The Vacant Casualty (21 page)

‘GUYS!’ shouted Sam, grabbing Bradley’s sleeve. ‘We’ve got to go!’ He pointed at the pile of rubbish in the corner, which was now not only substantially more
massive than before, but visibly growing. ‘I think the noise of the spaceship must have affected it. It’s bursting!’

‘Shit!’ said Bradley.

‘Literally,’ said Horace. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that.’

The rubbish spilled out onto the square now like rapid lava from a nearby volcano, falling in cascading waves in the centre and oozing around the edges.

‘Well, I’ve always wanted to say this,’ said Sam. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’

‘Okay, let’s go!’ Bradley shouted to the soldiers, and their commanding officer waved them away to the south corner of the square, the townspeople running with them. As they
all ran, however, the road collapsed in front of them and a poisonous gust of rancid air spilled out in a dark cloud. Many screamed and fell back. The major, taking his eyepatch off, yodelled at
the sky, having apparently now gone mad for real. The soldiers shouted urgently into their walkie-talkies as another terrible rumble and roar came down from the mountainside. A massive sprouting
stream of garbage spewed out from a fresh hole, high as a tsunami, and engulfed the street leading from the north of the square.

The helicopters came thumping across the rooftops and hovered above them.

‘Hurry!’ shouted Bradley and Sam, and the soldiers waved their arms furiously. Rope ladders were dropped from six different aircraft, and with agonizing slowness the old people
started to climb, encouraged with shouts from the soldiers.

The noises, infernal burpings and explosions continued to come. The abbey was shattered into a pile of stones, and the houses on the north side of the square were sucked down from inside and
crumpled, falling inwards and disappearing completely.

‘I’m not satisfied,’ shouted Bradley into Sam’s ear. ‘we’ve not solved the case!’

‘Okay, but can we talk about it later?’ Sam shouted back. Then a thought struck him. ‘Oh my God!’ he shouted. ‘What about the children at the school?’

The pair exchanged a terrified look before Bradley’s expression cleared and he pointed into the sky. There, buzzing between the helicopters and darting in and around the tops of the roofs,
were a hundred or so children, flying on broomsticks.

There was so much to take in at once that Sam didn’t have time to question what this meant – and now it was his and Bradley’s turn to jump on the rope. The soldiers had mounted
onto other craft that rose ahead of them and as his foot left the cobblestones the detective felt them tremble beneath him. When he had a firm grip he looked down and saw the stones all shaking and
chattering, before the pattern dissolved and only churning mud was left. A fast-moving pool of slurry spread across the surface of the square, as fast as a breaking wave, a hellish odour rising
from it.

The helicopter lifted up, just as the few remaining walls of houses were flooded, and shattered on the impact, or a second later were overcome with trash. As the chopper rose, banked and sped
towards distant safety, the last traces of the town disappeared under the tidal wave of shit.

T
HE SMALL FLEET
of helicopters (and broomsticks) hugged the treeline as it crossed miles of clear countryside touched only by early-morning sunshine.
For a moment all the children were out of sight and as he gazed into the rising sun, it felt to Sam like this madness was all imagined, and he wondered whether this would make for the television
pilot he had always wanted to write.

‘No,’ he thought, ‘the budget would be way too high.’ He looked at Bradley, and realized that for him the case was really still unresolved. ‘I forgot to tell him
about the other kind of detective novel,’ he reflected, ‘the kind where the case remains unsolved and sticks in the detective’s mind for years on end, becoming an obsession with
him. Oh, well.’

They were set down at an army base some twenty miles south that had been put on emergency. Ambulances were there, ready for those suffering from injuries, panic and (in seven instances) mild
heart attacks. There was one sight which had haunted them all as they had risen into the sky from the doomed town and that was the cordoned area in the east end of the square, where Bradley had put
the granny mafia under armed watch. This had become cut off at the last minute and none of the grannies had survived.

‘Good,’ said Bradley. ‘Serves the fuckwits right.’

The survivors were given blankets and taken into the mess hall, where hot drinks and soup were offered them in cups. After several dozen loud complaints, the soup and tea were replaced by
‘medicinal’ brandy from the store, which was ladled out into tin cups and some time after that, the ancient crowd was subdued into sad and quiet conversations, or sleep.

