by I H Laking
The Vanishing Villa
An Inspector Ambrose Story.
By I H Laking
Text copyright © 2014 I H Laking
Inspector Ambrose Aramis stared down at the letter in front of him. It was early on the first day of the working week, and he was sitting at a booth in Tilly’s Tea Emporium, one of his favourite spots in the whole city of Traville.
As was always the case at the very start of the week before the sun rose, the Emporium was a buzz of businessmen and politicians discussing current events from around the Empire. Ambrose glanced impatiently at the seat across from him. Ordinarily, he would be enjoying his cup of herbal tea, extra hot, with his partner by now, but this morning Detective Percy Portland was running late. Ambrose was normally quite put out when his partner ran this late, but the letter he had received the previous night had him rather distracted. He read over the short letter again, making sure that he understood it correctly. His mind raced as he studied the words, hoping that what he was reading wasn’t true.
The letter was written on a tiny piece of scented paper with a message that was short, to the point, and in the mind of Inspector Ambrose, devastating:
Dearest Ambrose,
Just a quick note. I’m on my way to Mansfield Manor to begin preparations for a large fundraising dinner our philanthropic society is organising. I have listed you as the guest of honour, to share some of your wonderful detective stories with those in attendance. I know you’ll do an outstanding job, and I’ve already organised for you to stay at the manor with the travelling party. Mother has instructed me to make sure you’re looking after yourself, and I’m sure this trip will be just what you need – you simply must get out of the house more! We’ll be staying for a week at the manor, and I’ve advised the hosts that you’ll be joining us on Friday. I trust that won’t be a bother.
Hugs and kisses,
Felicity
Ambrose couldn’t believe the timing of his sister’s letter. He had just completed a total clean of his house in plenty of time for The Freeze, which was due to blow into the capital city in a month or so. There was hardly a more inconvenient time to be going away, especially as the dust would now settle around the house, and when he returned he would have to clean the whole place again.
Besides the cleaning situation, Ambrose always found holidays to be a bother. He felt the time required for packing, travelling and relaxing were far better off spent investigating cases around Traville, looking into Mech misbehaviour and making sure dangerous criminals were not on the streets. He usually only took one day off a year: his birthday, when he would treat himself to a stroll through the countryside away from the hustle and bustle of the Traville.
And to top off Ambrose’s concerns about his sister’s letter, the last line was causing him deep distress:
P.S. I’m bringing my good friend Melody with me to Mansfield Manor. I’m sure you remember her – very tall, blonde and pretty. I believe you’ll have a lovely time getting to know one another better.
It was bad enough having to go and speak at a fundraising function for his sister on short notice, with her free-spirited attitude and disregard for anything resembling decorum, but to have to put up with another of her attempts to pair him up with one of her society friends was simply too much. Ambrose felt sick to his stomach, as romance had never been of much interest to him, and emotions in general were far too unwieldy to be of interest. He sighed deeply and began to read the letter one more time, hoping that somehow the words would change to indicate that his sister had fallen ill or her friend had decided to marry a rock of some sort.
Ambrose’s concentration was interrupted by a cherry voice cutting through the noise of the crowd.
“Good morning Inspector Ambrose! Everything alright?”
Ambrose looked up into the face of Detective Percy, who had sat down at the other side of the booth. Percy was a man of enormous girth, and it always surprised Ambrose that he could even fit into the booth, let alone do it so quietly.
“Yes, Detective,” replied Ambrose, shaking off his concern. “I’m glad that you’ve seen fit to join me this morning. I imagine you had to hurry to even arrive this late?”
Percy blushed. “No, not at all,” he exclaimed hopefully. “There was just a long line at the counter to order tea this morning.”
With that, Percy slid a cup of herbal tea, extra hot, over the table towards Ambrose as evidence of the supposed hold up. Ambrose smiled. One thing his partner never failed to do was to remember to eat and drink. Unfortunately for Percy, his appearance gave away the fact that he had been in an awful rush. The detective’s long brown hair was messy and stuck to his forehead in great clumps, and his freckly cheeks were flushed a deeper shade of red than usual due to running through the cobblestone streets. Ambrose still couldn’t believe that they were partners, even after all these years. He and Percy were like chalk and cheese – wherever Ambrose was fastidiously neat and tidy, Percy was messy and unkempt. Thankfully his faith in The Order made up for Ambrose’s sullen cynicism.
Picking up his tea from the table, Ambrose thanked Percy for the drink and took a sip of the strong brew. He glanced around the room, pushing aside his concerns for a minute. The Emporium was a sea of grey suits and black coats worn by proper gentlemen, broken only by the occasional red coat such as those he and Percy wore. It was a room full of life, and full of stories. It was hard to love the city of Traville, but it was easy to love the Emporium, Ambrose reflected. His train of thought was once again interrupted by Percy, who had just noticed the letter that Ambrose was holding, and understood immediately what was happening.
“Oh dear. Is your sister insisting you travel on short notice again?” he enquired, having seen this scenario many times before.
“Yes,” Ambrose sighed, “And she wants me to meet another one her friends in the hope of getting us ‘better acquainted’”.
