Loose threads: part 2

Consequence at last

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: The fighting is over. For some, there remains unfinished business. Once-detective Frank Holland has signed on as a hunter, tasked with tracking down members of the former regime and holding them accountable for their crimes. He’s been joined by Christopher Bakker, a former colleague from the Met…

Note: There’s some strong language in this one. Because, you know, Frank Holland.

Kettlewell. Mid-Earth.
October. 1980.

Telling the villages apart wasn’t easy. To Frank Holland, one picturesque cobbled row of houses nestled around a pretty bridge was much the same as as any other. Kettlewell ticked all the boxes: river, watermill, old mill and forge, a couple of pubs, newsagent with boxes of fruit out on the pavement.

The only surprise was the sheer number of flags, both of the Kingdom of Great Britain variety and the Earth First adapted version of the George Cross, draped from every lamppost and almost every house.

“These people sure do love their country,” Holland said, eyeing Bakker’s reaction.

“Seems that way.”

They were walking down the main street, having caught a slow, rickety bus from Pateley Bridge. The bus had smelled of cigarettes and sawdust and they’d been the only passengers save for an old woman who had eyed them suspiciously the entire journey. The morning had brought with it a fresher day, the rain having poured itself out overnight, the air crisp and cold.

Holland grunted. “I remember when the flag actually meant something.” Smiling, he took a deep breath, listened to the birds in the trees behind the street. “When I was a lad, I had a red and white hanging in my bedroom window for years. It didn’t have the face at the centre of it back then.” Earth First’s bastardisation of the flag featured the silhouette of a head at the intersection of the lines of the cross, the red eyes staring out. We are watching you, it said. It was a human head: not a koth’s, or an aen’fa’s. The implication was clear.

“The genius of Earth First,” Bakker said quietly, “was to extend nationalist pride to cover the entire planet. The One True Earth. And then mixing that in with centuries of English empire building.”

“As a marketing campaign it worked pretty fucking well for them,” Holland said, clocking the tiny, local police station at the corner of the main market square. An officer could be seen sat in reception. Useful for later.

Village life appeared to have been paused, with people standing awkwardly in doorways, or watching from windows as Bakker and Holland moved down the street. Children stopped their playing to stare at the outsiders.

“Interesting place,” Holland continued. “Not the warmest of welcomes.”

Bakker nodded. “Word gets around quickly, it seems. Do you anticipate any trouble?”

“From this lot?” Holland made a show of looking to both sides of the street. He waved to an especially grumpy-looking older man who was stood with a large shovel in his front garden. The gesture was not returned. “I mean, they could give it a go. I’m not seeing much of a threat.”

“You had much difficulty on other jobs?”

Shrugging, Holland made a noncommittal noise. “Not really. I’ve only done three so far, though. There was one guy, a prison guard from the koth ghetto. He’d fled overseas, was moving through France and trying to get out east. I picked up that job while I was on my way back from Addis. Intercepted him in a town halfway up the alps. Gave me the run-around, tried to shoot me, and then had the gall to beg for his life. Actually pissed his pants, would you believe it? This slimy motherfucker who’s probably shot so many koth he’s lost count. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me: these guys who have shown no mercy their whole lives, now pleading for it?” He held his hand to his throat. “It gets me, right here, like I’ve swallowed something nasty.”

“Do you see it as a way to atone for your own hypocrisy?” Bakker didn’t even bother to look at him as he said it.

“Don’t psycho-analyse me, Bakker,” Holland snapped. He felt that rage inside, that defensive reflex, and pushed it down. Save it for Maxwell. Besides, Bakker had a point, and that was the worst of it.

They passed through the village without incident and arrived at a large house on the outskirts. It was noticeably grander than the other buildings in Kettlewell, taller and with an ornate façade.

“Is this the place?” Bakker was scoping the area, and Holland could see the investigator in him beginning to wake up. They’d spent the previous night drinking into the early hours, Holland catching him up on everything that had happened since Stamford and Coin. It hadn’t occurred to Holland that Bakker would know nothing of the past five years. The guv had been in the cold, forcibly retired. Banishment to Yorkshire had been by far the best of several bad options.

“Looks like the one in the photos.” Holland slid his fingers through the knuckleduster in his pocket. “Listen, I’m a registered hunter. That gives me certain powers and protections. It all starts kicking off in there, leave it to me.”

“Noted.”

The guard on the front gate took one look at the two of them, then at Holland’s ID, and waved them through. A hired goon, rather than a faithful supporter. The man who opened the door was a little more zealous, attempting to slam it shut. Holland’s boot got there first, and a swipe to the man’s head was enough to send him scurrying out the front and away. There were signs of a party, half-eaten food and empty bottles of wine on every surface. A mostly naked woman at the top of the stairs stifled a scream, then pointed towards the back of the house. Holland and Bakker proceeded through, Holland in the lead. It was good to have someone at his back; a proper partner. He’d not had that for a while.

