Fantasies: part 3

Investigating the scene of the crime

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

Previously: Two bodies have been found in an alley behind an exclusive, very expensive high-rise apartment complex called The Lighthouse. Detectives Kaminski and Chakraborty are interviewing Patrick Boorman, the resident of the penthouse suite…

Early shift
On duty: DC Zoltan Kaminski & DC Nisha Chakraborty

London.
1974. August.

It was the biggest damn television set Kaminski had ever seen.

“That is the biggest damn television set I’ve ever seen,” he said, turning to Boorman in disbelief.

“The biggest damn television,” Boorman repeated slowly, pointing at the giant device set into one wall of the apartment suite. “What, this?” He tapped his knuckles on the top of the set. “This is nothing. Forty inches corner to corner, top of the line CRT. Note how the glass is almost entirely flat. Takes a lot of engineering to get rid of the curve.” He took a step back and stared at the blank screen, shaking his head. “But this, detectives, this is nothing. Have you been to Max-Earth? Seen what they have? Seventy inch flat screens. Wall projection. LED panels covering entire surfaces of a house. Augmented reality contact lenses, with virtual screens as big as you want.” He held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of my country, detectives. Proud of my kingdom. But we’ve got a long way to go when it comes to home entertainment. Besides, the only thing on at the moment is this tedious election.”

The election. Shit, they needed to go vote. The early call had waylaid even Chakraborty’s careful plan to get to the booth.

Boorman walked across the room to a polished metal hi-fi, all dials and knobs and flanked by massive speakers. “Sound, though? Music? We have them beat on every front.” He pulled a record out of a drawer and placed the disc onto the player. “Everything on Max-Earth is digital. Easy-peasy, press a button, any song you like.” He lowered the arm and a song started playing - it might have been a pop song from earlier in the summer. Kaminski thought he had heard it on the radio. Boorman nodded his head to the beat. “We still have all the best musicians. We have to hunt it down. Find the best. Curate. Art still means something here.”

“Mr Boorman,” Chakraborty said, stepping forward.

“Mind the rug, please,” Boorman said.

“I’m sorry?”

Boorman pointed at a white fur rug laid out between the long couches. “Very expensive. No outside shoes on it.”

Chakraborty side-stepped. “At least it isn’t green,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” Boorman said, frowning.

“We have some questions for you,” Chakraborty said. “There was an incident last night at the rear of the property.”

“An incident at the rear of the property. Yes, I was informed. Sounds awful. Suicide, was it?”

“We’re still trying to establish the specific circumstances,” Chakraborty said. “There was a fatality involved, and caused by a fall from a significant height.”

“From a significant height.” Boorman nodded, then ran a hand along his jawline, as if to emphasise its cut. Kaminski wasn’t getting a good feeling from the guy. “This is why you needed to talk to me,” Boorman continued, “because this is the only apartment with exterior access.”

“Your rooftop,” Kaminski said. “Can we take a look?”

“Yes, of course. Follow me.”

They were led through glass doors onto a balcony, then up a set of steps to the garden. If the apartment itself had been an exercise in extravagance, the rooftop was a declaration of extreme entitlement. It was a good job nobody from the street could see the luxury these rich arseholes were enjoying. The place was immaculate: beautiful plants, perfectly manicured lawn, a couple of covered seating areas and even a goddamned pool. Steam rolled off the pool in the morning sun. It was like they’d entered a different world when they’d got into that second lift up to the penthouse. A little portal of this guy’s own making.

Chakraborty roamed about the garden, doing her thing. Absorbing everything she touched and saw. “Did you have other people here last night, Mr Boorman?”

“People, here? A few friends from work. Quiet affair.”

Kaminski walked towards the pool. “You run your own company, is that right?”

“Boorman Enterprises, that’s right. You might have heard of us. And if you haven’t, you’ll have bought or used something that we’ve handled. Import-export.”

Something caught Kaminski’s eye, floating in the corner of the pool. He crouched down and took his pen from his jacket pocket. “A quiet gathering, was it?”

“We like to celebrate the wins. We work hard, it’s important to recognise achievements.”

“Looks like it was quite the celebration,” Kaminski said, fishing the used condom from the water. “You must be very close to your colleagues.”

A flicker of annoyance crossed the man’s face. “You know how it is, detective,” he said, “there are always a few who get over-excited. Carried away.”

“I don’t know,” Kaminski said. “I think I might be going to the wrong parties.”

Chakraborty raised her voice from the other side of the roof. “How many people were here?”

Boorman took a deep breath, sucking it in between pursed lips. “It’s hard to say. A few.”

“More than five?”

“Yes.”

“More than a dozen?”

“Possibly, I don’t recall. I can’t be everywhere at once.”

Kaminski took his notepad out, then flicked the condom onto a deck chair. “We’ll need details, names.”

“Details and names, detective? Yes. I’ll get my secretary on it.”

“Was anybody missing? Anybody disappear halfway through the night?”

Boorman spread his arms wide and smiled. “You’re going to need to be more specific, detective. I know a lot of people. Do you even know who it is that you’re looking for?”

