Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “She should burn.”

  It wasn’t Neil’s fault. He was a man after all and men had wandering eyes.

  “And wandering hands and p…”

  It was her fault; the slut that had lured him away from the woman that loved him.

  Loved him!

  It was the first time that she had admitted that to herself. She’d said it a few times when asked, but she hadn’t really meant it. Or had she? Had she been fooling even herself? Had she been fooling anyone? Had she been fooling Neil? He had certainly been fooling her.

  No. It was the slut’s fault. She had taken him away, lured him away like a siren of the Iliad. She had bewitched him.

  “Witches should burn.”

  Witches should burn, especially perfect-haired temptresses. She was probably there right now, with Neil, her perfect mouth clamped around his nether regions whilst her flirty eyes glittered up at him.

  “Both should burn.”

  Nicole stood up, not even noticing the half-drunk glass of shiraz fall from her unfeeling fingers to spill over the rug, no doubt staining it irrevocably. She wandered over to the main door where her work shoes were equally forgotten and abandoned on the floor. She was still dressed in the nurse’s uniform that Neil had been so excited by once upon a time; only the first of the outfits that she’d worn, and disrobed from, for him. This one was real, at least. She stuffed her feet into comfortable trainers rather than the unappealing flats that she had to wear on the ward. Her hand reached for the lock.

  “Don’t forget me. You can’t burn without me.”

  Yes, she’d take the waste paper bin. She could spill all his burned and melted stuff out onto his rug, or even onto his faithless lap if he was sitting down. That would give him something to remember her by.

  “Careful! You don’t want to be burned twice in one day.”

  The bedsit boasted a small, self-contained kitchenette, though it was hardly much of a boast. Cooking was one of Nicole’s pleasures, one that Neil had appreciated, especially on the nights when they’d wined, dined and done the other things. She only had one oven glove in there, but a tea towel would suffice for the other hand.

  She picked up the waste paper bin carefully, barely reacting to the large, perfectly-circular area of singed carpet that was revealed from beneath it.

  “Sorry about that, but you didn’t think about the metal bin conducting the heat, did you?”

  She crossed back to the door, manoeuvred the lock and left the bedsit. She descended the narrow stairs to the door at the back of the house, the stairs that allowed access to her flat and the one belonging to the computer support cold-calling guy. She didn’t like him. He openly eyed her up every time that they arrived or left at the same time.

  “Lecherous tech-support geeks should burn.”

  They were all the same, it seemed to her now.

  “All men-pigs should burn.”

  The night was cool, but not cold. The nurse’s uniform was designed for use in heated wards, not in the evening’s open air, but she barely noticed the chill as she walked through the garden and out onto the road. It was late enough that there was nobody else about. Exam time wasn’t far away and this area was popular with the student body.

  “Student bodies should burn.”

  Neil only lived a couple of streets away and Nicole didn’t encounter any other pedestrians on the short walk. If she had, she wouldn’t have been able to explain what she was doing, strolling around the town with a burning waste paper bin held out in front of her like the Holy Grail itself. They would probably have thought her mad and they would have been right, except that she was mad in the angry way.

  She reached the door to Neil’s shared house, which was older than her own and fronted directly onto the pavement. Without thinking about it, she took her keys from the pocket of the nurse’s uniform and unlocked the door.

  Hah! He hadn’t thought about that with his stupid text dumping. How was he going to get his keys back? He would probably have asked her to send them to him when he finally thought about it. Then again, maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t expect his exes to come barging in, demanding explanations and…

  “Revenge.”

  …justice.

  Maybe he liked to leave the keys with his jilted lovers so that they could come over and beg for him to carry on, providing some spectacular make-up sex to sweeten the deal.

  She closed the door behind her and headed up the elderly staircase. It was even narrower than the one leading to her bedsit. She sensed someone below, but knew that it wasn’t Neil. If the fact that she could sense it wasn’t him didn’t prove that she loved him then she didn’t know what would.

