Assault on Stamford & Coin: part 1

Don't stand on the rug, it's about to get pulled

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. The ramifications are about to ripple out through the Specialist Dimensional Command…

London.
1974. December.

There was a routine to mornings that Christopher Bakker always followed. As long as the first hour of the day went according to plan, he could handle anything that was thrown at him later. Being in the police meant he had seen awful things, dealt with terrible people, but it was all tolerable as long as he had his coffee, his toast with jam and a boiled egg.

The coffee was nearly made and cooling off to the perfect temperature. He preferred to make it using a drip filter, one of the many variants of coffee maker in his collection. One of the main benefits of the triverse, he had always thought, was its introduction of so many new ways of brewing drinks. Palinor had its own rituals. Max-Earth had a cornucopia of methods, from simple gravity and pressure-based manual devices to complex automated machines. Bakker was a collector, but the filter drip remained his favourite. Simplicity always won out. Complexity was for charlatans.

His egg bubbled away happily in a pan of water. Lauren had already left to get the children to school. As he pushed down the lever on the toaster, the telephone rang. He crossed the room to where it sat on the breakfast table, next to the wall. Keeping an eye on the toaster and the boiling water, he lifted the handset.

“Christopher Bakker, who’s speaking, please?”

“Bakker,” came Ford’s unmistakably gruff voice. “I’ve been trying to get to a telephone all night but they’ve kept us in lockdown at Thamesmead. They’re bringing in new people from outside the SDC, so me and Morgan are now on a list for questioning.”

The water boiled.

It was unlike Ford to avoid the point. “What’s happened?”

“It’s Miller,” Ford said. “Suicide. Hanged himself in his cell last night.”

Steam vented from the pan.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Bakker said.

“I know,” Ford said, his voice sounding close to the microphone. “He shouldn’t have been at Thamesmead. The transfer wasn’t approved by us.”

Miller wasn’t the type to take his own life. He valued himself too much to consider it, certainly not after barely a day in custody. “He’s dead, then?” The question was pointless, but Bakker required confirmation.

“Very much so.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I have to go. Watch your back, Chris.”

The line clicked and Ford’s voice was replaced with a droning tone. Bakker stood with the handset to his ear for a few seconds, then lowered it to the table, not bothering to replace it onto the receiver. He stood very still, running through the implications and the possibilities, running all the threads together and apart to see where they might lead.

Without really thinking about it, he crossed to the hob and took hold of the handle of the pan. The egg would be ready. The coffee was just about good to go. All he needed was to wait for the toaster. He stared at the small machine, the slice of bread nestled in the burning-red slot.

Miller being dead meant their main witness was gone. No first hand information, just some recordings of a dead man. Circumstantial accusations from an unstable and depressed officer who had now taken his own life; likely fabrications not worth pursuing. That’s how it would be spun. There would be no useful evidence in Miller’s files. He already knew that Hutchinson would have been sure to cleanse his own archives.

The water continued to boil angrily.

They had been so close. Bakker thought back to the actions taken, checking for bad decisions that should have been played another way. They’d simply been out-played. Maybe Bakker had never really understood the game. They’d killed Callihan, and now Miller. They’d gone after Kaminski.

So close, and it had all been snatched away. All of their cautious activity, evaporated. They were in a worse position than they had been prior to Holland bringing them the recordings. Now their investigation was known, and they were all compromised.

They’d lost. Been outsmarted. Underestimated their opponents.

Bakker made a point of not making mistakes.

The toaster popped, springing the toasted bread into the air. Bakker shouted in frustration and swung the pan across the worktop, hitting the toaster and spilling boiling water everywhere. He released the handle and the pan skittered across the room, denting a kitchen cupboard. The toaster fizzled and smoke puffed from its innards as the lights in the room tripped and turned off. The boiled egg rolled around on the floor, a small crack on one edge.

As an angry young man, Christopher Bakker had taken steps to address and control his raging. He didn’t like being reminded. Burn marks tingled on his forearm and leg.

He turned back to the worktop and lifted the drip filter away from the coffee mug. A benefit of the drip method was that it was the perfect temperature by the time it finished the brewing process. Lifting the mug, he took a gentle sip. It was good coffee.

Back at the kitchen table, he replaced the handset on the receiver, then lifted it and dialled the number for the office.

