On dogs and driving

DI Playfair was driving. Miss Flava was sat in the passenger seat, and the Rottweiler, Calamity, was alternately on the back seat and in Miss Flava's lap, trying to find somewhere she thought was comfortable. Crossing from the back seats to the front and back again meant that she was regularly shifting the gear-stick and stepping on the hand-brake, but this made little noticeable difference to Playfair's control of the car. His foot pressed the accelerator to the floor constantly, and the car's actual speed was regulated by the foot-brake and the clutch. The engine roared like an ancient dragon with haemmorroids, blue-black smoke rose from both the exhaust pipe and the bonnet, and the gears clanked like a medieval knight in a full suit of armour. Miss Flava had mentioned this to Playfair once, and he had glared at her and announced that all the cars in the police pool were like that.

He had also named the Rottweiler. Her trainer, when introducing her to the department had suggested that they pick a short, one- or two-syllable name for her, and Rosie had been popular until Playfair came in, looked at her, and named her Calamity. To everyone's astonishment she had taken to him instantly, and responded to her new name immediately. When Miss Flava had asked him why Calamity, he had said, "Name of my favourite Crimean nurse. Calamity Jane."

"That was Florence Nightingale," Miss Flava had said. "Calamity Jane was a wild-west frontierswoman who fought native Americans."

"Rubbish," Playfair had said, snorting. "Florence Nightingale is a character from the Magic Roundabout, like Ancient Mu-mu the Cow and Bob Dylan."

The conversation had gone no further.

"Is this liaising with the community?" said Playfair, shouting over the roar of the engine. He never took his eyes off the road, which he was glaring at as though hoping it was going to do something he could arrest it for.

"What?" said Miss Flava, stretching her legs out after Calamity's latest visit to her lap.

"Is this liaising with the community? Talking to this antiques shop owner. Only you said they didn't want me to liaise with the community anymore."

"Oh, I see," said Miss Flava. "No, I don't think anyone thinks this is a real crime, which is why we've got it. And it won't be liaising with the community at all unless you listen to the owner."

Playfair hmmphed, and tried not to smile. "I listen to people," he said. "I listened to Nnnk-Thss tell me the plot to the Usual Suspects. Have we got any leads on why there are more heads than bodies yet?"

"You only listen when you've run out of other ideas," said Miss Flava. "Your approach to policing is just a variant on shouting 'It was you what done it, ain't it!' at everybody until someone breaks down and confesses everything. Then you leave it for three weeks, and astonish everyone in the department by revealing that you know how the crime was committed. You sit there, with an unbearable smugness that would leave Sherlock Holmes green with envy, and point evidence out that everyone saw and no-one thought was evidence, and leave us all thinking that you have to be the greatest sleuth in history. Then you shout at us all for sitting there in awe of you until someone breaks down."

"It's therapy," said Playfair gruffly, his chin sunk into his chest so that his collar could hide his mouth while he eyeballed the road. "It's cathartic for you."

"Therapy?" Miss Flava paused, caught off balance. "You view yourself as a psycho-analyst?"

"See, made you think there, didn't I?"

"Let's all dance on the grave of Freud," swore Miss Flava. "You're part of the psycho-antagonist school of thought, aren't you? You provoke reactions from people and then analyse them."

"And work out what's wrong with you all," said Playfair. "I don't think most of you are cut out to be detectives."

"I don't think most of the department know they're signed up as patients in an experimental psychology experiment! Playfair, you're the most twisted, devious, manipulative corkscrew of a thinker I've ever met! How-"

"Bodies and heads," said Playfair sharply.

"Oh," said Miss Flava again. "Oh. Well, it turns out that all the bodies do have heads, they'd just been cut off and sewn inside the abdominal cavity. The 41 other heads are still unknowns. Mr. Nnnk-Thss thinks they're talking to him though. In snake."

"Does that mean we have a statement from him that mostly reads 'Hisssssssss'?"

"Yes, and one that talks about someone called Henry Trotter and what sounds like a giant anaconda."

"That'll be Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets then," sighed Playfair.

"You know him?"

"It's another film."

Playfair finally took his foot off the accelerator, swung the steering wheel and wrenched the handbrake up. The car slewed across two lanes of oncoming traffic, the tires squealing like a eunuch at an orgy, mounted the pavement still turning, and ground to a halt just shy of a lamp-post. Calamity picked herself up from out of the foot-well and started barking excitedly. Miss Flava swore under her breath, and Playfair grinned like a boy who's just hotwired his first Porsche.

"Let's go and arrest this shopkeeper then!" he shouted.

