Guy Adams - The Clown Service

It was about perception. It was about who retained the dominant position. She did what she did because it allowed her to be financially independent and, if she was perfectly honest, emotionally distant. Her clients were all regulars; from the lonely IT manager who brought her presents (sweet little things, tokens that made him feel like he was in a relationship of the heart not the wallet) to the cold and silent ‘Mr Green’ (she was not stupid enough to think it was his real name) who coupled, grunted, paid and left. It was business. It was controlled. She didn’t take on new clients now, didn’t take risks. She survived. And, in doing so, she kept an eye on the one person in her life that she considered important: August. She was not a woman who took her debts lightly and August was a man in terrible need of looking after. Or had been until now.

Toby. What did she make of him ? He was a man who needed to get out of his own way. So many people seemed to spend their lives constructing roadblocks to their progress. Maybe August would help Toby just as he had helped her. If they found him. If she found him. It was not a job she could entrust to someone else.

Tamar found the warehouse by following Toby’s instructions, and took a small moment to appreciate the magic of its invisibility as she walked from the modern world into this dark, forgotten corner of the ’60s.

Derek Lime was startled to find her hovering over him, his attention lost to a cat’s cradle of wiring he was trying to replace.

‘I am friend of…’ She stopped herself, remembering what Toby had told her. ‘… Leslie. I mean you no trouble.’

‘Pleased to hear it,’ he said, extending one of his large hands to shake hers. ‘I’ve more trouble than I can handle as it is. No need to add more.’

He gestured around the room at the equipment that was lying everywhere. ‘Charles – or whatever his name is – has got me trying to get all this back into working order. I’ve had to pull a sickie at work and…’ he floundered, ‘… well, to be honest I’m a bit freaked out. Glad of the company. I keep thinking that bloke who snatched Leslie is going to turn up again and have a pop at me.’

‘There has been no more trouble?’

‘Not a thing. But my nerves are broken. I just don’t understand what happened and, as a physicist, that’s a bit like discovering your legs are broken when you really need to walk somewhere. I rely on my head, on understanding. That’s not to say mystery can’t sometimes be a pleasure, but only if you know you stand a chance of solving it. How can he just have disappeared?’

‘I do not know. But I’m not like you, I don’t need to know. Life is a river. You do not have to know the making of water so as to swim.’

She wandered around the warehouse, looking in all the shadows, checking under Derek’s van.

‘You are safe to carry on your work,’ she told him. ‘Nobody will harm you while I am here.’

‘I’m not exactly defenceless you know,’ Derek replied. ‘I’ve got a whole lock-up filled with championship trophies for wrestling.’

‘This was a long time ago, yes?’

‘Well… yes.’

‘Then you play with your wires and I will punch anything that needs punching.’

b) Iain West Forensic Suite, Westminster, London

April took a restorative nip from her hip flask before offering it to her lunch companion.

‘Here you are darling. Nothing peps up a cheese and pickle sandwich better than washing it down with a drop of Stolly.’

‘You know I shouldn’t drink alcohol while working,’ said her friend, taking a large mouthful before handing it back. ‘You have to be Chief Commissioner before you can get away with that.’

April took another swig and then placed the flask between them on the small Formica table. There were two ways to put Johnny Thorpe in a positive frame of mind. She was beginning to accept she was getting too old for one of those so had settled on the other: hard liquor.

‘I’m beginning to think he doesn’t love me anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s been positively ages since he took me out to dinner.’

‘You awful tart; you always ran us all ragged.’

‘Perhaps, but I never brought him a packed lunch so I must love you the most.’

Thorpe took a mouthful of his sandwich and winced. ‘Did you make the sandwiches yourself?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thought so.’ He placed his back in the lunch box and reached for the flask again. ‘I should just retire, take my pension and blow it all in a last, desperate binge. At least I’d go out smiling.’

‘Not if you’ve only got a state pension, darling. You’d be lucky to get as far as a King’s Cross hooker and a cheap bottle of blended Scotch.’

‘That would be enough these days; I haven’t the stamina anymore.’

‘Then tell me all about Harry Reid – before the vodka puts you to sleep.’

Thorpe reached for a folder of notes. ‘Absolute madness, of course. Just what’s needed to pep up a dull week. We’ve had a hell of a time even getting the permission to examine him. All medical tests show that he’s dead and yet he’s moving. I don’t know what strings they pulled at the Home Office, but I finally got to get my scalpel into him. He’s definitely Harry Reid, deceased 1963. Dental records have confirmed it. He has no brain activity, no pulse, no respiration at all. And yet… he’s moving. He’s an absolute medical impossibility. Which is both exciting and yet also really fucking annoying. They’ve got me and my team trying to prove that he wasn’t dead before so that the case makes sense. Which we can’t, because he was.’

‘A fun morning, then.’

‘Infuriating. And wonderful. The decomposition is all wrong, which I think is what gives CID hope. He appears to have been preserved by some kind of chemical, rendering him so hard it was a nightmare to cut into him. He’s more like a rubber facsimile of a cadaver than the real thing.

‘His toxicology reads like a sci-fi novel. The tissue was positively reeking of alien contaminants.’

‘Alien?’

‘Steady, old girl, not in the space ship sense.’

‘That’s some relief.’

‘I’m not sure it is; at least that would have explained a few things. I’ve taken samples but I won’t have the analysis back for a few hours. It must be the cause of his condition because… well, Occam’s Razor – we’ve an unnaturally preserved corpse, and it’s packed full of unknown chemicals… Seems that the facts must be related.’

April pulled her brother’s set of old case notes out of her bag, rifling through them until she found the ancient pharmacology report for the sample taken from the warehouse. ‘Make a copy of that and let me know if your results match would you?’

‘Any reason why they would?’

‘Only a guess. Occam’s Razor again, I suppose. I have a feeling that a case my brother is working on might be heavily linked.’

‘Do you have any idea what could be going on?’ Thorpe took her hand. ‘All jokes aside, we’re looking at what my delightful trainee likes to call an “absolute clusterfuck”. I’m out of my depth and don’t mind admitting it.’

‘If I knew, I’d tell you,’ April replied, ‘but at the moment I’m as in the dark as you are.’

‘You’ve never been in the dark in your life, you infuriating cow.’

‘If only that were true; I’m just better at hiding it than the rest of you.’

c) Shad Thames, London

Tamar made her way upstairs, as much to get away from Derek’s constant chatter as to investigate the upper floor. She was sure the man meant well, but she was not interested in his conversation, only the return of her August.