Assault on Stamford & Coin: part 2

A deeply regrettable incident

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

Previously: DCI James Miller was found dead in his cell, having been arrested on charges of corruption. A concerted effort is now being expended to frame the rest of the SDC and halt their investigation into corruption…

London.
1974. December.

Nisha Chakraborty moved around a lot, never seeming able to hold down rent for long. That much had always been apparent to Zoltan Kaminski, and as he stood on a cold London street and fiddled with the lock to the block of flats he couldn’t help but compare the place to all her previous. A run-down part of town: tick. A front door with a lock that barely worked: tick. Finally the catch lifted and the door opened. Filthy staircase with a collection of rubbish at the bottom: big ol’ tick.

They’d fallen into the habit of having keys to each other’s places while convalescing from the dopur poisoning the previous year. She’d come to stay with Kaminski and his parents when she’d got out of the hospital, and had still needed assistance once she’d returned to her own place. In the early days she could barely climb the stairs.

The dopur. He hadn’t actually thought about it in months. Too much else to consider. Looking after his father, with his mother gone. Keeping Chakraborty from going off the deep end. Trying to wade through the swamp with Bakker and the others. He’d nearly died more times than he liked to consider. It was becoming an annual tradition.

He hopped up the steps two at a time, all the way to the second floor where she lived. It was the kind of staircase where you couldn’t rely on the banister. Bakker had called him just as he was heading out the door to go to the office and filled him in. So, Miller was dead. Chakraborty hadn’t been picking up, which is when he’d raced over as fast as he could.

His fist hovered in front of the door, but he paused and instead pulled his keys again from his pocket. Best to be careful. This door, at least, opened without difficulty and he slipped into the flat, a two-and-a-bit room setup consisting of a combined kitchen and living space, a bedroom through one door, and a bathroom in the opposite direction.

The smell hit him first. Acrid, organic, like when the insides of a person were not in the right place. He suppressed a retch. The thin curtains were pulled together, the morning light filtered through to a dim, tobacco yellow. The immediate area around the doorway was a mess, a bundle of coats strewn in a heap to one side, shoes to the other. There was a dark stain in the carpet and broken glass in the tiny kitchen area.

Kaminski moved further in, closing the door quietly behind him. On the floor by the table was a telephone, its cable ripped from the wall. Another step, and he felt his shoe sink into something soft with a wet squelch. Looking down, he discovered a spread of vomit, which extended to the door frame leading into the bedroom and a little way up the wall. That was the smell explained.

He found her in the bedroom, lying face down on the bed, half-undressed, one leg dangling off the edge. There was a small sidelight switched on next to the bed. She must have made it home, probably already drunk, then drunk some more, before barely making it that far.

“Nisha,” he said, gently, approaching slowly. Her head was turned, her dark hair matted and tangled about her face, individual strands lined with chunks of whatever she’d thrown up in the night. She hadn’t choked on her own puke, at least. “Nisha,” he said again, rocking her shoulder slightly.

A low, drawn-out death rattle of a groan escaped her cracked lips. “What the fuck,” she said, one hand sliding up to grasp at her forehead. “Why’d you turn the light on? Turn it off.” The words were slurred, hesitant. She sounded like she was still drunk.

“You left it on,” he said. “You need to get up. We’re meeting the others.”

“What? Fuck, no, I’m not going anywhere today. I’ll call in sick.”

She’d been missing days here and there. Kaminski had wondered if it was actual illness or the booze. Looked like it was the booze.

“Not today,” he said. “Come on, get up. Miller’s dead. Shit’s hitting the fan.”

“What?” Her breath caught and her eyes opened for the first time. “Dead? Fuck. What happened?”

“We don’t know. Bakker called me half an hour ago. We need to get to Stamford and Coin, meet the others, decide what we’re doing next.”

“Fuck,” she said, drawing out the vowel for as long as she could manage. “I literally can’t get up. My head will explode.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll get you there. Get some coffee in you, you’ll be fine.”

With a heroic effort befitting tales of ancient myth, Chakraborty pushed herself up onto her elbow. “I have literally never been this hungover.” She ran a finger over her mouth, then through her hair. “Oh, jesus. Did I throw up?”

“In several places.”

“Christ, you could have said. No, why are you even here? Don’t look at me like this.” She managed to swing her legs to the floor and move to a sitting position. “Oh my god, my head.”

“Get dressed, wash up, we have to go now.”

“I need a shower.”

“No time. Just clean yourself up and we’ll go.”

She reached up and grabbed at his arm, pulling herself to her feet. “Why am I not wearing anything except this shirt?”

“Changing into pyjamas was apparently beyond you,” Kaminski said, pointing towards a loosely folded set on the end of the bed.

“You could have said. Have you just been staring at my arse this whole time?”

He smiled. “I can stare at your vomity hair instead, if you like.”

