Oddjobs

by Heide Goody

  Table of Contents

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Authors’ Notes

  Oddjobs

  Heide Goody & Iain Grant

  Pigeon Park Press

  ‘Oddjobs’ Copyright © Heide Goody and Iain Grant 2016

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for personal use, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9933655-3-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9933655-4-6

  Published by Pigeon Park Press

  www.pigeonparkpress.com

  info@pigeonparkpress.com

  Monday

  Rod’s mobile and house phone rang at the same time.

  He was up and out of bed, reaching for both phone and trousers before the second trill. He looked at his phone. It was not yet midnight.

  “Campbell.”

  “The alarms have gone off at the Library.” It was Dr Spence. Ingrid. “The Vault.”

  “Something’s tried to break out?”

  “In.”

  Rod pulled on an already-buttoned shirt while he swiftly digested this.

  “Is there any kind of incursion scheduled?”

  “Not this week.”

  Rod stepped into his boots. “Do we know what it is?”

  “Human. We have security at the doors,” said Ingrid, “but I didn’t think it wise to send anyone down until someone with authority was on site.”

  “Authority. Hilarious.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Aye, I do. I’ll be there in four minutes. Start counting.”

  He killed the call and whipped his jacket off the bedside chair.

  Rod had dressed one-handed and in the dark. He could have turned the light on – there was no one else to be disturbed – but he didn’t require it. He had practised dressing one-handed in the dark. He couldn’t say what specific situation might call for this (just as he couldn’t be certain when he might need to make a phone call with his nose, pick a lock with a spoon or escape out of his third floor apartment via the window) but he was sure he’d be grateful he’d bothered to practise when any of those situations arose.

  Rod headed out. En route, he collected with barely a break in his stride: his ID card, a clip-on tie, car keys, a strawberry protein shake, his Leatherman multi-tool and, from the shelf above the front door, his Glock 21 pistol.

  Tie on, pistol holstered and protein shake open, Rod headed down the stairs. He clipped his Library ID card to his breast pocket. Library security were real sticklers for that kind of thing.

  A person with a keen interest in civic buildings would know that the Library of Birmingham was the largest public lending library in Europe; that it had been designed by a Dutch architect; and built with a façade of gold cladding overlaid with huge interlocking steel circles that made it look like a robot birthday cake. They might also know that it was opened to great fanfare and then, due to local government funding cuts, almost immediately had its hours slashed so that it was open for the briefest of windows. Getting a book out of the library required the determined stoicism of a Soviet housewife queuing for bread during the cold war. Someone with more esoteric interests and a higher security clearance would know that those interlocking circles were a copy of Dee’s Ward of Perfect Intersection made from tungsten-magnesium alloy with a selenium core and that the Library’s public opening hours had nothing to do with local government cuts.

  Dr Ingrid Spence was waiting for Rod in the ground floor lobby, tablet in hand.

  “Three minutes, forty-eight seconds,” she said.

  “And it would have been five seconds less if Security Bob had been quicker with those doors.”

  They walked together to the bank of lifts.

  “You know, getting from bed to office in four minutes isn’t an entirely appealing quality,” said Ingrid. “Unhygienic some might say.”

  “Wet wipe face scrub in the car and a sodium-toothpaste mouth-bomb of my own devising. I’ve begun developing a five-second flosser made from an egg-slicer.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “There were some teething problems, aye.”

  In the lift, Ingrid swiped the hidden card reader and the doors closed. Rod looked at her slip-on crocs, baggy grey jogging bottoms and loose T-shirt.

  “They get you out of bed too?” said Rod.

  “I was working the night shift,” said Ingrid. “These aren’t pyjamas.”

  “No. I wasn’t… It looks…” The T-shirt had a cute cartoon cat and dog above the slogan ‘Life is Meaningless and Everything Dies’. “It looks classy. So, what happened, doc?”

  Ingrid gave him an ironic glare of annoyance and tapped her tablet.

  “Alarms went off twenty minutes ago. One of the rear doors was forced open. Security were alerted. I only called you when the Vault was accessed.”

  “How?”

  “Manual keypad entry in the back stair. I would have called Greg but he’s…”

  “Dead, yeah. Have you called Vaughn?”

  “And what would he have done?”

  Ingrid tilted the tablet towards him. CCTV footage of a section of corridor, a slight figure in trailing clothes running away and off screen. Rod dialled it back.

  “Is that a knitted scarf?”

  “And a big flappy coat.”

  “We’ve had a break-in by Doctor Who.”

  “Looks like a woman.”

  “They were going to get around to gender-free casting eventually.”

  The lift doors opened onto a white, brightly-lit corridor that terminated against the glass airlock doors of the Vault. Three Library security types stood in readiness. One had a pistol drawn. Rod wasn’t sure what the guy expected to do with it. The only individuals he would conceivably be allowed to use it against were his fellow guards or himself.

  “Anything?” said Rod.

