The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “Oh, by the way,” he added with relish. “You might not have heard, but Constable Matsaran was transferred to the Department of Interrogation two days before his death. Sergeant Hogman might not have known him well, but he’s very loyal to his own. I wouldn’t be too surprised if he paid you a little visit anyway.”

  The bottle fell from Dendril’s nerveless fingers to shatter on the floor. Tendrils of smoke began to drift up as the liqueur ate into the floorboards. Inspector Heighway closed the door with a satisfied smile and went in search of Sergeant Raasay.

  The Long Pig Grill-room was, by the standards of most orcish restaurants, a very high-class establishment indeed. Although the tables were encrusted with old food, there was very little on the walls and none on the ceiling. Most evenings there were only four or five fights, and Heighway knew for a fact that no one had been killed there for at least ten days. The orc waiters were trained to a remarkably high standard; somehow, the owner had managed to instil in them the basic tenet that, no matter how severe the provocation, you never massacred the clientele.

  After ordering Raasay to stay on guard outside (for it was never wise for a human to disappear into an orcish establishment without some form of back-up), Heighway pushed open the door and went inside. The restaurant was full of orcs, all plainly on their best behaviour, for the noise was merely deafening and it was possible to dodge between the bits of food being thrown around.

  Brushing his way past an ineffectually gesturing waiter who he guessed was of the shashlik tribe*, Heighway strode to the back of the restaurant, where the maître d’hôtel, a much larger uttuk, was snarlingly surveying his domain and occasionally reaching out to give one of the scurrying waiters a ringing clout around the back of the head.

  Wordlessly, Heighway held up his police ID card, and the maître d’ surveyed it impassively.

  “Yeah. Right. Well, what can I do for you, Inspector?” he growled.

  Heighway was impressed, for it wasn’t often you came across an orc who’d bothered learning to read. In fact, he was relieved he’d remembered to bring his real ID. On those frequent times he forgot it, he usually showed orcs his membership card for the Pink Puss-Cat club instead, and it would have been very embarrassing to show that to an orc who could recognize it for what it really was.

  “I believe you bought in a couple of corpses yesterday from our Sergeant Dendril,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s anything left of them?”

  “Ah! A human being of discernment!” It was the orc’s turn to be impressed. He turned and clicked his talons, summoning one of the cowering waiters across. “If the inspector would care to take the table in the corner . . .”

  “No!” Heighway was horrified. “You don’t understand! I don’t want to sample them! It’s just that we’ve discovered they were murdered, and I was hoping to examine their . . . remains, to see if there was any evidence of how or why they were killed.”

  “I see. Well, you’d better have a word with the chef, then. Come with me.”

  The maître d’ turned to lead the way through a swing-door into the kitchen beyond, and Heighway followed apprehensively. The only orcish kitchen he’d previously experienced had looked like a pigsty that had just hosted a particularly bloody massacre, but he was relieved to find that this one was actually cleaner than some human kitchens he’d seen. In the far corner, a small, scowling orc in a mucus-green chef’s hat was chopping up onions. Heighway guessed that this was Chancre.

  “Chef?” the maître d’ called across the room. “There’s gentleman here from the police force. See if you can help him. He’s investigating a murder and he’d like to know if we’ve got any remnants of the two policemen we bought yesterday.”

  Chancre paused to wipe his brow with the back of one taloned hand.

  “The two policemen, eh?” he snarled. “Hang on. Lemme think. The noisettes de gendarme have all gone. Same with the filet de flic avec champignons and the brigadier bourguignonne. And all the trimmings went in this morning’s stock. Apart from one piece. That’s still in the meat larder over there.”

  He jerked a thumb in the direction of a battered wooden cupboard that was sprawled against the wall.

  “One piece,” repeated Heighway.

  “Yeah.”

  “Just the one?”

  “You got it.”

  “Oh, great. Er . . . do you mind if I . . .?”

  “Nah, go right ahead,” Chancre told him. “Help yerself. I don’t want it. Nasty spotty-looking thing.”

