by Heide Goody
“Doesn’t mean he can spell it,” said Junior.
Vivian looked across the interview panel table, Vaughn Sitterson to her left, the ineffectual Cheryl Clement to her right. In the interview chair, Kathy Kaur sat primly alert, hands on knees, knees pressed tightly together.
“This is quite a departure from your current job, isn’t it?” said Cheryl.
“In some ways,” said Kathy and then reconsidered. “It’s very different. A much more technical role that will challenge me in a new way.”
“Are you sick of dealing with sick people?” said Vivian.
“Yes.” Kathy looked shocked at her own response. “I like helping people. I like having helped people. It makes me feel good about myself.” She stared as though she couldn’t believe she had said that. “Christ, that makes me sound I have a God complex.”
“Do you have a God complex?” said Vivian.
Kathy responded carefully. “I think I have no more of a God complex than the next person.”
“Do you think Mr Sitterson here has a God complex?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know him.”
“Do you think I have a God complex?”
“Yes. Definitely.”
“Interesting,” said Vivian, watching the candidate’s hands scrunch into tense balls in her lap.
“I seem to be unaccountably honest at the moment,” said Kathy. “I do apologise.”
Vaughn shuffled his papers uncomfortably.
“On your responses to the in-tray exercise, Dr Kaur… Would you care to explain your response to scenario A and how you would deal with the unexpected delivery of eighteen tons of Yobhani Xo?”
“Yes?” said Kathy.
“You said that you would have room but the scenario said that there was none.”
“Yes. I would operate the Dumping Ground so that it would always register as full. It’s like departmental budgets. You have to spend them or someone will take them away. It’s the same thing. We would make sure that there was no obvious visible space in the Dumping Ground or else someone would fill it.”
“You would lie?”
“No,” said Kathy. “Not directly. It would be a matter of organisation. Creating an element of flexibility.” She paused and then spoke, almost as an aside, as though she was host to two competing personalities. “I believe that’s how the previous post-holder operated. Please understand, I know this is not an okay answer to give at interview. I really do. For some reason, I can’t help myself.”
Cheryl Clement leaned forward. “Do you feel unnaturally compelled to tell the truth?”
“I do.”
“Why do you think that is?” asked Vivian.
Kathy thought. “Have you cast a spell on me?”
Over the next ten minutes, Fluke came up with three phones, a skateboard, a very soggy copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and a child’s bike.
“It’s not just a bike,” said Rod defensively as he marvelled over the rusted and muck-smeared thing. “This is a Raleigh Grifter, king of bikes. They haven’t made these in decades.”
“This must be what it was like when they found the Staffordshire Hoard,” said Junior, failing to share his excitement.
“You may mock,” said Rod.
“I believe I will.”
Fluke surfaced, waving something that was at least the right shape and size to be a wallet. He tossed it ashore.
“Let’s take a look,” said Rod and pulled the wet thing open. “A lot of cash.” He passed the notes to Junior. “Bank card, travel card. Ah, provisional driving licence.” The card came out with some resistance. “Jeffney Wilson Ray. He lives in Shirley.”
Fluke pulled himself out onto the path with powerful arms. It was rare to see a fish with a six pack. Junior could almost understand why a certain type of woman might find that attractive. Almost. Apart from the big fish head, obviously. Fluke shook himself off and pressed the worst of the silty water from his trousers.
“Give us the address, fed. We’ll sort him out.”
“Ha,” Rod smiled. “We’ll take it from here.”
Junior tossed Fluke’s T-shirt back to him.
“Hey,” he said, “we – ggh! – got some vengeance to deal out.”
“Which is why we will handle it,” said Rod.
“Besides,” said Junior, tapping her bruised cheek, “we’ve got some vengeance to deal out ourselves.” She peeled away approximately half of the banknotes and offered them to him. “Here,” she said.
“Ggh! A payoff from the adn-bhul five-oh?” spat Fluke, although that might have just been him spitting out canal water.
