The Vacant Casualty (20 page)

‘Well, when he was in the middle of trying to turn us both into human tartare, a hole opened up on the side of the hill and swallowed him whole.’

‘I sometimes wonder if it would be easier to get to the bottom of all this if one was a bit more sober some of the time,’ confessed Horace.

‘That is possibly true,’ agreed Sam, peering out of the window at the town square, which was to his eyes bright-lit with neon lights and zigzagged in zany ways upon his retinas.
‘So you’ve no idea where the damned thing came from?’

‘The school, I expect,’ said Horace. ‘I don’t know how these thickos fail to notice it, but it’s obviously a school that teaches witchcraft of some sort. Anyway,
I’m very sorry for your trouble, and glad you’re safe. But . . . A
hole
, you say – and it opened up just like that.
Another
one!’

‘There have been others?’

‘A few years ago a semi-detached house vanished into a hole that suddenly appeared at the top of the town, near the base of the hill. It was never really investigated, they had it all
hushed up. Terry Fairbreath was terribly interested in all this, I seem to recall.’

‘Interesting,’ said Sam. ‘Here, Bradley’s coming over.’

‘Better hide the old snort.’

‘No, give him some. He could do with it. But don’t mention you knew the ogre was out there – that might be a bit of a sore spot.’

Bradley got into the car.

‘Want some drugs?’ asked Horace.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ the policeman asked, whipping the proffered packet out of his hand and examining the contents.

‘Uh, nobody. Well, we met before. And then I nearly killed you earlier, and you arrested me. That’s why I’m in your car, at least.’

‘Oh, yeah.
You
,’ said Bradley, dunking his nose into the crystals. ‘Can you keep your posh mouth shut for ten seconds while I talk to Tinker Bell over there on the other
seat?’

‘Not a problem,’ Horace said cheerily, for which he received a slap.

‘I said
shut
,’ said Bradley. Horace nodded dumbly.

Sam leant forward and offered the bottle of alcohol. The detective partook largely of it and then once more of Horace’s powder, the latter so much so that on receiving his packet back,
Horace stared at its emptiness with outrage for a moment and articulated several violent oaths without using his vocal cords. Sam felt a pride at Bradley’s new attitude swell in his
heart.

‘So tell me,’ said the detective.

‘There are
other
solutions,’ Sam said. ‘Not just that everyone did it.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Well, now,’ said Sam. ‘I would say “please don’t overreact” but I suppose we’re past the point where that would be a helpful request. If it’s not
the butler, and not the detective, and it wasn’t everyone acting in collusion, then . . .’ Sam reflected an instant too late that this new Bradley, this monster who was a creation of
his, would not respond to what he was about to say. He had to finish the sentence.

‘In my experience of crime novels, which you are asking about,’ said Sam, ‘it could be the narrator.’

Bradley didn’t even say a word. He opened his car door, got out, walked round, opened Sam’s door, yanked him out (spilling his drink) and slammed his head four times against the
bonnet.

‘Don’t fuck me around!’ he shouted. ‘You’re holding out on me!’

‘I’m not!’ yipped Sam, his face squished against the police car. ‘It’s a clever ending if the innocent-seeming narrator turns out to have done the
murder.’

Bradley yanked on his arm and spun the young man round. He looked at him, and saw that Sam was being honest and was trying to be helpful. He grabbed a handful of his T-shirt and lifted him off
his feet.

‘What the FUCK does “it could be the narrator” mean?’

‘It depends if we are characters in a novel that is written in the first or third person. Guessing that it’s third person, then the narrator is of course the murderer in every
whodunnit ever written. And even if they were a first-person narrator, we wouldn’t be able to tell who it is.’

‘Meaning what, in relation to my inquiry?’ asked the detective.

‘Okay,’ admitted Sam. ‘Meaning that that remark wasn’t any use to you at all. It’s meaningless.’

Bradley let him go so he smacked into the cobblestones, and rubbed his arse as he got up.

‘I was only trying to give you a list of potentials,’ said Sam pathetically, as the world spun counter-clockwise.

Bradley pointed to the car door. Sam got in and Bradley walked back round to his front seat.

‘So what else is there?’

‘Okay. As you can imagine, we’ve exhausted the conventional solutions. If you really want to know, the next idea would be that we aren’t in a murder inquiry at all.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Occam’s razor. Follow the evidence to the least unlikely solution: we’ve got no body, so there was no murder. Terry’s out there somewhere, still alive. Maybe he’s
run off because of tax problems, or had a fall and got amnesia. Maybe he killed himself.’

