Short Fiction – THE PERVERTED DETECTIVE

The detective got out of the car, hands in pockets of her shabby greatcoat, suit stiff and faded, patches on the knees of her trousers at her elbows, and went to Mr. Fleming’s house, at number fifteen on Newsome Road, watched by all the neighbours from behind their curtains. The road was steep and the weather brisk and the houses all frozen, northern terraces lined up for inspection; the paint on number fifteen’s door was cracked red. The garden was filled with weeds which she stepped over, her boots navigating the mess, shoving it aside, trampling it and breaking it all down, bringing order to chaos. Twice the wind nearly knocked her hat, her charming brown beret, clean off her head, and she had to use a hand to steady it. She came to the porch and to the sad red door. Above it was a sign that said BLESS THIS PLACE. The dusty windows had their placards proclaiming HOPE AND GLORY, THE IRON LADY YET LIVES, which made sense because it was election season. An old colourised photograph of the young Mrs. Thatcher decorated the poster, set against a soft blue background. The Iron Lady’s dead eyes watched the detective and the detective watched her back. She took out a cigarette and a Zippo lighter that was decorated with a scratched image of Dangermouse and she lit up and smoked. Her name was Amelia Tremble. She adjusted her tie and checked her hat in the window and smoked a little more. Then she hefted her lanky frame up to the door and rapped upon it. “Mr. Fleming!” she called. “LawOrd here. Please open the door.”

Click, went the latch. It swung open and Fleming was there, middle-aged decay in a chequered sweater, paunchy and with his hair greying, square face set in worry, his slippers too small for his feet and his watch too small for his wrist. “Blimy.” she said. “You look awful nervous. Hey, my name’s Detective Tremble. Some people call me Amy. You can call me that, if you want. Do you want to? I wouldn’t impose it on you, but I find these things always real bloomin’ awkward, you know, this whole police business, when everybody’s uptight and worried, when there’s this atmosphere of…” she paused, screwing her face up, scratching her hair, “what’s the word? Mistrust, nervousness, paranoia. Those all work. I think it’s better if we take it easy. Heck,” she smiled at him, “you don’t have to call me anything at all, if you don’t want. I’m a public servant, Mr. Fleming, and I don’t half take the meaning of that seriously – I’m here to serve the public, not to scare the living daylights out of them with threats and such. So if you could just let me in for a chat – yes, I think it’s important to ask for permission, and all! Just a few words and then we can all go back to our Saturday afternoon. Are you busy today, Mr. Fleming? Well, I’m sure you must have something to go back to, after our chat. Which is what,” she was inside his hallway now, floral wallpaper and a large mirror stained here and there, a light fitting with a broken glass shade, a little bookshelf carrying several paperbacks on bird-watching, “I wanted to ask about, anyway. Do you mind?”

“Um.” Fleming said. “Uh, no-” So Tremble went into the living room and sat down in one of the armchairs, a great plush entity covered with a florid quilt of many colours. There was a portrait of the queen on the wall, young and pretty and digital, her unreal skin smooth and shiny as a baby’s. On the mantelpiece were a series of model trains arranged in a long line. The Amstrad terminal took up one corner, its varnished wooden case marked all over with scratches and dents. Stacks of newspapers and magazines were layered upon the coffee table. She tented her fingers and reclined. Fleming took the opposite chair. “You married, Mr. Fleming?” Tremble asked. Fleming shook his head. “Bleeding heck, I’m right sorry. Not an artful question, is it? But I was only trying to make conversation. Say, did you catch the footy the other day?”

Fleming quivered. “Mr. Tremble-”

“Miss Tremble.” she said.

“Right. Miss.” He grunted, as if letting out a terrible bit of gas as quietly as possible. “I’m only too happy to assist the police with anything.”

“Ah!” She scratched her hair. “Terrible of me. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Ecky-thump. I wanted to ask you, Mr. Fleming – well, it’s not nice to talk about, so I suppose I was avoiding it, but we’ve had a call about you.”