“Where the hell is my badge?” DC Yannick Clarke was in a bad mood and had clearly decided to let everyone know about it. Robin watched him as he stamped about the SDC office, lifting files and folders on other people’s desks, checking in random drawers, looking in bins and generally being a very bad investigative detective.

“Yannick,” she said, from the relative safety of the large, wooden reception desk, “aren’t you supposed to be good at finding evidence?”

“That’s never applied to my own things, unfortunately,” he said.

“Have you tried the canteen? Perhaps you put it down there. Or the gents.”

Clarke pointed a finger in her direction and made for the doors, just as the telephone rang. Robin picked it up and recognised DI Bakker’s warm voice, though there was a edge to it, as if it were catching on something.

“Robin, good morning. Is Yannick in the office?”

She held out the handset as Clarke was about to walk past. “For you, it’s DI Bakker.”

“Thanks,” Clarke said, taking the offered handset. “Morning guv, it’s Clarke. I’m on Robin’s telephone.” He listened intently and Robin watched him, as he nodded, then stiffened, then as colour drained from his face. She’d worked with these people long enough to read their expressions and posture, and Clarke had just heard about something very bad indeed. “What about Kaminski and Chakraborty?” he asked. Another nod. “Understood.” He was about to return the handset when he snapped it back to his ear. “Wait, what about Holland? He’s under house arrest. OK. I’m on my way.”

Taking the handset back from the man, she placed it gently on the receiver. Clarke was breathing heavily, his face stricken with worry.

“Anything I can do, love?”

He patted her shoulder absentmindedly, shaking his head. “No, it’s alright, Robin. Thank you. I need to go — take any messages for me and I’ll try to check in later. If yo hear from Kaminski or Chakraborty, tell them to go to the old place.”

“Old place?”

“They’ll understand.”

Robin, her official role being the receptionist, was often excluded from decisions being made at the top of the SDC hierarchy. She was rarely privy to discussions among the higher-ups in the Met or Joint Council. But she wasn’t an idiot.

“Is this about Detective Miller?” The atmosphere in the office had been strained since Miller’s arrest, a development Robin still could not get her head around. One of their own, arrested for corruption? At least, that’s what the rumours were.

Clarke sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “Stay well clear of it, Robin.”

He gave her one last smile, a little forced, then retrieved his coat and headed for the exit.

He was still getting paid, which was the main thing. Leaving the house wasn’t an option, which meant Holland didn’t have much he could practically do with that pay, despite all the free time on his hands. After he’d visited Bakker’s place and delivered the good news, in the form of several tapes of incriminating recordings, it had been forty-eight hours of chaos.

Bakker had sent him to the office, which was smart. That way they could arrest him at the same time as Miller; make it a little harder to figure out what had happened. Obfuscation wasn’t something he’d given Bakker credit for, but the man had been running a covert op for months after all. Shaw wasn’t on shift, but they’d get her at her home. He’d been taken to the lock-up, under the pretence of being questioned by Morgan and Ford. They knew he was already on-side, and so after several hours of catching some kip in a cell he’d been shuttled back to his home under guard, and there he’d stayed.

House arrest was an odd thing, like an enforced holiday. He watched people walk up and down the street, oblivious, doing their own things. He’d never know their lives, and they’d never know his. There were officers stationed out the front and the back, not that he had any intention of violating the deal while the ink was still drying. This one he had to play by the book.

The plan had not been to always go this way. At the start, Miller’s extra-curricular activities had been intriguing and Holland had thought they may have some merit. Bakker had been acting suspiciously, as had Clarke. They’d been up to something, that had become increasingly clear.

But, then, so had Miller. It was why Holland liked to be his own man, and focus on his own preservation. Factionalism, taking a side, meant making enemies. It was much easier to strike out solo: no friends meant no enemies either. In his experience. He’d always prided himself on being an equal opportunity arsehole.

That worked fine when the world was ticking along as normal, in its own, inimitably fucked up manner. That was where Holland had a problem with Miller, Hutchinson and the rest. Their whole thing was upsetting the apple cart. Flipping the tables. Disrupting the status quo. Making a mess. Holland didn’t like that, because it made life complicated. He just wanted to do his job, get paid, go whoring, get drunk, repeat. Easy. If nobody got in his way, he wouldn’t get in their way either.

