Procedural: Part 2

The Season 1 finale!

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Detective Constable John Callihan was killed in the line of duty in July. It is now December, and his colleague DC Zoltan Kaminski is following up on new leads that suggest Callihan’s death wasn’t just a random attack. Seeking clarity, he is visiting Callihan’s former home, where his partner Zara still lives…

This chapter unlocks 11 February 2022. Early access subscribers can read immediately.

London
1972. December.

“It’s been five months,” Zara noted, glancing at Kaminski as she led him through the house. “To the day.”

“I’m sorry, Zara. I should have realised.”

“Clearly.” She took him through to the kitchen, which was at the rear of the house and looked out onto a narrow but long garden. “So why are you here, now, after all this time?”

Kaminksi spotted a bench outside, a barbecue, table and chairs. For a second he imagined her and John, enjoying each other’s company, earlier in the summer, not realising what was about to happen. “Listen, Zara,” he said, standing uncomfortably having not been offered a seat, “I’ve been looking into some things, some inaccuracies in the report and the evidence.”

“Inaccuracies?”

“There are some details that don’t make sense. So I’m taking another look. Off the books. Just doing it as a favour.”

She poured herself a glass of water from the tap. “A favour to whom?”

Shit. “Well, to John, I suppose. Me and Callihan, we weren’t friends exactly, but we got on fine.”

“I don’t care,” she said, looking right at him. “Cut the bullshit, get to the point.”

He swallowed. “OK, look, Zara, I mean it. There’s some weird fucking shit going on with John’s case. It’s officially closed but the boss’ got me taking another look. Mind if I smoke?”

“I do mind, yes.” Zara turned away and stared out the window. “At the funeral, Detective Miller told me that you got the koth that did it. That it was all wrapped up, was a case of wrong place, wrong time. I told him there had to be more to it than that, but he told me not to worry.”

“Yeah, well,” Kaminski rolled an unlit cigarette around between two fingers. “Miller’s an arsehole. You’ve got me now, not him.”

“John always said you were an arsehole as well.” She smiled, ever so slightly.

“He always was good with reading people. I just want to know what happened, and nothing’s adding up, but it’s like I’m missing half the formula.”

“You mean half the equation.”

Kaminski took in the kitchen, white and clean and sparse. Cereal boxes arranged neatly on a worktop beside the fridge. A magnetic knife strip on the wall behind the hob. It didn’t look like it got used much. “If there’s anything I should know, anything you didn’t mention before, now would be the time.”

“I remember John talking about you,” Zara said.

“Yeah, he said I was an arsehole, apparently.”

“He also said he trusted you,” she said. “I think he was considering bringing you in on what he was doing.”

Feeling his eyebrows rising, Kaminski tried to restrain his expression. He’d gone there mostly out of desperation, not thinking it would lead to anything concrete. “What was he doing?”

She gestured for him to follow and she took them back into the hallway, then up the stairs to the top floor which featured an office, nestled into the arch of the roof. “This is where John did his work. Most of the case files were taken away. Yannick came and cleared it out of all the official stuff.” She went over to the wooden desk and pulled at its edge, dragging it slightly away from the wall. Kneeling, she rooted around for something out of sight.

“But…?”

“But this,” she said, turning with a large metal box in her hands. She held it up for him and he took it, finding it surprisingly heavy.

“What’s in here?”

Pulling a set of keys from her back pocket, she unlooped one and passed it to him. “Take a look. You can stay as long as you like.” She sighed, looked down at the floor, then up at his eyes. “But, Zoltan, none of this brought John anything good. It won’t bring you anything good either.

“Noted. Thanks, Zara.”

Once she’d disappeared back down the stairs, Kaminski cracked open one of the angled ceiling windows and lit the cigarette that he’d been fingering in his pocket the whole time. Standing by the open window, blowing the smoke out and bracing against the cold outside air, he stared first at the box, now placed on the desk, then at the key in his free hand. A hundred possibilities ran through his head. Bakker was right.