“We’re still working on identification,” Chakraborty said, approaching. For a moment, down in the restaurant lobby, he’d thought that maybe she’d taken a liking to Boorman - or, at least, his appearance. He could see now that she’d moved past that: her attitude and posture was that of an angry cat. She never was very good at hiding how she was feeling.

“Still working on identification,” Boorman said, repeating the words slowly. It was an odd habit of his, Kaminski had noted. Maybe he was playing for time, thinking about what to say next. But there was an undercurrent to the repetition; a judgment, a silent critique. Like he wanted them to know that he was better at this than them, and was unimpressed by their words. “You have to understand, detectives, that I’m a popular man. I’m highly in demand, professionally and otherwise.” He grinned. “I’m joking. But you know what I’m saying. If a couple of people were here, didn’t say hi, and left early, I likely wouldn’t know.”

The businessman clearly wasn’t going to offer up anything useful. Either he didn’t know anything, or he was obfuscating. At least he hadn’t called in a team of lawyers yet. Kaminski took in the rooftop. If there had been a party, of any scale, it must have been followed by a dedicated clean-up job. The place was clean, uncannily so, without even a hint of city grime on railings of the edges of benches. Rogue prophylactic aside, it looked like nothing ever happened up there.

“Here,” Boorman said, flicking open a small metal case to reveal a white business card. “Take this. That number will get my office. Get your people to call my people. We’ll get a list of who was here over to you, then we can get this all sorted out.” He nodded in the direction of a building opposite. “Look over there. Sure the bodies didn’t fall from the other side of the street?”

The double elevator ride back down to street level felt faster than the ascension.

“What a weirdo,” Chakraborty said, shuddering. “You notice the way he kept repeating everything I said?”

Kaminski nodded. “Repeated everything you said. Yes.” He lit up, smoke drifting through the small lift space.

She looked at him disparagingly. “Ho ho. Funny man.” She shivered again, involuntarily. “Creepy guy, right? Not bad to look at though. You could open a bottle on that chin, Jesus. I’ll bet he has more products in his bathroom than I do. Seriously. You don’t get a complexion like that without spending a lot of money.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Kaminski said, stroking the stubble on his cheeks. “I’m all natural.”

“And all the better for it,” Chakraborty said. She froze up immediately, just for a second, annoyed at herself for the unguarded compliment But fuck it. Kaminski any day of the week over that streamlined conference room manbot. “You notice how easily he slipped into referring to bodies, plural?”

“Did we say it was two people?”

“Don’t think so. Maybe to the concierge downstairs. But Boorman knows more than he’s letting on.”

Kaminski coughed. “So, yeah. Morgue next?”

“Yeah, let’s see if the doc has figured out who got jellified.” She looked at her watch, tensing up for a moment - but there was still plenty of day left. “Got to do something on the way, though, Zoltan.”

“What’s that?”

“Polls are open,” she said. “We have to go vote.”

---

Thank you for reading!

So this was the week in which someone namechecked me alongside Margaret Atwood.

My brain wrestles with two conflicting reactions here. On the one hand, it’s absolutely lovely of S.L. Stallings to mention me in such a positive manner. The inter-connected support network that is the Substack fiction scene is the best online community I’ve encountered for about 25 years.

On the other hand, being mentioned in the same sentence as M Atwood is clearly ridiculous. I don’t mean to say that S.L. is ridiculous, of course - just that my rational brain cannot possibly accept that juxtaposition. I know S.L. wasn’t comparing or drawing parallels with our writing ability, but even so.

I suppose I should just say thanks! and move along.

I nearly met Margaret a few years back. She frequently visits Norfolk here in the UK and has strong ties to the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, where I worked for a good while. Alas, I was off site on other projects that day, but I did get to edit some video interviews. Check out this one with some brilliant young writers:

Also, get a load of Dragon Hall. Not a bad place to work.

While we’re here, you can’t go wrong with some actual writing tips as well:

Meanwhile,

Inktober

has begun! I’m doing it with my 10 year old son which is proving to be great fun. Not to mention hanging out with other participating artists over on Notes. My efforts so far:

Inktober days 1 - 5

Here’s a couple of new ebook giveaways that might be of interest:

• Urban Fantasy Freebies

• Quest for New Worlds

Author notes

For a while I was heavily into scriptwriting. In the late-90s and early-2000s I really wanted to be a filmmaker. Part of that, I think, was a real enjoyment for writing dialogue. There are times now, with my prose, when I have to resist the temptation to have a chapter that is purely dialogue.

Today’s entry is mostly a dialogue scene. In fact, one of the challenges I encountered when I first started writing Triverse, which was my first foray into crime fiction, was how to explore the stories in ways that weren’t always characters talking at each other. My previous books were much more action-oriented and adventure-based, whereas crime fiction lends itself often to a slower, more cerebral, more contemplative style. Not always, of course, but in the case of the detectives here, a lot of the detecting involves relatively ‘quiet’ action.

That made me nervous in the early days, back in 2021. It felt slow paced and I worried about it being ponderous. I’ve relaxed into it over the years and fret far less about Triverse’s pacing, chapter-by-chapter. The quieter periods help the noisier moments stand out.

Not much else to note today - next week sees the return of everyone’s famous coroner, so that’ll be fun.

If you know someone who might enjoy Triverse or the Write More newsletter, do pass it along: