by Alan Beechey
Their conversation continued with further brief expressions of affection and mild lust, and then Effie was interrupted by the arrival of DS Moldwarp, who was covering her duties until she returned to the Yard. Oliver hung up the telephone regretfully, and was about to go to his bedroom when he caught sight of his reflection in the hallway mirror. His left ear was black.
Chapter Three
To Human View Displayed
Friday, December 19
Not her dry cleaner, Effie speculated, looking curiously at the policeman’s harsh features. Perhaps it was the man who ran the pet shop on the street where she grew up? No, it had to be that actor who’d been in the movie she’d watched last week on Channel Four.
Detective Inspector Lenny “Spiv” Welkin finished his phone conversation, and Effie momentarily gave up wondering who he reminded her of. They were sitting in his office, a tiny, glass-walled room that completely failed to separate him, visually or acoustically, from the criminal investigation area in the small Plumley subdivisional police station. It was her first morning on her temporary assignment, and her unannounced appearance at the station had clearly provoked some curiosity among her new colleagues. From her seat, she could see several of the younger detectives appraising her frankly while pretending to take phone calls or check for data on computer screens. (Her hair, particularly, seemed to feature in their sign language.) Let them look, she thought. If they cross the line, she had her defenses.
“Congratulations again on your promotion, Spiv,” she said. Although Welkin had worked only briefly for Mallard, she had known him for several years and respected him. Despite the tough visage and the unrelenting Cockney accent, she knew him to be a fair man, devoted to a house full of pedigree Burmese cats.
“Ta, Eff. I think I’m going to like it here, although it’s been nothing but paperwork since I arrived a couple of weeks ago. Still, that suits a man in my condition.”
He gestured at a walking stick propped behind the door. Their one assignment together had resulted in a rather energetic arrest for Effie, but a shattered tibia for Welkin, and while his leg was out of its cast, it was clearly not fully functional. “That’s partly why I asked for you to come ’ere. It’s only a small station—most of the big stuff goes on over at the main Thripstone cop shop. But we’re a bit short-staffed, even for us. Two detective constables are out on the panel and my usual sergeant’s gone off on honeymoon.”
“You asked for me personally?” Effie said with surprise.
“Oh, yeah. I was talking to Assistant Commissioner Weed, and ’e let slip that Tim Mallard might be taking some time off, leaving you at a loose end until the New Year. So I made a grab for you. Figuratively speaking, of course,” he added hastily, although he wasn’t sure the qualification was an improvement. Welkin tensed, knowing only too well what Effie could do to him if she sensed anything untoward.
“In that case, I’m flattered,” she answered, to his visible relief. “But are you expecting any bloodbaths in Plumley High Street between now and Boxing Day?”
Welkin laughed. “If the worst thing that happens is a double-parked sleigh and an unlicensed reindeer, that would suit me down to the ground. No, Sergeant, while your talents as a homicide detective are only to be envied, I was hoping you could help me with something else.” He nodded in the direction of the large room outside. “You may have noticed that you’ve already attracted some admirers.”
Effie did not alter her gaze. “You mean the prematurely balding stick insect playing pocket billiards, the pint-sized Casanova with the scrubby moustache and acne who keeps moving his chair so he can see up my skirt, or the chicken wearing glasses who keeps making odd hand gestures, as if he’s shaking up an invisible bottle of medicine? A rather small bottle, I might add.”
“I see you need no introduction to your colleagues on the shift,” said Welkin wryly. “Don’t worry, I’m working on their reeducation, and a splendid time is guaranteed for all. This morning, you’re merely serving as a distraction from their normal victim, Detective Constable Tish Belfry. That’s her in the corner.”
Effie turned, and two of the male detectives outside suddenly became very interested in items on their desktops, although they did look up swiftly and grin at each other for no apparent reason. The third, the shorter man with the moustache, had now maneuvered his chair too far from his desk, so he pretended instead to be lost in thought in the middle of the room, tapping a pencil against his untidy teeth. Behind them, a dark-haired young woman in a severe navy suit was looking worriedly at a file. Her apparent obliviousness to the men’s muttered conversation was so complete that Effie knew she hadn’t missed a word.