His face was stern. But it had whitened. One hand tapped its index finger against the face of his watch. He swallowed. “A call?”

Tremble gurned in sympathy. “Aye. Now – oh, I hate having to ask this, but you don’t have any Continental friends, do you?” A strange kind of indignance passed over Fleming’s face like the shadow of a bird flitting overhead. “Continental! Detective, I assure you-”

She puffed out smoke. “Well, everyone bloomin’ assures us. Being a copper is a bit like being a pretty lady, you know; everyone is always just saying what they think we want to hear.” She leant forward, peering at his table; The Daily Mail, The Times, an old issue of Hurrah For The Dryboys. The smoke from her cigarette drifted unconcerned towards the ceiling fan. She pulled a face. “Speak any Frog, Mr. Fleming? Ever holidayed abroad? Got any opinions about the Soviets, the yanks, and so on? But you could give me any old guff, couldn’t you? But if someone calls in with these things I’m obliged, sorry to say, to chase things up, and so here I am. And anyway,” she gave him a friendly smile, “we already know you have a bit of GCSE French, and had an auntie out in Nice before the war, and you used to be a member of, heck, the Socialist Party, back in your youth. LawOrd ain’t what people say it is, but we are the plod, you know, and we do have a lot of files on a lot of things.” Fleming’s jaw moved. He tapped those fingers against his watch. One of the trains on the mantelpiece was the Flying Scotsman and it was a larger, more expensive model than the others and she liked that. She smoked in her seat. “Sugar!” she said. “Oh, but I didn’t mean to bleedin’ scare you. I’m just rabbiting on a bit. I don’t need to ask you any of that stuff. But what I do need to ask – heck, I’m very sorry – is about your whereabouts on the night of October 7^th.”

Fleming stopped tapping his watch. He seemed to chew something stuck in his mouth that he couldn’t be rid of. “October 7^th?”

“Aye. There was some mess out there, you remember. Terrible thing! A bombing of a Conservative Party meeting in this very town! A little homemade firecracker right under the councillors’ table. Some burns, some scared old men.” She tutted. “Deplorable! But anyway. Yes. Just a formality, Mr. Fleming. Never mind it. So where were you, that night?”

“I was at the pub with the gents.”

“The gents?”

“Harry Tiller and Mark Rotherham from the Model Train Society. We go every Wednesday.”

“All night?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you eat for dinner?”

“Fish and chips.”

“Which pub were you at?”

“The Lamb and Flag.”

“How many pints did you drink?”

“Seven or eight.”

“Seven or eight?”

“Eight.” he said at last. Tremble put her cigarette out in the ashtray next to last week’s Daily Mail (Our Boys See Off Continental Naval Incursion With British Grit!) and leant forward and grinned at him. “Heck! You’ve got a good memory, Mr. Fleming. Too good! Were you rehearsing that one in front of the mirror or what?”

“Detective-” Fleming began.

She slapped her knee with one hand. “Pulling your leg, mate! Come on. Right. Well, I’ll have to corroborate your story, obviously, but that all sounds good enough to me. You know, LawOrd isn’t as scary as people think!” She tapped her nose with a finger. “But mind you, can’t have the bleedin’ Euros know that!” Tremble stood up, looming over him. “I’ll see myself out, Mr. Fleming. Have a good day, will you? Hopefully we won’t see each other again!” She winked. “Unless I find my way to the Lamb and Flag on a Wednesday evening!” Haha, Fleming laughed weakly. Tremble left him there and as she had promised saw herself out, and when she was in the street again she adjusted her hat and stalked back out of the yard and into the street. A banner was being hauled through the grey sky, civilian plane cutting through the vagaries of cloud above, in its wake trailing the words PATRIOTS STAND AGAINST EUROPE!. Tremble went to the Austin Metro where Morris was sat behind the wheel waiting for her. “Trap set.” she said.

Morris leant out of the window smoking, big man with a mighty mop of dark curled hair, in turtleneck with chain about his neck, squinted at her, as he did at everyone. “You got the bugger?”