Bakker pointed to the French doors, leading out into the rear garden. Halfway down the lawn ran a man in a loose shirt, boxers, and socks pulled up his calves, glancing frantically over his shoulder every few steps.

Wrenching the door aside, Holland stepped out onto the patio. There didn’t seem to be much of a need for haste. The fleeing man stumbled repeatedly, tumbling to the ground, still wet from the night’s storm. Catching up to him was easy, and Holland picked him up and spun him around.

The weedy face was instantly recognisable, with its multi-layered chin, those supercilious eyes and short-cropped, greyed hair. Nigel Maxwell had looked the same for the past thirty years, one of those politicians who seemed to have gone from teenager directly to middle-aged. Covered in mud, he was a far less polished figure than the one standing at the Prime Minister’s box in parliament, or the wily bastard in the TV interviews, or the charlatan pretending to enjoy a pint with the common man.

“Don’t kill me,” Maxwell whimpered, “oh, god, please don’t kill me.”

Holland drew him close, until he could feel his breath on his face. “I’m not going to kill you. I want all your friends to see who you really are.”

Throwing the former Prime Minister back in the direction of the house, Holland stalked after him. Hunters had significant freedoms in how to execute a contract, the parameters scaling to the accused’s crimes. The investigation came first, and a trial in absentia. The hunted could turn themselves in, or face justice in the field. It had only been a matter of months since the government’s fall, and it wasn’t difficult to make a case against the highest profile quarries. It would become more challenging over time, but there was no shortage of targets. More was the pity.

Maxwell fell at Bakker’s feet, who had stayed back by the patio doors. “Please,” Maxwell said, clutching at Bakker’s arm, “I can pay you. Get me away from this madman and I’ll pay you.”

“I used to have a good job,” Bakker said, disdain across his every feature. “It paid well. It brought me satisfaction. You took it away from me.”

The former politician clutched at the air, as if trying to find a workable answer. “I don’t even know who you are,” he stammered.

“Everyone knows who you are,” Bakker said, then looked up at Holland. “Now what?”

Grabbing Maxwell by the shirt and dragging him into the house, Holland called over his shoulder. “Now we take him down the station and book him for being a wanker.”

They marched him down the middle of the road, foregoing the pavements. Nigel Maxwell in front, Holland and Bakker flanking him a couple of steps behind. Eyes watched them from windows, from doorways, from the darkened pubs and shops. The wind had dropped and the flags drooped lifelessly.

“What do you think?” Holland glanced at Bakker.

“I think this is the most fun I’ve had in years.”

“Plenty more where this came from. These cunts had five years to falsely imprison, murder, rape and kidnap, just because some people looked a bit funny or thought the wrong thoughts. The list’s big enough to keep us in business for years.”

Bakker laughed. “I’m retired.”

“Shit, so was I, guv. But you know what they say. You can take the man out of the Force, but you can’t take the Force out of the man.”

There was no response from Bakker.

Through the village they went, nobody lifting a finger or raising a voice to stop them. There was a part of Holland that enjoyed the unfiltered power, the ability to break into a house and seize the person inside. Catching bad guys was what he did, what he’d always done. It’s what had almost sent him down the wrong path. Finding perps and knocking heads was his skillset, and at least as a hunter he could point those instincts in a useful direction.

He used Maxwell’s face to push open the door to the police station.

“Hello, mate,” he said to the sergeant on the desk. “You will never guess who we just found down the end of your village.”

The booking took an hour. Arranging transport another. Maxwell would be transferred to London the next day, to await trial. His capture would send a signal that nobody from the former regime was safe.

Bakker and Holland sat on a bench in the corner of the station foyer, Holland filling out form after form. “If a hunted is killed, the forms are even worse,” he said. “Main reason to bring them in alive, to be honest.”

“What next for you?”

“Well.” Holland inhaled deeply and whistled through his teeth. “I’ll ride down with Maxwell. Don’t want him going missing on the way. Then I’ll check the job boards and get a new case. You can pick them up in all the major cities - Earth First wasn’t just England, it was throughout the kingdom. That’s a lot of territory and a lot of bad guys.”

“But you got Maxwell.”

“We got Maxwell, guv.”

Bakker laughed softly, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. “I don’t know, I don’t feel like I contributed much.”

“Fuck off,” Holland said, punching Bakker on the shoulder. “If you hadn’t started poking around in this mess, then Kaminski and Clarke and all those other idiots wouldn’t have got involved. If they hadn’t got involved, we’d never have seen any of this coming. Styles would never have been where she ended up on the other side of that portal. And right now we’d all be living under Earth First rule, or we’d be dead, or worse, and we wouldn’t even know what had hit us.”