A Christmas Menu

Someone shouted wordlessly behind closed doors, and the Rottweiler sat up, his ears pricked, facing the door. Miss Flava sighed, very very softly, and rubbed the dog's head.

"It's ok boy, it's only Playfair," she said. "The committee for the creation of the Christmas Menu have probably brought up the vegetarian option. I did tell them not to, at least until they'd got him to agree to the main menu."

The Rottweiler whined and stretched his front paws out again, lying down, his head resting on his legs, still watching the door. The other two secretaries in the room, Jeanine and Delilah, shivered in unison, and starting typing a little bit louder than was really necessary. Miss Flava often thought of them as canaries, as they seemed to have an uncanny sixth sense about when DI Playfair would hurtle into their shared office. On the day that he'd been rear-ended by a venomous traffic-warden in the police carpark they'd both called in sick within minutes of each other half an hour before the incident occurred. From where Miss Flava sat, she could still see the stains from the window opposite her desk. She started counting under her breath.

As she reached 5, the door opened. Like most office doors it was fitted with a regulator at the top, a hinged triangle of metal that usually slowed the closing of the door down so that it didn't slam. The one on this door was hydraulic, and slowed the opening of the door down so that DI Playfair couldn't charge through it like a bull in a mating pen. The door wheezed open at almost normal opening speed, which meant that DI Playfair must have hit it running and put most of his weight behind it. He stumbled in, having lost most of his momentum.

"Vegetarians?!" he shouted. His face was dark red, and there were traces of spittle around his lips. "Why the hell are we hiring vegetarians to work in the police force? Bloody creatures are only fit to be pond-scum. Or if there's no room there, traffic wardens!"

"We're an equal opportunity employer," said Miss Flava, her hand resting on the Rottweiler's collar. He tended to get overexcited around Playfair. "And even if we weren't, it would be politicall-"

"Don't give me bloody politically correct!" yelled Playfair. "Those limp-wristed panty-hose-wearing liberal femi-communist perverts deserve everything they get, and then buggery besides! We should cook the damned vegetarians and serve them up to the people with a proper diet! Who ever heard of a meal that doesn't involve meat?"

"Breakfast?" suggested Miss Flava, moderately impressed with DI Playfair's description of the politically correct, a group which included most of his superior officers.

"I always chop raw steak onto my cereal," said Playfair, breathing heavily. "None of this tofu-banana crap."

"I think you might mean muesli there?"

"Rabbit droppings. That's the Swedish word for rabbit droppings. Why would you eat something that someone else has already digested for God's sake? What next, boil-in-the-colostomy bag food?"

Delilah pushed back her chair looking pale and fled the room, managing to get past DI Playfair, who hadn't moved from the doorway, without actually touching him. As she disappeared Miss Flava could hear her retching.

"Right. Well. I'll write a new memo on the menu then, and forge your signature on it and send it to the committee so that you don't have to be bothered by it again," said Miss Flava. "I think you've probably done everything you can to the committee members now."

"I could lock them up in the cells with the snake-priest and the severed heads," said DI Playfair, but some of the anger had gone out of his voice now. "Give them some time to think about their stupidity."

"We're overcrowded enough as it is," said Miss Flava. "I'll sort the menu-memo out. You go and get your coat. We should go and look into this antique shop burglary before the owner complains that the police aren't taking him seriously."

"Someone had better have died there, that's all," muttered Playfair, backing out of the office, letting the door fall shut. As the door clicked closed, Jeanine fainted, and Miss Flava had an instant premonition that the chair of the committee must have gone to Playfair's office to confront him. She ducked beneath her desk, pulling her laptop with her, and waited for the noise and dust to subside.

An Open-Source Monster

Dr. Monsanto has been a family friend since before I was born. He is quite short, and has a hunch-back that my mother forbade me ever to mention, has thick black hair that sprouts from his head like a fatal dandelion, and wears thick-lensed rose-tinted glasses. When I was very young I was scared of him, which he found amusing; he still tells stories to this day of me running off to hide when he came to visit, and how my mother had to coax me to come out of the hall-cupboard with slices of fresh steak. As I grew up, he became more familiar because he was so often a visitor, and now, as I wait out the summer holiday before University starts, he's just someone I know.

He's also incredibly clever, well-off enough that he can afford first-class aeroplane travel, and had offered me a summer job working in his laboratory in Switzerland. I jumped at the chance, especially when the first-class flight ticket was mentioned, fancying that I would be doing a couple of hours a day in the lab, then off skiing and in the evenings impressing the local Fraeuleins and Milchmaedels.