“I don’t have to spell it out, do I, Effie?” said Welkin. “Tish is a promising copper. I think she’d really benefit from a few days in your company. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
He eased himself to his feet and limped to the door, allowing Effie to hold it open for him as a matter of pragmatism, not affirmative action. Picking up the walking stick, he led her across the main room, ignoring his male subordinates who began practicing sly Long John Silver impressions behind his back, and tapped Belfry lightly on the shoulder.
The speed with which DC Tish Belfry spun around and the intense scowl she assumed were promising, Effie thought, but she had to lose the flicker of apprehension, a true tell for the experienced bully. Tish appeared relieved when she saw Welkin and even managed a smile when he introduced her to Effie. She had strong Indian or Pakistani coloring, with straight, glossy hair cut to the level of her chin. But there was also the suggestion of European genes that added a sallowness to her clear complexion and lightened her eyes from espresso to a strong cappuccino. Probably on her father’s side, to judge from the family name, but the strong nose and angular chin that detracted only slightly from her general attractiveness could have come from either heritage. Tish’s accent as she greeted Effie seemed local, and Effie found herself constructing a life story for the young woman (child of mixed race, probable disapproval of the parents’ marriage from both sides of the family, only child or at least no brothers or she’d be better prepared for the indignities of life as the token female in a CID unit, most likely a single-sex school) before she reminded herself she wasn’t dealing with a murder suspect. Mallard had trained her too well—Tish would probably answer personal questions without demanding legal representation.
“Effie’s not too familiar with the manor,” Welkin was saying, “so I thought you might start with a quick tour, show her the sights.”
“Of course, Inspector.”
“I could show her a few sights without leaving the station,” muttered one of the men behind them. Welkin turned quickly, just as the stick insect began to limp across the room in another parody of the burly inspector’s gait. He swiftly adjusted it to a scuttle.
“What are you doing?” Welkin asked, in long-suffering tones.
“Oh, just showing the lads my impression of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Boss,” the stick insect replied, crossing the room with bent knees, one shoulder higher than the other.
“That’s your Richard the Third,” sniggered the chicken.
“Nah, this is my Richard the Third,” the stick insect responded, dropping his shoulder and lifting the other one. The other men snorted with messy laughter. A telephone began to ring in Welkin’s office, and he hobbled back to answer it.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us to the new girl, Tish?” asked the undersized Casanova. He was still draped like a starfish over the office chair. “I’d offer to get up, love, but I’m up already, if you get my drift.”
His colleagues groaned and laughed again. Casanova assumed a poorly arranged expression of sincerity and looked up at Effie.
This was his mistake.
He had just moved on from admiring her copious, curly hair to gazing at her light blue eyes, when an odd sensation began. It wasn’t that she ch
anged her demeanor or even moved a muscle in her face, but suddenly he saw behind those appealing features the long-suffering, quizzical, slightly pained, but vaguely pitying countenance of every woman who had ever judged him in his life. He had the impression that a vast pair of scales was being created in his mind, and into one pan went all the instances of human decency and nobility that had moved him to tears since his childhood, from Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech to Neil Armstrong’s voice declaring “The Eagle has landed,” while into the other pan went every example of his own unworthiness, freshly and vividly recalled (such as the time he had gone three stations past his stop on the Underground because the City secretary crammed in beside him had left one button of her blouse undone), every spiteful joke he had passed on, and every fierce suggestive remark he had ever whispered or shouted at a vulnerable woman whom he knew could not fight back. A great voice seemed to toll in his head “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting!” This unfamiliar emotion that now coursed through every bodily canal—is this what shame, abject shame feels like? It made him want to shrink down below the floor and pull the linoleum over his head, so that he’d never have to face anyone or anything again. Especially Effie’s ice-blue eyes. Instead, he slid off his chair.
