The Vacant Casualty (16 page)

They began to walk downhill, Bradley keeping ahead on the lookout for the treeline which they should soon enter, and they held their golf clubs up and ready in as menacing a pose as they
could.

They soon came across what looked like some farm buildings and attracted the barking attention of a dog, making them skirt the property as widely as possible, going back uphill for a few hundred
yards before turning south again. Soon they were at a fence and climbing into the woods.

‘So, do you think that the old ladies killed Terry Fair-breath, then?’ asked Sam.

‘I’m not sure. I’d say whatever he was interested in, they are trying to keep secret. But whether that means they killed him, I don’t know.’

‘They’ve certainly got the intent to carry it out.’

‘Well, yes, that is true. But maybe they scared him and he simply ran away.’

They had now been creeping silently through the woods for some minutes, and were thoroughly disorientated by the absolute darkness all around them. A large bruise was forming on top of
Bradley’s head, along with a decided headache compounded by the knock he’d received, the hangover that was setting in and thoughts of how he would explain all this to both his wife and
his Superintendent. For his part, Sam didn’t think he had broken any ribs, but he was pretty sure he had perforated a kidney, if that was the sort of thing that you could do by falling thirty
feet or so into a field. Almost all of his back muscles were bruised. His calves ached, one knee had a nasty shooting pain in it and he still had absolutely no idea where he might go to sleep later
on. If, that was, they survived the night.

Suddenly the trees seemed to clear and a small fraction of light peeped through from the night sky. A dark shape loomed above them, one that seemed large and out-of-place enough to make them
both stop.

‘What
is
that?’ asked Sam. ‘It’s too tall to be a shed . . .’

‘Or a hut,’ said Bradley, blinking to get a better view. ‘It’s too dense to be a tree. It’s sort of
man
-shaped.’

Bradley swung his golf club and thwacked it in the middle. ‘It’s soft,’ he reported. ‘Sort of like a huge rock made out of flesh.’

The object they were standing in front of then cleared the matter up by suddenly doubling in height, turning around on two giant legs, opening a mouth about as wide as a sofa and roaring.

‘It’s a bloody PERSON!’ shouted Bradley, sprinting past it. Sam remained rooted to the spot, staring up at the furious face some thirty feet above and feeling that he was
suddenly in the middle of one of Roald Dahl’s nightmares.

‘Run!’ he shouted. Then he noticed that Bradley was nowhere to be seen, and that the creature had raised a fist angrily over its head. ‘Shit!’ he said, darting between
its legs, and bolted down the hill.

That both had suddenly disappeared, slightly bewildered the creature for a moment, and they sprinted downhill to make as much headway as possible, hearing heavy footsteps and further roaring
behind them. Feeling the need for silence was now at an end, and that being chased by an ogre was no time to maintain decorum, both screamed wildly as they sprinted and flung themselves over a
solid wooden fence that appeared in front of them. They landed and rolled, and skidded down a bank, then staggered to their feet and looked upwards.

There was a beat of silence, then the ogre burst through the fence as though it was made out of nothing sturdier than a collection of breadsticks. They yelped again and ran on at full speed.

Finding themselves in the front yard of someone’s country house, they flew in through the side door of an enormous, barn-sized garage. Locking it behind them, they then tiptoed to the
back, crouched at the far end of the room and waited, hoping by some chance that the ogre might have been tricked or confused by their disappearance.

‘What
is
that?’ whispered Bradley.

‘An ogre, I think.’

‘An
ogre
?’

‘Well, I think so. Or a really, really expensive children’s toy gone wrong.’

Another extremely loud roar told them that their hiding place was not safe, and they saw the enormous creature tear through the garage’s aluminium door as though it was no stronger than
kitchen foil.

The two men mewed in fear, fell back and tumbled out of the back door that flew open as they fell against it. Finding the hillside still stretching out beneath them, they leapt and ran until
they came to an ancient stone wall constructed of paving slabs. They clambered up, jumped down on the other side and found themselves standing on the verge of a road, then ran across and looked
back tensely. This time, they felt, they might have been quick enough to evade the monster’s notice.

