by steve higgs
‘I tried calling the mobile number for Lee already. He hung up on me and hasn’t answered it since. Can you find an address for either of them? Or where I am likely to find them?’
‘Shouldn't take long to get home addresses. They finished their undergraduate degrees in the summer and went straight onto a Master's program.'
I made a mental note to intercept them at school. ‘Anything on the milk?’
‘Not a thing. Not yet anyway. I did research what could cause it to glow but didn’t get very far. I need more time on that one.’
‘Okay. Thanks, James. I’ll have a good read of the report later.’ I thanked him again and disconnected.
The next item on my agenda was to see Steven and Simon at Maidstone Police Station. They would be waiting for me if I got there in time.
I slid into my car and damned near wet my knickers when I spotted the hooded figure sitting on my passenger’s seat.
'What the hell, man?' I screeched.
I swore quietly as my pulse settled. ‘You gave me such a fright. Can you take the hood off, so I can see who you are now?’
The hooded figure slowly shook its head. It was creeping me out that the person inside didn’t speak. I assumed it was a man because of the size and shape but it might not be. Stuff not knowing though, I grabbed my phone and flipped it to torch mode.
Shining it inside the hood made my heart rate spike again though.
The face looking back at me was reptilian!
Involuntarily, I screamed.
It took a second, but my brain caught up: I was looking at a mask. I could see where it ended around the eyes. Green, lizard skin covered everything but the two orbs.
The hooded figure reached for the door handle to get out but removed an envelope from the hoody’s front pouch first. The envelope went onto the dashboard held by a hand covered in the same prosthetic skin.
‘Hey!’ I called as the mystery guest opened the door and began to get out.
I clambered out my own side of the car intending to give chase. My mystery hoody person had run off into the dark and was gone once more though. Not a word exchanged. Using my police training, I recorded what I knew. Probably a man, around five feet eleven inches tall with an athletic build. The eyes were disguised by contact lenses that made the pupils also looks reptilian. It wasn’t much to go on.
I snatched up the envelope. It wasn’t sealed and there wasn’t much inside, just a single piece of paper that appeared to be blank. It wasn’t though, I was holding it the wrong way around. When I turned it over, I discovered a short sentence on the other side.
Check the soil
Another cryptic clue. I sighed inwardly and pressed the ignition button.
Foreplay. Thursday, November 10th 1709hrs
Finally, the message from Gemma came as I was driving back over the bridge from Strood to Rochester. She wanted to meet in the carpark of the Tesco supermarket in Strood at eight o’clock. It was a twenty-minute drive from my house, but it was easy enough to get to. Her message went on to explain that her boyfriend wanted somewhere public and lit but with good escape routes. He sounded more than a little paranoid.
Regardless of any misgivings, I replied to say that I would be there. I needed a break in this case. So far, I had nothing but weird. The spaceship landing site today, the luminous milk, the unfriendly farm workers. The mysterious person in the hoody and their enigmatic messages. Gemma’s boyfriend knew something, or so she claimed, and that could get me looking in the right direction.
I was being hopeful.
The clock in my car told me the time was just after five o'clock. In my head, I was doing math to see how I could fit in a date with Brett. There would be time between getting home and going out again. We could do a late-night booty call, I was tempted to suggest it, but it felt too early in our relationship to be calling each other just for sex.
I called him anyway. I wanted to hear his voice.
The phone rang only twice before his velvet voice came on the line. ‘Amanda, babe.’ I could hear the smile in his voice. I was wearing one as well.
‘Hi, Brett. How was your day?’
‘After last night, nothing was going to dampen my day, babe. Although, I will say that I have been a little tired and wanted a nap this afternoon.' This made me giggle in a semi-embarrassed, semi-excited way. We really hadn't got a lot of sleep last night.
‘It was a lot of fun. When do I get to see you again?’
‘How about tonight?’ He asked, his tone playful.