“A reward,” said Junior and pressed the cash into his hand. “There’s several hundred there.”
“Treat your girlfriend – Kirsten, isn’t it – to something nice,” said Rod. “Something to cheer her up.”
“Like a Nando’s?” said Fluke, his eyes ashine.
“Aye. Sure,” said Rod despairingly. “A Nando’s.”
Fluke smoothed out his T-shirt, touched Tupac’s face for good luck and headed off.
“Shirley, then,” said Rod.
“Yeah. Let’s get back to your car. I’m worried about Steve.”
“He’s a possessed doll in a jam jar,” said Rod. “He’s not a Labrador we left behind in a hot car.”
“I’m just… you know.”
“Soft,” said Rod. “Aye. Come on.”
“I’m just saying, this is a waste of time.”
“We’re going to find him,” said Morag Senior.
“Yeah, maybe,” said Nina. “But we could have just tweeted, ‘Have you seen this man? Hashtag Shirley. Hashtag douchebag drug dealer’ and waited for responses.”
“Is Twitter the future of criminal investigation?”
“It’d save all this legwork.”
The two of them had been doing house enquiries for a little over an hour, taking the oldest of the soul cash contracts as a starting point. So far, they had elicited a lot of blank faces and a few vague maybes. More than a couple of individuals had wanted to share their very specific opinions on door-to-door salesmen or the state of the neighbourhood or whatever cuckoo nonsense was on their mind at that moment. In many respects, just like Twitter.
Away from its long, drawn out high street, Shirley was mostly a mass of post-war housing estates: crescent after avenue after cul-de-sac of Englishmen and their semi-detached castles. If it weren’t for the map on her phone, Senior wouldn’t know whether they were re-treading old ground or not.
“Shall we just play chappie-knockie at the next one?” she said.
“What?” said Nina.
“Chappie-knockie.”
“What the hell?”
“You know, when you knock on someone’s door and run away.”
“Oh,” said Nina, uninterested. “One, it’s called knock down ginger –”
“Bit gingerist.”
“– and two, no one plays that anymore. Is that what people did before the television was invented?”
“How old do you think I am?” said Senior as she rang the doorbell of the next house.
A balding bloke opened the door sharply as though expecting to catch chappie knockers or knock down gingerists in the act.
“Can you read?” he said.
“Yes, thank you,” said Nina cheerily.
He pointed at a home-printed sign stuck in the porch window which read: NO JUNK MAIL, NO FREE PAPERS, NO LEAFLETS, NO COLD CALLERS, NO SALESMEN, NO JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES.
“Nope, we’re none of them,” said Nina.
“Or Mormons,” he said.
“We just wanted to ask some questions,” said Senior, flashing her ID card.
“I’m not letting you in until I’ve checked your credentials.”
“We don’t want to come in.”
The man clicked his fingers for her ID. Senior passed it over.
“We’re actually trying to track down a fraudulent door-to-door salesman who’s been targeting this area.”
&nb
sp; “Is that so?” said the man, his interest suddenly piqued. “Cos they’re everywhere, aren’t they?” There was something in the way he said “they” which made Senior think the conversation might take a sudden turn into nationalistic/xenophobic/UKIP/Enoch Powell and Rivers of Blood territory.
“We’re looking for a young white male,” said Senior, “with a number of scars on his face. He’s been selling what he says are broadband contracts to people up and –”
“You mean Linda Ray’s lad. He’s got one of them conditions.”
Senior frowned.
“His face,” the man said. “He does it to himself. Can’t help himself.”
“Linda Ray?” said Nina.
“The lad’s called Jeffney. Not Jeffrey but Jeffney. He’s harmless really. They live round the corner on Shakespeare Drive. Number four.”
“That’s brilliant,” said Senior. As she reached to take her ID, the man pulled back a little and tapped the card.
“This picture. It ain’t you,” he said. “It’s that Black Widow woman from the superhero film.”