‘No way!’ said Bradley. ‘I’m following my intuition, just as you told me to. I can feel in my gut there’s been a murder here and I’m going to find my way to
the heart of this.’

‘Okay,’ said Sam, somewhat hopelessly. ‘What else can I say?’

‘Give me the next solution you can come up with.’

‘These solutions are from
fiction
, you understand? Right, well, here goes. I’ve eliminated all the conventional ones. Maybe it’s metafiction. Or a genre mash-up . .
.’

Bradley began to growl threateningly.

‘. . . We could be in a science fiction novel,’ explained Sam, ‘for all I know.’

‘That would be fun,’ said Horace.

‘Shut up or I’ll smash your face in,’ said Bradley.

Horace looked at Sam and saw a trickle of blood coming from his hairline, following his recent beating. He shut up.

After another glowering look at Sam, Bradley got out of the car and came round to his door. ‘Here we go again,’ said Sam, hoping that if he got another bash to the head at least it
would knock him out. Bradley ejected him from the vehicle and pointed up at the sky.

‘A science fiction novel,’ he said. ‘So you’re saying a flying saucer would appear right now?’

‘Not a flying saucer,’ said Sam. ‘No one believes in flying saucers these days. More like some sort of heavily armoured spacecraft, or perhaps an enormous mother ship. Like
that one . . .’

Bradley let go of Sam, sending the writer crashing to the floor again as he, and all the people in the square, looked up and saw a huge dark shape fill the sky.

A
BOVE THEM
in the sky was something that at first glance looked to the detective (who lacked any other frame of reference) like a mile-long carburettor.
Its main difference in appearance from this common piece of machinery was in the circular orange lights that glowed from its sides, and perhaps in the thousand smaller white specks glimmering from
its millions of windows. Spiky, hundred-yard-long antennae extended from the front, and the whole structure was a sequence of giant spheres, hexagons and cuboid structures attached to each other by
triangulated scaffolds through which ran spiralling supply pipes and walkways as wide as roads. The surface was of some dark, hard matt substance that hardly reflected light but gleamed meagrely,
and the impression it struck on all the humans who gazed up at it was one of stupefied horror and awe. All voices fell silent; the helicopters scooted away across the trees to safety. The soldiers
pointed their rifles upwards, useless as ants staring up at a tree about to fall.

There came one giant, glaring note from an instrument within the spacecraft like an intergalactic foghorn, a frightening blast that blew out all the windows and sent a gust through the square,
leaving all the humans clutching their ears. Then a narrow spindly shaft of glittering light flickered down and widened to a spotlight upon the cobblestones.

‘BEHOLD!’ thundered a voice. ‘The one and only Zaltor the Merciless!’

There was a blinding flash and suddenly there in front of them, standing in the spotlight, was a strange creature in a white space suit. It seemed humanoid, with pale skin and wild red curly
hair that sprouted from the back of its head in a sort of ginger halo. Behind it stood another figure with a notepad.

‘Behold,’ said the creature, coughing politely, and reading from a flimsy piece of foolscap he held in front of him. ‘For I am Zaltor the Merciless, Lord of the Seven Moons. I
am here to demand from you, citizens of Naxi-Mori-Dolli-Phumofillimoltimollibosss (often referred to as Percy for short), that you deliver unto us the Gem-laden Sword of Shlorb. Or we’ll be
really cross. And when I say really cross, I mean
really
cross.’ Finishing what was on the sheet, he looked up and coughed modestly. ‘It’s a bit on the nose as
pronouncements go, but there you are, name of the game, really. Er . . . Why are you all looking at me like that?’

Sam looked around him. Everyone else seemed speechless with terror and/or in the process of having a stroke.

‘Er . . .’ he piped up timidly. ‘We’re not actually the, er, the citizens of . . . Where did you say?’

‘The risk with talking to aliens,’ Sam thought, ‘is that you really don’t know how they’re going to react.’ He half expected to be zapped into a small pile of
ash, but instead Zaltor blinked three times and said: ‘Naxi-Mori-Phumos. Did I say it right?’

‘Not if you meant to say “Earth”. This is Earth.’