“Airtight alibi.” Tremble said, bending over to fit her enormous frame into the tiny car, she taking the passenger side. Morris edged to the right in his seat so she could fit. He had put his Webley on her seat and now he took it and slid it into the holster at his hip. “But that’s old news.” she said. “I’m trying something else. He knows we know, now. So I just need to keep my date with Cartwright and see what happens.”

Morris scowled. “Load of bloody guff. Stupid bastards. What do they think they’re doing? These raids aren’t even useful. Sodding ex-army wankers.”

“Language, please.” Tremble said. “But I agree. Or I would, if it didn’t just this once serve our purposes instead. We’ll see who turns up, eh, now that the boss has had a shot fired across his bows? Start car up, anyway. I want to go have a nap.”

“A nap?”

“Nothing we can do until tonight. Drop me off at home, would you, pet?”

“Shove off.” Morris said, gunning the engine. With a wheeze the Metro came to life and juddering and wobbling upon uneven road it set off down Newsome Road, up into the centre of Huddersfield where the old industrial buildings sat in heaps, shadowed by eternal hillside, the Yorkshire countryside rolling up and down in endless undulation beyond this shabby enclave of brick and stone; the mills and the old warehouses and offices, the fecund swamp in which British capitalism had long ago been born, were now decorated with election materials, Conservative posters of the Iron Lady, God rest her soul, and of Lady Fisher, boss of LawOrd and in a technical sense Tremble’s boss, thin face and grey hair and severe pouting frog-like face, and too the virtual queen, young Elizabeth III. They had made her breasts bigger for the election, Tremble noted. She was blushing like a virgin as she implored voters to stand up for Britain and reject Labour tyranny.  Morris took the Metro up past St. George’s Square, past the edifice of the station, where a group of Dryboys were holding a rally, in their suits and ties with their placards of Mrs. Thatcher and the queen, chanting OI OI LABOUR NONCES OUT TODAY and throwing rotten vegetables at a portrait of the leader of the Labour Party, who was currently in police custody anyway, if Tremble remembered correctly. As they drove on she saw Sergeant Sturridge there, the giant thug from Cartwright’s assault detachment, his suit too tight on him and his face gleeful as he chanted something uncouth about the Asian community. Morris wasn’t looking; he kept his eyes on the road and forced the Metro onward until the square was gone. “Stupid buggers.” he muttered. Soon they were out of the town centre and onto New North Road, the hillside looming, and then they came to Edgerton Grove, the suburbs, where alongside surviving old Victoriana were the squat boxes of the post-war houses, subdivided now into flats. It was quiet here and the noise of the Dryboys was far away. Morris parked the Metro outside number eight. The garden was clean, the grass freshly cut military-style. “Heck.” Tremble said. “Thanks for the lift.”

“Don’t get in over your head, lass.” Morris said. “Watch yourself. With Cartwright and that.”

She grinned. “Yes, sir!” And the Metro chugged away and she started down the cracked paving-stone path to the door, which was faded white plastic with a window of frosted glass through which she could already see Sam waiting for her. She waited there and waited and then the door swung open. “Alright.” Sam said, long dark vampire hair, t-shirt and joggers, freckled cheeks, chewing on a toothpick. “You win.” And they hugged. It was a Saturday afternoon and there was little else to do, so it was that Tremble went to her room and took off her work gear and changed into her pyjamas and slipped into bed with a tape on the Amstrad portable. It was Mr. Video, faux-Japanese underground. Tremble lay there with her headphones in and listened and fell into the usual comforts, the dreams of foreign places, people, lands. At some point Sam came to join her in bed. It was a long period of emptiness; the cracked wallpaper of the flat, the stink of tobacco smoke on Tremble’s clothes, the shifting patterns as flies dithered about the bedroom window, the sensation of Sam’s fingers on hers; these were all written in the air by the tape, which worked its way deep into her brain and unspooled it. Tremble did not know how to turn off, others had said. The tape could do that for her and so that was why she liked it. “Say,” Sam offered, swigging Chivas Regal from the bottle, “you said you’re going out tonight?”

