The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  “Exactly!” nodded George and raised his eyebrows in a facial expression the equivalent of a boy talking to a dog that’d just managed to sit when it was told for the first time. “Well done, good boy, who’s a clever puppy, yes you are, yeeesss yoouuu aarrree!” it seemed to say.

  Shoop caught the expression and darted a look of warning in George’s direction. George recoiled instantly.

  “How long have they known about this?” Shoop went on. He was visibly disturbed by the news that the Sphere knew about this. This P.O.S. or Priory Of Sion, were already on their books. It was not good news. He had very much wanted to be one step ahead of them and was clearly not happy about the prospect of them being one step ahead of him.

  “It seems that they had a Templar in custody who talked in his sleep.” George went on, “He started babbling on about some organisation called the Priory of Sion, they didn’t think much of it at first, they just thought he was rambling, but then he mentioned a few half garbled names and they started getting suspicious. They woke him up and gave him a dose of truth serum. They managed to get a few names out of him before he realised what he was doing and decided to kill himself by holding his own breath.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He killed himself by holding his own breath!”

  “Bollocks he did, that’s not possible! His body wouldn’t let him do it!”

  “Says it right here in the file…look for yourself if you like.”

  “Nah, I’ll take your word for it, but really, that’s weird!”

  “Indeed.”

  “Have they followed up on the lead though, are they trying to find out more about this Priory thing?” quizzed Shoop.

  “Luckily they’ve been prioritising the hunt for alien technology recently and put it on a back burner. If they knew what we know now, if they had any inkling that it had anything to do with that crypt in India, then they’d definitely step up an investigation into it.”

  Shoop pondered on this for a minute. “That’s a relief,” he said rubbing his chin, “but I’m not going to wait until they figure out that they’ve got something hot sitting on their computer. We’d better move on this right away. I’m getting a funny feeling about it!” He paced for a while and looked off into space while playing with his stubble. Then he stopped. “I’m going upstairs George. I’m going to have to have a nice polite chat with the Boss, distract him, try and put myself off his radar for a while. Then I’m going to go and see if I can get some information out of this Jeeves fellow out at the school.”

  “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing, just sit tight, I’ll get back to you once I’ve had a chat with Jeeves.”

  “Wait there a minute,” said George, “I’ll just go and get you the address for the school and his home address in case you miss him.

  Shoop picked up his coat and hat and got ready to head off.

  If life had taught Shoop one thing, it was never to get your hopes up, but he felt different with this case.

  Shoop had a supernatural ability to attract the unusual and when he was following a good lead something tingled inside him. It was like heartburn but further down toward the pit of his stomach and it didn’t so much burn as warm gently and tingle a bit. It had been so long since he’d had a sensation like it that he almost didn’t recognise it when it came and as he picked up his hat and jacket, getting ready to leave, he realised that he was onto a good thing.

  His senses had been dulling progressively over the last twenty years and he’d begun to believe that he was loosing his edge. He did the job that he did for two main reasons; because he couldn’t stand anything that was even slightly abnormal being in one piece and because he really liked knowing secrets. At least that was the way that it had started. Somewhere down the line it had all become about the money and not the destructive, angry principals to which he so adamantly clung. It had started out making sense and had been full of excitement and adventure, but as the years had edged on and his senses dulled a little year by year, he’d been left with a permanent lethargy that always seemed to lie just out of reach of his perception. He hadn’t realised how lacklustre he’d become until he started getting some of his old senses back. He hadn’t known how sluggish he’d been until that moment, standing there, putting on his hat, realising what the tingle in the pit of his stomach actually was, that he felt a little reborn.

  His overlords had done a good job of keeping him in the organisation while taking away everything that he was. He’d felt like a shell for so many years. Like an animal that’d been tied up for too long and had lost it’s will to be wild.

  He kept on working, however, because there was little else he could do. He kept toiling away, hoping beyond hope that something would come along to wake him from his forced slumber and he’d be lead back to his old sense of freedom. He wanted the good old days back. He wanted to be back in charge of his own life. He wanted his self respect and power back. He wanted the power of secrecy and inflicting fear.

  It was difficult for Shoop not to get excited about the tingles that were going on in his stomach, but he had to keep his cool. He’d had false alarms before and things had gone a bit pear shaped. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake with anything as important as his sixth sense.

  But this wasn’t like the false alarms.

  “NO!” he thought, “I know what a false alarm feels like. It feels a lot like Delhi belly. This is different, this is the feeling I used to get when I was a child and a young man.” It was like he was twenty years old again. He could smell the potential in this case as potently as the cigarette smoke crawling up his nose as his cancer stick hung from his lips. It felt like the keepers of his inner caged animal had left the door open by accident. Shoop wasn’t the type of man to ignore an opportunity. He could feel the old venom returning to his fangs.

  George came back into the room as Shoop pulled on his raincoat. “Here you go, the schools called Craigmount High and it’s out toward the airport past Corstorphine. He should be there now. I phoned them and they said that he very rarely left the library before 7pm”

  “Right!”