It was with a mixture of abject fear and grinding inevitability that they saw the giant figure smash through the stone wall as though it had been made from nothing stronger than – well,
you get the picture. It was flippin’ strong.

They clutched each other. Between them here or there they might have let out a little squeak of terror, or an imprecation for their mummy to be near, or a regret at some life ambition that
remained unfulfilled. But largely, as the gargantuan creature took one mighty step towards the road, they watched it in terrified and quaking silence.

Then, with a giant
whumf
, it disappeared.

Bradley and Sam continued holding each other and whimpering for a few more moments, inclined to believe that in the extremity of their terror it was their eyes or brains failing them, rather
than the huge animal in human form (which might or might not be classified as an ogre) that had vanished.

G
RADUALLY
, as a minute or so passed and the animal failed to reappear, their breathing slowed, and Detective Inspector Bradley and Sam unlocked from
each other’s arms.

Cautiously they stepped forward until they were looking at where they had last seen the ogre standing.

‘Odd,’ said Bradley.

This was possibly something of an understatement, and Sam, who was a fan of understatement, but rarely managed it himself, cast the detective an admiring glance. They had crossed this short
stretch of earth themselves only ten seconds before the ogre, and yet where firm earth had supported their footsteps, now there was quite clearly nothing but a large hole in the ground. It went
down so far that there was no bottom, that they could see.

‘
Very
odd,’ agreed Sam. They listened out for the ogre for a minute or so, persuading themselves that they heard distant noises, but could not be sure. Then suddenly there
came a deep rumbling below the ground that shook them off their feet again, and, crawling backwards at first, then getting up and running, they got as far away from the hole as possible.

‘That noise was no ogre,’ said the detective.

‘It felt like an
earthquake
. What the hell is going on? There are no earthquakes in this part of the countryside.’

‘Hey,’ said Bradley. ‘Let’s stop this guy. Quickly!’

There was a station wagon coming along the road and they both frantically waved it down. The driver was a grey-haired middle-aged man, and he wound down his window.

‘Thank God you stopped,’ Bradley told the man. ‘We desperately need a lift to Fraxbridge.’

‘That’s fine, I’m going that way,’ said the man. ‘Hop in.’

They got in and slumped back on the seats, hardly able to believe their luck.

‘Thank God you came,’ repeated Sam. ‘We just narrowly avoided an assassination attempt by a gang of old grannies!’

‘Oh, yes?’ said the man, pulling off.

‘Yes, but we got away.’

‘Then my car exploded,’ added Bradley.

‘Oh dear,’ said the man.

‘And we got chased by a huge ogre.’

‘An ogre, you say?’ said the man, concentrating on his driving.

‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘Thirty feet tall, and able to smash a wall with its fists.’

‘It was terrifying,’ added Bradley.

‘Doesn’t sound very pleasant at all,’ agreed the man.

‘It wasn’t! But luckily, just before it was going to get us and tear us into shreds, a huge hole appeared in the side of the hill and sucked it down.’

‘Oh,’ said the man.

‘A huge hole,’ added Bradley. ‘Just like that, out of nowhere!’

‘That’s lucky,’ said the man. ‘Where you going to in Fraxbridge, then?’

‘The police station,’ said the detective glumly. He and Sam leant against the windows and stared out, watching what they could see of the countryside sliding by in the darkness.

‘You mind if I put on Radio 3?’ asked the man.

They both sighed.

A
LOT OF THE TIME
being insomniac could be a terrible affliction, thought Mrs Elizabeth Bottlescum, as the clock struck two and she climbed weary and
sleepless from her bed to make her way downstairs. But even if one was just a humble old lady in a quiet little English village like this, there were small consolations. For instance, she thought
as she climbed back up the stairs, she could perch here by the bedroom window with her bottle of sherry and her Sudoku puzzle on her knee, and watch the moonlit streets.

