Late shift


    On duty: DC Nisha Chakraborty and DC Zoltan Kaminski


    London.


    1972. August.


    The morgue was so clean it reminded Nisha of a restaurant kitchen. Whenever she went out for a meal, she imagined the chefs dissecting the animals, examining their innards for cause of death. Intended to be eaten by a human. She smiled to herself, for only a moment, then returned her attention to the coroner and the corpse on the table. The aen’fa girl from the river was now more ordinarily proportioned, the bloating having reduced, her skin thin and flaccid as a result of over-stretching. She would have been slim, probably attractive. Her skin was a light, pastel green, though much of it was now a slushy, decaying brown, like autumn leaves rotting on the pavement.


    “She’d been in the river a good while, at least a week,” the doc was saying, “the only reason she’s in as good condition as she is, is because the river’s been colder than usual, and the slower aen’fa decomposition rate. Putrefaction brought the body back up where it got tangled in netting, which is how it ended up on the bank.”


    Dr Steven Wong always seemed more excited by his job than was appropriate. Nisha liked her job, believed in what they did at the SDC, but Wong? He loved pulling apart bodies, especially if they were of Palinese origin. Cracking his knuckles, he pointed at a plastic container on floor at the end of the table. “Hard to say with any accuracy, but there was a lot of detritus tangled in her limbs and hair. Netting, rope, mostly, but also some broken glass, old tin cans. Might give you an indication.”


    “Unlikely. The lungs were fully collapsed, and were only wet through prolonged exposure. There is no evidence of inhalation of water, so I’d say she was dead before she was submerged.” He pointed at the aen’fa’s forehead, above the sharp, eyebrow-less brow, where a deep gash cut through to the bone. “There’s also this. Definitely bludgeoned with something solid and heavy, fracturing the skull around this area. Looking at the impact marks and the size, I’d guess at the side of a table, or a mantelpiece sculpture, something like that. Can still find flecks of red paint in the wound, and whatever hit her left an uneven mark - which is why I’m angling towards some sort of object, with an uneven surface.”


    “Can’t say. There’s evidence of bruising around her ankles and shoulders, consistent with the body being moved, though.”


    “Make sure we get some of those paint flecks out and examined,” Nisha said. “You never know.”


    “What is that? A tattoo?”


    The dark, raised mark, about the length of a finger, depicted two connected chain links. Nisha grimaced. “That’s an ugly thing. Some sort of aen’fa mark? A tribal thing perhaps?”


    “Point. OK, let’s wrap it up. Doc, we’ll take a look through the contents of your stinking bucket. Give us a shout if you find anything else.”


    A ceiling fan meandered haplessly, unable to shift the stifling humidity in the offices of the Specialist Dimensional Command. Clarke sat at his desk, flicking idly through incoming case files without giving any of them his proper attention. He knew he’d need to get back out in the world soon, but not yet. Checking over old cases, dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, felt more comfortable. The new girl, Styles, was good. Keen as anything, highly competent, insightful, clearly had done her homework. Young people like her made Clarke feel even more obsolete. What had he been doing when he was her age? Certainly not making detective so soon.


    The main door opened and Holland and Hobb came in, ready for the night shift. Holland laughed raucously. “Clarke! You’re here again? It’s not even your shift.”


    “What about you, Styles? Don’t you have a life to attend to?”


    Holland stared for a moment, mouth curled up into a confused sneer, then he turned away as if the conversation had never happened and joined Hobb over at her desk. They’d been there to take down the koth. Clarke ought to be grateful, but it felt unfinished. There was so much he still didn’t understand about the encounter that had killed Callihan, but everyone else seemed content to keep it in the past, like any other old case. He turned his eyes back to his desk.


    “What things? Pubs?” Her voice was always so perky, so enthusiastic.


    A silence followed, long and deliberate, even Styles holding her tongue for once. Clarke was grateful when the door banged open again and Chakraborty and Kaminski entered, chatting away to each other. Kaminski nodded in Clarke’s direction, while Chakraborty headed straight for the evidence board at the head of the room. She began pinning papers and items up onto the board.


    This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    “Give me a chance,” Clarke said, “she’s only been here a day.”


    Raising his eyebrows, Kaminski grinned from behind his cigarette. “Well, if Yannick doesn’t mind, come and have a look over here at what we’ve got. Aen’fa dragged from the river. Not everyday you get one of these.”


    *


    “I’ll bet she’d have been pretty,” Kaminski said.


    “You know what I mean. Reckon she was here legally?”


    Kaminski looked at his watch. “Nearly home time. Want to grab some beers on the way out?”


    Frowning, Lola leaned in. “That’s not an aen’fa symbol,” she said. “Where was it?”


    “Doc says it’s a brand,” Chakraborty said, knocking his hand away. “Not a tattoo.”


    Kaminski looked at her askance. “You some kind of expert?”


    His face changed, as if he was reconsidering his assessment of her. “Good. We could do with more of those.”


    Frank Holland swaggered over from the kitchen. It hadn’t taken Lola long to pick up on bad vibes between Holland and Clarke, though she hadn’t worked out the specifics. “What you got?” He stared at the board, nodding to himself. “You can tell she’d have been a looker.”


    “I’ve seen one of those before,” Holland said, pointing at the chain motif. “Work cases around Soho and you’ll see stuff like that. Not exactly that, but marks like it. It’s a territorial thing. Ownership. Property, you know.”


    “That’d be my guess,” Holland said, turning and walking away.


    Lola attempted her sweetest of sweet smiles.


    Clarke waved at Kaminski and Chakraborty as they grabbed their bits and headed out the door. He stood next to Lola. “Anything interesting?”


    “Yeah, but we also have to be specialists in sentient spaceships and quantum computing.” He laughed, though not unkindly. “Listen, there’s a lot to get your head around when you’re trying to handle crimes across the triverse. We can’t all be experts in everything. Why do you think you got the gig here? That’s why they hired you. Everyone knows you’re a nerd for anything from Palinor.”


    “You’re not wrong. What did Holland want?”


    “He thinks every woman is a prostitute,” Clarke said, a little too quickly. He glanced at her. “Sorry. He might have a point in this instance.” He touched his hand to the pencil sketch, then looked at the photographs of the girl lying on the table in the morgue. He muttered something under his breath, then spun and strode back toward his desk.


    Clarke lifted the box of Callihan’s old case files and dumped them onto the desk. He rifled through them, hunting for something, eventually pulling a particular folder out triumphantly. He leafed through the papers inside, pulled one out. “I’ll be damned.”


    He read from the paper. “‘Description of missing person: Aen’fa female. About five-nine. Nineteen years old. Orange hair. Green skin. Illegally entered Mid-Earth eleven months prior. Whereabouts unknown, reported missing by acquaintance known only as Shona.’”


    “It was the last case I was working with Callihan. Missing person. He had a contact, this Shona, but she’d only ever talk to him and even that didn’t go anywhere. We lost contact with her and I thought that was that.”


    Clarke took his jacket from the back of his chair. “Now, we go to Soho.”