Morrow sighed and watched Chief Superintendent Ellsmore steam away with his sights firmly set on course. She was becoming accustomed to observing the Super sailing through life like a galleon in a high wind.
In the Specials’ parade room, Section Officer Bob Loach was vainly trying to make some semblance of order in his paperwork. His audible groans and grunts of brute persuasion seemed of no use in consolidating scraps of assorted documents.
Abruptly there was a sharp rap on the door, which opened immediately. To Loach’s surprise, standing there like a royal oak was Chief Superintendent Ellsmore.
‘Chief Superintendent?’
As Ellsmore entered, Loach hurriedly straightened and shuffled the paperwork to the side of his desk.
‘Should’ve known you’d be here …’ The Chief Superintendent didn’t sound overjoyed at this discovery. ‘Wanted a quick word, Loach.’
Loach was powerless to prohibit the Chief Superintendent from poking through the paperwork at random, like casually rummaging through someone else’s toolbox, looking for nothing. It was an ominous diversion.
‘Good God, it seems damn stupid you Specials giving up your free time to fight crime, just to end up processing bumff,’ Ellsmore lectured, rippling a few pages of paper with evident contempt. ‘Fruits of bureaucracy, that’s what it is, Loach.’
Why was he stalling? All that this delay accomplished was to make him more nervous. Maybe that was the idea.
‘We try and cope, Chief Superintendent.’
‘Yes.’ Ellsmore did not pursue that dead end. ‘I haven’t seen much of your SDO lately, but I hear he’s been having some trouble at home.’
Telling himself there was no reason to panic, Loach was patiently taking in the information the Chief Superintendent was feeding him, but he still didn’t quite understand what Ellsmore wanted him to swallow.
‘Anyway, I … wanted to have a word with you about one of your lads, Loach.’
‘Trouble, sir?’ Here it comes, he thought.
‘Oh, no, no, no.’ Three times: he doth protest too much. ‘Just a storm in an egg cup.’
Brace yourself, this is it.
‘But you know, I hate there to be any friction between Specials and Police. There are enough jokes as it is.’
What is it, what happened? Who? Why?
‘It’s Freddy Calder.’
Loach’s blood rose as his spirits descended to the satanic depths of the underworld. Freddy Calder was an Achilles’ heel if ever there was one.
‘How long’s he been selling lingerie?’ Ellsmore was, sad to say, dreadfully serious.
‘About a year, sir.’
‘Right. And before that, he flogged …’
This was getting more painful by the moment. ‘Kitchen ware.’
Ellsmore clucked his tongue in mock regret. ‘A pity he didn’t stick to it. You know, he tried to sell a pair of peach cammy knickers to a visiting Woman Police Inspector.’
Loach was sure his cheeks were already as red as he was going to lash Freddy Calder’s backside. But his own torture wasn’t finished yet.
‘And worse … cracked some blue jokes with that damned puppet of his.’
That was too much. Loach’s will was sapped, any hope of suitable revenge dwarfed by Freddy’s towering imbecility.
‘Have a word with him, Loach. Nothing strong. Just tell him to stop selling his ladies’ undies on the premises in the future.’
Investigating the eerie surrounds of the Ellman Superstore at night gave Special Constable Viv Smith a weird case of the ‘creeps’, and having Special Constable Freddy Calder at her side was worse than Rosemary’s Baby: what loony Americans would call ‘a horror show’. Angular slabs of concrete cast deep shadows and what few sources of light were within reach merely served to spread the shadows out longer.
Slower and slower they walked, until Viv stopped. Freddy looked at her with questioning eyes, although not a sound emerged from his throat. She prayed there wouldn’t be another peep out of him, as she took a cigarette out of her shoulder bag.
‘Don’t say another word,’ Viv warned him in a low, cemetery whisper. ‘I said I’d give them up.’
The cigarette was in her mouth, and she was just about to light up, when a squeaky noise pierced the night air. She froze like a deer, although she might just as well have shrieked and jumped over the moon. Freddy also appeared to have been instantaneously transformed into a pillar of salt.
Slowly she turned, her antennae searching the horizon for the direction of the squeaking noise, which seemed to become louder every second, as if coming toward them from the shadows.
Suddenly one of the shadows was moving! And while it was moving closer, it was growing larger and the squeaking noise louder and louder.
The moving shadow expanded to fill an entire wall, appearing to be a giant creature of some sort inexorably screeching toward them. The cigarette fell out of Viv’s mouth, yet she wasn’t at all sure she could manage a scream.
Something appeared at the bottom of the wall, beneath and much smaller than the shadow: something that was causing the shadow.
It was a supermarket trolley with a young child inside, being pushed by another child.
Quickly the Specials headed for the trolley, trying not to frighten the children the same way that they had been spooked.
The children immediately saw them and waited where they were. Freddy got to them first.
‘Whoa there, stranger,’ he soothed with a friendly smile, almost in one of his character voice impersonations.
Pushing the trolley was a young boy, not more than six years old. In the trolley was a little girl even younger. The two looked up with fear, uncertainty and suspicion mixed into their expressions of bewilderment. Viv’s heart went out to them.
‘Hullo,’ she said gently. ‘What are you two doing here?’
The children said nothing.
‘Been shopping then?’ Freddy inquired.
The boy laughed, unable to repress his reaction. ‘Silly. It’s closed,’ he scoffed.
Another laugh from the boy even made the little girl smile. God bless Freddy, he really did have a talent after all.
‘How did you get here?’ said Viv, trying to pry some basic information out of them.
The