In these quiet hours there were many things she could contemplate and allow to wander through her mind. Her childhood in the north London suburbs; the family holidays in rugged, mountainous
Scotland; those heartbreaking months of being sent away to live with strangers during the Blitz; and her husband’s absolutely massive, colossal wanger. Thick as a milk bottle and as long as
his foot. Amazing to behold. It was a wonder he could get about, she had often thought.

God, she missed that thing.

‘HMS
Dreadnought
’, he used to call it. That was a bit of a turn-off, of course. And the way he used to show off, using it to change channels on the television, or break empty
the bottles of stout on the kitchen counter when he was one over the eight. Five bottles was his record. Bloody idiot.

‘Come on, Pocket,’ she said, pouring a splash of sherry into the cat’s bowl.

She looked out over the rooftops, heard a distant rumble and saw the trees sway in a sudden gust of wind.

‘That farting noise again,’ she said. ‘God knows where it’s coming from. Horrible smell too.’ Even in a quiet place like this, she thought, where people were
supposed to have everything and be happy, there was always some trouble. She had seen what she was sure was a police detective pottering around – oops! Careful, she told herself. One
mustn’t use the word ‘potter’, all the residents knew that. She glanced at the large house at the top of the hill. One didn’t want to displease the world-famous celebrity
author who definitely
did not
secretly live in the locale. She nodded and raised her sherry glass.

‘God bless you, ma’am,’ she said, and drank a toast to the fortune that had flooded into the town since she had moved nearby. Admittedly it had meant those shops taking on
ridiculous new names – Ye Olde Bakery and such like. She had kept an eye on the semi-secret gay porn parlour that Ralph Tingsdale was running out of his garage in the hope that he would put
up a sign reading The Olde Bi-Curiositye Shoppe but to no avail.

It certainly was blissful living in such a beautiful small place as this. Quiet. Tranquil. And no immigrants. What’s more, beneath the surface everyone was doing each other and trying to
make money on the sly, while pretending to be terribly nice all the time. And if there was anything that Elizabeth Bottlescum loved (since the HMS
Dreadnought
had gone to the great
ship-breaking yard in the sky) it was a seething hotbed of gossip.

And now there was a detective snooping around, asking questions! She scarcely dared wonder what he was likely to dig up. Who was it he was investigating? Oh yes, that Terry Fairbreath fellow.
The thought half-stirred something in Elizabeth’s memory and she frowned for a moment, but it refused to come. What was it now? Had
she
by any chance seen something? She was sure there
was something there. Something about someone being on fire . . . Being shot at . . . Bows and arrows, perhaps . . . But quickly the images blurred with the John Wayne Western she’d been
watching on the television the day before – which had been just super – and whatever she had been trying to think of was gone.

‘If it comes, it comes,’ she told herself. ‘I can’t force it.’ She was getting terribly forgetful these days, it was true. There was that rhubarb pie she had left
in the oven all night last week. And that boy she had found trapped down a well – once she got home she popped the kettle on and then the thought went right out of her head and only came back
a week later. Silly old ditz!

There came a sudden booming noise, startling her awake. Over the rooftops shone a bright jet of orange flame. She thought at first one of the houses had exploded, but then saw that the flame had
taken the shape of an enormous dong-and-balls, flaming there in the sky.

‘Oh, those wizard boys down at the school,’ she chuckled to herself. ‘Will the teachers never get them under control?’ She leaned back in her chair, sherry in one hand
and the other stroking Pocket on her lap. As her gaze rested on the huge cock in the sky, her mind naturally turned once more to the HMS
Dreadnought
and the adventures they used to have in
the old days.

Gradually she fell into a doze, a smile on her lips and all thoughts of the fate of Terry Fairbreath quite forgotten.

W
HEN THEY REACHED
Fraxbridge police station Bradley and Sam signed in and then went upstairs to sit and plan their next move. Bradley knew he should
report all that had happened to his superiors and allow the law to take its course, but (on consultation with Sam as to the correct genre behaviour), he decided the case would likely be taken away
from him, and he was determined to solve it on his own.

‘I don’t care if I have to kick arses and get in trouble,’ he said, ‘but I’ll solve this goddamn case myself and damn the lot of them. How was that?’
‘Pretty good,’ said Sam.