She moaned and held her head again. “Oh, this isn’t good. I need to—“ Then she half-ran, half-walked out of the bedroom in the direction of the bathroom. The door slammed, then a few seconds later he heard the very obvious sounds of retching.

The press conference played on the television above the counter, most of the cafe’s clients studiously ignoring it. There was a high ranking officer speaking, someone Holland didn’t recognise.

“The investigation is active and ongoing, so I won’t be saying too much this morning,” he said. “But I can tell you some of the facts. As you know from reports, there has been a deeply regrettable incident involving Detective Chief Inspector James Miller, who we now know to have taken his own life. What has come to light is that Detective Miller was under investigation and was facing charges relating to abuse of his position. As you know, we have long had a problem with human trafficking through the Palinor-Mid-Earth portal, and it would seem that Detective Miller and several of his colleagues were involved with facilitating illegal transit. It is with great sadness that I can also report the death of another police officer, Detective Constable Frank Holland, who was part of the efforts to uncover the operation. We are actively following up on several leads and will have the perpetrators in custody very soon. There is no need for public concern at this time.

“I will now hand over to Detective Sergeant Caitlin Shaw, who was working closely with DC Holland.”

The very much alive Frank Holland lifted his cup and took a sip of coffee. Motherfuckers must have written their script ahead of time and not had time to change it. Got their hands not talking to their mouths. They had it all planned out, were going to pin it on Clarke. But it was all rolling downhill faster than intended. He pulled his cap lower on his head, glanced across the street to the old office. Clarke was already there, but Holland was waiting.

“Detective Holland was a good man,” Shaw was saying. Still in their pocket, then. Holland recalled the tape of her and Bakker; she was at their mercy as much as any of the rest of them, poor girl. Maybe he should have told her what he’d had planned, got her out at the same time. Then again, if he’d done that she might already have been dead. “We will make sure his sacrifice was not in vain.” Christ, laying it on a bit thick. Shaw’s voice was wobbly, like there was someone holding a gun to her head just off camera. Maybe there was. “We are already making progress. This koth was arrested in Bruglia and has in the last twenty-four hours been extradited to Mid-Earth. They are now in custody in London.” The broadcast switched to show a mugshot of a koth, looking a little bloodied around one eye. “This koth, known as Bo’lath, was a ringleader of the smuggling ring. They directly oversaw the shipments, even transiting back and forth through the portal. By smashing this ring, we will be helping stop illegal migration, as well as help those legitimate refugees seeking safe passage.”

That was a strange detail. Holland would have stayed to listen to more, but that was when he saw Kaminski and Chakraborty arrive, slinking down the street and disappearing into Stamford and Coin. It was a cold day, everyone shuffling about in their coats and scarves, minding their own business. Nobody noticed them.

He left money on his table for the coffee and breakfast.

The wait had been interminable, making Kaminski and Chakraborty’s arrival a welcome relief. Clarke jumped up from his chair and went over to greet them, pleased to see friendly faces rather than a firing squad.

Chakraborty doubled over by the door to the office and vomited onto the floor.

“Are you OK?” Clarke kept his distance.

“She’s very hungover,” Kaminski said quietly, gesturing, while Chakraborty groaned and headed towards where the toilets at least used to be.

“Get it together, Nisha,” Clarke said, ignoring the middle finger that was flung in his general direction. He turned to Kaminski. “We need her sharp.”

“I’ll look after her,” he said, lighting up a cigarette. “How bad is it? Where’s Bakker?”

Clarke shrugged. “No sign of Bakker. Maybe they got to him? He’d be here by now. Miller’s dead. Don’t know about Holland. Seems like they’re cleaning house.”

“Who is ‘they’? Did we ever figure that out?”

“Lord Hutchinson. Baltine over in Bruglia. Matheson on Max-Earth. All of whom we can’t touch. And it seems Miller wasn’t the only one on the payroll.”

Kaminski shook his head. “So we’re fucked.”

It wasn’t something Clarke wanted to entertain. He couldn’t afford to lose, not yet. He still owed Callihan. That was his purpose. He closed his eyes and tried to channel Lola’s optimism, but it was too distant. She’d been gone from his life for too long, and her buffer of hope had degraded. All that was left was Clarke, with all of his cynicism intact. They were back at the old HQ, with nowhere left to run.

“Probably, yes,” he said, at last. “We probably always were.”

The younger man nodded. “How bad are we talking? Demotion? Sent to a backwater nothing place? Arrested and falsely charged?”

The door banged open and Frank Holland walked in. “No!” he declared, “it’s much, much worse than that. They will try to fucking kill you the first chance they get.” He came to an abrupt stop, a look of disgust on his face. “The state of this place. Looks like homeless scabs have been in here pissing and puking all over.” He looked around the room. “I missed it.”

“Frank?” He wasn’t somebody Clarke had expected to walk through the door.

“Some wanker broke into my house this morning and tried to murder me.” He flicked something through the air towards Clarke. “There’s your badge, by the way.” He stepped carefully over the pool of vomit.