Turns out Miller and his gang of ideologues had gone deeper than Holland could have possibly imagined. Bakker had filled him in: what had really happened to Callihan, how the man was set up, and how he was investigating corruption when they got him. The construction of a new AI, spread across the triverse to avoid attention. Attempts on Kaminksi and Chakraborty’s life. There was more to tell, but that would require more trust. Honestly, Holland could do without it; he had no intention of joining Bakker’s merry band of adventurers. He’d done his part and delivered the evidence; they could take down Miller and Hutchinson and the rest and stop everyone playing silly buggers.

Still, John Callihan. The man had been a prick. Hell, he was barely a man. A bright-eyed, naive boy in a suit, with delusions of influence. Holland had shot the koth who had torn the kid’s head off, which had been the end of it. But apparently not. Holland hadn’t liked Callihan much, but he’d been a colleague and a cop. That meant there was unfinished business.

Holland was on the first floor of his small terrace, in the front bedroom, having just got showered and dressed. It felt a little pointless keeping up the routine, but it helped to stop him from going crazy at being shuttered in. There was only so much daytime television he could tolerate while in his boxers.

It was a cold morning, condensation on the window. It was a shitty single-pane job, which may as well have not been there, the way the wind whistled through in the winter. He wiped it clear with the sleeve of his jumper and looked out to nod at the officer.

The little path from his door to the street was empty. A pedestrian wandered past on the other side of the street, but there was no sign of a uniformed officer. Holland ground his teeth against each other.

Moving through the house, he reached the small study at the back, which looked out onto the crappy scrub patch that was supposed to be a back garden. There was nobody by the back fence either.

Streets of old terraced houses in England had particular characteristics, no matter which city you were in. One being that the floorboards always, always creaked, no matter where you trod or how carefully you moved. It was a design flaw that gave Holland about half a second’s warning to duck and pivot as a truncheon swung past his head, the displaced air brushing his cheek.

The person on the other end of the weapon was thick set, tall, and was wearing a black balaclava. They wasted no time coming in for another hit, prompting Holland to desperately dive to the floor and roll towards the door. He struggled back to his feet, vaguely observing that rolling on the floor was harder in his late-forties than it had been as a child. He gripped onto the door frame as he regained his balance, just in time to see the assailant charging him again.

Another oddity of 19th century house construction was the staircase layout, whereby a sheer set of steps would ascend to a T-junction of sorts, with single steps up to rooms in each direction. That left a small space between the rooms where the floor dropped down a step. Holland knew the layout of his house intimately. He could navigate it while blind drunk and not stumble.

This guy, this arsehole who had invaded his place, clearly didn’t spend much time in terraced houses. Holland took a step backwards, moving up and into the adjacent room. The attacker, still charging at full pelt, forgot that there was the small depression and tipped forward into the space, his balance entirely shot. Holland was ready and grabbed at the truncheon arm, trying to wrestle the weapon loose.

The arsehole recovered faster than he’d anticipated and grappled Holland, managing to pin one of his arms behind his back. Shit, not good. Holland still had hold of the truncheon with his free arm, but wouldn’t for long.

Ah well.

Shifting all his weight, Holland pushed himself backwards, taking the other man with him, knocking them both back into the gap between the rooms. Bracing a leg against the back wall, Holland pushed as hard as he could, launching both of them down the steep flight of stairs.

It was going to fucking hurt; he just had to count on it hurting the other guy more.

His pinned arm was released as they fell and he pulled it around in front of him just before they crunched into the final few steps, bumping down to the ground floor. Holland felt his back and shoulder collide with the other man’s face and chest, and they landed in a crumpled heap.

The wind knocked from his lungs, it took Holland a few seconds to recover his wits, during which time he expected the truncheon to come sailing down on his brain. Finally he was able to command his limbs to work and he rolled away, spinning to face his attacker.

At the bottom of the stairs lay the man, his neck at a peculiar angle. His legs and one hand twitching slightly. Holland stretched, checking if anything was broken on his end. Every part of him felt bruised, but nothing seemed to be malfunctioning.

He moved carefully back to the twitching body, reached down and pulled off the mask. The face was bloodied and belonged to a bald, fairly anonymous and unpleasant-looking fellow. Probably a hire. There was spittle and foam at the corner of his mouth.

