The escapists: part 2

Visiting a prisoner in a cell

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

Previously: Witness statements from a series of crimes on Palinor describe a balding male with a scar above one eye, a description which appears to match a known criminal from Earth. The only problem being that he’s still locked up in a prison cell in London…

Early shift
On duty: DC Frank Holland & DC Yannick Clarke

London.
1974. January.

The alarm rang once, then the outer door slammed shut. Clarke chewed on the inside of his cheek, hands in pockets. There was a time he’d felt powerful coming into a prison, like he was the man in charge. Something had changed; it left him uneasy. The alarm rang again and the inner door slid open.

“This way, detectives,” said the prison guard on the other side. He was a tall man, of wiry build, with a thin, blonde moustache. Clarke thought him an odd fit for a guard.

“Can’t help but feel this is a whole lot of nothing,” Holland said. Making a visit to HMP Thamesmead had cancelled the possibility of an afternoon skive to the pub, which had left him even more disagreeable than usual. “Still, not been here for a while. Wonder if we’ll see anyone we know.”

Clarke raised his eyebrows slightly. “You got friends here?”

“Was thinking more enemies,” Holland said, sighing, “but it’s all much of a muchness.”

The corridor was long, white-walled and grey-floored. Doors led to pokey offices containing sad-looking people. And that was just the staff. They were taken through and into the inner yard, where a chain link fence separated them from exercising inmates. Thamesmead was huge, the highest security complex in the Kingdom and the place where all the real scum was sent. They were in one small area of the site, which stretched one and a half miles east to west and another north-south. It held over eight hundred inmates and was located squarely in East London - a short tube ride would get you back into central. The prison was surrounded by residential areas, grocery stores, cafés, kebab shops, barbers. Normal life, with a tumorous growth lurking within.

Eight hundred prisoners, and they were here to see just one.

The guard took them to a tall building, inside of which were three storeys of cells. The walkways were patrolled, prisoners escorted back and forth between their cells and wherever they were being taken. It was a human block, with no koth or aen’fa in sight. There were particular requirements for incarcerating Palinor natives that a standard human jail didn’t fulfil.

After climbing two flights of stairs, they stopped at the bars of a particular cell. “This is him,” the guard said. “Have fun.” He ran his keys along the bars. “Collins, visitors.” And with that, the guard moved to a discreet distance, leaned back against the railing and began flicking a toothpick from side to side in his mouth.

The cell was small, clean and large enough to hold a bunk bed. There was a tiny sink and toilet on the back wall and a light embedded in ceiling behind a grate. There were odd personal items in the cell: a framed photo, a poster on the wall, a couple of books stacked up in one corner. One man lay on the lower bunk, reading a magazine. A different pair of legs swung out from the top bunk and a man dropped to the floor. He had a shaved head, some stubble and, as he approached, Clarke noted the scar beside his eye. Looked like there was a story behind that. The man looked like the police sketch, though the artist had depicted him perhaps ten years older. He put his hands in the pockets of his prison overalls and stopped by the bars. He smiled, a big, toothy grin that contained within it far too much confidence. “Coppers, then?”

“I’m Detective Constable Clarke, this is DC Holland.” Clarke gestured towards his partner. The thought of Holland being his partner still made him twitch involuntarily. “We’ve got some questions for you.”

“Excellent,” the man said. “Company helps the day go by.”

“You’re George Collins?”

The man looked down at his shirt, as if searching for a name tag. “Last time I checked.”

“How long have you been in here?”

Collins smirked. “You should have checked the records with the back office ladies on your way in.”

“We did,” Clarke said, “but we wanted to ask you as well.” The prisoner was cocky, assured of himself, as if he had absolutely nothing to worry about.

“Two years, four months and fifteen days.” Collins said, staring at Clarke. He leaned to look past and nodded towards the guard. “Feels longer when you have to put up with shitweasels like Crabbe, mind.”

The guard stopped leaning on the rail. “Watch it, Collins. I can fuck your day right up if you give me a reason to.”