“Thank you!” said Senior with bitter gratitude. “Three weeks I’ve been on this job and you’re the first to notice.” She snatched it from him. “Let’s go, Nina.”
Cameron Barnes looked very relaxed in the interview chair. Vivian did not approve. With that casual tan, that untamed haircut and the bead bracelet he thought she couldn’t see under his cuff (or worse, didn’t care) the man looked like a surfer who had been stuffed into a suit, a hippy come in from the cold.
“The in-tray exercise,” said Cheryl Clement. “Your answers were superb.”
“Tendhu,” he said, gratefully.
“Apart from scenario H.”
“Is that the ghost of your dead granny one?”
“Yes. And you wrote, ‘Hold a spontaneous fireworks display in a nearby park’.”
“I did.”
“Why?” said Cheryl, baffled.
“It struck me as obvious,” said Cameron, rather smugly. “Apparitions of dead loved ones could have a number of causes. However, the scenario mentioned it was Tuesday. Why Tuesday?”
“Random detail,” said Vivian.
“But is it?” said Cameron.
“Yes,” said Vivian.
“But is it? Tuesday is the day when stress and depression are statistically likely to be at their highest. The psychic lo-frax field, the pre-Soulgate net that surrounds our durigan world, might have responded to those energy changes by manifesting ghostly images of those who have already gone.”
“Yes?”
“So, I was suggesting some form of massive public celebration to lift spirits and remove the underlying cause.”
“But the Tuesday thing is irrelevant,” said Vivian.
“That might be the way you wrote it,” said Cameron, “but the reader is the final arbiter.”
“But I could have written Thursday.”
Cameron paused for only a moment. “Then I would look at an almost opposite cause. Woman are significantly more likely to give birth on a Thursday. An increase in randhu gefit ta-ta – that’s background soul-pressure to you and me – might draw a response from the lo-frax field.”
“Friday then!”
“Oh, that would be different,” said Cameron. “I would probably be looking for a specific human agent, unregistered occultist prodding the cosmic horrors with a stick. The criminal element are most active on Fridays.”
Vivian held her tongue. The man was insistent on subverting test scenarios she had written, infuriatingly so. It was doubly annoying that his answers were intelligent and insightful.
“Very good,” said Vaughn. “Tell me, Mr Barnes, what strengths do you bring to this job?”
“Direct personal experience with the Venislarn is number one,” said Cameron. “The time I spent in Pohnpei and aboard the research platform over Cary’yeh meant I was dealing with individual Venislarn and their em-shadt accoutrement on a daily basis. My contributions to our understanding of the citizens of Cary’yeh were invaluable.”
“And yet you were there for only a matter of months.”
“My rotation had come to an end. There are dangerous colour fields in the area so no one can stay there for too long.”
“But,” said Vaughn, intently looking at his notes, “some staff rotate to nearby islands for a few weeks and then return. You weren’t asked to.”
Cameron smiled. It was deep and warm and, even Vivian could see, entirely artificial. “Has Dr Rolf said something?”
“What would she say?”
“She would say I became too close to the Venislarn. Personally. She might have said I developed an attachment to the yon-bun dweller called Chagulameya.” Cameron stopped and shook himself as though he had just spoken from within a trance. “But I don’t want to go into that.”
“I think we should,” said Vivian.
“I would want to tell you that Dr Rolf was jealous that she was unable to build up a similar personal and cultural bond with the Venislarn.”
“You’d want to?”
“Yes,” said Cameron, “but I think she was showing an understandable professional concern about a sexual relationship between a man and a twenty-foot sea cucumber.” He shook himself again. “Why am I telling you this?”
“You feel inexplicably compelled to tell the truth?” suggested Vivian.
“I do.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Cameron looked blank.
“If it’s any help,” said Vivian, “today’s Thursday.”
Rod pulled up outside the house on Shakespeare Road.
“I’m unarmed,” he said.