“They can’t just kill all of us,” Clarke said. He wanted to believe that to be true. He couldn’t allow panic to set in, not yet. “It would be too hard to explain.”

A bitter laugh from Holland. “It’s all over the news, Clarke. They’ve got a whole story cooked up and ready to go. We’re people smugglers, apparently. They’ve implicated Miller, claiming he killed himself because he’d been found out. They even reported I was dead. Linking it all back to some Palinese trafficking ring out of Bruglia.”

Bruglia. That made a link back to Lola, if they wanted to go that far. She wouldn’t know what was coming, what had happened. He couldn’t shake the feeling of having let down another partner.

“This might not have been the smartest place to rendezvous,” Holland said.

He was right, but it was too late to do much about it. That didn’t mean they were helpless, though. “We need to prepare,” Clarke said.

Kaminski squinted at him. “Prepare what?”

“Barricade the doors. Find anything we can that’s been left. Anything that can be made into a weapon.

A lupine grin spread across Holland’s face. “Now that’s more like it, Clarke.”

---

Thanks for reading.

I think Holland and Chakraborty are trying to out-swear each other.

That’s one thing I hadn’t quite anticipated when deciding to write a book aimed at older readers (or, rather, non-children). My son, 11, is really interested in what I write, and is a keen comics illustrator himself. Currently, though, my newsletter is not at all suitable for him or his friends, which I actually find slightly disappointing. All of my previous books were largely YA-friendly, and No Adults Allowed was designed to appeal to younger readers.

Then again, making Triverse’s audience a ‘mature’ one has opened up interesting new storytelling possibilities that I’ve not had in my previous projects.

I wonder what happens when young fans of Happy Feet decide to check out the George Miller’s other work.

Anyway - some stuff I read this week:

• I met

  Elif Shafak
  at London Book Fair many years ago when I was recording an interview. I love that she has a newsletter, one which tends to be short, to the point and memorable. Amateur Writers Vs Professional Authors is a must-read.

• Eleanor Anstruther
  continues her 8 Questions series, this week pointing the spotlight at
  Clancy Steadwell
  . The interview is here.

• I thought

  Simon Owens
  had a good take on why YouTube is so dominant (almost to the point that we don’t notice how dominant) in Why YouTube will continue out-competing Hollywood. It’s been especially peculiar to see the streaming platforms all start to slide towards an ad-ridden, packaged-up model that looks increasingly like the old model they work so hard to destroy.

• It’s worth subscribing to

  Meaghan McIsaac
  ’s newsletter for the illustrations alone. This week she has a Listy List of interesting bits and bobs.

• Google announced a load of stuff this week, most of it predictably AI-related. It has implications for search, which could impact on writers (a significant proportion of my readers come from organic search these days). The Verge covered it.

• I’ve been playing a lot of Hades II. Wonderful writing and storytelling.

Tomorrow I’m going to be at Dragon Hall in Norwich for the ‘Building a Presence Online’ panel organised by the Society of Authors. It will be both fun and interesting! Do come along if you’re in the area.

Earlier this week I continued my Babylon 5 rewatch. Do jump on board with us if it’s your thing:

Thanks to everyone who popped along to the chat yesterday evening. Always good to hear what people are up to. You can hop in here:

Right, enough ramblings. Let’s talk about this chapter.

Author notes

Around the start of the Ukraine war, Russia had some peculiar newspaper articles published that had very little to do with reality. Now, Russia is clearly a propaganda-driven state, so this was nothing new, but the gap between fact and reality was wider than usual. It appeared that the pre-written newspaper articles announcing Russian victory had been published according to a timed plan: a plan that had not factored in the possibility of Ukraine putting up one hell of a fight. There’s a BBC article on it here.

That was in my mind when I was putting this chapter together. The somewhat surreal scene of Holland watching a news report of his own death, and the ‘alternate’ facts being presented, is very much referencing that Russian propaganda goof. Conspiracy and false realities are difficult to maintain. As with any web of lies, they’re most likely to tangle up the liar.

The other obvious touchpoint for this storyline is John Carpenter’s film Assault on Precinct 13, from which I’m liberally taking inspiration. That will come increasingly apparent in next week’s chapter. This entire storyline is an exercise in breaking apart the Triverse formula and putting it back together again in a new shape. Given the events of the last few chapters, there’s really no going back for our characters; all they can do is go forward.

Chakraborty clearly has an alcohol problem. I wanted to feature a character so drunk, or hungover, that they are barely functioning. That’s not something I feel like I’ve seen often: the effects of excessive alcohol consumption are usually played down, or played for laughs, and I wanted to explore having one of our key characters basically incapable of functioning for what would otherwise be described as an ‘action sequence’. Nisha is being forced into a dangerous and stressful situation while at her most incapacitated.

Next week gets really exciting. Hope you’re enjoying the ride.