“Well… you are in a pickle, aren’t you?” Percy said, knowing full well how little his partner enjoyed romantic entanglements of any kind, especially when they threatened to get in the way of work. Percy also knew that a good way to ease Ambrose out of his reflective mood was to bring work up again quickly. “I have a case for us today.”
“Excellent! What is it?” Ambrose immediately brightened up.
“Well, it’s one that I think we’re going to have to see to believe. There’s a man up in the First Ward who’s claiming that his house has been stolen,” Percy said.
Ambrose was sure he’d misheard that last sentence. “You mean he’s had something from his house stolen? That doesn’t sound hard to believe at all,” he mused, sipping some more tea.
Percy persisted. “No, it’s not something from inside the house that’s been stolen. It’s the whole house.”
Ambrose just blinked. He wondered if there was something a bit different in the tea this morning. “Right. So this person’s house has been stolen.”
“Yes.”
“They just turned up one day and it was gone.”
“Yes.”
“You do realise how unlikely that scenario is, don’t you?”
There was little reaction from Percy, who had clearly expected this reaction from his logical partner, who always refused to believe that anything had less than a completely rational explanation.
Despite his doubts, Ambrose knew they would have to investigate further, now they had been assigned the case. He finished his herbal tea, which by this stage was only mildly hot, and stood up to leave, zipping up his red ja
cket so that the zip met just under his chin. On his jacket, the symbol of The Order, the eight-spoked wheel, gleamed in the gaslight of the Emporium’s giant chandelier.
As he was about to leave, Ambrose turned to ask one more question of Percy.
“Who bought the case to us?”
Percy flipped through his trusty notebook – it was never far away, Ambrose reflected. “The complainant is a Mr. Francis Finney, of Finney’s Construction Corporation.”
Ambrose nodded. For someone to be able to afford to live in the First Ward, which was situated up near the top of the hill that Traville was built on, they needed to be considerably wealthy. This also meant that cases arising from the First Ward often came with nasty secrets – both business and personal. Ambrose was sure this case was likely to uncover more of these, and he shook his head a little as they headed for the door, and out into the crisp morning air.
On their way up the hill to the First Ward, Percy filled Ambrose in with many of the details he had scribbled down in his notebook. The house that they were to be investigating was centuries old, and was one of the first houses built in Traville.
Good, Ambrose thought to himself. That means it’s valuable.
Establishing a motive was always the key to getting a list of suspects. Wealth, and especially the acquisition of it, was a contributing factor in many of the cases Ambrose and Percy had worked on over the years. Because of this, the slums were often the best place to look for a culprit when something was stolen, as its desperate inhabitants were prone to using petty crime in their attempts to get ahead (at least according to The Order). Ambrose had found in his experience that the inhabitants of the slums were often more genuine than those who ran the city.
As Ambrose and Percy walked and talked, the sun was slowly rising in the east, gently waking the sleeping city. With the day beginning in earnest, the streets were starting to fill up with people scurrying to their respective jobs, and with Mechs scurrying along beside them.
Nowhere else in all the Empire could you witness scenes like this, Ambrose thought to himself as he rounded the final corner that led to their destination. The street was a winding road that started at the very top of the hill near the Citadel, which was the national headquarters of The Order. From the top of the hill, the street ran down in an eastern direction until it met the city walls at the base of the hill, where the slums began. A location like this in such an affluent suburb was usually reserved for the most elite people in the city, and Ambrose was sure he was about to meet someone of the highest standards and etiquette. The detectives continued up the hill until they reached their destination.
The two metre tall brick wall that greeted them was nothing spectacular at all. It was covered in climbing ivy, and appeared quite ancient. But as was usually the case in Traville, what was beyond the gate was often far more spectacular than the plain exterior. Ambrose inspected the wall and immediately breathed a sigh of relief. For the thieves to steal the house, they would surely have had to remove a significant portion of the compound wall – but the vines and bricks were all in place. Ambrose ran his fingers along the time-worn bricks, but they showed nothing out of the ordinary; as he had suspected, there must have been some sort of mistake.
Ambrose smiled gently to himself, and he and Percy (who was already scribbling notes furiously in his notebook) walked over to the wooden door that stood in the middle of the fence. Ambrose knocked in his usual fashion – three sharp raps on the wood. They could hear the sound of the knocks echoing around on the other side of the fence. Ambrose adjusted his jacket – it was time to meet the society man.
“ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT I’M COMING!” boomed a harsh voice from inside the compound. Both Ambrose and Percy jumped.
“He must have a new butler in training,” Ambrose said quietly to Percy, to which his partner nodded understandingly.
Heavy footsteps could be heard approaching the door, and a slit at eye level opened up, revealing a red face with pale blue eyes and a long red nose. The character looked at them for a second and then proceeded to shout at the top of his voice.
“WHO ARE YA AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING KNOCKING ON MY DOOR AT THIS TIME O’ THE MORNING!?”
Ambrose was shocked. Whoever this new butler was, he was obviously on either his first day of training, or his last day of working for Mr. Finney.
