t blame his bosses. Resources were stretched thin across this evil city. Last month an old warehouse had been quarantined when it was found to be full of dead cops, apparently killed by an unidentified bio-weapon. Those who were left alive were all busy searching for a perpetrator.
At least Bromham would have some company soon. When he got to apartment 303, he’d meet up with the officer who’d called in the homicide, and they’d investigate together. Bromham hoped Detective Simms would be an old man, like him, with stories of the glory days. Someone else who remembered how things were supposed to be.
There was no alarm when he wrenched open the fire door. Most of the apartments in this building had no registered occupants. They had been half renovated when the credit crunch hit, and were left to fester in their patchy paint afterwards. Plain-clothes cops sometimes checked the building for vandals and illegal immigrants, but other than that, it stayed empty. Bromham didn’t see a soul as he climbed the silent stairwell.
The third floor was a gallery of graffiti and burn marks. It was once a home for the wealthy, then for those who had nowhere else to go, then for no one at all. Some of the apartment doors were open, reveal ing yellowed mattresses lying on the bare concrete and cockroaches scratching across the ceilings.
The door for apartment 303 was closed. Bromham pressed his ear to it.
Silence.
He took a deep breath, thumped on the door, and shouted the words he’d shouted a thousand times before: ‘Police! Open up!’
The noise boomed around the deserted corridors before fracturing into pieces too small to hear. There was no response.
Bromham tried the handle. It turned easily, but emitted a scraping sound that made the hairs on his arms stand up.
He saw the bodies before he saw anything else in the room - because there was nothing else in the room. Unlike the other apartments, which had a squalid, lived-in look, this one was eerily clean. It was like dust refused to cross the threshold.
The two corpses lay side by side in the middle of the living room, as though making snow-angels. They looked like a middle-aged woman and a teen age girl, although from this angle, Bromham couldn’t see their faces clearly.
‘Detective Simms?’ he called. There was no reply.
He stepped into the apartment, his hand sweaty around the rubber grip of the taser, peering left and right. There was no sign of anyone else. When he reached the bodies, he
bent down to check the pulse of the older woman - and he froze.
Bromham had seen many dead bodies in his career. Sometimes they were sad, like the woman who’d been stung by a bee on her honeymoon and had gone into anaphylactic shock. Sometimes they were gruesome, like the man who’d been found in a sewer after drowning six months earlier, or the one who’d fallen onto the killing floor at an abattoir and been herded by the cattle into the bladed machinery before anyone could switch it off. But he’d never, ever seen expressions of horror like the ones on these two women.
The middle-aged woman’s eyes were so wide that the whites were visible all the way around the irises, and her lips were drawn back to expose teeth that had been frozen mid-chatter. He found himself won dering if her hair had been grey before her death, or if fear had bleached the colour out of it.
Dried saliva was cratered around the teenage girl’s mouth, and her face was as waxy as an old photo graph. Her eyes were rolled back into her head.
Recovering his composure, Bromham touched their throats. No pulses, and each corpse was some how colder than the room.
Leaving the bodies where they lay, he pulled on some latex gloves and went to examine the rest of the apartment. The bedroom had no bed, and the win dow was blacked out with tape. Inside the walk-in robe, he found no clothes, just rails from which they might be hung - and on the floor, eight dead rats.
At first he thought this might be the work of an exterminator, since there didn’t seem to be any wounds. It was rare, he knew, to find dead rats in groups, because unless they all died at exactly the same time, the live ones devoured the dead. But as he bent down to look more closely, he could see that they were in varying states of decomposition. This one, with the pitted eyes and shrunken joints, had been lying there for weeks, but that one, still plump and furry, only days. Another looked like it could have been alive only hours ago.
One dies, Bromham thought. The smell draws an other. That one dies, somehow, and the smell draws yet another.
He closed the wardrobe.
The bathroom was only identifiable as such because of the circular holes in the walls and floor. There were nooks for the vanity, the toilet and the shower, once the piping had been installed. Peering down one of the drains was like looking into a well. Bromham could faintly see his reflection in the distant water, and was surprised how unnerved he looked. As a teenager he’d visited a haunted house at a carnival, and been photographed just when a man in a rubber mask had grabbed his leg. He hadn’t bought the photo afterwards, but he’d seen it on the flickering screen. His brows had been knotted together and his lips curled downwards at the edges in the same way they were now.
Keep it together, he told himself The forensics team will be here soon enough.
He walked back into the living room.
He had three mysteries to unravel. Firstly, why had Detective Simms left the scene of the crime?
Secondly, what had killed these two women? There were no bullet-holes, no stab-wounds, no ligature marks. Their necks didn’t look broken, and there was no vomit, which usually meant no poison. It looked like two simultaneous heart attacks.
Thirdly, why were there two bodies, when only one had been reported?
Very carefully, Bromham started going through the pockets of the teenage girl. No keys, no wallet, no phone. Her clothes had no labels; in fact, they looked homemade. The stitches were unwinding at the edges.
He expected to find the same thing when he searched the other body, but instead he found a wallet, a can of capsicum spray and a two-way radio. He opened the wallet, and found a police badge shining at him.
He looked at the ID. Name: Detective Rebecca
Simms.
A chill crawled up his spine. That explained mysteries one and three. Simms had found the dead teenager and called it in, but she hadn’t checked that the murderer was gone.
A dead cop needed to be reported right away. Bromham pulled out his radio.