Bradley was not for hanging around, though. There was something on his mind and without delay he seconded a jeep from the army base (which came with a soldier in it, to check he didn’t put
it to misuse) and headed back to Fraxbridge as fast as he could. Sam saw him turning on the motor and jumped in the back at the last minute.

‘Wait for me!’ he said. ‘I want to come.’

‘Okay,’ said Bradley, speeding out of the gate. ‘But there’s no time. Something’s about to go down, I can feel it.’

They hit a bridge and lifted off for twenty yards, landing with a tremendous smash. The soldier’s rifle went off.

‘Whoopsadaisy,’ he said.

‘There’s something else, Sam,’ said Bradley. ‘Something you haven’t told me; something you’ve forgotten. I can feel it. You said I ignore the evidence,
right?’

‘Right. Follow your gut.’

‘But you mean the
legal
evidence, right? The stuff my superintendent would care about.’

‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. You should pay attention to the little stuff, the little signs of wrongdoing that aren’t exactly evidence, but
clues
.’

‘
Exactly
,’ Bradley repeated, as they tore round a corner. ‘There’s something. Something someone said; something troubling the back of my mind.’

‘But we’ve left behind all the suspects at the military base,’ protested Sam.

‘The
obvious
suspects,’ said Bradley. ‘The butlers, all the other residents . . . Something doesn’t fit .’

They raced down a country lane at approaching three times what Sam would have regarded as a safe speed. His training of Bradley had nearly come to fruition: he was sharing a car with the
detective of his dreams, and now he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to. But he was proud of his creation – not to give encouragement now would be like Frankenstein taking a hammer to the
monster just as it raised its head.

‘You’re right, Detective. You’ve got all the pieces, you just need to put them together. The chances are you’ll puzzle over it and then at the last minute you will be put
onto the scent by an apparently innocuous remark by someone else – possibly one that, when you think back over it, comes across as rather shoehorned in. By the way, that last line you said
about how something doesn’t fit – that’s perfect. You’re becoming a natural.’

‘Well, something
doesn’t
fit. What is it that’s troubling me? Tell me all the events in the last twenty-four hours.’ He was nearly hitting ninety now, the trees
that lined the lane racing past, the light flitting through. The soldier sat quite happily next to him, unperturbed.

‘The pub. The landlord . . .’

‘Braindead.’

‘The grannies . . .’

‘Actually dead.’

‘The car, the field, the golf clubs, the ogre . . .’

‘Almost certainly dead.’

‘The driver who picked us up.’

‘Again – braindead.’

Sam thought there was something exciting and fearful about Bradley’s intensity. He himself had been perfectly certain there was no crime to solve, but the detective’s ferocity was
starting to make him feel otherwise and causing an uncomfortable cold sensation to rise through him. They tore through a small hamlet that was still asleep, ripped straight over the roundabout in
the middle of the road, took a left turning too late and missed the bridge – instead they hit an abandoned truckbed that leant to the ground and formed an improvised ramp, and, hitting it at
nearly a hundred, they cleared the stream easily, landing with a resounding crash that made the soldier’s rifle go off again.

‘Whoopsadaisy,’ he said once more.

Bradley angled the jeep through a farm’s back yard, avoiding several chickens before smashing through a bush and hitting the road again. He looked at his watch.

‘Fried chicken,’ said Sam.

‘Delicious.’

‘Horace, the Duke of Rochester.’

‘Daft,’ said Bradley.

‘The butlers . . .’

‘Innocent.’

‘The square. The soldiers . . .’

‘There
is something
,’ insisted Bradley.

‘The spaceship.’ Sam tried to think laterally. ‘The Tea Shoppe. The cobbles. The drugs . . .’

‘Ooh, have you got any drugs?’ asked the soldier.

‘
No
!’ they both said.

‘The car, the full moon, the rubbish . . . I can feel it, I’m close . . .’

The engine started smoking as Bradley reached the edge of Fraxbridge and began emitting flames by the time they hit the high street. He slew to a halt by the side of the street and left it where
it stopped, then got out and ran.