  “Are you alright Shoop, you look, well, you look… different!”

  Shoop paused for a moment looking George dead in the eye. “Now I don’t want you to get too excited, it might be nothing, but, well, It’s the tingle George! I think it’s back!”

  “Holy shit!” blurted George completely ignoring his previous attempt at not getting too excited, “are you sure? I mean absolutely? Because you’ve been wrong before!”

  “Best not get the hopes up too high is all I’ll say!' I’ll head up to the school and see what I can find. But there’s no hiding it, I’ve got a good feeling about this one.” Said Shoop with a positively hellish glint in his beady little eye.

  Shoop left George’s library with a smirk-ridden grimace on his face. When people get a good feeling inside them they tend to get a bit of a skip in their stride. Shoop was the opposite, his strides tended to appear even more menacing. He seemed larger, more primal and his grimace had a fire inside it that seemed to punch through his face and threaten to burn anyone that looked at it.

  He bounded through the small underground town. He was a blue flaming comet. His heat was cold and shadowy yet luminous at the same time. He moved like a whisper. People felt him before they could see him. It was like they could feel his malice at a distance, like a chill wind blowing through all matter.

  His old resolve was nudging itself awake and he liked the feeling.

  He took out his phone.

  “It’s me, yeah I know it’s been a while. I need you to get as many of the boys together as you can. I need you to check out an address for me, it’s important, the sixth sense is back on, and don’t let the Sphere know!”

  Chapter 5

  The Boss

  Shoop wandered out of the cleaning cupboard, past the coffee house franchise, (flicking his cigarette butt in) and on to the lifts.

  His s
ixth sense was all a tingle; the way he was feeling he could take on the whole organisation and not get a scratch, but he knew better than that. He knew that he had to keep himself under control if the Boss was to be kept out of his investigations. He would have to try and keep his cool long enough to convince the Boss that he wasn’t up to anything.

  The Boss knew that Shoop had spent the previous evening tailing one of the ancient vampires and would be expecting Shoop to have secured the creature in the basement ready for questioning and experimentation. The fact that he had landed a grenade between the creature’s legs was bound to get on the bosses nerves, which meant that there would be one of their usual tense confrontations.

  They were never openly aggressive with each other, their face-offs were always subtle and under the surface, each trying to read between the lines to subtly ascertain the truth behind the others façade, each trying to hide messages in their words and demeanours that would throw the other off the real scent. It was a conversational game of chess; it was two lions walking in circles around each other, both waiting for the other to challenge its authority. Shoop had the upper hand in this regard; his senses were infinitely better than the Bosses at picking up the whispering undercurrents of a person’s true meaning and personality. Even with this, though, a confrontation would be best avoided. Even the smallest of mental skirmishes would make it difficult for Shoop to keep his cool feeling the way he was and it was very important that he held The Boss at arm’s length until he could figure out the whole Priory of Sion thing.

  He stepped into the lift and rode it to the top of the building slowing his breathing as he went in an attempt to calm himself. As he stepped out he was reminded, yet again, of just how important affluence was to the Sphere Of Influence as his eyes scanned the vast reception hall. There were no offices other than The Bosses on this floor and it seemed like a bit of a waist of space to Shoop. He was in a huge space that was spattered with tasteful minimalist finery and smelt just that little bit too clean and fragranced. They’d clearly hired someone to try and recreate some manner of eastern style temple without the slightest idea of what such things actually look like because they’d never gone further than the chip shop on the other side of town. Then he’d chosen to poison the air with the synthesised scent of imagined oriental flowers that ended smelling more like a combination of Old Spice, maple syrup, sweaty legs and chiropodists off-cuts.

  It was obvious that nobody came up to the top floor very often. The carpet that spanned the hall was unnecessarily plush, soft and cream coloured. Busy offices didn’t have cream coloured carpets, coffee got spilt on such floor coverings, people actually walked on them. Normal busy offices tended to have thin, soul sucking grey floor tiles. The kind that are the colour of pavements and tend to have chewing gum stuck to them. The carpet in this hall would make the average person’s mattress seem cheap and nasty.

  There was a reception desk against one of the walls. It was made of bamboo and slate, hinting that wealth was akin to the deepest eastern wisdom. The receptionist, seeing Shoop approach, increased her defensive demeanour to a point that would’ve worried your average battle hardened soldier. It was the human equivalent of a cobra’s hood. Shoop barely noticed.

  “You can’t smoke in here Mr Winkle!” said the cobra woman.

  Shoop, without even acknowledging the woman’s existence, dropped his cigarette on the plush carpet and drove it into the thick soft pile… a lot!

  The woman looked like she might try to object until Shoop locked eyes with her, firing a funky rancid grimace at her that made her lungs temporarily forget what they were usually used for.

  She backed down.

  In all the years that she’d worked for the Boss and the countless times she’d had to deal with Shoop Winkle, she had never seen such intensity in his eyes before. He seemed taller, younger, more animal like. She had always been so disgusted with him and found him to be the most repulsive sort of person, but the small flash of venom that had darted at her had revealed a torrent of animal nature surging under Shoop’s surface. She suddenly felt a bit flushed. Her cobra hood didn’t just unfold, it dropped clean off, shrivelled up into raisin sized ball and ate itself just to get away!