The stick insect and the chicken guffawed as it rolled away on its castors, leaving him flat on his back.
“That put you in your place,” shouted the chicken. “I don’t think you’re her type, mate.”
“That’ll do,” murmured Welkin, stepping out of his office.
“Hey, maybe she doesn’t like men at all,” said the stick insect with exaggerated surprise, as if he had just discovered a pulsar in his bathroom.
Casanova had clambered to his feet. “Knock it off, lads,” he muttered nervously backing away from Effie without daring to look at her. The chicken and the stick insect paused and stared at their colleague.
“What’s the matter with you?” the chicken asked suspiciously.
“Nothing, nothing,” said Casanova, risking a glance back at Effie, who had not moved since he had approached her that lifetime ago. “I’m just concerned that we’re not creating a good first impression.”
“Do what?”
“We’re not being very polite to our guest, that’s all.”
“A guest who outranks you all, incidentally,” Welkin announced smugly. “You can call off the guided tour for now,” he continued quietly, after the three chastened men had absorbed the news and slunk away to their desks without speaking. “I have a real job for you both.”
“I’d love to know what happened back there,” Tish said, as she and Effie disappeared through the door. Welkin smiled again, knowing that what Tish was to learn privately was worth three months of classroom-based training. He had only once been on the receiving end of Effie’s “Look,” for a mild infraction, but she had elicited one of the half-dozen memories that always provoked a physical shudder. He shouldered his walking stick as if it were a rifle, and limped slowly back to his office, pausing only to crook the handle around the stick insect’s unsuspecting neck and pull him backwards.
“And if I see any more Hunchbacks of Notre Dame, Constable,” he hissed into the detective’s ear, “I’ll personally kick you in the bells.”
***
Oliver Swithin despised Finsbury the Ferret. He found it a constant effort to dream up despicable schemes for the evil beast to inflict on the hapless Railway Mice family, and he daily thanked Providence that the stories were published under his pen-name, O.C. Blithely, which—like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson before him—let him avoid responsibility for his character when it suited him.
Oliver couldn’t even relieve his irritation by laughing all the way to the bank. The success of the Railway Mice books should have given him a decent income, but all of his earnings were currently sitting in an escrow account, managed by his publisher, Tadpole Tomes for Tiny Tots (although Oliver had wondered why this account was held in Switzerland). This was because the original illustrator of Finsbury—a callow art student on her first freelance assignment—was now suing the publisher for a sizeable share of the ferret’s profits, past, present, and future. An interim judgment had recently allowed Tadpole Tomes to pay Oliver a stipend to cover his daily expenses, which freed him from the need to find a day job. Unfortunately, it also gave him more time to work on the Finsbury saga.
Not that he had any choice. Just before Finsbury’s arrival in the Railway Mice books—an appearance that started out as a quick, private caprice, but accidentally found its way to the printed page—Oliver had signed a long-term contract with Tadpole Tomes, and the publisher was not going to back out of its only moneymaker, even if that money was currently a set of glowing numbers on a computer screen in Geneva. And the public appetite for the stories showed no sign of abating. Imitators had attempted to duplicate Finsbury, of course, but Willesden the Weasel and Slaithwaite the Slug, among many others, had failed to find an audience. For true depravity, there was still nothing like an original Finsbury the Ferret escapade, to Oliver’s continued annoyance.
Tadpole Tomes had even hired a public relations firm, Hoo Watt & Eidenau, to think of new outlets for Finsbury, and Geoffrey Angelwine, who worked for this company, had exploited his long friendship with Oliver Swithin to finagle himself onto “the Blithely Account.” Since Geoffrey now saw Oliver’s continued productivity as the key to his own professional advancement, he was constantly urging new Finsbury-related projects onto the author, including the assignment on religion for Celestial City. And because Geoffrey lived in the same house as Oliver, he would often materialize at odd times and berate Oliver for not writing enough. So with wealth and fame out of the picture—the former unrealized, the latter unwanted—the primary motivating force in Oliver’s working day had become avoiding Geoffrey.