  The orc chef turned back to his onion chopping, and Heighway wandered reluctantly across to the cupboard, desperately hoping that this one remaining piece wasn’t going to turn out to be the piece he thought it was. If so, it was going to be downright embarrassing having to produce it in court as evidence. Mind you, on the plus side, it would be a laugh watching Madam Min trying to carry out an autopsy on it . . .

  Heighway gripped the handle of the rickety door, watched impassively by the maitre d’. Pausing to take a deep breath, he closed his eyes and pulled open the door. For a moment he stood there, eyes screwed tightly shut, and then he forced his right eye open a fraction and squinted nervously into the larder. And found two eyes staring back at him.

  Constable Matsaran was spotty, all right. Years of fatty junk food and little exposure to sunlight had left him, when alive, with a complexion that had been more spot than not. In death the skin of his face and neck looked like a very old chopped-tomato pizza. For all Inspector Heighway knew, maybe the rest of his body had looked the same, but there was no way of telling, for all that was left of Matsaran was his head, neatly severed above the Adam’s apple and resting on a plate.

  Heighway winced and was about to turn away when something caught his eye. Bending, he peered closely at Matsaran’s open mouth for a few seconds. Then he reached into his inside pocket, pulled out a pencil and used its finely sharpened point to prise a couple of tiny items from between Matsaran’s decay-ravaged teeth.

  Turning to face the light, the inspector examined the two items. One appeared to be a flake of oatmeal, the other a piece of nut. He gazed at them for a while, occasionally turning them this way and that with his forefinger, and a slow smile spread across his face.

  “I wonder,” he muttered to himself. “Could it possibly be . . .?”

  Straightening, Heighway beckoned to the orc maitre d’ and pointed to Matsaran’s pathetic remains.

  “That head is now evidence in an official police inquiry,” he said. “Find some sort of a bag to put it in, would you, and then take it outside to my sergeant?”

  The maitre d’ frowned.

  “I’m afraid it’s not really my job . . .,” he began, but Heighway cut him off.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “You’re the head waiter, aren’t you?”

  And, chuckling happily to himself, he left the kitchen. At last, Inspector Heighway was starting to enjoy the case.

  All the way back to the police station, Sergeant Raasay kept throwing fascinated glances at the weighty leather bag that the maître d’ had given him. He was dying to know what was inside, but the inspector had told him not to open it and was now lost in one of those reveries of concentration that Raasay knew meant they were close to cracking the case. So he just trotted contentedly along behind his superior and said nothing.

  After a while, Heighway spoke.

  “I just can’t make the connection,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Why would Vaedrl be killed? He was nothing to do with the Interrogation lot.”

  “Well, he was a mate of Sergeant Hogman, sir,” ventured Raasay, and immediately had to take sharp evasive action in order to avoid colliding with the inspector, who had stopped dead and swung round to stare at him.

  “Was he, now?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Old mates, they were. Well, they’d been in the same group at cadet school, sir, years ago. They used to go out once a month and get drunk together, sir.”

  “Well, I never knew that.” Heighw
ay thought for a moment. “So if Hogman had some new fad he was dead keen on, he’d have told Vaedrl all about it?”

  “Oh, I should think so, sir.”

  Heighway grinned and clapped the surprised Raasay on the back.

  “Good man, Raasay. Well done. Now, let’s get back before another member of the Interrogation Department dies a horrible, lingering death . . .”

  But they were too late. When they arrived at the police station, the place was in uproar. Three burly constables were on guard outside the main entrance, their swords drawn and at the ready, their eyes scanning visitors suspiciously. Inside the entrance foyer, people were scurrying hither and thither, and the air was filled with a confused babble of voices.

  Raasay stared about him, bewildered, whilst Inspector Heighway sighed and leaned against the wall, his shoulders slumped in dejection.

  “We were too slow, Sergeant,” he muttered. “Some other poor sod has copped it. We should have run back . . .”

  “Heighway!” Superintendent Weird’s voice rang out across the foyer. Looking up, Heighway saw his superior beckoning from an office doorway.