“That’s a very generous reading of the situation.”

“It is what is is. What about you? Back to Pateley Bridge with your sausage rolls and olde worlde sweet shops?”

Bakker shrugged, mumbled something that Holland didn’t catch.

Holland held out his hand. “It’s been a funny old road, guv, but we got him in the end. Right?”

There was a pause, anticipation in the air, a building pressure, a decision about to be made. Turning to face Holland, Bakker smiled. Holland couldn’t remember if he’d seen the man smile before.

Bakker grasped his hand tightly. “It’s a start.”

Photo by Josh Kirk on Unsplash

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References

• Christopher Bakker first started tugging on those loose threads back in ‘Traffic’ (October 2021)

• To know more about Nigel Maxwell, if you’re so inclined, have a read of ‘Electioneering’ (March 2023)

Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading. Only barely got this one out the door due to an ’orrible cold descending upon me all week. Hence no voiceover, because I barely have a voice right now.

I rewatched Casino Royale last weekend with my son, who had never seen it before. He’s a big fan of the Knives Out mysteries, but had never seen Daniel Craig in the Bond role (“Wait, he’s British!?”). Something that did take a bit of explaining was the very loose approach Bond films take to serial storytelling.

It’s a very long-running series, but the notion of continuity is vague and largely irrelevant. Several characters recur, such as M and Q and Felix Leiter, but everyone else is expendable. Female co-leads in particular are generally never seen or mentioned again. Except in Craig’s run, where there was some continuity between movies. Character development is rare, and usually only takes places when the Bond actor changes: suddenly, Bond is much more serious, or more brutal, or more quippy.

Each film is allowed to be whatever it wants to be, without being shackled to decades of prior storytelling. They don’t twist themselves into knots trying to satisfy continuity, which avoids the Marvel problem of everything sooner-or-later becoming lore rather than story.

Yet, there is still a repeating loop of escalation, with each actor’s run starting out with a certain grittiness and becoming increasingly silly and fantastical until the franchise snaps in two — at which point they take a break, swap out the lead actor and start over.

And now for something completely different: this week I learned about Articy, a narrative design tool for interactive projects. Once I wrap up Triverse, an option for a future 2026 project is a game of some sort, so I’m keeping an eye on options. I’ve used Inform, Ink and Twine in the past, but Articy is a new one to me. It was used for Disco Elysium, which is about as high a recommendation as you can get.

I’ll be poking at the options in February, for sure. For now, let’s do some:

Author notes

Returning to these two sidelined characters for the closing chapters of Triverse was a bit of a risk. Readers inevitably are more attached to Styles, Clarke, Chakraborty and Kaminski. And I didn’t want to get into the Return of the King problem of having fifteen endings, one after another. Structurally, it’s simply not possible to give every character a big send-off.

These two felt right, though. They’ve both played important parts, but also feel like failures. They were both ejected from the main story — Bakker especially, who didn’t even get a choice in the matter. Not everyone gets to take part in the revolution, and ‘Loose threads’ has been about exploring regret and shame. Also how it’s easy to overlook or dismiss our contribution to events.

An intriguing aspect to this storyline is that Holland didn’t need to recruit Bakker. He could have gone and picked up Maxwell by himself. Perhaps he wanted some backup, in case Maxwell had more security, or the villagers kicked off. Or perhaps, despite their differences and complicated history, he suspected Bakker was in a similar hole and needed a hand to get out of it? I’ll leave you to make up your own mind.

I freely admit that ‘Loose threads’ is a bit of wish fulfilment. It’s the moment a lot of us are waiting for, in various countries around the world, when the dictator, the oppressor, finally falls from power and is held accountable. A rare event, alas, but it does sometimes happen. It’s this bit from Daredevil:

Shades here of Nazi hunters in the 20th century, of course. Also abuse of the flag, and the way patriotism is always repurposed and corrupted by those who are the least patriotic — something that is especially on my mind in the UK, given events of 2025. There’s a lot going on in the margins of this chapter, and we can assume that the transition back to a ‘normal’ government is going to be long and difficult for Mid-Earth’s Britain.

There’s still a discomfort to this chapter. Holland’s new gig is morally right but ethically dubious, and the vigilante status is highly problematic. What watches the watchmen, and all that. Still, this is Holland trying to do the right thing, trying to figure out his past and who he really is. He’s as abrasive as ever (and I apologise for his language — he’s really quite coarse), and I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he’s likeable. But he’s trying.

Right, next week I have a bonus chapter in mind, and then there’ll be one more story to go. At which point all the tales will have been told.