Collins turned his gaze back to Clarke, then looked at Holland. “Any other questions? Come on, give me something a bit tougher.”

“You got any siblings?” Holland asked, his attention somewhere down the walkway.

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“How many?”

“A brother and a sister. That’s two, if you’re not one for mathematics.”

“Your brother’s not listed on your family record. Where are they both?”

“Sister went off to Australia when I was a lad. God knows where she is now. And Jimmy, he went under a tram. Never was very good at crossing the street.”

Clarke cleared his throat. “OK, tell us about why you’re in here.”

“You coppers really should do your research,” Collins said, “then you wouldn’t have to come all the way down here to ask me. Anyway, that job, the one that put me away, that was a thing of beauty. I don’t divulge details of jobs, though. Copyright, you know? Got to protect my ideas. Never know when they might come in handy again.”

The questions were largely meaningless. Collins was right: they’d already read up on all of this in the records room before entering the prison itself. Clarke had thought it worth asking some questions just to ascertain that everything was on the up-and-up, and there was no denying it: the man was in his cell, had been in his cell for over two years, give-or-take the usual prison routine, and absolutely had not been out pulling off daring crimes on Palinor. The brother sounded like a dead-end as well. Perhaps the likeness was a coincidence - bald with a scar wasn’t exactly unique among criminals. He’d asked Robin to send a decent photograph of Collins back through the portal, just in case. At least it could be shown to the witnesses to rule Collins out as a potential suspect.

It was disappointing; Clarke had looked forward to working on the case remotely with Styles. Even separated by universe, it would have been a way to keep that partnership going. He’d been the one insisting they come down to talk to Collins in person, which meant Holland would make it known for certain on the return journey that it had been a waste of his time.

Bruglia.
3102. Frostfield.

There was no formal police force in Bruglia, not in the form they existed on Earth. Instead, such duties fell to the city guard, whose primary purpose was to keep the peace, clamp down on any insurgents and defend the city from external attack. Forensic investigation wasn’t top of the list.

Lola entered the main garrison to discover a training ground rather than anything resembling a police station. The large courtyard in the centre of the building was an open field stuffed with weapons of war, dummies to fight against and guards in training. They looked far more like soldiers than police officers. The layout and appearance of the building reminded her a little of old Chinese architecture, rather than the rugged, stone-hewn and mud-compacted structures that made up most of Bruglia.

“Detective Styles,” came a booming voice, “I see you got my message.” A broad-shouldered, muscular man probably in his fifties had emerged from one of the doors leading off the courtyard “Welcome to my garrison. I’m Captain Rexen. Here you’ll find the best fighters in the city. Probably in all of Palinor.” He saluted to a group of guards practising with swords. “We’re all very excited that you’re here, Detective,” he said, shaking her hand vigorously.

It was a warmer welcome than she’d expected. A frostiness wouldn’t have been out of place; she was intruding on their turf, after all. “Thanks. We don’t have anything like this back home. Some specialist units for dealing with terrorist attacks or armed robberies, that sort of thing.”

Rexen frowned. “How do you put down rebellions? Fend off orcish hordes? What if the undead rise from the cemeteries?”

Lola’s mouth moved with no sounds coming from it for a few seconds. “We don’t really have those.”

Laughing uproariously, he clapped her on the back hard enough that she took an involuntary step forward. “Ha! No, neither do we. No such thing as orcs, I just read about them in a book that someone brought over from Max-Earth. Very silly.” His eyes narrowed, as if he were examining her for the first time. He pointed a finger. “I think we’re going to learn a lot from each other, Detective Styles.”

Relaxing, she smiled. “That’s what I’m hoping, Captain.”

There was a shout from the other side of the courtyard and a much younger guard ran across to them holding a scrap of paper. “Captain,” he said, wheezing under his armour, “there’s been another attack, this time on a food store to the north of the city. Early descriptions match the previous.”

“The bald human?”

Lola raised a hand, immediately feeling silly for doing so. “That’s why I’m here. I recognised the sketch of the suspect. Or, I think I did. I think there might be a link to Mid-Earth.”