  “Um, just, ah…” she stuttered, clearly flustered by Shoop’s new aura.

  “I’ll go in shall I?” Shoop’s gravelled voice punched her in the guts.

  “Yes, that’d be fine…yes,” she watched as he walked off and then seriously considered taking a copy of men’s health from the waiting area and heading into the ladies room to relieve the arousal she felt at such fear and intimidation.

  Shoop entered The Bosses office. It was a long, dark wood panelled space with a conference table that stretched the length of it. It was lit by brushed metal lamp shades that hung half way down the height of the room which made the ceiling almost invisible and at the far end of the room, the entire wall, which was about 15 feet high and just as wide, was made of glass and offered a superb view of Edinburgh castle. The Boss sat in a chair, much larger than the others that spanned each side of the rectangular conference table, at the far end of the room, silhouetted against the view. He was the master of his realm, perched on his throne.

  The Boss liked the effect of being silhouetted against the huge window. He liked the effect it seemed to have on the majority of people that came into his office. It immediately put them at a disadvantage. They would enter and almost instantly start squinting to try and find some sort of features on the darkened figure sitting against the glare of the window. It always made people look a little foolish, which in turn made The Boss feel superior. Shoop, however, was an entirely different matter. He just pulled his hat down in front of his eyes, walked the length of the room, passed The Boss and leant against the window, effectively reversing the situation, forcing the Boss to swivel his chair around to see Shoop, silhouetted against the window. He did it every time and loved the effect it had on The Boss.

  “Must you do that Winkle? It’s bloody bright out there.” Said The Boss.

  Shoop said nothing, took out a cigarette and lit it.

  “Anyway,” continued The Boss, ”how did it go last night? Did you have any luck bringing that vampire in?”

  The Boss performed a curious kind of facial sneer as the word vampire left his mouth. He didn’t like the fact that things like vampires were a reality. He’d spend his life trying to accrue a mountainous fortune and for businessmen of his ilk people who believed in vampires had previously been wedged into two neat little categories; lunatics and teenagers. The fact was, though, that vampires did exist, and he was one of the people that had been forced believe in them.

  It’s difficult not to believe in something that you’ve personally dissected in a lab.

  The sneer sat curiously well on his face. It seemed to match the rest of it. He was a scrawny man of considerable height with a moustache that hinted at the appreciation of the way that Hitler had run his country. He wore his hair in a side parting with far too much oily hair cream in it and flashes of grey strands mottled through its slippery fluidity. His skin was oily too, pail and clammy and its greasy sheen made it look as if he perspired constantly. He had cold, grey, dead and angry eyes and facial lines on his long thin severe features that suggested his soul to be utterly joyless. He was extremely powerful, and like a lot of extremely powerful people, was unreservedly revolting both inside and out.

  “Well,” Shoop paused for a moment wondering how he was going to let The Boss down easily. Then he decided against it and said, “Things got a bit violent actually.”

  “Jesus Winkle, don’t tell me that he’s in lots of different pieces. I specifically asked you to bring him back in one piece and I’m going to be very upset if he’s in any more bits than that.”

  The Boss fired a warning look at him that would’ve made a constipated man runny. Shoop barely registered it, which got on the Bosses nerves a bit.

  Shoop had originally intended to play this meeting very carefully
and to make sure that The Boss would leave him alone. To do that he was going to have to make The Boss believe that he was ready to play ball and follow the orders of the Sphere of Influence. This all seemed very reasonable and equated to a very well judged course of action. The thing was though, that every time Shoop got near The Boss he wanted to wind him up. It was a compulsion. All he wanted to do with the greasy little twat was to make his life as uncomfortable as possible.

  For example, he could’ve quite easily made up some nonsense about the vampire being so ancient and highly tuned that he’d ended up in a difficult position and had to let the creature go in order to preserve the lives of both him and some innocent bystanders. Instead Shoop replied with.

  “I blew him up.”

  “You blew him up?”

  “I blew him up, but if it’s of any consequence, his head remained animated for a good five minutes afterwards. It just lay on the ground blinking and mouthing angry words at me. Quite freakish really.” The smirk that twitched on Shoop’s grimace was almost miss-able, almost, but not quite. The Boss saw it and didn’t like it one little bit.

  The Boss sighed heavily while looking down and shaking his head in dismay, “You just can’t do it can you? You are completely incapable of playing along with us. Why, for the love of god, can you not just follow orders and be a team player.”

  “Team player?” winced Shoop, ”Have you been reading your bullshit executive books on buzz-words again. I warned you about that, they’ll rob your soul, but then it might be a little too late for you.”

  “Fuck you Winkle!”

  “Look, there’s no need to get all testy,” Said Shoop, quite enjoying the fact that he was getting under the Bosses skin. “I just did what I had to do, it was clearly a case of him or me.”