  “Hey, Nicole.”

  It was Mark, one of Neil’s housemates. A nice enough boy, but always lost in the shadow of Neil’s looks and Neil’s personality.

  “Mark should burn.”

  “Hey, Mark,” she replied without looking back down at him.

  She turned onto the landing at the top of the stairs. Neil’s room was at the far end, overlooking the street outside. After the cool of the air outside, her cheeks…

  “Burned.”

  …tingled from the heat of the fire she was carrying. Her hands, too, could feel the heat through the thick material of the oven glove and folded tea towel, though she only started to notice it now that she was back in the warm interior.

  As she walked the very short length of the landing, she wondered what she was going to say. Should she act outraged and scream at him or act coolly as though he didn’t matter all that much to her. Well, that wasn’t going to work; she had just carried a hot waste paper bin over here to teach him a lesson. You didn’t do something like that if you didn’t care.

  The moment’s reflection was over before it really got going, so short was the landing. She didn’t pause at the door, but put her trainer-clad foot against it and pushed. The internal doors in the boys’ house were old and didn’t fit properly, so the catches never really caught very well. The door swung open.

  The room inside was in darkness, with the curtains closed against the streetlights outside. The only illumination fell into the small bedroom from the landing, meaning that she was effectively silhouetted against it. She didn’t think that the ruddy glow of the flames would be enough to light her face. They had sunk low in the bin during the short journey between houses.

  “Mary?” the indistinct shape in the bed moved sluggishly and a curly-topped head emerged from under the duvet.

  “Oh, so it’s Mary is it?” Nicole demanded and then paused as a thought struck her. “Mary? From the Eagle and Child Mary?”

  An arm emerged from beneath the duvet to allow the hand at the end of it to wipe across the pale, but oh so handsome, face. It was clear that he was in the bed alone. A slight doubt washed through Nicole. She had been so sure that his new girl would be here with him, that she would catch them in flagrante delicto, or whatever the phrase was. At it.

  Then she saw the bra hanging out of the side of the bed, half held in place by the weight of the duvet. It wasn’t one of Nicole’s so it must have been hers.

  “Steamy.”

  “You didn’t waste any time, did you?” Nicole demanded and would have winced at the screech had it been anyone else’s voice.

  “Nicole? What are you doing here? I thought I said I didn’t want to see you again.”

  “You didn’t say anything,” she pointed out.

  “The text was pretty clear, even for you. You should have got it. Damn, I should’ve known you wouldn’t be cool about this.”

  “Cool?”

  “Cool?” Nicole demanded. She knew that Mark had come halfway up the stairs, but she knew also that he would come no further. Nobody wanted to get in the middle of someone else’s domestic. “Of course I’m not bloody cool with it. And don’t worry, you aren’t going to see me again. Ever.”

  She half-tipped, half-threw the contents of the bin at him. Part of it clung to the metal and sort o
f slopped out onto the end of the bed nearest to her and onto the floor alongside it. The rest landed squarely on his unprotected face, the hot embers suddenly transforming into bright yellow tongues of flame wherever they landed.

  Neil screamed as the duvet became a sheet of fire. His hair ignited and shrivelled on his head. Flames ran along the skin of his face…

  “Not so handsome now!”

  … and the arm that he raised in tardy defence. He opened his mouth to scream and the flames raced inside. His eyes boiled and burst in their sockets. The speed with which it all happened was shocking.

  “Whoever said that revenge was a dish best served cold didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.”

  Neil’s body thrashed and turned, but the movements were purely instinctive now, the last animal remnants trying to survive once the controlling mind had fled into madness or death, or perhaps even both. Then, slowly, even those movements stopped.

  Nicole dropped the empty waste paper bin onto the burning duvet and coughed, the smoke getting into her eyes and coating her throat. She realised that she could barely see. The smoke layer beneath the roof was descending rapidly as the small space filled with the sooty remains of the man she had thought was the one.