This was easy if the weather was fine. Oliver would grab his laptop computer, walk to Kensington Gardens, settle himself under a tree with a flask of tea and a croissant, and reluctantly devise vile plots for Finsbury, pausing only to smile at a passing nanny, or tourist, or dog, or if his surroundings failed to distract him, playing solitaire until his battery ran out.
But on colder, wetter days, Oliver would creep moodily from room to room of the Edwardes Square townhouse he shared with Geoffrey, Ben Motley, and Susie Beamish, looking for distractions. Ben, the owner of the house, had converted the top floor into his photographic studio, and had taken to pretending he had a client whenever he heard Oliver’s footsteps on the landing. Since his subjects all wanted to be photographed at the height of sexual ecstasy, Ben had learned to be creative with his vocalizations, and Oliver had often gone back down the stairs wondering why so many of Ben’s clients sounded like Darth Vader sucking helium when they got aroused. Sex mystified him, as he had once said to Effie, who didn’t seem surprised by the comment. Although she had never complained either.
That Friday afternoon, Oliver was camped in the shared kitchen at Edwardes Square when the oven timer rang to tell him it was time to leave for Theydon Bois. He shut down his laptop with his new Railway Mice story (The Railway Mice and the Vertically Challenged Vole) barely started and his solitaire winnings at minus £3,000, grabbed the slice of frozen pizza that he had slid into the oven ten minutes earlier, and headed downstairs to his bedroom.
He was only dimly aware that something was wrong when he noticed that his door was standing wide open. It was normally his habit to close it while he was out. The room beyond looked odd too, misty and slightly out of focus, as if seen reflected in a dusty mirror. Oliver made a mental note to get his eyesight tested again, stepped through the doorway, and collided with nothingness.
Well, obviously not nothingness. It must have been something that brought him almost to a halt, squashing the pizza into his face and causing cheese and tomato sauce to cascade down his clean shirt. But he couldn’t see it. It was almost as if the room had been filled with wate
r and then deprived of gravity, so that he had walked into a vertical wall of something clear and slightly yielding.
Oliver dropped the pizza slice and snatched at the film that was now wrapping itself around his face and chest. Plastic wrap! Somebody had taken lengths of plastic kitchen wrap and stretched it tautly across the doorway, leaving Oliver to bounce off the transparent barrier like a sponge hitting a drum.
“Gotcha,” said a voice behind him, with a giggle.
“Geoffrey!” cried Oliver, trying to disentangle himself from the skeins of wrap, which were now bandaging his limbs so that he looked like an exhibitionist mummy. Geoffrey Angelwine’s birdlike face emerged from the shadows, his beady eyes bright with amusement.
“You blithering moron!” Oliver exclaimed. “Look at my shirt! What do you think you’re doing?”
“It was a practical joke.”
“What? This is no time for practical jokes!”
“When is?” Geoffrey asked innocently, pulling the wrap off his friend. “Did you know some people will pay good money to have this done to them?”
“Have you totally lost your mind?” muttered Oliver. “This is just—”
“—like something Finsbury would do,” Geoffrey interrupted. Oliver was not going to say that, but he knew that Geoffrey’s habit of finishing other people’s sentences was often a way of taking over a conversation, and he hoped it would lead to an explanation. Not that he had time for one.
“Exactly,” Geoffrey went on. “Finsbury would do that. Do you remember when we were at University, it was a good party joke to stretch kitchen wrap over the toilets and wait for someone to take a pee?”
“Yes, bloody hilarious.” Oliver screwed up the last of the wrap into a large, noisy ball and flung it at his friend. It stuck to his hand.
“So I simply applied the method to the whole body. You’ll thank me for it.”
Oliver exhaled noisily. “Geoff, I’m startled, I’m stained, I nearly dropped my computer, and I’m going to be late now to see—”