Now I wished I hadn’t arranged to meet Gemma and her boyfriend. ‘Maybe…’ I dragged my answer out. ‘I have some things I have to do tonight so I’m not sure what time I will get home. Not before nine, I expect.’
‘Are we talking late night booty call, you naughty girl?’ I could hear the excitement in his voice.
It did feel naughty. I couldn’t recall ever having a booty call before, but if I was ever going to, I couldn’t come up with a better partner than Brett. ‘Yes.’ I murmured into the phone breathlessly. ‘Come whenever you want. I’ll be waiting.’ God, I was horny suddenly. What was he thinking right now? Was he picturing me naked?
He whispered into my ear, ‘I’m going to make you beg for mercy, babe.’ Then he was gone.
My legs felt weak.
Crime Scene Guys. Thursday, November 10th 1802hrs
I had called the number for the crime lab so they would know I was on my way. I was still working on favours and suspected that I would need to devise some way of paying them back soon. I think they dealt with my odd requests as a hobby more than anything else. They had no need to take the work on. Nevertheless, when Simon answered the phone, he was clearly pleased to hear my voice and asked what I had for him.
They were just about to finish work so were going to meet me in front of the station. His suggestion meant I could avoid going inside where I might run into CI Quinn.
At this time of day, parking was easy and I risked not paying for a ticket in the carpark just along the road from the station as I was only going to be a few minutes.
Both Steven and Simon were outside waiting for me. I had always got on well with the two older men. Each was somewhere around fifty and had more hair coming out of their ears than they had on their heads. Neither wore a hat to ward off the cold air but both had their hands in the pockets to keep them warm.
‘Hi, guys.’ I waved and smiled as I approached.
‘Hey, Amanda.’ Simon answered while Steven returned my wave. ‘You have an alien artefact for us and some milk, yes?’
‘I have an odd piece of metal that I hope you can analyse, and yes I have some milk.’
‘What’s the story?’ Asked Simon as he took the six-inch-long piece of metal from me. ‘Where did you find it?’
I answered the second question first. ‘It was lying on the ground in a clearing in the woodland near Cliffe Woods. The clearing had burn marks on the grass where crazy people are claiming a spacecraft touched down. It didn't get there by itself.'
‘It’s really light.’ Simon observed as he handed the odd component to Steven.
Steven hefted it in one hand and tried to scratch it with a fingernail. ‘It might be a magnesium alloy?' He asked Simon.
‘Easy enough to find out.’ Simon replied. ‘Tell us about the milk.’
I filled them in on the whole story of the farms and their cows and the crop circles and the lights in the sky at night and all the nutters it was attracting. While I was talking, I remembered the little tissue packet of burnt soil I had in my pocket.
‘I also have this.’ I said as I produced the plastic pack with a tissue inside it.
‘You sneezed?’ Steven asked, mystified.
I cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘This is soil from one of the burn marks. It smells like petrol.’
Steven took it from me and sniffed it himself. ‘Paraffin.' He concluded. ‘Probably paraffin, anyway. It will be easy to work out. Not much extraterrestrial about paraffin, I'm
afraid.'
I nodded. The chaps were clearly on their way home. Finished for the day but always on call if they were needed somewhere. ‘How soon do you think you can look at this?’ I asked cagily. I needed it now, or at least very soon. I couldn’t say that to two fellows doing me another massive favour though.
Steven hefted the odd metal component again looking thoughtful. He glanced at Simon. ‘Probably tomorrow?’ He asked.
Simon nodded. ‘Yeah, probably tomorrow. It won’t take long to identify the accelerant in the soil or what material this is.’ He said holding up the metal thing. ‘What it was used for or what it was originally fitted to might take a bit more work.’
‘I can test the milk.’ Steven added.
‘There is going to be a cost this time though.’ Simon said, his tone suddenly serious.
‘We can’t keep doing this stuff for free, you know.’ Added Steven.