  She turned around to reach for the door, but couldn’t see it. It had to be right behind her. She hadn’t moved from the spot where she had entered the room. It ought to be right there, but it wasn’t. Or perhaps it was, but she couldn’t see it and her questing hands found only smooth wall.

  She was coughing continuously now. Her lungs were…

  “On fire.”

  …hitching and spasming as they tried to find the air that was needed. Her eyes were streaming; her nose was a river of black mucus.

  She fell to her knees, partly because she lacked the strength to stand any longer and partly because she had heard that the cleanest air in a fire was near to the floor. She found nothing but roiling black smoke that brought nothing but a burning sensation to the inside of her chest.

  She collapsed to the floor and lay there, her chest hitching ever more feebly in search of oxygen. There was some, just above the carpet, but it was too little to give her the energy to crawl. She could see a little too, though her eyes still streamed water against the drying effects of the searing atmosphere. The fire was everywhere now, all around her. She could see the doorway and could see the feet of figures beyond. They were trying to come to the room, but seemed to be beaten back each time. The doorway was ringed with fire and as she watched, it seemed to move and take on the semblance of a face, the face of a devil. And it was laughing.

  “Didn’t your mother ever warn you, little girl, not to play with fire?”

  The Detective’s Genie

  Gruber looked at the tearful woman across the expanse of polished mahogany table top and felt pity for her. Sure, he had problems of his own, but her problems were not of her own making. Gruber certainly couldn’t make that claim.

  It was clear from the faces of the others around the table, all men as it happened, that they felt much the same way and were as incapable of assisting her as he was. Supplying a steady stream of tissues for her to wipe her eyes was about all that they could do.

  “So that’s it?” she asked through the tears. They flowed easily, but there was no sobbing, no hitching of her chest as she fought for breath and no unpleasant flow from her nose. Gruber didn’t know what kind of cosmetics the woman wore, but the manufacturers had certainly earned the right to market them as waterproof as far as he was concerned. “There really isn’t anything more that you can do?”

  “Nothing, Mrs Maine,” the man sitting closest to her, and also the man who looked the most ill at ease with the woman’s public display of distress, replied. He was Mayer, the big boss, the owner of one of the Ms in MMCW, the biggest law firm in the city. Who was Gruber kidding? Marston, Mayer, Coyne and Walker was the biggest law firm in the state. You didn’t hire them unless you had a bank balance that could be raided for six figures with barely even noticing. Mrs Maine, or rather the unfortunate Mr Maine, had such a bank balance. That was part of his problem. “We have exhausted every single avenue of investigation, every single possible way of derailing the proceedings, every defence that could be raised under the circumstances. There really is nothing more that can be done now. It lies in the hands of Justice Pennant and the jury.”

  “The judge hates Eric,” Mrs Maine said with some vehemence, showing a little of the steel that lay beneath the smooth-skinned exterior of the woman. She might be crying, but she was far from being out of control. “Everyone hates Eric.”

  Whilst that was manifestly untrue (she had married the man, so she couldn’t hate him), a good portion of the population of the city, and the state, did hate Eric Maine. Counting both banker and real estate developer amongst his expansive portfolio of interests, Maine had reacted badly to the worldwide banking crash and had made some decisions that saved him a considerable fortune, but left an awful lot of innocent families penniless and out on the street. Promises made were not kept and documents signed were suddenly missing.

  At least that was the story.

  Eric Maine told a different tale. His was a story involving state officials embezzling funds, colluding with bankers to ensure that draft legislation supported their way of doing business and ensuring that any pesky law enforcement investigations were guided to look in the wrong places. His tale was one of bribery, corruption and defrauding the public purse on a huge scale. In his story, Eric Maine was the fall guy.