Instead, it's 10pm, dark outside, and we're still in the lab. There's me, Dr. Monsanto, and Igora, Dr. Monsanto's tall, utterly gorgeous assistant. She smiled at me when I arrived and I dropped my suitcase, which burst open, dumping my slightly tatty boxer shorts at her feet, and my best sweater in a puddle of something on the lab floor. While the sweater dissolved, Igora picked my boxers up, handed them to me, and winked. "Not your pulling pants, then," she said, and I stood to attention. Much to my embarrassment.

Dr. Monsanto believes in Open Source he tells me; he doesn't use things that come with copyright agreements, and makes his research publically available to anyone who wants to use it. There's a kind of license involved that means that anyone using his research has to credit him, and must make their research that is based on his free too, which seems fair to me.

But I'm a little concerned, when we're not working. Dr. Monsanto is building a kind of robot that utilises human tissues, a cyborg I think. He gets a bit vague when I press him for details, and tells me to ask Igora. Only when I go and talk to Igora, I kind of forget how to speak, and end up just drooling until she suggests I go and do something useful. But the tissues are all treated using some process that Dr. Monsanto has invented, that rids them of copyright issues. And I don't understand how a tissue can be copyrighted like that.

There also seems to be less and less metal involved with the cyborg each day, and more and more tissue. I laughingly said to Dr. Monsanto this morning that if it carried on this way we'd have built our very own Frankenstein's monster, and Igora looked at me and said gravely, "Dr. Frankenstein was way ahead of his time." This shocked me so much that I think I saw her properly for the very first time when I stared at her, and I realised that she has a circular scar that seems to run round her forehead.

Then later, I noticed that she had a line of stitching running down the back of her neck. Almost like a seam.

And that's when I started to wonder, and so last night, before I went to bed, I went to google first. It took me a while to figure out what I was searching for, but finally I came across a book scan of a 17th century text about constructing homunculi, and discovered that if you're building it piecemeal, you can't use baptised or consecrated flesh.

I woke up in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, having realised that baptising or consecrating flesh might be conveniently described as affirming the copyright of some creator agency over it.

I'm starting to wonder just what my CV is going to look like at the end of this summer...

A company man

"Right Sandy," said Ron, "I've called you in for this review because there's been some doubt expressed at higher levels that you're not really pulling your weight."

I gaped at him, clueless as to what he might mean.

"You see, it's been noted that you went home every night last week at 7:30," continued Ron, who was busy not looking at me. He was corpulent, florid and bald, sat behind a flatpack desk on a chair a little too small for his bulk. His pin-striped suit, stretched across his gut, made him look like an executive beach-ball. "There's concern expressed that you're not committed enough."

"Er, but our working day is 9 till 5:30," I said. "I haven't exactly been leaving early."

"But you're not staying all that late either, are you?" said Ron, wheezing slightly. "You should take a leaf out of Alex's book, he's got real commitment to the company."

"He's dead!" I said. "We found him dead at his desk in his cubicle, and only because the cleaners complained that he was starting to smell."

"For which we're all deeply grateful," said Ron, then paused, looking puzzled. "Deeply regretful," he corrected himself. "But he showed commitment, Sandy, even in death. It turns out that his life insurance policy named the company as his benefactor. Thanks to his death we have a once-off profit to add to the balance sheet this year; we're thinking that the return to the shareholders will be up a whole half-percent on last year. He had no dependents, so there's no-one to contest it.

"Is that the problem, Sandy? Is family getting in the way? At the last board meeting the directors approved us hiring a divorce lawyer full-time so as to be able to provide staff with the most competitive prices. We can get you out of any awkward marriage commitments."

"Well, I have a girlfriend--" I started, but Ron cut me off.

"That's fine Sandy, we'll have the corporate lawyers send her a cease-and-desist letter. We'll have you footloose and fancy-free in no time! A young buck like you should be proving your commitment to the company now, and earning the salary that'll allow you to buy the woman of your dreams when you retire!"

"Umm, I think I'd quite like--"

"We all would, Sandy, but we have to think about what's best for the company here. Look at the CEO for example. His racing yacht was written off last month when it ran over that sunken coral reef off the coast of Australia, and because it was secured against his wife and children he's all on his own until the insurance comes through and frees them up."

"What?" I said, feeling that I'd missed something Ron had said.

"They're collateral," said Ron patiently, shifting in his seat and making the chair groan. "They've been indentured so that if the insurance doesn't come through the bank gets its money back anyway. His wife is working as an exotic hostess in Swindon, and his children are being used for testing genetically modified crops by one of the big agrifirms."