“This guy, Jeffney, isn’t exactly the physical type,” said Morag.
Rod raised a hand meaningfully towards Morag’s bruised face.
“You’d squash him like a fly,” she assured him.
Besides, Rod reasoned, even though he hadn’t yet acquired a new sidearm, he wasn’t unarmed. The pen in his breast pocket contained a one-shot taser, he had a paracord bracelet threaded with monofilament which could be used as a garrotte, his belt could be reassembled as a hunting bow and he had a survival penknife which opened out into, well, a knife. He was also, by chance, wearing his Kevlar-lined waistcoat today.
Morag put the jam jar containing the freaky doll, Steve, in her bag.
“Does he have to come with us?” said Rod.
“Yes,” said Morag.
“I want to see the man squashed like a fly, fleshling!” cried Steve.
“Fine.”
They walked up the cracked driveway to the front door. Morag knocked on the frosted glass. Rod casually took out his taser pen and put his thumb over the trigger stud. The door opened.
“Hey,” said Nina in the hallway and then looked at Morag in deep puzzlement. “What are you doing there? And your face…”
“I got hit, remember?” said Morag.
Nina turned round. The other Morag, the original, stood in the hallway.
“This might require explaining,” said Rod.
Nina had no trouble in accepting the existence of multiple Morags and was, if anything, only put out that they hadn’t confided in her earlier. Linda Ray, Jeffney’s mother, stood silently in the kitchen while they all (one Rod, one Nina, two Morags plus a member of the entourage of Prein trapped in a pabash kaj doll), caught up with each other.
“Jeffney’s not here,” said Morag Senior. “He left an hour or so ago. Where did he say he was heading, Linda?”
“He didn’t,” said the mother in a dead monotone, staring out of the window.
Morag indicated a cardboard box on the counter.
“We searched his room and collected these. No major clues.”
“We were going to have a look in the shed next.”
“He said he was going to take it down for me,” said Linda.
Morag Junior flicked through the box. Amulets, fetishes and symbols. Mass-produced rubbish or cheap imitations.
“We had to wade through a sea of happy tissues to find those,” said Nina. “We deserve a fricking medal.”
“Happy tissues?” said Rod.
“That boy spends a lot of time alone in his room,” explained Nina.
“Oh. Eww.”
“Venislarn: A Language Primer,” said Junior, pulling out a slim but well-thumbed book. “What’s this?”
“An unauthorised and illegally-distributed book,” said Senior.
“And I think I recognise the writing style,” said Nina. “That’s one of Sheik Omar’s.”
“Interesting,” said Rod. “You think he’s behind this?”
“Could be. And if we want to question him, we know exactly where he is.”
Professor Sheikh Omar sat patiently in the interview chair while the interviewers considered the test results before them. He gave his fingernails a cursory inspection while he waited (they were perfectly manicured, Vivian had noticed) and gave his glasses a brief polish with a paisley handkerchief.
“Some of your answers to the in-tray exercise were… interesting,” said Cheryl Clement and Vaughn nodded in agreement.
“I aim to be interesting,” said Omar genially.
“Most interesting is your answer to scenario I, regarding the child in hospital. Can you clarify what you wrote?”
“I believe I wrote that we should kill the child,” said Omar simply.
“Kill the child?”
“Kill the child.”
“Many would say that’s a morally repugnant answer,” put in Vaughn.
“Yes. And it is.”
“The child could be saved.”
Omar smoothly uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “Could. But shouldn’t be. Its quality of life would be very poor. Besides, Prince Holunh Adhulas needs the child’s brain and we can use the child’s bone marrow to placate the Fahaib’soree.”
“You’ve made a decision about the individual’s life based on its basic usefulness to your needs,” said Cheryl, displeased.
“We do that all the time,” said Sheikh Omar. “This interview situation being a case in point.”
“But this is a person’s life – their death. Can you put a value on it?”
“The life insurance industry is built around that very idea.”
Cheryl made a disagreeable noise.