‘Slow down!’ shouted Sam. ‘I’m injured, for God’s sake. By you!’

‘Hurry,’ said Bradley, slowing to a jog.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know but I have to get back to the police station. Yes,’ he went on quietly. ‘It all ties in together. The spaceship had nothing to do with it. A ticking time
bomb . . .’

‘That bomb was part of all this?’ Sam hobbled along as the soldier jogged happily beside him.

‘You can’t carry me, can you?’ he asked.

‘Nope,’ said the soldier.

‘Yes. It all fits together, but I can’t work out how. The rubbish had already started to appear. You remember the pile outside the library when we got there?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Sam, surprised.

‘Well, you know how all those explosions keep coming from within the grounds of the school and no one seems to think anything’s up? Like when my car exploded. No one took any notice,
or came looking. They’re used to explosions. So a bomb was laid somewhere near the base of the Hill. The whole thing was triggered deliberately, ahead of time.’

He came to a stop, and they stood in front of the blown-out police station offices. Sam bent over, wheezing, begging for them not to go on again for a moment. Straightening, he plucked the
bottle of rum out of his inner pocket and had begun to swig when it was snatched by Bradley, who drank it like Lawrence of Arabia helping himself to his waterskin. Looking on askance, Sam instead
lit a cigarette and immediately doubled up again, his throat rent by a horrible tearing cough.

‘When this is over I’ve got to sort out my act,’ he said. ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ He held the cigarette away and took a breath of clean air, coughed
again and whimpered somewhat. ‘I sound like a werewolf.’

Bradley took the bottle from his mouth and tossed it aside – Sam was lucky to catch it, and got a splash across his shirt for his efforts.

‘Werewolf . . .’ said Bradley, looking up at the morning sky. Sam and the soldier followed his gaze. With the sun still low near the horizon, it was a beautiful, clear pale blue,
with nothing in it except the half moon, clearly visible.

‘You know what I feel?’ Bradley said to Sam.

‘No, what?’

‘The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. For real. Werewolf! That’s it!’ he said, and pointed to the soldier. ‘
You
, come here!’

U
PSTAIRS IN THE
first-floor squad room, as Sam called it, all was quiet. It made for a desperately sad sight. The walls were scorched black, desks
charred and chairs turned over. There were standing pools of water from the fire-engine hoses that had soaked the building to ensure the fire had gone out. There were flame patterns across the
ceiling, interspersed with sections where the paint had mottled and melted, and where the plaster sagged in damp bulges, ready to collapse. Where the windows had been, remnants of the plastic
blinds hung and moved gently in the breeze so that the early-morning sun slanted inwards, making a slow-motion strobing effect.

A tall figure came in slowly through the door, treading with great caution. He squinted through the dimness, trying to make out a shape amid the mingling of the sunlight with the ashen air and
last traces of smoke.

Soon he saw what he expected in the centre of the room and stood stock still. But it was too late – he had been spotted. A crouching figure was feeling through the soggy embers and
half-burned papers around Detective Brauti-gan’s desk, whispering to itself incessantly. But now it stopped and turned its head to the door.

The tattered blinds shifted in the wind and light fell across the face.

‘Terry Fairbreath,’ said the tall figure, its face still in darkness.

‘
You
,’ whispered the crouching man. ‘You, of all people! The idiot detective! You were supposed to be dead.’

‘I know,’ said the tall figure. ‘You planned it all. You uncovered the secret of the Hill, and planted a bomb to explode it and destroy the town. But first you wanted to fake
your own death so that it was recorded before the evidence was destroyed.’

‘Yes,’ uttered Fairbreath, hate narrowing his voice to a whisper. ‘I planned it perfectly. It took months! That reliably snooping old battleaxe Mrs Bottlescum was supposed to
see me being convincingly massacred. How could I know the stupid old cow had the attention span of a gnat? The second I was out of sight, covered in fake blood, she just forgot the whole damn
thing!’

‘That was your first mistake,’ said the figure.

‘Oh, don’t patronize me. You got lucky! It’s that bloody writer who’s been following you around, filling your head with ideas,’ said Terry Fairbreath scornfully.
‘I suppose he’s with you now.’