"That's inhuman!" I said.

"Not at all," said Ron happily, grinning from ear to ear. "He spoke to them only last week, and said that they're as happy as pigs in genetically engineered mud up there."

"Mud doesn't have genes," I said.

"Their's does!" said Ron, and again he looked slightly puzzled for a moment, then his face brightened again. "But the point is, Sandy, that you need to show a little more commitment. The firm wants to get more from you in return for what we're giving you. We're going to put you on the incentive program."

"I've not heard of that," I said, wondering what they could offer me that they thought would encourage me to work myself to death.

"It's not something we talk about a lot," said Ron, "and only selected employees are eligible for it. Fortunately both of your parents were still alive, so you are."

"Were?" I said. My blood was suddenly roaring in my ears, my heart was pounding in my chest, and little black dots were eating away at my vision.

"Well," said Ron, sounding embarrassed for the first time, "like I said, it's an incentive program, so you have to know what the consequences of failing to take the incentive are..."

Trench cookery

I sighed and looked back at my desk. The book was still there, square on the leather blotter, gold embossed letters on a heavy-stock cover. Trench Cookery. 320 perfect-bound pages, due to cost £20 in the shops, and unlikely to sell a single copy. Not quite how I'd imagined my career here ending.

The book came about because of my tendancy to mumble, the author's mild ear-infection when we'd been talking on the telephone about the commission, and the sheer intransigence of my secretary, who refused to believe for an instant that anything I had said could be wrong. So much so, that when the title of the book was questioned, he insisted that it had to be right. Without ever checking with me.

My secretary was hired under slightly unusual circumstances. On the day of his interview I was running slightly late, and so as I got out of my car in the car-park, he was getting out of his. I glanced at his car, as it was just across from mine, thinking that it looked familiar, as he glanced at me and did a double-take.

"Are you ok?" I said politely, not interested in his answer.

"I slept with your mother last night," he said back.

And he had. He had recognised me from the pictures my mother has adorning the wall up the stairs and his car looked familiar because he'd been there when I'd called in for five minutes to give her a CD of piano recordings and ask her to stop placing ads in the lonely-hearts column on my behalf. I called my mother anyway, just to check, and she admitted that she had, as my father likes to put it, been tramping it around again.

I hired him. I felt I had to do something to try and protect the family name, though when it came out at Christmas that my brother had been working as an ideas man for the Khmer Rouge for ten years the family name was unsalvageable. He's still doing PR for the kind of people whose usual approach to dissent is torture and murder. He's been talking about organising package holidays to Guantanamo Bay next year.

But I now had a secretary whose loyalty to me was unswerving, and who was probably still sleeping with my mother on and off. I asked him once about the age difference and he started talking about the benefits of experience and I had to leave the room. I'd hate to think that my mother could teach me a trick or two in the bedroom.

And the net result of all this was a book entitled Trench Cookery instead of French Cookery. The first chapter was about actually digging a trench, lining it with charcoal and cooking the food in it, often covered over with leaves, herbs or soil first. The kind of cookery only university students have the time and drive to do, or people looking to make money for charity. Utterly unsuitable for home cooking.

The second chapter was about the kind of food you could eat in a trench, complete with photographs of burly workmen looking stunned and annoyed, probably by the photographer. The food is mostly burgers. And who would cook the food, unless they were planning on spending time in a trench in the near future?

The chapters continue like this, steadily stretching the premise thinner and thinner until the book reaches the piece de resistance: food that would have been eaten in the trenches in World War I. Most of it is rotten in some way, and it's definitely primitive, the food of privation. The suggestion of acquiring trench foot to go with the trench food ("visit a music festival of your choice in Britain in the summer -- the torrential rain and rivers of mud will produce trench foot in no time at all, and all while you're hearing the best new artists of today!") can only have got past the sub-editor because she was beyond believing that the book was serious.

I look again at my desk. The book is still there, and will go on sale to the general public tomorrow. And then I shall pray for grace.

McArthur's Quantifiers

It was a hot and steamy day in the office and I was sweating like a fat man in a sauna. We all were; the air-con had failed a couple of hours ago, and since there's six of us sharing one chair and one desk in the office (we stack), the woman at the bottom was getting the combined waterfall of our sweat. I was glad to be second from the top, where there was a tiny breeze from the window.

