Early shift

On duty: DC Yannick Clarke and DC Lola Styles

London.

1973. February.

It was cold, the damp sort of cold that England specialised in. Not the clear, fresh cold of somewhere further north. Lola Styles sat with her arms crossed and a hot water bottle on her lap. “I’m not happy about this,” she said.

“So you mentioned,” Clarke said, sat next to her at his desk. He was flicking through reports of open cases, grunting disapprovingly with each discarded sheet of paper.

“Why couldn’t the heating break next week, when I’ve got leave? Or at least when it’s not my shift. Or, you know, in the summer.” It was times like this that she wanted to be anywhere but London. Anywhere else in the world, or a world next door.

“Sod’s law.” Clarke held up a report. “Can you believe this? It’s just common theft, which happens to have been perpetrated by an aen’fa girl. That’s not in our remit. Christ, they’re just slinging any old shit our way these days.”

“If the perp has pointy ears, give it to the SDC crew!”

Clarke pointed a finger at her, then gave her a thumbs up. “Exactly. Now you’re getting it, Styles. We’re a dumping ground. A bin for all the cases the regulars can’t be arsed with. Hand it off to the loser in the portal squad.”

Shifting the hot water bottle to her other side, Lola smiled. “It’s not all bad. Some of us get to go on jollies to Max-Earth, for example.” She raised her eyebrows.

Grouping all the reports together and pushing them to the far end of the desk, Clarke sighed. “I should be keeping a tally of all the times you bring that up.”

“It’s only because of abject jealousy. That’s all.” Her tone was jovial, but it still stung that Clarke had gone through a portal without her. Not that he’d had any choice in the matter - orders were orders - but it seemed unfair that she couldn’t have accompanied. She was his partner, after all - and she’d met Justin, the megaship AI, aboard the airship.

“Listen,” Clarke said, “next time I get an all expenses paid invite to Max-Earth I’ll be sure to make sure you’re my plus one. Or, even better, you can go instead of me.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“You do that - oh, this is interesting.” He held up a case file. “Mutilated body. Sounds more like our kind of thing, right?”

“Who, where and when?”

His eyes scanned down the page. “Yesterday. Body’s down at the morgue. Found north of Bloomsbury. Wounds consistent with bites from an animal attack, but doesn’t appear to be a native species.”

That did indeed sound very interesting. Lola leaned forward attentively. “Non-native? As in, non-Earth?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, partner,” Clarke said, standing and pulling his heavy trench coat on. “Let’s go have a chat with everyone’s favourite death doctor and see what he has to say.”

*

“Oh yes, this is a good one,” said Dr Steven Wong, a glint in his eye that reminded Lola of her younger sister on Christmas morning. He led them down the steps into the autopsy room. “I’ve got him laid out for you.”

“Very kind,” Clarke said. Lola suppressed a smile, well aware of Clarke’s discomfort with Wong’s enthusiasm for the recently deceased.

The morgue always made Lola think of a hospital, an especially poorly performing one. Walls of sealed, metal cubicles filled with cooled bodies, temporary coffins for the duration of each victim’s legal purgatory. The smell of the building’s air conditioning units and neutralisers locked in an endless battle with the creeping rot of the unliving. It wasn’t her favourite part of the job.

On the slab was part of a body. Several parts, in fact, arranged to approximate what would have once been a human. The naked lumps of dismembered flesh were distorted, like an old, well-melted candle on a pub table, ripples of skin and muscle and fat falling over each other as if trying to escape from the rest of the body. The head was mostly intact and undisturbed, while one of the legs - no longer connected at the hip - resembled an oversized and battered off-cut of ham from a butcher’s discard bin.

“Christ,” Clarke said quietly, “what happened to this poor sod?”

“Still trying to work that out,” Wong said, rubbing his hands together. “The melted appearance seems to be a consequence of coming into contact with an acidic agent of some sort. Biological in origin.”

“Looks like he fell into a vat of it.”

Lola pointed at his head. “Not all the way in, though.”

Clarke grunted. “More like a deadly hot tub, then.”

“It gets weirder,” Wong said. “Looking at the less melted areas, or if you scrape beneath the outer epidermis, there is significant and widespread evidence of teeth marks.”

“A hot tub in the Barrel.”

Sticking her tongue out halfway, Lola made a point of disapproving of Clarke’s joke. “What kind of bite marks do you mean?”

“I’ve got some photos,” Wong said, stepping away and wheeling a pinboard over. Magnified, black and white images were pinned to it, showing tiny imprints in the skin. “They’re certainly not human.”

“Did the biting happen before or after the acid melted the skin?”

Wong took a deep breath. “Best I can tell, both.”

Lola leaned in for a closer look. “Reckon all the bite marks are from the same creature? The same mouth?”

“I think so,” Wong said, tapping a finger on one of the photos. “Similar size, pattern, depth and pressure. My best guess? An animal that secretes something to aid with breaking down its food. Like what our stomachs do, but an external process.”

“Starting to think we should’ve taken that common theft case, Styles.” Clarke turned back to the body on the slab. “Looks like most of the body is still here, doc? Except for the hands?”

“Correct. Only one foot, also.”

“Why would something nibble this guy to death but then not actually eat him?”

“Not a sentence you ever expected to say out loud,” Lola said, moving around the table to get a look from the other side.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Wong said. “Perhaps it bit off more than it could chew?”

*

The streets around the British & Empire Museum were green and lush, in stark contrast to most of the rest of London. The museum was the largest single building in the capital and it was surrounded by expansive parks, the extravagant use of real estate testament to the museum’s power and historical significance. It was a tourist magnet, not solely for viewing the museum’s considerable gathering of remarkable items from around the empire and beyond - an entire new wing had been built to display artefacts liberated from Palinor - but also to spend time in an area of London that was not smog-filled and covered with a film of oil. The parks were an unexpected natural oasis in the midst of the industrial, steaming city.

A family walked happily through Russell Park away from the museum. Two siblings, a young boy and girl, with their parents. The children scampered from the path, darting into bushes and running in circles around fountains and marble statues.

Seeking a hiding the place, the boy pushed his way through the drooping leaves of a willow tree. In the shaded cool beneath it was a clearing of sorts, the ground carpeted with leaves. The branches shielded the space from the rest of the park and indeed the wider city, even muffling the noises of London. It was a quiet, contemplative space, and as perfect a hiding place as the boy could imagine.

As he crouched down by the bough, staying as silent as possible, he noticed something odd resting on top of the leaves beside him. At first he thought it was a shawl, or a thin scarf. It was about as long as his arm and translucent, looking almost like wet paper. He poked at it with his foot: it was soft. He tapped it with his hand, finding it to be dry and surprisingly leathery for how thin it was. Reaching out, he picked it up, holding it to the dappled light filtering through the leaves above. It was a sleeve of some sort, slightly smaller than he was, and reminded him of pictures he’d seen in the museum of a snake’s skin after shedding. Perhaps this had come from an animal? The boy frowned, fairly certain that snakes weren’t generally found in England.

So intent was he on examining the silvery skin, the boy was entirely unaware of the crunch of leaves and twigs until the creature was upon him.