“Work.” Tremble said, reclining under the Batman sheets.

“Wow.” Sam said. “Serious?”

“Aye.”

“You want fishfingers for dinner?”

“Aye.” She was aware, from the depths of her tape-stupor, of Sam’s hands upon her side. Watching from within herself she saw her roommate kiss her, felt it from very far away. “Do you want to-?” Sam was asking, but Tremble closed her eyes and returned to fantasy Japan. Now, what did she know about Japan? Tremble had been born in Huddersfield after the war; had never spoken to a foreigner in her life. But – for a minute, a precious minute, submerged within the tape’s brain-tickling subliminal beats, she could imagine, perhaps, what it was like to be elsewhere, to see other worlds, to feel Sam upon her kissing her and doing other more impolite things and so on, as not only what she was, working-class semi-broke unemployed lodger who mixed illegal neurotapes for fun, but as the portent of some kind of possibility, which she had never found in waking life – when she woke up it would be Huddersfield again, God help her, but for now she was thinking, in the non-thinking way of the tape addict, of the general atmosphere of Japan, the platonic ideal of Japaneseness. But Plato too had been a foreigner. Sam occupied her otherwise anyway, driving these thoughts aside. Later, after the tape and the whiskey and the sex, they ate Birdseye fishfingers sat on the floor of the living room, two plates and her fork and her fork and a big pile of ketchup and BBC1 on the telly, The Weakest Link, where a contestant was struggling with a question about which one of four things was Winston Churchill’s greatest achievement: Smashing the Hun, Starving the Indians, Slapping the Japs, or Starting the Iron Lords Program Which Liberated Noble Britannia From Continental Oppression. “I wonder,” said Sam, “if they ever used to have questions about other places on here. Like all the questions are about Britain and how great it is. Did they ever ask about other places and stuff?”

“I’m sure they did.” Tremble said.

“Bollocks! Like the EU, and America, and that?”

“And Japan.” Tremble said, eating fishfingers. “I think they must have. I think they must have deleted all those questions after the war. That’s why they repeat sometimes now. The Beeb is really strict about this stuff. Do you remember that Frenchman they had in Eastenders?”

“No.” Sam said. “When was that?”

“Oh, ecky-thump. About ten years ago. Just a bit part, but he was in one scene and then his name was in the credits, and they noticed he had a really French name, something very foreign. I think they shot someone over it.”

Sam whistled. “Ten years ago. I was, what, twelve?”

Tremble ruffled her hair. “Sugar! You don’t need to remind me.”

“Feeling your age?”

“A little bit.”

Sam kissed her. “You definitely fuck like a lady, I’ll say.” Tremble slapped her softly on the rear. “Sorry. I meant it as a compliment. All gentle and quiet. It’s cute.”

“Not for that.” Tremble said. “For your language.” After The Weakest Link there was a special news program on the war, as there was every night these days. The Coastal Patrol Group had sunk sixteen Continental ships and there had been a raid by the MetalWarriors upon a Soviet terrorist cell in Glasgow and for the tenth year in a row the British economy had outperformed the collected Continent, the EU Nazis now down to 1930s levels of sustenance according to top boffins from the University of Oxford. Final victory soon, fellow Britons, Andrew Marr intoned solemnly. Tremble checked her watch and saw that it was seven, and she peeled Sam away from her and went to go put her costume back on. She went outside and Sam lingered in the doorway and they shared a furtive kiss – you never do know when the neighbours are watching, or also working for LawOrd and really watching, just so something can go in your file just in case – and she hopped onto the old Raleigh and fixed her hat on her head and set off under the irregular glow of the streetlights, for power rationing was back for the duration of the current Continental offensive, to go find Lieutenant Cartwright and find out if Mr. Fleming was smarter or stupider than she had thought. She rode on in the dark of the countryside with her light on pushing the Raleigh forward on the empty roads – a fuel shortage, too, she remembered – downhill and then up again as she left Huddersfield and found herself surrounded by the silhouette form of splendid English valley on all sides, pockmarked with the concrete and steel of the military outposts, the anti-vampire bunkers, and the great surveillance pylons, and soon she came to Scapegoat Hill, the village on the hill surrounded by fields. It was here that Cartwright had arranged things.

