As she stirred the foxglove seeds into the soup, Mrs. Boyle thought to herself that maybe they had always been hurtling towards this fate. That this was God’s plan for them, and Sally’s obstinance in the face of reality might have been a blessing in disguise. Maybe Sally’s fourteen years of fighting her guidance every step of the way was a clue, a sign to recognize when the time came, to show her what she should do.
She had a choice with Sally.
“Before we begin, please listen to a personal message for Our Prudent Friend: The Fox is in the Hen House. The Fox is in the Hen House!”
“Really? Uh, I mean, Zanthus!” Ms. Henderson said the codeword to confirm receipt of the message. She could hear the man on the other end of the line snickering as she hung up the phone. She dashed back the safehouse in Edenham as fast as she could with bare feet. She’d need to catch Prudence before she left. “Before we begin” was code for “do not proceed”.
When she got back, Prudence was packing her spartan collection of toiletries back into her handbag, preparing to move on to the next stop in the underground.
“You may as well get comfortable here for now,” Ms. Henderson said. “We’ve just been told to pause all plans for the time being.”
“What? Why?” Prudence said, alarmed.
The Candyman lied. Ugo suspected as much when he took that so-called Sally Special and it had a bland, dusty non-taste like flour. Sally Specials were sweet. Not like candy exactly, the sweetness was more subtle but it was there. The tablet didn’t dissolve the right way either. It turned into a ball of paste on his tongue and stuck to the roof of his mouth where it should’ve crumbled away and melted.
The real clue that he’d been duped was that he still felt like shit. It was becoming harder every day to deny they were all getting older. The stiffness in all his joints after crashing on the couch in the VIP Lounge was a reminder that even Joy couldn’t erase. But a Sally Special could. A Sally Special made one feel faster and fitter, ten years younger. There was no way he was going to get through the show in this state.
“You’re not even dressed yet?” Robin said from the door, startling Ugo.
Buster Edwards, a thief, had been casing Nick Lightbearer’s house for a week. It was now Friday and Nick still had not left. You’d think a rockstar would have events to be at, but Nick had spent the last five days lounging around his home in various states of lucidity and undress.
Buster came back from a long postponed piss break to see a tall, skinny someone up in the scaffolds, crouched in his spot and reading his notes.
“Fuck,” Buster whispered to himself as he ducked out of sight. He watched this interloper scurry across the scaffolding around the building and slip into Nick’s house through the third floor window entry point detailed in Buster’s notes. That lanky shit was gonna knick all of Nick’s knick-knacks!
Buster climbed back up into the scaffolds and waited. A while later, Nick finally emerged from the back door. Or… no, it was that stringbean fuck dressed as Nick. You could tell because he was about six inches too tall for the outfit. The pants were unfashionably high up the ankle and his jacket was too short on the waist. He had the wig on straight at least. Buster spied on him as he tore off down the street, pointing at passerby and greeting them with knock-off Nick-isms.
The real Nick was still yet to emerge. Buster chanced a few circuits around the scaffolding to peek into his windows but didn’t see him anywhere. Unless he had a secret basement or he was Harry fucking Houdini though, Nick had to still be in the house.
“These just came from Haworth Labs. Apparently Miss Boyle has had another conflagration of inspiration,” Sergeant Sargent explained to Chief Inspector Peters, placing a pill bottle filled with pitch black capsules on the edge of his desk for Peters to take.
“They call it Oblivion. Makes one forget everything. Entirely. The Chief Constable feels these would be best applied on Skippers trying to leave town via the Britannia Bridge. Orders are that anyone caught trying to leave should be forcibly administered one of these and sent back the way they came.”
Peters collected the pill bottle and nodded an acknowledgement that could be easily misconstrued as agreement.
As he entered the elevator and the doors closed him off from the rest of Central, he regarded the pills in his hand with measured alarm. He supposed Sally Boyle more than anyone understood the want – the need, even – to forget. Still, she had to know making a drug like this was incredibly dangerous. The constabulary’s use for it was downright benign compared to how a drug like Oblivion could be used. In the wrong hands…
“So James from Byron and Sons made me a proposition today,” your brother Michael says. “A real hinky-ass proposition, but… I don’t know. We might be desperate enough to take up hinky-ass propositions.