Zaltor waited a beat, then turned round and said to his underling, ‘Earth? We’re on fucking
Earth
? We’re not even in the right galaxy, Chris. Are you kidding
me?’

‘Maybe I got the coordinates wrong,’ said the second alien, looking at his notepad.

‘Yeah, I’m guessing you fucking did get the coordinates wrong, you dungwit! That’s right, I said “dungwit”! And I’m not taking it back.
Earth
!’
He spat the last word in disgust, as they both looked up into the spotlight and twiddled buttons on their watches.

‘Oh, er, sorry about that,’ said Zaltor the Merciless. ‘Do carry on. Is this a party? Well, have a good time.’

Then he zapped back into space with a scarcely audible blip.

Everyone looked around, dazed, at one another for a moment before the yellow glittering spotlight shone back down again on exactly the same spot. Zaltor once more flickered into being in front
of them.

‘Wait a minute . . . Earth,’ he said. ‘You created Spaghetti Carbonara, right?’

‘Er, yes,’ said Sam.

‘And cricket? And the cryptic crossword?’

‘That too.’

‘Cracking!’ said Zaltor. ‘Keep up the good work, and see you in a thousand years. Toodle-pip!’

There was another flash of light, Zaltor disappeared again, there came another deafening blast from the foghorn and the spaceship blinked out of the sky.

Bradley looked at Sam. ‘Metafiction, you say?’

Sam shrugged, then looked around. ‘What’s that sound?’ he asked.

‘It’s the ship,’ said Bradley, ‘flying off.’

‘I don’t think it is,’ said Sam, concerned. ‘It seemed to just blip off to another galaxy. Can you hear that rumbling?’

‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Bradley.

‘I think it’s coming from the Hill. Hey, look! That didn’t used to be there.’

Sam pointed to one corner of the square. ‘Wasn’t that where Yeay Thee Olde Curiosity Tea Shoppe used to be? Now there’s just a huge towering pile of rubbish!’

But Bradley wasn’t listening. Sam’s mention of the Hill had brought to his attention the one avenue to do with Fairbreath’s disappearance that they hadn’t had an answer
to. He marched over to where the townspeople were being guarded at gunpoint. The members of the Parish Council had huddled together, as though they were having an ad hoc meeting. The mayor saw
Bradley coming and piped up.

‘Oh it’s you, Bradley, you utterly brainless bumhole! What is the bloody meaning of arresting my butler in the middle of the night?’

‘Shut it, fatso, or I’ll knock your teeth out!’

The mayor then saw Sam and recalled what had happened to him shortly before the interruption of Zaltor the Merciless. He shut up.

‘Why was Terry Fairbreath interested in the Hill? What is it that you’re trying to keep secret about it?’

They all looked at each other nervously. None of them wanted to be the first to speak.

‘The Hill?’ piped up Horace, who had come over to watch. ‘You should have asked me. It’s full of shit.’

Bradley elbowed him in the stomach so forcefully he doubled up and collapsed over, clutching his belly with his handcuffed hands. ‘No, I mean it, it’s literally full of
rubbish,’ he said from the ground.

‘God damn it, be quiet, Horace!’ shouted Lord Selvington. ‘Or I’ll jolly well cut off your allowance!’

‘Whoop de doo,’ said Horace.

‘Go on,’ said Bradley. ‘Tell us about the Hill?’

‘Well, after the Second World War the town was impoverished, and there was this landfill site a few miles away. We were offered a lot of money to have it put here. The town used the money
to start doing itself up, becoming a picture-perfect tourist trap.’

‘So where did the rubbish go?’

‘Under the Hill. Twenty million tonnes of it. They just turfed it over and pretended it wasn’t there. If anyone found out then the town would lose its reputation.’

‘Is it just me,’ said Sam, pointing to the same corner of the square as before, ‘or is that pile substantially
bigger
than it was a few moments ago?’ But no one
was listening to him.

‘Terry started hearing about the old murders that had happened, got interested and they bumped him off.’

‘
No
!’ shouted Selvington. ‘It’s not true! He was poking around, yes – but there’s nothing to find. I swear it. Those murders were solved and the
perpetrators caught.’

‘Shut it, you toilet!’ shouted Bradley.

‘Er, guys . . .’ said Sam.

‘I’m arresting you all on suspicion of murder. On SUSPICION . . . of . . .’ Bradley was finding it hard to be heard beneath a background roaring noise. ‘Of . . .
MURDER!’