‘Dispatch, this is Detective Bromham. I’m in apartment 303 on the corner of Launceston and Callam, and I’ve got an officer down and a jane Doe. Over.’
‘Copy that, detective. Sending backup to your location. Over.’
Bromham hooked his radio back onto his belt, and thought again of the warehouse full of dead cops. What was this city coming to?
For no reason at all, he remembered the rats. One death lures another, which lures another .. .
The teenage girl sat up.
Bromham yelped, and jumped backwards, his brain rebelling against the sight. He’d checked her pulse. She was stone cold. How could she still be alive?
‘Are you okay, miss?’ he stammered.
The girl’s head swivelled to face him. Her eyes stayed rolled back, but her mouth fell open like an oven door, revealing a thick, black tongue. She stood with unearthly grace, and before he had time to react, reached out and grabbed him by the wrist.
The pain was sudden and world-destroying, but it didn’t come from his arm. It came from his chest where, after four decades of loyal service, his heart had suddenly stopped beating.
Bromham tried to scream, but his lungs were already growing too weak to push out the air. His head was spinning. Ice trickled through his veins, everywhere except where the girl’s hand was sizzling on his arm like an oil burn. It was as though all the stored-up chemical energy in his body, all the glucose and fat and oxygen, was being incinerated and the resulting heat was being sucked out through his arm. His life force was being vacuumed up.
Bromham’s vision was blurring, but he could see the room was swinging. He toppled over, fireworks bursting in his brain as the back of his skull hit the ground. The girl - the monster - maintained her grip, patiently.
He gripped the taser in his trembling hand. He doubted that it would work on the girl. But just maybe it would work on him.
He pointed it at his own chest and pulled the trigger.
There was a snap and a fizz and the monster yowled, tearing her hand away. Bromham barely heard the sounds over the renewed pounding of his heart. It was like stepping out of a meat-locker and plunging into a pit of hot tar. The blast of electricity to his core left him thrashing and twitching and not dead yet.
He couldn’t stand, but he could crawl. He crawled towards the apartment door, cursing his shivering limbs for their weakness. His palms and kneecaps scraped the concrete. He dared not look back at the girl in case he lost his balance.
Three metres from the door. Two. One.
He reached up for the handle, as though he were a rock climber clawing at the precipice.
A hand closed around his ankle, and he felt the rest of his life slip away.
Detective Pravo pulled up a block away from the apartment building, and turned the key. The motor ceased its rumbling.
Two bodies. One of them a cop. Surely dispatch could have spared more than one detective to check it out? What was this city coming to?
Soon, she thought, they won’t send anybody at all.
Like all of Master Bath’s adventures, it began with a summons at our lodgings in Fettler’s Alley, beyond Covent Garden, London Town. I brought the message up to my master and pulled the curtains from around his bed; found his glasses as usual and his wig - without it he was bald as an egg.
As he read, he whistled.
‘East India Company! Ever heard of them?’
Now I might be young, only a servant-lad and new in a thieftaker’s employ, but even I had heard of the Company!
‘All the riches of the Indies, sir.’
‘Pouring into the coffers of dear old England!’ he finished. ‘And into ours, as well.’
‘So a fat fee offered, then?’
A nod. ‘Depending what’s been taken. Some Maharajah’s emeralds, slave girls, a boatload of elephant ivory.’ He smacked his lips. �
��So find my clothes, lad. We’re off to the Old Bailey Courthouse!’ But when we presented ourselves, neatly dressed, and washed as much as my master does (a splash in a basin), the truth was less exciting.
‘Only a trunkful of papers, Mr Fielding?’ my master said.
Fielding was a magistrate at the Old Bailey, fat as butter, but with eyes as sharp and clever as my master’s. He met us in his chambers, and being a man who liked his food and yet wasn’t stingy, we both got a slice of his morning pie.
‘A very large trunk, Mr Bath. Containing vital instructions for the company. Due to sail shortly. But someone thieved it off the coach, when the coach man had stopped to let out a passenger at the with ered oak, outside Peckham. He noticed only when he stopped in Peckham proper.’
‘You had it cried for?’
‘Peckham might be neither one thing nor the other, like the fish or fowl-meat in this pastie - neither London nor country, but it does possess a town crier. “Oyez, oyez!” off he went, “trunk stolen, big reward!”, ringing his bell, up and down the lanes around Peckham. But no result as yet.’
He took another bite of his pie.
‘Time is short, Mr Bath. To work, to take the thief and earn your rich reward!’
Time being short, indeed, Master hired a horse, a skinny nag with a rolling eye and a hard mouth, but fast, guaranteed! I hopped up on behind Master. Off we went, through the crowded streets of old London, the crowds falling away as the houses became less dense, until we saw green fields. Peckham.
On the Gravesend Road we found the withered oak soon enough, near to death and the only tree for miles. Every other tree had been razed by London’s thirst for firewood.
Master Bath dismounted, leaving me in charge of the nag. Master looked around with that hungry look he gets when he’s thief-seeking, with hopes of the taking and a fat reward.
‘What d’ye see from up there, lad?’
‘Fields, sir. A cow or three. Some labourers, dis tant, mending a fence. And flatness.’ He rubbed his stubbly chin.
‘Our scene of the crime. Imagine it, early morn ing, a brief stop, driver distracted with a call of nature I’ll bet. A crime of opportunity. A passenger riding on the outside, doin’ it cheap. Sees a trunk not well secured, gives the fastenings a little tweak with the pocketknife ...’