I was taken a little off guard. My normally friendly crime-scene guys were suddenly bordering on aggressive and were both looking down at me with rigid expressions.
‘Err, okay.’ I managed.
‘We would like…’ Steven started.
‘We demand.’ Cut in Simon.
‘That’s right. We demand… A box of donuts.’
I relaxed, my shoulders slumping where I had been tensing. With a chuckle, I said, ‘The best donuts I can find. I promise.'
‘Super.’ They replied simultaneously.
We chatted very briefly about work because they asked me how I was settling in at my new job, but I sent them on their way soon enough. They both had wives and children to get home to.
Satisfied that I would get some answers from their endeavours in a day or so, I walked back to my car.
Where I found a fixed-penalty-notice stuck to the driver’s window. I snapped my arm out to check my watch.
Twelve minutes.
Twelve friggin minutes! I ripped the fine open. A fixed penalty for failing to display a parking ticket. I cursed myself and was thankful the rotten parking attendant wasn’t in sight still as I might just vent my anger at them.
My watch told me it was a quarter after six. I was going out again in ninety minutes and I needed to eat and sit my backside down for a while, but Brett was coming so I needed to straighten the apartment and put on fresh bed linen. It was turning into a long day, but it had a promising ending. I just hoped Gemma’s mysterious paranoid boyfriend had something great to tell me. I really didn’t want to go, I wanted to stay at home and get ready for Brett.
Inside my apartment, I ripped the top off a microwave rice thing and gave it ninety seconds of nuclear heat. I needed to eat. I needed to tidy and make ready for a visitor and I needed to look at the research James had sent me.
While the microwave whirred, I ran through the apartment, turning on my laptop, stripping the bed and shoving things into the dishwasher. As the ping sounded to say the rice was ready, I was stuffing dirty bed linen into the washing machine.
I dumped the rice onto a pack of prawns and added some salad leaves from the fridge. Hardly a feast but it was what I had time for and would keep me going.
With a fork in one hand and the steaming bowl in the other, I sat cross-legged on the sofa in front of my laptop and clicked to get the research file open. James had pulled together a file that ran to six gigabytes. For a moment I worried it was going to be like trying to read an encyclopaedia but saw that the file contained videos and photographs which took up most of the space.
It was broken down into sections which allowed me to quickly skip the part on aliens in Kent and crop circle theories. I had read about them already. Mostly, I wanted to look up information on the people involved i.e. everyone that worked at the farm.
I started with the deceased, Tamara Mwangi. Also Kenyan, she was forty-three years old at the time of her death and had worked in the pharmaceutical industry for most of her life. There was a LinkedIn profile to show who she had worked for. James had pulled together a life history but skim-reading it, none of it meant anything at this stage.
Then I looked at Kieron and Richard because the hooded figure had told me to check the university photograph. As I opened their file, I wondered if I would find that the story they told about meeting at university would prove to be a lie. It wasn't though, James had found their graduation photographs on social media and they had indeed studied agriculture at Cambridge. They were bright guys. Wading through the reams of information, I came across a picture of the two of them in a class photo. They were sitting next to each other in the front row. Apart from having different hairstyles, they looked the same. Quite what the hooded figure expected me to learn I couldn't tell.
I was shutting the lid of the laptop when I saw another photograph labelled Dorchester University. I clicked on it, expecting to find another picture of the two men, but it wasn’t them in the picture. It was Lara and Michelle. It was five years ago, and they looked no different from now. Kieron and Richard said they met them in a bar when the two girls walked in together and sat down next to them. The girls had to know each other from somewhere, the somewhere turned out to be university.
I checked my watch. I needed to get on with other tasks.
Supermarket Carpark. Thursday, November 10th 1957hrs
I arrived a few minutes early to find a parking space. My paranoia was telling me that Gemma and her boyfriend were not going to turn up, that she had overstated what he knew and I was wasting my time. Because of that, I had written a shopping list before I left the house and was planning to quickly do my weekly shopping if she wasn't here.