Tremble cycled up past the fields and came to a stop at the edge of the village. The chapel was the staging ground, a small two-floor Baptist structure with its windows all boarded up, the trees around it shading a formation of assembled LawOrd Raid Department troopers in their dark uniforms, readying their L85A4 rifles and checking their gear. Tremble in her suit and coat and hat ambled up to this. She found Cartwright near the MetalWarrior they’d brought, overseeing as techies checked it over. He blonde-haired and fierce, with a scarred cheek and a touch of grey to his beard, saw her there. “Oh, bloody hell.” he spat in thick Leeds accent. “You.”

“Evening, lieutenant.” she said brightly. The MetalWarrior looked down upon her from behind its armoured mask. It was not one of Mrs. Thatcher’s revered Iron Lords, which had saved Britannia from Continental annihilation back in the eighties – for a job like this out in the country, good God! – but only a local police conversion, some veteran officer strapped into a coffin with arms and legs with wires threaded all through his organs so he wouldn’t think of ever getting out. He carried a 40mm cannon as if it were a pistol, his great steel bulk shuddering with anticipation. SGT. COTTON, the nameplate on his breast said. “Evening, sergeant.” she said to him.

“EVE-NING.” Cotton said. His mechanical eyes glowed like fading coals.

“Don’t talk to the bloody tinman.” Cartwright snapped. “Christ, are you going to fuck this up, eh, lass?”

“I don’t intend to.” she said, smiling. Cartwright slammed a magazine into his rifle and they were off – sixteen men and the MetalWarrior and she all piling into a waiting truck and going down the hillside for fifteen minutes, into the hills. It was a cold night and she hugged herself, sat next to Sergeant Derrick and Corporal Wilkes, who both ignored her as if she were something they’d stepped in they couldn’t quite stop and wipe off the underside of their boot just yet. “Oi, queer, where’s your sidearm?” another soldier, Private Martins, asked.

“I don’t like to use guns.” she said cheerfully. “Bloomin’ dangerous things, eh?”

“It’s regulation to carry a gun.” Cartwright said from somewhere to her right. “Even for you lot, surely.”

“Well, yes.”

“What’s with that hat?” Martins said. “That ain’t French, is it?” A sudden tension seized the whole of the vehicle. Tremble adjusted her beret. “No, I don’t believe so. Montgomery had one like it, you know?” They headed out into the dark towards Marsden, into the gurgling happy nowhere of the Butterly Reservoir. The truck stopped by the edge of a field and they disembarked and took up positions crouched over the reservoir’s spillway, a long pathway through which the water rumbled and sang to itself. On the other side of the spillway was a long field and the men were ready on the hillside looking down. The MetalWarrior was with them crouched in their midst, his enormous weapon thrust into the night sky. They waited like this for five minutes. Tremble was at their rear, unarmed, cold and tired and missing her tapes. They waited for ten minutes. The men were all tightly-wound and strained and kept muttering to one another. Twenty-five minutes passed. Forty minutes passed. Tremble’s legs ached and she was colder but she had smoked a cigarette discreetly a few minutes ago and that had helped. “Christ.” Private Martins said. “What the fuck is going on?”

Tremble checked her watch. She judged it had been long enough. “Allow me to explain.” she said, standing up. “Every week at this time Investigation spies have noticed that there’s a clandestine meeting here at the spillway of the Butterly Reservoir, between NATO-Soviet sympathizers distributing samizdat in the villages around Huddersfield. This is where they make their deliveries. You boys in Raid decided to watch and wait, to get them in the act, and now, finally, you all got all dressed up and came out here to make your move, only to find that there is no meeting here between enemies of the people tonight after all.”