“Short of it is, they wanna cut the legs off corpses and give them to us so we could… process the meat and sell it in our shop. They figure that’d keep the town fed until spring when we can get back down the mountain.
Work had become very tense. Hickinbotham knew he was in hot water and was being scrutinized. He had been reassigned to patrolling the records room, which gave him a lot of time to ruminate on the man he’d nearly killed and who’s career he’d definitely ruined. It weighed on him, but all the same, he could still comfort himself with the knowledge, the simple fact, that all that unpleasantness need not have happened if that man hadn’t run, if he hadn’t been buying illegal drugs in the first place. It was his own fault that Hickinbotham had beaten him to a pulp.
Eventually, Hickinbotham was given an assignment. An arrest, another chance.
Arrests weren’t exactly common these days. It was more likely that a criminal would be collected by the doctors than the bobbies anymore. Perhaps though, despite the problems he’d created in apprehending Miss Boyle’s client, he’d distinguished himself as someone who could bring in a perpetrator in one piece.
He reported to Carmarthen House, determined to redeem himself.
Sergeant Sargent was his partner on this job. His presence suggested Hickinbotham wasn’t entirely trusted to do this with another lower ranking constable, but it also meant that when he did do a fine job of it, Sargent would see it firsthand.
“You’re going to need this,” Sargent said, handing him a loaded syringe. “Knockout Juice. We can’t use our truncheons on Dr. Faraday or we might knock the smarts out of her. Best to sneak up on her and tranquilize her instead.”
The day shift patrol on St. George was easy and pleasant. It consisted almost exclusively of meandering along the cobblestone paths, tipping his hat to little old ladies, flirting with the birds, and popping in on the shopkeeps. Everyone was mostly doing what they were supposed to. There was little excitement at all and frankly, Hickinbotham liked that just fine.
He would probably still be on that beat if it weren’t for Sally Boyle.
Hickinbotham was aware that Sally was the only producer of Blackberry. Blackberry was not illegal per se, but its use was restricted to the constabulary, doctors, and a few other high-ranking officials. As such, the number of people stopping by Sally’s business on any given day was highly suspect. They couldn’t be there for Blackberry and there was no reason to come all the way out to St. George if you just needed to restock your medicine cabinet with healing balm and Neximide. She must be selling something else. Something that you couldn’t get at Stewart Adams’ apothecary or from a Mood Booth.
Her advertisements practically said as much.
Hickinbotham decided to take the initiative. He patrolled loosely around her house until one of her clients, some posh Parade gent, came and went. He followed the client at a distance until he passed into a street with no one else on it. Hickinbotham closed the gap between them and placed a firm hand on his shoulder.
Hickinbotham quite liked the night shift. It was peaceful. Just him and the occasional other constable passing like ships in the… well, the night. He found the ethereal calliope-esque tootling of a Jubilator on the next street soothing. And if it rained (which it almost always did) the streets would shine and sparkle even more than usual. The gas mask made it a little stuffy, but with the fog it couldn’t be helped. It was a sort of privilege to get to see the Village like this, something only Bobbies were afforded.
When he came upon the mangled corpse of a woman in the middle of the street, just on the periphery of a patch of pea-soup, her entrails flung hither and thither, he wondered if that was what had tempted her to break curfew.
He blew his whistle and the constables on the surrounding streets ran to his location. They made quick work of cordoning off the area. One of them popped back to Central to collect Constable Burne-Jones.
Burne-Jones stepped out of the Bobby Popper and approached the scene. He knelt down next to the corpse and inspected the killer’s handiwork.
“Yep,” he concluded, “It fits the M. O.”
Constable Bobby Hickinbotham had no patience for moral philosophy. For as long as he could remember, the path of virtue had never been obscured by the overgrown brush of nuance nor weathered and worn by doubt. It was as simple and clear as the painted road. In his estimation, it was not hard or complicated to do right and anyone who thought otherwise was being either willfully obtuse or too clever by half. As a young man, when it became clear that he would reach the requisite height, it was obvious that he should join the constabulary. It was the very personification of the honorable way. As a constable, he could guide those who could not see the world with the unwavering clarity that he did.
The path of righteousness became much rockier after he’d earned his badge though.
His first day on the job, he was assigned to shadow Constable Wright on the Salamanca Bridge.
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