Captain Rexen grinned wickedly. “Then it sounds like we have some detecting to do, Detective. Shall we?”

---

Thanks for reading!

A busy writing week, as I’m also working on the 3rd edition of my ‘guide to writing serial fiction’. It started life as a Wattpad series a few years back, then I rewrote the thing for Substack last year. You can read that version here. This third version is expanded yet further and updated, with a broader focus on productivity and combating writer’s block rather than only being about serialisation. It’s going to be available as an ebook and paperback, which is exciting. I’m rather looking forward to having my first non-fiction book available.

Talking of books, my novel No Adults Allowed has picked up some more sales over on Amazon. I’ve also been experimenting a little with Amazon ads, with some interesting preliminary results. I’ve done a lot in digital ads at work over the years, but that’s focused more on the likes of Facebook and Google. Amazon is a new beast for me, but so far it’s been quite author-friendly. I’ll do a proper report/guide on that once I feel confident I have something useful to say.

OK, let’s get into the author notes. Remember, you can start a free trial to give them a read, or become a paid subscriber to access all the juicy stuff.

Author notes

I’m enjoying the back-and-forth between Mid-Earth and Palinor. This season isn’t all going to be doing that - we’ll have some Mid-Earth-only storylines coming up - but it’s fun for now.

Exploring the way Bruglia works is fun. Palinor functions very much with medieval-style feudal city states, but that era collided with the 18th century and 24th century Earths when the portals opened. Rather than an averaging out, whereby everyone benefits from the cumulative knowledge, certain things have become entrenched. Hence on Mid-Earth they’ve doubled down on fossil fuels in a misguided arms race with Max-Earth, rather than learning from mistakes Max-Earth made in their past. Palinor, meanwhile, has found itself with a mix of older (from Earth’s POV) social-political structures and modern technologies. There’s no inherent better or worse here, though - Bruglia is a functioning city state, and I’m eager to never present Palinor as being somehow ‘primitive’ or ‘backwards’. It’s just different.

Hence the line from the captain about orcs.

The Thamesmead prison, then. Close geographically and architecturally to the real-life Belmarsh prison in London, but as has been the case multiple times with Triverse I couldn’t just go with the real world. The opening of the portals in 1772 back in chapter 1 means that anything beyond that year is shifted into alternate history territory. Hence there’s no Waterloo Bridge, because the Napoleonic Wars didn’t play out in the same way. South of the Thames is very different due to the portals opening and the portal station and Joint Council tower being established. HMP Belmarsh didn’t open until 1991, and so it’s highly unlikely that the same events would have occurred on mid-Earth’s timeline.

Hence we have HMP Thamesmead, similar in many ways but different.

I often have an issue with alternate history stories in which there are massive, decades-old fundamental differences but pop cultural moments have somehow remained the same. The Umbrella Academy using lots of pop music, for example (I don’t really mind, as that show is generally a bit nuts so can do what it likes). The worst offender, of course, being the Will Smith Netflix vehicle Bright - which in some ways has a similar-ish setup to Triverse, with orcs and other fantasy creatures integrated into American society. The problem is that the show makes a point of that integration having happened a long time ago (I can’t remember if it’s hundreds or even thousands of years prior - but a long time!), yet the Los Angeles culture portrayed in the movie is more-or-less the same as the real world, but with a clumsy metaphorical swapping of orcs for other discriminated minorities. Basically, it wouldn’t have happened that way. Even tiny things will splinter off an alternate history in a very different direction, let alone a reality incursion by a bunch of fantasy creatures.

Anyway. My point is that it means I have to pause anytime I’m about to reference a common London landmark or British saying and consider whether it would actually exist in the Triverse reality. Of course, Max-Earth is our reality, just several hundred years hence into the future, so some of that stuff could still bleed over. It’s very possible for real world 21st century pop culture to exist in Triverse, as long as it originates from the Max-Earth universe’s timeline.

It’s complicated. But fun!

Right, thanks as ever. Catch you next week.