“Who the fuck is this arsehole?” Holland said out loud, flexing his shoulders and tilting his neck. He checked through the man’s pockets. “Stop twitching, it’s annoying me,” he said, as he pulled out a pocket knife, a wallet with some notes and an ID card. No, not just any ID — a police badge. He turned it over in his hands and whistled.

“You, my friend,” he said to the dying man, “are a lot uglier than Detective Yannick Clarke.” He chucked the wallet onto the man’s chest, and leaned down. “I don’t know if you can hear me, mate, but Clarke’s probably better at fighting, too. No offence.”

An assassination attempt, then. That was new. More interesting than daytime television, that’s for sure. House arrest could do one; clearly it wasn’t safe to stay there. And he knew where to go.

---

Thanks for reading.

It’s all kicking off in the triverse. More on that in the author notes below.

This week I popped along to Dragon Hall here in Norwich for their writer’s social, a monthly get-together that I consistently manage to miss. Turns out that also in attendance was none other than

James Kinsley

, who I’ve nattered with via our newsletters for a while but had never properly met.

Writing is such a potentially isolating experience that meet-ups are a real pleasure. That’s why writing a newsletter is so rewarding: the community that has gathered around these parts is a special thing. Talking of which, I’m holding regular Thursday writing accountability chats over on the chat. Do come along whenever suits:

So, did you see the new Apple ad? If not, brace yourself. It’s quite violent:

In terms of getting people to talk about your brand, it’s a highly successful commercial. Perhaps not in the way they wanted, though. It’s tonally super weird, with a dystopian, end-of-days feeling that presumably wasn’t what they were aiming for.

It’s also bad timing on Apple’s part, arriving at a time when trust in tech companies is at an all-time low and creative humans are feeling under direct attack. I think the ad is a fascinating example of how we’re not in direct control of our stories: once we put them out into the world, they begin to interact with viewers and readers, and that interplay between author and audience can have wild and unpredictable results.

Simon Owens

shared a fascinating observation from the Content Entrepreneur Expo:

Platforms as a necessary evil

The abrupt (actually, a long time coming) flip from focusing on social platforms to focusing on creator-owned is such a massive change from a decade ago. It’s the crux of my decision to leave Wattpad and start this newsletter in the first place:

Why I left Wattpad for Substack

This is what I’ll be examining on 18 May at a Society of Authors event in Norwich. If you’re in the area do come along to ‘Building a presence online’. More details here.

Author notes

It’s been a while since Triverse had a major action sequence. They’re interesting beasts, at least in written form. Kinetic action is very at home in comics and movies, but on the page they’re a curious thing. There’s a pacing to them, a fine line to tread in terms of word count, sentence length, paragraph size, that determines whether an action scene works in prose.

A while back we had Daryla going full ninja, in an action sequence that was more choreographed and ‘cool’. That’s the sort of heightened action that can happen on Palinor. On Mid-Earth, and with someone like Holland, I wanted it to be more mundane. Faster, messier. Fights don’t usually last long in real life, and are crunchy, clunky things without much in the way of finesse.

Hence the fight between Holland and his attacker is short, awkward and painful. It’s over in less than a minute. Holland wins, mostly by luck. He was lucky that the floorboards creaked. Lucky that they ended up fighting right at the top of the stairs. Lucky that he was positioned to land on top of the attacker, not the other way around. Lucky that the fall killed the attacker. Any one of those things could have gone very wrong, very easily.

There’s another action sequence in this chapter, of sorts, and that’s Bakker’s explosive anger as he realises they’ve lost it all. We’ve only known Bakker to be calm, calculating, perhaps a little dull and procedural. He gets the job done in an unfussy way. Here we glimpse what’s just beneath the surface, for a moment.

I should probably talk about the title of this storyline. ‘Assault on Stamford & Coin’ is a title that’s been in my back pocket for literal years. It was a story idea from way back at the beginning of the Triverse process, though I wasn’t sure exactly how it’d fit into the wider narrative. You’ll find out properly next week. I did go back and forth on whether to keep the title, as it’s technically a spoiler, but decided to go with it — ultimately it’s part of the tease and the fun.

Lots more to say on this storyline, but those thoughts will have to wait until we’re a bit further in.