“I can bloody well see that.” Cartwright growled. “What the hell? Why aren’t they here?”

She scratched her hair. “It appears I warned them off.” Now he and all the other Raid troopers – all but Cotton, the MetalWarrior – were upon her, great looming shadows in the night. “Look,” Cartwright said, “you little fucking dyke bitch. You might get Chaffer on side because he likes you or whatever, but I know what you bloody well are, you freak, and if you’re mucking up Raid operations like this-”

“I’m going to do her proper,” someone mumbled, loud enough to hear, “fucking mouthy little bint, she is-”

“I’ll cure her, no matter-”

“They let these pervs do government work-”

“Shut up, you lot!” Cartwright barked. He turned to her and beneath his helmet his eyes were fierce and hard. “Now you. Explain.”

Tremble cleared her throat. “Beg your pardon. Heck, but I was only going to say, Lieutenant Cartwright, that thanks to your work here I can apprehend a key suspect in this investigation. So don’t worry. You’ll all get nice write-ups for your cooperation with us. Sorry for keeping you all in the dark, boys! Silly girlie that I am, I fretted over it, believe you me! But you know, operational security and all that.” She then smiled at them, these fearsome men who were rounding upon her. Only the MetalWarrior kept to himself. Was it sympathy she saw in his electric eyes? Impossible to say. She merely kept her smile up as she had been taught. “Alright.” Cartwright said. “It’s – it’s a pleasure to cooperate, then. Detective.” His men grumbled but did nothing. The MetalWarrior studied the night sky with his 40mm. And they got back into the truck and went back to Scapegoat Hill, and she bid them all a good night and went to where she’d parked her bike and before she got on she let out a deep breath and hugged herself for a while. Then she got on her bike and went to go visit Mr. Fleming again.

The house was the same and yet not, the street dark and therefore its disrepair hidden; she approached it calmly, thinking of nothing much in particular. Her boots repeated their path through the garden. She came to the door and rapped on it hard. “Mr. Fleming!” she called. “Gosh, I’m sorry, but I need to speak to you!” There was no reply. Tremble took out the spare key she’d had made yesterday and slid it into the lock. She slipped inside. The hallway was black, the floral wallpaper and the great mirror obscured. She crept along carefully. There was the faint sound of a creak from the living room, a floorboard stepped upon. Tremble followed it and found the two armchairs and the trains on the mantelpiece and the Amstrad terminal and Fleming there waiting for her, with a Browning Hi-Power in his hands which was trained at her heart. “Ah.” she said, stopped in the doorway. The other armchair was piled up with a leather suitcase open, packed with clothes and toiletries. “You know, that would make you look very suspicious.” she said. “Leaving town straight after our interview.”

“You little cow.” Fleming spat. “You – you bloody knew, didn’t you? You knew-”

“Well, I’m no expert, Mr. Fleming, but I knew that you couldn’t be got for the October 7^th bombing. We already checked out what you were doing that night, and aye, you were at the pub all evening, talking trains. You clever clogs! But they got Al Capone for tax evasion, you know, and when I heard about this little case our Raid lads were working on with samizdat deliveries – I wondered if I couldn’t get our suspect number one for planning October 7^th for something like that instead. I wondered if he might not have a hand in that samizdat business, too, and whether I might be able to,” she scratched her hair, “bleedin’ heck, how do you say it? Provoke him, so to speak. Into doing something silly like panicking after a little chat with a LawOrd officer, and calling off the night’s leaflet deliveries and trying to flee town afterwards, providing her with causal evidence of his involvement with the socialists so he could be brought in for questioning. And I will certainly say, it doesn’t hurt that you’re currently threatening to,” she looked at the gun, “shoot that same poor LawOrd officer to death.”

“That’s not legal evidence.” he said. “None of it is.”

