[Danny]

My Creative Juices have been flowing, and have spawned a 5th Chapter...

Chapter 5

“No entry, ‘cept police – Oh, sorry, Constable; yer can go up.”

Visk put away his badge and began to mount the crumbling staircase of the old warehouse. The slig bodyguards at the bottom seemed to have been successful at keeping the public out of the building, judging by the huge crowd gathering outside. Even reporters and the glukkon’s old colleagues had been denied access.

“Oh, there y’are, Visk. No point coming up here, we’re more or less done with forensics here. The body’s on its way ter the pathologist already.”

“Find anything int’restin, sarge?”

Frack smiled. “As it happens, we’re in luck. The bullet used was quite an expensive one – only two or three shops in the city sell them.”

“Shall I get this down to the Records Office, then?”

“Yeah,” Frack nodded, “Get them ter cross-reference the card numbers from the gun shops with any shops that sell the kind of knives we saw in the other killing, and I suppose yer could narrow it down by bringing in the shoes, if yer need ter…”

“Right. What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna go get the pathologist’s report. Meet you back at the station this evening, okay?”

“’k…” They set off in their appropriate directions.

* * *

The Kryellos Records Office is a small bunch of rooms, hidden away in the dark basement beneath the Library. Lit by a dim bulb that seemed to highlight the darkness instead of dispelling it, the offices gave Visk the impression of being buried alive. The air was stale, and every surface caked in dust. The record books themselves gave the impression that they had not been moved since they were put there in the first place (which was, of course, true for most of them).

Treading softly between the shelves of files, Visk was careful not to make any sudden movements that might disturb the years of dust, and was almost afraid to break the oppressive silence…

“You again…”

Surprised, Visk spun round, trying to find the origin of the dry voice that was lost among the tonnes of crisp untouched paper in the room. Squinting through the dimness and the dust, he managed to make out a small desk in one corner of the room. Approaching it, he muttered under his breath. “Oh f*ck, not him again…”

The familiar glukkon stared at him once more. “I had hoped I’d seen the last of you…”

“What are you doing here?”

“One job in Records sadly failed to pay the bills, so I was forced to take the job at KV Construction to supplement my meagre wages. What are you doing here?”

Visk rubbed his forehead. “Look, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible, shall we? I’ve got this bullet,” he held up the plastic bag with the bullet in, “And I need you to track down its owner. It’s a Scrab .22.”

To his credit, the Glukkon only raised one eyebrow. “They’re not cheap… But even though there are only a small number shops that sell them, they still have many customers, any one of whom could have fired this bullet. Do you want a list of them all?”

Visk shook his head, dislodging some dust that had settled on his head in the short time he’d been standing there, and sending him into a fit of coughing, much to the glukkon’s amusement. When he had regained his composure, Visk pulled out his notebook, and began to read. “I want a list of all credit card numbers that have been used to buy a Scrab .22 gun, at least one pair of Glarmani shoes (size 7 or 9), and some kind of knife roughly this shape.” He showed the glukkon the sketch, and the glukkon nodded.

“The list will be at the station by tomorrow. Thank you, and have a nice day.”

****ing Bureaucrat, Visk thought. “Thank you,” he said, “I’ll try my best…”

When he reached the surface, Visk almost choked on the comparatively fresh air, and vowed never to set foot in there again…

* * *

“…entered the skull just above the eye socket…”

Visk turned, shut the door again, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. He’d seen too many bodies over the past couple of days to want to see one cut up. Just a week before, he’d have been eager to see what goes on in the Pathologist’s Lab, but now he just wanted to sleep.

The door swung open, and Visk heard Frack’s voice softly beside his ear. “You okay, Visk? Yer didn’t stay in there long, did yer?” Visk shook his head, and didn’t open his eyes. “Well, yer’ll be fine coming in now. Lans’s finished the Autopsy now, so I’m just hearin’ his report. Wanna listen in?”

Visk nodded, and followed Frack into the Lab. The corpse was lying face-down on an operating table, covered by a sheet up to the neck. Lans was stood over it, examining an open wound in the back of the head with a pair of tweezers, and enjoying the activity far too much.

Lans was the station’s chief pathologist. A young vykker, Lans was disturbingly enthusiastic about his morbid job. When there were no murder victims to dissect, Lans was usually to be found cutting up small animals. There were many rumours running around the station as to where he got hold of these creatures, but he had been spotted at least once scraping small furry lumps from the roadside… Visk tried his hardest not to think about what people like Lans did before the Constabulary was founded…

“Ah, Constable Visk, I thought it was you. Come on in, come in, I was just getting to the Exit Wounds… Shall I recap from the start for you?”

Visk shuddered, pulled up a chair, and tried to think happy thoughts. Frack nodded, suppressing a smile.

“Well, the first bullet entered the upper back, just below the shoulder. That bullet was still lodged in the shoulderblade when the body came to me. Now, interestingly, the second bullet entered the skull just above the eye-socket, meaning that the victim most likely turned around in between the two shots. We can tell that this one on the back of the head was the Exit Wound rather than the Entry Wound because of the interesting pattern of dispersion we can see around the wound, where the flesh was literally blown away from the hole by the force of the bullet.” Visk tried not to watch the vykker’s hands, which almost seemed to be attempting to re-enact the formation of the wound… “Now, according the Sergeant Frack, the body was found lying against the wall, facing the stairs up from the lower floor, which suggests that the victim’s killers followed the victim up from the stairs from the lower floors. This is where the investigation passes out of my field of expertise, so I’ll leave Frack to fill in the rest…” Lans seemed genuinely unhappy at having to stop his morbid but animated presentation, but soon got over it, and eagerly began tugging at the flesh on the corpse’s head with his tweezers again…

Visk turned away, slightly nauseously, and left without a word. Frack followed him, but Visk was walking away too quickly down the corridors for conversation, so it wasn’t until they got outside onto the mock battlements, and Visk stopped to breathe the fresh air, that Frack was able to continue where Lans had left off. “We’ve interviewed Kilk’s bodyguards. They started runnin’ up the stairs at the sound o’ the first shot. By the time the second shot went off, they were almost on the floor where the shooting took place. But they still didn’t see the killers, which means that the killers couldn’t have come down the stairs as well as up. The bodyguards did a full search o’ that floor, and found nothing. The only other way the killers could have got out of that building was out of a window.”

Visk looked up, breathing steadily again now. “A window? But they were four floors up!”

“I know. Which means, unfortunately, that we may be dealin’ with professional assassins, rather than just killers.”

“So they might not be easy to catch?”

Frack shook his head. “Not just that. Even once we’ve caught them, we still won’t have caught the real killers: whoever ordered it.”

Visk turned away, looking out over the city. The sun was sinking below the horizon in a haze of crimson, with orange and pink streamers reaching out across the sky, as if the sun were reaching out to grasp the whole city in its thin, colourful fingers. The city, oblivious to the sun’s efforts, continued in its business almost as actively as it did during the day. Cities in Mudos never slept.

Frack reached out a hand, placing it gently on Visk’s shoulder. “You get home. Get some sleep. We can think about this again in the mornin’.”

Visk nodded. “We should meet up at the Warehouse, so we can get started right away.”

“K. See yer at ten, then?”

“See yer.”

They turned away from the dying sun, and walked their way back through the building.