  “Ah, well,” he said to Raasay. “Better let your Uncle Billy know what’s been going on. You wait here, and don’t let anyone else see inside that bag.”

  He walked wearily across the foyer through all the hubbub, like a ponderous beetle wading through scurrying ants. The superintendent beckoned him into the office and shut the door behind them.

  “There’s been another one, Inspector!” he burst out. Heighway nodded resignedly.

  “Who is it this time?” he asked.

  “Hogman.”

  “Hogman?” Heighway was stunned. There had been something unpleasantly permanent about the sergeant. He’d given the impression that, like death and taxes, you couldn’t escape him.

  “By the gods, Heighway, where’s it going to end? How do we find this killer?” The superintendent took time out to punch a nearby filing cabinet in frustration, then yelped with pain and scowled at his throbbing knuckles. “If I could only get my hands on the person responsible . . .”

  “That won’t be too difficult, sir,” said Heighway, quietly. The superintendent swung round and stared at him with new hope.

  “You mean you’ve cracked it?”

  Heighway nodded.

  “If you come with me, I think I can show you the killer, sir,” he said.

  They walked out into the foyer. On the far side, near the door, Raasay was flat out on the floor, unconscious.

  “What’s happened to him?” asked the superintendent.

  “Raasay? Oh, he’s probably just fainted. He must have looked in the bag.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’ll explain later, sir.”

  They climbed the stairs to the canteen in silence. Heighway pushed open the doors and led the way into the dining area. It was deserted, save for Ratshagger the cook who was sitting at a table eating something black and crunchy that might have once been a chicken leg. He leaped to his feet at the sight of the superintendent, an apprehensive look on his leering features.

  “Superintendent!” he gasped. “What brings you . . .”

  “We want to see the ingredients you use when you make up muesli,” interrupted Heighway.

  “What?” Ratshagger looked baffled.

  “Come on, man, it’s not a difficult concept to understand. Muesli. Ingredients. Us. Look at.”

  Frowning, the cook led them into the kitchen. He ambled across to some chaotically stacked shelves at the back and pulled down three small sacks. Heighway opened each in turn. One contained shelled mixed nuts, one raisins, and one dried apple slices. There seemed to be nothing remotely suspicious about any of them.

  “What exactly are we looking for, Heighway?” the superintendent asked him.

  “Constable Zaglin ate muesli as part of his healthy-diet thing, sir. Hogman and the others admired him. I think they all tried the same healthy diet . . . and it killed them. Listen, Ratshagger, muesli has oats in it. Where do you store them?”

  “Oats?” The cook’s eyes flickered nervously from Heighway to the superintendent and back again.

  “Yes. Oats. Come on!”

  The cook scowled, then reluctantly jerked a filthy thumb at a door in one wall.

  Heighway crossed to it, followed by the superintendent, and pulled it open. Inside was a storeroom about twelve feet long by six feet across. It was filthy-dirty and neglected, with grimy sacks and barrels piled along one side. Opposite, the wall was lined with ramshackle wooden shelving that was liberally covered in dust, spider webs and rat droppings. And at the far end of the room, beneath a closed and shuttered window, was a large barrel with PORIJ OTES written on it in Ratshagger’s near-indecipherable handwriting.

  Heighway winced at the assault on his nostrils, for the room smelled worse than a shashlik orc with a gangrenous leg. He strode forward and, as he did so, a large rat scrambled out of the PORIJ OTES barrel and quickly disappeared into a hole in the floor-boards.

  “Something tells me this might be it, sir,” said Heighway. He stepped gingerly forward, opened the window’s shutter to allow more light in, and then peered into the barrel. And almost retched at the sight that met his eyes.

  The barrel was half full of damp, mouldy, greenish oatmeal, liberally interspersed with rat droppings, mealworms, maggots, weevils and cockroaches. It was so infested that it seemed to be seething with constant motion. And if the sight was bad, the smell was a thousand times worse.

  “There’s your answer, sir. There’s probably more germs in that barrel than on a dead rat. In fact, judging by the smell, there may well be a dead rat in there too. Hogman and the others weren’t murdered – it was the oats in their muesli that killed them.”

