After concluding the briefing, Matheson turned to his WC and said, “Parker, I rang up DS Towson to hound him about his failure to show at work. Had quite a talk with him.” A long uncomfortable pause ensued. “I’m afraid Towson’s put in for retirement. Sorry.” The superintendent hung his head for a moment, then turned and looked out of his window at the giant mirror-finished icicle advertising the Sport Centre Ski Slope on Gladstone.
“There’s something I need to say to all of you.” He glanced back at Shad and me, then glanced at his toilet door. “I have no one but myself to blame for all this. I went at this job by bits and bobs, always hoping to be called back to Greater Manchester, putting this—what I considered this silliness of AB Crimes—behind me. So many issues I let slide—pay, working conditions, the entire range of our special problems.” He glanced at the toilet door. “At the end of the day, I fear I’ve failed. I just hope I haven’t ruined this office and the entire national and world ABCD offices neck and crop.”
He nodded to himself. “AB Crimes is important work because murder is still murder whatever suit carries the imprint. I hope you will all carry on, but I’ll understand if anyone wants to bow out.” He stood there silently, the gloom in the office so heavy it ought to have posted health warnings. I felt the duck kick my ankle. I looked down at Shad, his nonexistent brows were furrowed, his beak was open, and his wings held out to his sides as he glared at me.
I faced the superintendent. “Well, sir, thank you kindly for the offer, but these are early days. Despite being terribly understaffed and underpaid, and despite the media’s current cant on AB Crimes, I’ve rather gone off the idea of packing it in just yet.”
He turned his head and looked at me. “Oh?”
“Parker is doing an admirable job conducting this investigation, sir, we have good leads, excellent detectives to follow up the leads, and it’s frankly only a matter of time until we have a suspect. I am confident that the three of us under your leadership will be more than equal to the task. If that’s all, sir?”
Matheson nodded, smiled, and nodded again. “Thank you, Jaggers.” He studied me for a moment and turned back to his window. “Thank you, gentlemen.”
Outside the superintendent’s office, the door closed behind the three of us, Shad looked up at me. “You do know you’re going to Hell.”
I glanced up at Parker and the gorilla nodded sadly. “If lying gets one Hell, inspector, you’re in for it. I can smell the brimstone.”
“Well. Perhaps I’ll be offered a position.”
While Parker chased down video archives, researched injured and killed pigeon inquiries, and attempted to reconstruct the casework on the Kumar matter, he followed up on the gas guns. I helped him until late afternoon when I was to meet with Dr. Reginald Koch, Bishop of Exeter. Since the lord bishop was something of an anti-amdroid fellow, Shad’s presence would likely cripple the interview’s focus. Hence, Parker had Shad continue service in the RPAF to try to find out more about Flanagan’s last patrol.
As I entered the ornate vine-leafed gothic entrance to the palace, I could hear a strange ghostly choir singing high above me. I backed out of the entrance, looked up, and in line high upon the crenellated edge of a decorative battlement above the entrance were the lads—all of Puss in Boots Flight, including Shad and Mathilda. They were singing Vera Lynn’s “When The Lights Go On Again.”
I made a rude gesture and pulled the chain. No one answered. Trying the latch, the door opened and inside the palace was a state of barely organized chaos. Carpenters, plasterers, plumbers, glaziers, decorators, architects, contractors, and bishop’s minions appeared to be engaged in a shouting and dust generating competition accompanied by power tools of several kinds joined by chipberries playing at top volume several types of music and things that might be music. The choking haze of dust seemed to be settling out on acres of dropcloths while mechs carried stuff from here to there and from there to here.
There was a fellow in dusty livery and I went over to him and waited for a break in the bellowing. He was of medium height, a slender human nat of about forty with black hair, dark gray eyes, and a mouth that looked as though he had been suckled by a lemon. When he noticed me, he smiled, cocked his head to one side, and said, “Yes?”
“I’m Detective Inspector Jaggers here to see Dr. Koch,” I yelled and held out my identification. “I have an appointment.”
His puckered upper lip curled slightly at the sight of my ABCD card. “Artificial Beings,” he said as though he had just discovered a decomposed badger in his pudding. “Come this way, inspector. Dr. Koch is expecting you.”
I followed him around jack mechs, ladders, scaffolding, and stacks of building materials into a long hall, the walls draped to protect them from construction dust and debris. As I followed my guide, I watched as he brushed off his green and black coat. “Forgive me for not answering the door, inspector, and for not introducing myself. Inexcusable, but you see how things are. My name is Fedders.”
“Not at all, Fedders. Making a few changes?”
“It seems endless, inspector. Parts of the palace date back to the thirteenth century and I’m afraid the subsequent centuries haven’t been kind.” He reached a blue glowing tarp field at the end of the hall. Reaching to his vest pocket, Fedders turned off the field, opened the almost black varnish-caked oaken door thus revealed, and leaned his upper body into the room beyond. “Detective Inspector Jaggers, milord.”
I couldn’t make out a response from within if there was one. The butler stood aside and held the door for me.
“Thank you, Fedders,” I said. I entered a study that was all that I imagined a bishop’s study should be: book-lined walls, green shaded lights, ornately carved wooden beams, luxuriously stuffed chocolate brown and green leather chairs, and a ceiling mural of one bewhiskered fellow I assumed to be God bestowing upon another bewhiskered fellow who resembled Burt Reynolds a pair of tablets numbered from one to ten. None of this was computer generated or liquid crystal; all quite real. In the midst of this actual and studious piety was the rear-on view of a remarkably overweight fellow in green plaid shorts, purple satin short-sleeved shirt, red and green argyle socks, and spiked red and yellow golf shoes. As he teetered upon his artery-lined legs, he was apparently attempting to knock golf balls with a putter across his solid green carpet into a container that resembled a highball glass.
“A moment, inspector,” said the man. His head came up and he was wearing a strange garment upon it that appeared to be a white leather tam with a purple visor and a large purple pom-pom on top. “I finished up an appearance at that three day golf thing at Oak Meadow in Starcross this morning. Abominable weather.”
He swung, he hit the ball, the ball rolled straight and true across the carpet just where physics sent it: wide of the glass and directly beneath a green leather chair studded with polished brass tacks. The Lord Bishop of Exeter raised a trembling hand gripping his putter above his head, made several gasping and choking noises that to my ear approximated certain Middle English nouns, verbs, and adjectives fighting for expression, then the hand came down. He put the putter handle-first into a large purple bag leaning against a built-in bookcase where the gleaming instrument joined his other implements of improbable relaxation.
“Not as young as I used to be,” said the bishop.
“It’s going around, milord.”
He wiped his fleshy red face with a purple towel. Lowering the towel, he regarded me for a moment, then tossed the towel in the general direction of his golf bag and seated himself in a brown leather chair next to a table that had a drink of some sort requiring a tiny pink umbrella up top and a polished silver tray beneath. He nodded toward another chair and I seated myself in it. He lifted his glass and asked, “Care for something to drink, inspector?”