  “Nothing since we got here,” said one, an ex-soldier called Malcolm. “Nick thought he saw something but…”

  Rod swiped his card at the first airlock door and presented his face to the biometric camera.

  “You going in alone?” said Ingrid.

  “Just for a look-see.” Rod stepped inside. He looked back pointedly at Nick and then at Nick’s gun. “Put it away, mate. If there’s some sort of trans-dimensional face-sucker on the loose, I’ll give you a signal.” The door began to close. “Probably featuring a lot of muffled screaming and some frantic arm-waving.”

  “I’ve not seen you here before,” said the man on the next couch over in the buffet car.

  The man – Mediterranean or possibly Middle Eastern complexion, modest but stylish grey suit, huge bald-spot, the NHS glasses of a young Michael Caine – had an English accent, an empty tumbler in his hand and a lazy, almost foolish smile on his face.

  Morag checked her watch and smiled. Five minutes to midnight. The cosmos, that vast indifferent bastard of a universe, had well and truly put the boot in today and apparently it was not yet finished. Morag smiled because if the universe was laughing at her, there were worse things she could do than laugh along.

  “Is that the train equivalent of ‘Do you come here often?’”

  NHS specs frowned.

  “Dear me, no,” he smiled. “I’m not coming onto you. Gods, no. I’m one sudden move away from a hernia and I’ve never got the hang of seduction. No, I meant you see the same faces on this train, week in, week out. It’s like a little travelling community. And you…”

  “You’ve not seen me here bef
ore,” said Morag, nodding apologetically. Okay, so only ninety-nine percent of the universe was out to get her, the other one percent was avuncular and slightly camp bald men.

  “Is that whiskey?” she said, pointing at his glass.

  “Was. Glenfarclas. Not a bad drop.” He caught her eye. “Yes, even Sassenachs can appreciate the good stuff. Glass? My treat, dear.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve a big day tomorrow and I should get some sleep.”

  “In my experience, there are two kinds of people. Those weird machine people who actually sleep on the Caledonian Sleeper and those who travel anaesthetised.”

  Morag looked out of the window at a dark world, smeared with occasional lights.

  “Where are we?”

  “Not yet past Carstairs.”

  “Well, if we’re still north of the border,” she said.

  NHS specs pushed himself off the leather sofa and went to the small but crowded buffet bar. Morag looked at her fellow train passengers, the business folk and the tourists. She wondered how many of them were also being sent into exile with the threat of face-melting tortures and a slow death if they ever returned. No, probably not many.

  “Big day then?” he said, returning.

  “Hmmm?” She took one of the tumblers from him. “Slainte. Yes, well, I’ve been promoted.”

  It was late, she wasn’t good at hiding her emotions, and the subtext in her words was as clear as if she had done accompanying hand gestures.

  “Oh, I’ve had that kind of promotion,” he said. “Sudden? Not even enough time to clear your desk? Sent to the corporate equivalent of a Siberian gulag?”

  “Birmingham,” she said.

  “Close. A sideways move then or, God forbid, a backwards one dressed up as promotion?”

  “No,” she said, unnecessarily defensive. “It’s definitely upward. I’m sure I’ll be very good at it.” The Glenfarclas warmth spread through her. “I can turn my hand to anything.”

  “Ah, the confidence of youth,” he said.

  She laughed at that.

  “Away with you. I’m closer to forty than twenty.”

  “Pfff. And we’re closer to Norway than London. That doesn’t make us flat-pack building Scandawegians.”

  Morag looked into her glass.

  “I’ve never been to Birmingham,” she said.

  “I don’t think anyone goes to Birmingham,” he said. “Not deliberately. I’m sure it was a big manufacturing powerhouse in its day, back when we used to make things in this country. It’s a big city, the biggest outside the capital, I think. Didn’t they used to build cars there or something? British Leyland.”

  “That’s a kind of tree.”

  “Yes, you are definitely young.”

  “Don’t they all have funny accents?”

  “Says the redheaded lass with the Highlands burr.” NHS specs held out his glass and she dutifully clinked it with hers. “You’ll be fine. The Brummies will take you to their ample if unattractive bosom. It’s a has-been town, a nowhere place. A cultural wasteland, I’m sure. But that’s not a bad thing. There’s security in dullness. What can go wrong in a city where nothing ever happens?”

  Shelf-lined aisles stretched away in three directions. The Vault, fifty feet below street level, extended beneath much of Centenary Square outside the Library and even under the dual-carriageway on the other side. Rod strongly suspected that, when the commissioning ministers shared their brief with the architects, they had simply said, “You know that warehouse bit at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Like that but underground, with wipe-clean surfaces, energy-saving light bulbs and decent air-con.”

  Rod stood, listened for any sounds above the near-hum of a modern building, and then set off left. Although it was one of the core functions of the Birmingham consular mission to the Venislarn, Rod had little professional interest in the Vault, or the Dumping Ground from which much of its collection was harvested. He worked mostly in clean-up and court liaison. The Vaults were the province of eggheads like Ingrid or regulation freaks like Vivian Grey. He was vaguely aware that most of the shelves were filled with documentation: witness statements, field reports from other agencies, plus the diaries of madmen and the theses, research papers and personal accounts of those who had strayed too close to the abyss. Ahead of him was the section holding the Vault’s physical artefacts.