“Well, no.” she said. She smiled, her real smile. “But that’s the fun of being a copper in the reign of the virtual queen, ain’t it? It all depends on my intuition, and I do have a fairly good feeling about who you are now.” Now Fleming paused. A pain seemed to strike him. He could not tap his watch now but she saw those same fingers twitch. “Look.” he said. “You’re young, right?”

“Not that young.”

“You don’t remember what it was like before. Before Thatcher and her bloody war – before those metal machine-men of hers, those fucking Iron Lords, marched over the channel and tried to take over Europe and were pushed back as they deserved to be. Before we were trapped here, in this prison, by American and European guns, by those Tory dictators!” His voice had risen and his pupils had narrowed. His trigger finger was not yet in place, she saw.  “This ain’t bloody supposed to be England!” he said. “We were supposed to have a better future than this, this grey little living-dead fake country with its fake living-dead monarch!” Now he calmed himself. His eyes found her afresh. “You don’t know anything about that, detective.”

“You’re right.” she said, her voice low. They watched one another in the gloom, the living room a frozen edifice, a display of some hypothetical model Briton’s life. A museum exhibit from the far future, where one day England would be a curiosity for the impossible citizens of elsewhere and tomorrow. “I don’t know what it was like before Thatcher.” she said. “You think I’m a silly young lass who doesn’t remember history, and I’m not young really, but it’s true that I don’t know much about what went before. It’s But I do know, Mr. Fleming, that I’m silly, yes, but only because unluckily for me I was born as some kind of strange person, a freak, a pervert, and what-have-you; that I can’t survive by being honest and brave and good, in this New Jerusalem, and that all I know how to do is hold myself right close to the whirling blades and hope I’m too near for them to hit me. I’m a big fat coward, basically. But heck, this is lucky for you, at least. Because cowards like me don’t much like trouble. If you put that gun down and come with me, then I’ll be in charge of your processing and not whatever Raid team finds you hiding out in the moors in a few weeks’ time.” Tremble stepped forward. Fleming’s trigger finger twitched but did not touch the trigger. His eyes were desperate; pleading. “I’ll give you a fair time of it.” she said. She held out a hand to him. “I promise, Mr. Fleming.”

“I could shoot you.” he said. His form in the unlit room was a sketch of itself, a shadowed thing that suggested the actuality of him. Tremble nodded. She did not lower her hand. “Aye.” she said. “You well could.” He did not shoot her. She sighed with relief and took the old man’s gun – he was only perhaps a decade older than her, but in that moment he seemed as old as her grandfather – and raised her watch and called in Morris, who had been waiting at the station all night and would be grateful, she had the impudence to think, that she hadn’t been shot to death. Then there was nothing to do but wait. Tremble sat back down in the armchair and so did Fleming, sans firearm, and with that placed on the coffee table between them with the newspapers and with the lights turned on the room almost felt its normal self. Although nothing would ever be normal again, she supposed, for its owner. But better she than Detective Black, or that thug Fairclough, or heaven forbid someone like Cartwright on a Raid manhunt. It was not a good deed, that which she had done today, but it was less bad than some others. “Would you like some tea?” Fleming asked her.

“Oh, yes please!” she said. He poured them a cup of Tetley each, his with milk and hers with two sugars, and they sat and sipped. “Say,” she said, “I have a question.”

“Yes?” he asked. His quivering had almost stopped. They were utterly alone in the world, only this rotting old house and this cluttered old living room existing. Tremble drank her tea. “You know The Weakest Link?” she asked.

“Yes?”

She sat forward, serious. “They used to ask questions about other places on there, right?”

“They did.”

“Blimey! Like the EU, and America, and Japan and that?” Fleming nodded. Tremble sat back, thinking. There was a car pulling up outside, the Metro’s corrugated stutter. Morris’s great shadow was approaching down the garden path. Tremble gave Fleming her smile, her real, real smile. “I think,” she said, “if people can just keep on remembering that they used to talk about foreign countries on the telly, then everything might one day be alright again.” Fleming stared at her. She winked. “But then, I’m just a pervert. Heck. So who knows?”