“We are detectives with the Citizen Protection Force, and we’ve come to investigate an… incident that was reported over the past few days,” Ambrose said. Giving away too much information to house workers was never a good idea in his experience.
The butler appeared to be quite confused about the situation, but that didn’t stop him from yelling, “AN INCIDENT! IS THAT WHAT YOU CALL IT WHEN A HOUSE DISAPPEARS!?”
Ambrose gulped. It appeared that the butler was well informed. “Yes, we’ve had a report of the house being stolen… may we come in?” there was no point standing out in the street getting yelled at. Ambrose particularly despised making a scene in public, especially during work time.
“YOU CAN COME IN ALRIGHT! THEN YOU’LL GET AN IDEA OF WHAT AN ‘INCIDENT’ IS!” the butler swung the door open, and Ambrose and Percy walked into the courtyard, and a rather unexpected scene.
The butler was eyeing them rather suspiciously, but gave a wave of his hand for them to follow. He was dressed appropriately for his position, with a crisp white shirt and dark grey waistcoat. After only a few steps, Ambrose (who was trying to figure out where the owners were) stopped in mid-stride and stared.
The courtyard was part of a long compound, surrounded by a tall brick fence that drank in the morning sunlight. Trees lined the pathway that ran through the centre of the courtyard, and until halfway down the path everything appeared normal. But as Ambrose’s eyes took in the rest of the scene, he was amazed.
The ground began to undulate as the path moved along, and the rising and falling of the bricks increased until they reached their destination, which had once contained one of the oldest houses in Traville. Now, all that remained where the villa had stood was an ugly patch of brown soil lying at the foot of the rear retaining wall.
“Blimey,” muttered Percy, as they picked their way along through the tangled mess of uneven bricks to where the butler now stood in the middle of the dirt clearing.
Ambrose and Percy joined the butler in the clearing. They stood there for a minute, looking around at the scene, taking in the unusual sight. Percy pulled out his notebook and began to jot down various notes about the strange scene, while Ambrose sized up the butler.
The butler was a balding older man with a twisted face, and a long nose. He appeared to be cursed by tremendously bad posture, judging by the way his back hunched as he stared blankly around him. His anger seemed to have dissipated somewhat as he stood in the clearing, and he now spoke loudly, rather than shouting.
“There! What did I tell you? It’s gone! I left the house ‘ere just a week ago, came back and found it like this!” he flailed his arms around emphatically. “Dirt and ashes!” he shouted, and then his voice suddenly dropped as he repeated the last phrase again.
“Dirt and ashes.
The butler sighed to himself, and then fixed Ambrose with a steely glare. “So what are you going to do about it?” he put his hands on his hips and spat into the ground beside him.
Percy lifted his eyes from his notes, clearly fed up with the lack of basic manners on display. “You know, for a servingman, you have appalling manners. How about showing the Inspector a little bit of respect?” he demanded.
If the butler’s first gaze had been steely, his response to Percy was like fire. “SERVINGMAN!? THIS IS MY PROPERTY!” he screamed.
Suddenly the courtyard was a flurry of movement as the butler grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it at Percy, who took off at a mad dash. Percy’s brown hair flapped behind him as he narrowly avoided getting tackled by the man, who was now clearly no longer willing to be considered a butler. Unfortunately for Percy, his girth slowed his progress cons
iderably, and he found himself rolling around in the dirt frantically wrestling with the man, who was shoving fistfuls of dirt in his face.
Ambrose, who was loathing the effect of the dirt on his rather new leather work shoes, quickly made his way across to the combatants and pulled the man off Percy, who was quite a sight as he lay on ground, coloured red from running and brown from rolling in the dirt.
Everyone spent the next few minutes calming down, and then Ambrose decided it was time to kick off their investigation in earnest – and the first step was to establish the identity of the would-be butler.
“Our apologies for any offence we may have caused you, sir. Might I assume that you are Mr. Francis Finney, of Finney Construction fame?” he began.
“Yer too right I am!” Mr Finney spat on the ground. “And don’t you forget it!”
Ambrose knew he probably shouldn’t ask the next question, but found the words were tumbling out of his mouth anyway.
“Very good, I’m sure we shan’t. Might I enquire why you are wearing the clothes of a butler and answering your own gate on this fine day?”
Mr Finney glared at him. “Well, I was planning on wearing my best clothes for your arrival, but if you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a house anymore!” he gestured wildly around himself once more, stood up, and dusted himself off. “These are the only clothes I had left around the property – as embarrassing as it is to be lookin’ like a butler.”
Mr Finney shifted his glare to the property next door. “I just hope none of the neighbours see me like this,” he muttered, appearing to calm down properly for the first time since the detectives had entered the property.
Ambrose pressed on with his questions
“I see. Now, may I ask you about the situation at hand? You say that your house has been… stolen. Is that correct, Mr Finney?”
“If we’re going to be talking so much, just call me Francis,” he responded. “You’re right, my house was stolen. I left home a week ago on a business trip with my wife. I arrived back here yesterday afternoon to find that the house was gone. All that you see here,” he swept his arm widely in front of his body, “is at it was when I arrived.”