  He heard a sound. A short squeak, like rubber soles on tile.

  Rod slowed, approaching quietly.

  He passed cases of reinforced glass containing objects that had been fashioned by either the Venislarn or those who had glimpsed more of their science than any human ought: a selection of one-sided objects, a dog-eared and unedited manuscript of The Carfax Monographs, a pile of Tiny Blue Innumerables, an eye-bending four-dimensional Julia Set composed from the remains of the mathematician who had been foolish enough to unlock it.

  Another squeak, this from a side corridor hung with paintings, photographs and even a tapestry or two. There was no abiding theme to the collection, apart from the fact that no sane person would have any of them hanging on their living room wall. Beneath a batik print of something that looked a bit like a hedgehog, a bit like a beetle, and a lot like the handiwork of a deranged vivisectionist stood a stout metal tank. It had a circular door like a bank safe, albeit a bank safe with a porthole in the door. And, looking in through the porthole, a length of rolled up canvas in her hand and oblivious to Rod, was a young woman – probably just a teenager – wearing a shapeless knitted scarf, chunky earrings and a Paddington Bear duffel coat. She looked like a size-zero actress on her way to audition for the role of ‘kooky undergrad’.

  “Excuse me?” said Rod.

  The young woman jumped.

  “Oh!” She put a hand to her chest and then laughed. She was a pretty girl. No, more than that. She was beautiful, her student shabby chic infused with an enchanting movie-star glow. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Beautiful or not, she was irritating.

  “What are you doing?”

  The young woman seemed momentarily perplexed. Then, remembering herself, she unfurled her canvas banner. In wonky lettering were the words ‘Hands OFF our libraries! No CUTS to jobs and Services!! ’.

  “You’re…”

  “Izzy,” she said.

  “A protestor?”

  “That’s right.” She waggled her banner. “You can’t call it a library if it’s always closed.”

  “How did you even get down here?”

  “All these books locked away where no one can see them. It’s a crime. What is this anyway?”

  She pointed at the book in the sealed pressure chamber.

  “It’s the Bloody Big Book.”

  “I can see that but what is it?”

  “It is the Bloody Big Book. The Wittgenstein Volume. The Book of Sand. How did you get in here?”

  Rod stepped forward. The young woman slipped something from her huge sleeve and, before he could reach her, she had slapped the other end of the handcuffs around a metal upright on the safe.

  He growled, exasperated.

  “All this amazing stuff locked away,” she said. “You can’t do this.”

  “So this is your stand against the man?”

  “It should be on display, freely available, anyone —”

  “And you don’t know who the man is,” Rod interrupted.

  “There’s even a mummy back there. I didn’t know we had a mummy in the library.”

  Neither did Rod.

  “Mummy?”

  The woman, Izzy, jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

  “All kind of weird and leathery.”

  “Did you touch it, lass?” said Rod.

  “I’ve not damaged anything.”

  “Right,” he said, removed his tie clip and, with a twist, separated it into two needle-nosed blades.

  Izzy looked at him worriedly.

  “Lock picks,” he said.

  Sometime previously, the Caledonian Sleeper ha
d crossed into England but it seemed perverse to stop drinking just because of that.

  “Right, my turn.” NHS specs shifted on the sofa. The effects of alcohol, tiredness and the gentle rocking of the train tried to drag them both from the vertical to the horizontal but they were fighting it. “I’m going to guess yours.”

  “I told you, I can’t tell you what I do,” said Morag. “This is how this whole conversation started.”

  “Are you embarrassed to tell me, dear?”

  “No.”

  “So, you’re not allowed to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you like a spy?”

  “Um. No.”

  “Not MI6 or MI5?”

  “No.”

  “Private sector?”

  “We’re not playing this game.”

  “We’ve already started.”

  “No, not private sector. Even if you get it, I can’t tell you.”

  “So, you work for the government? Central government?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And you have offices in Edinburgh and Birmingham?”

  “Yes.”

  “And other major cities.”

  “The big ones.”

  “Is this a military thing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really. It’s a national security thing though.”

  “Yes.”

  “Borders and customs?”

  She laughed at how close to the truth he was. “God,” she said. “Look, my glass is empty.”

  By chance, one of the buffet staff heard her in passing and paused. Resigned to her drunkenness, she ordered refills.

  “Immigration,” said NHS specs. “Do you run one of those internment camps for illegal immigrants?”

  “If only it were that easy.”

  “I got it right?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “But it’s some sort of central government preparedness thing?”

  “Preparedness thing?”

  He shrugged.

  “Disaster planning? Flood defences? Preparing for that flu outbreak that’s going to kill us all? Maybe… maybe you’re building missiles to take out an asteroid that’s on course for earth?”