It took hours just to have a cursory glance over the material. The box was compartmentalised, organised into notes and evidence, alphabetised and chronologically ordered. Callihan had never been especially tidy in the office, at least not to this extent. There were receipts, cargo manifests, newspaper cuttings, blurry photographs of individuals - some of which Kaminski thought he vaguely recognised, others he definitely knew. He showed up in the images, and Chakraborty, and Clarke and Holland, and Miller and Ford and Bakker. The Commissioner was in there. Callihan had been observing all of them, in and out of work. Some of the familiar-looking suited men he realised he had seen on television, on news programmes. They were politicians, or businessmen. He’d have to look them up. Bakker would probably know more.

There was a lot, too much to properly digest. His attention zeroed in on what appeared to be a hastily produced photocopy of an invoice, seemingly for transportation of fabrics. Taking a closer look, he realised it was for portal transport to Max-Earth, listing full details of the container number, its delivery details and more. The shipping company name made him pause, and for a long moment he wasn’t sure why: Barrindon.

The invoice wasn’t alone; there was a whole stack of them, dating back a year. He realised with a jolt that some of them were dated after Callihan’s death. Some were for the next year. Callihan had been keeping a close eye on the operation, somehow, and whatever he’d been watching for was still going on. He flicked through the invoices, glancing at the dates on each, until he found it: a scheduled delivery for that very day.

He hadn’t been certain that it would work, retrieving the old search warrant from the office. It was dated all wrong, details were sketchy, but he was banking on the junior stevedore at the portal station being too busy to care. It was the same warrant they’d used to search the place four months prior, during the murder case of the aen’fa girl.

Kaminski had hung around the security office for an hour, waiting for the senior manager to go on his break. No way an expired warrant would get past someone like that, but the kid who was leading him down the stairs had no such cares.

They walked out onto the floor of the enormous cargo dock and Kaminski turned things over in his mind. Callihan had been keeping track of multiple individuals, and in fact now seemed like a particular kind of paranoid crazy. Bakker had his hunch about Callihan’s death not being entirely accidental, which was supported by the disappearance of the 999 caller. The case with Laryssa, who had washed up on the bank of the Thames, had been linked to an illegal people trafficking scam being run out of the portal station and Palinor. She’d been one of many Palinese conned into giving up their savings to be taken to a better place, only to be sold into a far worse fate in the Barrel. That smuggling ring had been shut down, though the shipping firm whose containers had been modified had called in their best lawyers and saw to it that they were cleared of any knowledge or wrongdoing. Barrindon, one of the oldest and most well known hauliers in the kingdom. Barrindon, the name that kept coming back. Callihan had been watching them for months. He’d been the one originally on the Laryssa case with Clarke, back when she’d only been missing rather than dead. Maybe he’d been investigating the trafficking the whole time? But that wouldn’t explain all the surveillance, or why he wouldn’t have brought it into the office.

It was too much to hold in his head. Callihan’s metal box was full of documents he hadn’t had time to read yet, but the delivery on the invoice slip had been dated that day so time wasn’t an available luxury.

“This is the one,” the kid said, pointing at a nondescript, blue container. He indicated the identifier code printed on the side. “Let me open it up for you, guv.”

Kaminski stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, the clang and bustle of the shipping yard echoing around him. The portals at either end of the cavernous hall hung in space, big and black and silent. The kid swung one of the end doors open, its hinges shrieking. There was an audible hiss as a seal was broken.

“Wait here,” Kaminski said, pulling out his pocket torch.

“Can’t be long,” the kid said, “I don’t have the authority to pause the schedule, so this container will be on its way pretty soon.”

“Yeah, don’t panic.”

He climbed up and into the container, feeling an odd deja vu from the last time he’d been down here. He flicked on his light, the beam narrow and bright. It picked out the details of something large; an odd, dark, irregular shape, curved and with protrusions that might have been pipes, or structural. It was a single object, almost as long as the container itself, with broad plastic straps stretched over it and secured into the container floor with metal rings. Kaminski had no idea what he was looking at. He moved around it, edging sideways along the container wall between it and the object, until he was at the far side. From this angle it was no clearer what it was, other than perhaps part of something larger. A component for a building construction project?