  Well, not literally the fall guy. That honour went to the late Henry Marsh who had taken a fall; right out of a seventeenth storey window. The only way that the police had been able to identify him was by gathering what remained of his teeth from wherever they had been thrown by the impact with the asphalt. According to his wife, who had no doubt cried at least as many tears as Mrs Maine was shedding, Henry Marsh had been about to blow the whistle on the whole scheme before his terminal swan dive. The family’s insurance company had tried to assert that Mr Marsh’s untimely demise was suicide so that they wouldn’t have to pay out on the sizeable insurance policy that he held, but the police had quickly unearthed enough evidence to suggest that it was a case of murder most foul and that the person responsible for the act was Eric Maine.

  Perhaps a little too quickly for Gruber’s peace of mind.

  Archibald Gruber had been investigating people for as long as he had been able to hold down a job. That first job had been as a cop. He worked twenty years on the force before he became the final victim in a mass shooting. The ironic part (and oh how he hated irony) was that he had not even been shot by the nutjob with the semi-automatic machine gun. No, he had been shot by some gung-ho idiot who had a gun for his own defence, but couldn’t tell the difference between a cop and a mass-murdering maniac. The big white letters spelling out POLICE across Gruber’s body armour ought to have been a clue. The case judge had actually commended the moron for bravery in the face of danger. Gruber’s whole attitude on gun control changed overnight. He was pensioned off with a thank you and barely enough money to get him through the first year of retirement.

  Cops and private investigators don’t hate each other nearly as much as Humphrey Bogart films would make you believe. Half of the investigators out there are ex-cops anyway. An old friend had put Gruber in touch with some people and soon he was doing work for lawyers. Yes, some of it was unfaithful husband stalking, but there were just as many women doing the dirty on their partners these days. The alimony work led to more sensitive and difficult cases and finally he had ended up in the employ of MMCW, who paid well enough and had a good health and dental plan. Enough for him to keep his house and car and occasionally visit his son in Miami and daughter in Pasadena.

  All of which added up to a lifetime’s worth of experience in dealing with crooks and victims and the occasional honest person who had gotten lost. Eric Maine may very well have been a crook in financial terms, but he was not
a killer. There was nothing that would make Gruber believe that. He had sat in the same room with the man and looked into his eyes. Maine had probably done a great many things that nobody ought to be proud of, but killing Henry Marsh was not one of them.

  Unfortunately, Gruber had not been able to prove that someone had framed Eric Maine, even with all the resources that MMCW could cough up (billing the unlucky Mrs Maine for every penny).

  “But the jury…” Mayer started to suggest. Gruber had seen the partner in action in court and his performance had been a good deal more convincing then than it was right now.

  “I heard every moment of testimony, both in court and replayed on the news every night,” Mrs Maine said harshly, “and right now I would bring back a guilty verdict. But I know that Eric did not do this thing.”

  “I believe you. We all believe you,” Mayer said consolingly.

  Gruber noted the words. Not ‘of course he didn’t’ or ‘we know’, but ‘we believe you’. Mayer, like most lawyers, would squirm a million times before he could commit himself to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.

  “Do I have to remind you that I have paid this firm a very great deal of money for my husband’s defence?” the tears were drying up now and it started to become clear what it was that Eric Maine had seen in Felicity Carmine that had persuaded him she was the one to share the rest of his life with. The woman had reserves of strength that Gruber admired.

  Old man Mayer actually shrank slightly under the strength of her accusatory stare.

  “And need I remind you further that this state had the death penalty?”

  Nobody could bring themselves to meet her eyes. Fortunately, she did not even look in Gruber’s direction. He was not important enough to bother with.

  “My husband is going to die. My children are going to be left fatherless. And all because you failed to do the job that I paid you for.”

  Nobody spoke into the awkward, deep silence that followed. What could they say? That the job had been impossible from the start? That they had done everything that was possible and a good deal more than many other firms might have been able to achieve? None of that was going to help anyone feel better.