  “But loads of officers eat the canteen porridge,” insisted the superintendent. “Why haven’t any of them died?”

  “You know how Ratshagger cooks things, sir. He probably boils the porridge for about two hours. Even this amount of germs couldn’t survive that. But the thing about muesli is that you don’t cook it.”

  They stared at the heaving mass of infested, infected oatmeal.

  “Surely someone would have said something,” muttered the superintendent. “I mean, that must have tasted appalling!”

  “Zaglin had a bad cold in his first week here. He probably couldn’t taste a thing. And the others had never eaten muesli before. They knew it was meant to do them good, like medicine. They probably thought that the worse it tasted, the better it was for them.”

  “So after all that, it was only food poisoning,” said the superintendent with a faint smile. “Well, well.”

  “We’d better arrest Ratshagger for manslaughter,” said Heighway, “and then I think we should announce—”

  “No, I rather think we’ll hush this one up,” cut in the superintendent, quickly. “No point in damaging police morale. No, we’ll have a quiet word with Ratshagger about his hygiene standards, then issue a statement about a food-poisoning outbreak, source traced to, ooh, let’s say that nasty little Southron restaurant in Flensing Lane.”

  “With respect, sir, four people have died because of that insanitary little—”

  “My mind’s made up, Heighway,” the superintendent cut in again. “We’re hushing it up.”

  A sudden flash of insight hit Heighway.

  “You hadn’t been on at Ratshagger about cutting back on the canteen budget, had you, sir? Ordering him to spend less on food, use up all the old supplies, that sort of thing?”

  “I’ve no idea what you mean, Inspector.” Superintendent Weird stared coldly at Heighway. “Nor do I think you’d be wise ever to repeat such a strange theory. Still, I must say you’ve done an excellent job in tracking down the cause of the deaths. You deserve some time off. Why not take a couple of days’ leave and relax in a few nice taverns, eh? And leave me to straighten out this mess . . .”

  There was no mistaking the order in the superintendent’s voice, or the
threat implicit in the tone. Heighway nodded.

  “Very well, sir. I’ll leave it to you.”

  Mustering what dignity he could, he walked out of the canteen, down the stairs, and out of the police station. There was nothing he could do about the cover-up that would now take over. That was a reality of life in the police force. He would just have to take pleasure in the fact that he’d been able to crack the case so quickly. But it was a shame that his fellow officers would never find out that he’d solved it.

  Still, it was best to look on the bright side. And so, with a smile on his face, Inspector Heighway went off to find a nice tavern and celebrate in style. For it wasn’t every police officer who had the satisfaction of knowing that he had just tracked down the city’s first-ever cereal killer . . .

  * vlatzhkan gûl - an orcish liqueur that is somehow actually stronger than pure alcohol. The name, literally translated, means “removes lining of stomach in seconds”.

  * The two smallest breeds of orc are the shashlik and the bazhakûl. Both are about five feet high, with grey scaly skin, green pointed fangs and yellow slits for eyes. Usually, the only way a human can tell the two breeds apart is by smell, for bazhakûl smell like a rotting skunk that’s been dipped in a vat of liquid manure, whereas shashlik smell far worse.

  THE STRAWHOUSE PAVILION

  Ron Goulart

  Ron Goulart has been writing stories about the occult investigator Max Kearney for forty years. You’ll find some of the stories collected as Ghost Breaker (1971). He’s written a lot else besides. His more recent books include a series featuring Groucho Marx as a detective, starting with Groucho Marx, Master Detective (1998), and the beautifully illustrated Comic Book Culture (2000).

  The second time the kitchen caught on fire Wendy Mayer didn’t rise from the living-room sofa.

  “Bert?” she called toward the distant door the smoke was billowing through.

  Her husband appeared in the smoke, a tall slightly stooped young man. “Do you have a five dollar bill, Wendy?”

  “Another fire?” asked middle-sized Max Kearney, who’d run for the fire extinguisher in the hall closet.