Movement at the open end of the container caught his attention, as did the eyes of the kid as they flashed in the glow of his torch for a brief second, before the container door swung closed with a heavy bang that reverberated through the container. There was the sound of the lock being slid and cranked back into place.

Kaminski shouted, but there was no response.

He moved awkwardly past the the object and back to the doors.

He pummelled his fist upon them, but there was no response.

Arcing his torchlight, he looked for another exit, but there was none.

He examined the door from the inside, but there was no mechanism to open it from the inside. He heard the hissing again, and felt his ears pop at a sudden increase in pressure.

There was no way out.

His pulse thudded into his wrists, his heart hammering. He flicked the torch off and was plunged into total darkness. He turned it back on.

Everything about the interior of the container was ordinary: barren, corrugated metal with peeling, flecked paint, and the thing strapped down in the middle.

Then there was a vibration, and a thunk from above, followed by a profound silence. He put a hand to the wall, but could feel nothing. Then the entire container vibrated and rocked, and Kaminski could feel through his legs that it was being lifted from the ground. A queasy sense of vertigo flowed over him as the container rocked gently from end to end. He crouched to the floor and tried to brace himself between the wall and the peculiar cargo.

Another judder as the container came to a halt, but still seemingly suspended in the air. Then another movement, and a feeling of being rotated anti-clockwise. A slight tilting indicated that the container was being moved in a straight line again, with Kaminski now at the rear.

That’s when the void entered the container, appearing at the opposite end. A blackness so total that Kaminski’s torch could do nothing to illuminate it. The rectangular black void filled the opposite end of the container, cutting it off entirely. The black square moved inexorably towards him, eating the container walls and ceiling and floor, and the mysterious cargo. It was a dark curtain hiding away the world before him. Kaminski pressed himself against the doors behind him as the space contracted, the void taking everything in its path.

He realised just before it hit him that it was the portal, and that the container was being pushed through to the other side. Then the blackness reached him as well, and swallowed him up.

---

This week’s illustration was easy to make.

This is it, the end to season 1 of Tales from the Triverse. Did you even realise this thing was broken down into seasons? This first season has been tentatively titled ‘1972’, for obvious reasons, and its culmination has coincided with the real new year, which was unplanned but satisfying.

Unlike with television, there won’t be breaks between seasons, so I’ll be back next week. :)

I hope you enjoyed that! If you’re enjoying the story please do share it with friends and family. Paid subscribers can read on for some behind-the-scenes notes…

Lots of heavy lifting in this chapter. Figuring out how to get Kaminski into the container took a bit of wrangling but it hopefully plays out in a reasonable manner. There’s some recapping in there as well, which is less important when people are reading the chapters back-to-back but can be useful for anyone who is reading ‘live’ as the chapters go up. For them, some of the chapters and storylines being referenced were literally months ago.

Callihan’s Box Of Useful Things is of course a bit of a macguffin and a convenient plot device to move the investigation forward. It’s a bit of a cheat, but it also serves to retrospectively inform his character. It’s in keeping with who we know Callihan to have been, so in that respect I think it’s acceptable. I’ve continually found it interesting to have a dead character playing such a large part in the story: for someone who was only in a single chapter, Callihan is still powering a lot of the main story, as well as influencing the characters. That’s how it goes, though, especially with people who leave a positive impression on the world - their influence remains for a long time after they’re gone.

The scene of Kaminski being trapped in the container was a good one to write. Creating a sense of rising panic and claustrophobia, and of being in a space with a weird unexplained thing, and then having the discomfort of being forced through the portal. It leads up to the most obvious ‘cliffhanger’ we have had so far. If this were a TV show in the 90s we’d have had to wait 6 months to a year for the next season; fortunately Triverse carries on next week.