Sitting in my car, I called the number she had messaged me on earlier. It connected immediately.
‘Hello, is that Amanda?' A man's voice asked. The voice sounded young, which I expected given Gemma's age and it had the awful guttural accent that many parts of the Medway Towns bred. I had no doubt he would drop every H and T and use swear words as punctuation in even the briefest sentence.
Was it better to make myself sound like him? Would he feel more relaxed and ready to talk than if I countered his accent by making myself sound like I came from Royal Tonbridge Wells?
I went with option one. ‘Yeah, dis is ‘Manda.’
‘What’s wrong with your voice?’ asked Gemma. He had me on speaker, possibly through the in-car system.
I felt my cheeks redden as I said, ‘Nothing.’ In my usual voice. ‘Can we meet in person?’ I asked. Surely having dragged me to a supermarket car park there was no need to hide in our cars. If we were going to do this over the phone, I could have been at home.
‘Yeah.’ The man’s voice returned. ‘I just needed to make sure you were alone.’ More mystery.
My car engine was already off, the phone to my ear, so I climbed out of my car and stood up. ‘Can you see me?’
A set of headlights flashed on a battered looking Mitsubishi Eclipse a row over from me. Then the car’s interior illuminated as the door opened to show me Gemma and her boyfriend. The tiny Gemma had found herself an equally small boyfriend. He looked childlike in his proportions and had left the thin wisps of hair growing above his top lip and across his chin in a bid to make himself look older.
I walked towards them, but he grabbed Gemma’s arm and pulled her towards a darkened corner of the carpark. He made sure I saw and nodded with his head that I should follow them.
‘Have you got any recording equipment with you?’ He asked before I could introduce myself.
‘No.’ I answered. He was looking me up and down but not in a leering way, he was checking to see what I had on me, to see if I had a hidden camera in a coat button, what was in my hands etcetera. He was a nervous little mouse, his movements jerky and sudden.
‘You need to put your bag over there.' He insisted, pointing to a forlorn-looking shopping trolley with three wheels. ‘And empty your pockets.'
I hesitated, convinced that none of his nonsense was necessary. I was already here though, and I had come this far with his rubbish, I
might as well play along a little further.
When I had shown him my empty pockets by turning them inside out and he was convinced I wasn't wearing a wire, he finally relaxed.
‘Now are you ready to talk?’ I asked while trying to keep the irritation from my voice.
‘That depends, lady. Are you ready to listen?’ He eyed me knowingly like he was the one with all the answers. I was getting impatient. Perhaps sensing my attitude, he pressed on. ‘What I mean is, most people are not ready to hear the truth. It’s scary for most folks to hear.’
Okay, I was officially bored. I took a step toward him. I was at least six inches taller than him. ‘Start talking, little man, please. So, I don’t have to hurt you.’
He took a quick step back, putting a protective arm across Gemma to shield her from the angry blonde woman ‘Okay, love. Keep your hair on.’
‘Tell me something interesting. Do it now.’
‘It’s the cows.’ He whispered, his voice so quiet I was forced to bend and lean in to hear him. ‘They have been bringing cattle from their home planet to impregnate our cows.’
Oh brother.
‘Gemma is working there as a spy, risking her life to expose the truth.' He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Their plan is to seed the world with their superior genetic code. Through their breeding program they will develop superior creatures that will obey their instructions and when their numbers are a match for ours, they will strike. No one will see it coming and because we will have been eating their modified livestock, we ourselves will be unable to resist their commands. That is why Gemma and I are vegan. Only true vegans can survive the coming apocalypse.'
Gemma saw the look on my face. ‘You have to believe him.’ She begged. ‘I have infiltrated the farm unnoticed. The farmers are all in on it. The aliens must have promised them that they would be spared or that they would be granted seats of power under the new order. I can’t stop them by myself. Will you help us?’