The door to the office creaked open, and a cloud of dust from the dry rot in the floorboards puffed upwards like a penny-theatre's special effect. When the dust subsided, a tall, thin man with more angles than a protractor was revealed. He was gray: his suit was gray and ill-fitting, his shoes were gray, his hair was gray, and his skin was gray. I dismissed him immediately as an accountant, probably here to talk to the ambulance-chaser of a lawyer who was fourth from the top in our little stack, and went back to daydreaming about Miss Sapphire.

The man coughed to attract attention, a hearty, chesty cough, that started and didn't stop, because the dust that had settled on his skin flew off and got sucked into his lungs. Slowly he doubled over and sank to his knees, his face turning purple and the coughing turning steadily into choking. Finally, unable to concentrate on Miss Sapphire for the noise, I pushed the guy on top of me off, and slid off the stack. I walked round the desk to our visitor and kicked him in the kidneys. My shoes have steel-toecaps, and the visitor stopped coughing and sprawled across the floor. I stood over him and asked him what he wanted.

"I'm looking for McArthur," he said wheezily. The coughing had shaken the dust off him, and though his suit and shoes were still gray, his face was now quite pink and his hair was ash-blonde. "I'm told you'll take any case that's offered you."

"No job's ever been too hard for me," I muttered, waiting for him to try getting up so I could kick him again. "And I've tackled some difficult cases in the past."

"I have a case for you then," said the man on the floor, refusing to move. I wondered how much he'd heard about me. "A set of quantifiers were stolen from my office last night, and they're unique. They're my ticket to academic freedom."

"And you want them back?" I snorted, inhaling the dry rot from the floor that was still hanging in the air. "That's a case for the police, Mister." I sneezed, three times in quick succession, and splattered the floor and the back of my visitor with black mucus, reminding me of my days as a snuff-addict.

"No," said the man on the floor in precise, clipped tones. "Just retrieval wouldn't get all the information back. I need to know that the only person who knows about the quantifiers is me. I need the quantifiers back, and the heads of whoever had read those papers."

I sneezed again, and felt the wrenching in my chest that had finally forced me to give up the snuff. "Murder's illegal," I said.

"Is there anything you do that isn't?" replied the prostrate man.

I sighed, he had a point. My doctor was of the firm opinion that breathing was a privilege I'd forgone after the snuff, the police force in this town put me on the list of suspects for anything that came in, and if it weren't for Mad Frankie's protection, I'd probably be my own exhibit in the Chamber of Horrors in the municipal museum.

"Where shall I start?" I asked.

Keeping Flowers in full bloom

When you approach the Temple of Concern the first thing you notice are the flowers. Whatever the time of year or day, whatever the weather, the flowers are in full bloom. The path that is barely there, handfuls of gravel scattered on thick mud that sucks at your shoes, is bordered by thick, luscious tulips of deep burgundy and purple hues. Heavy bulbous heads stand proudly erect on thick fleshy stems of vibrant green, and never wilt, never die. Beyond them, where the path reaches solid ground and becomes a lattice of wooden slats laid carefully irregularly, there are sprawls of creepers and ground-cover shrubs, all covered in tiny white and blue flowers like tiny jewels wherever you look. Even at night the air is heavy with pollen and scent, and bees buzz all around, their soft drone a gentle hypnosis.

The irregular wooden path, a metaphor that you must puzzle out and understand during your stay at the Temple, leads into the walled gardens that lie before the temple. Trees stand, branches laden with blossom that never falls, and never reveals ripening fruit, and the ground is laid out in checkerboard fashion. In one square bed grows vegetables for the Temple, in the one adjoining it grow yet more flowers. Against the wall jasmine climbs, and its scent is strong enough to be pervasive throughout the Temple. Even when I left the Temple the first time, I found myself wearing scents with a jasmine base, unable to concentrate on the outside world without the reassuring breath of jasmine close to hand.

Inside the temple, flowers that were cut over two hundred years ago and are still fresh and in full bloom today are arranged in vases, urns and sacred vessels. These have lost their fragrance now, but are still visually appealing.

I asked the Temple's custodian, a gaunt man with a black patch over one eye, waist-length brown hair, and a paleness of skin that suggested he never saw sunlight, how the flowers were preserved. He told me that they weren't exactly preserved, not in the sense I meant, and escorted me through the Temple.

The Temple is tall, though it sits on a small footprint. It towers impossibly when you see it for the first time, with turrets growing out of the middle of walls, and then themselves supporting further walls and further turrets, like a forest of incestuous mushrooms. We ascended first, and spiralled in towards the middle, and then descended a little again, and I think we must have reached the dead centre of the temple itself. There, sat in a small empty chamber at a plain wooden desk with nothing on it, was Brother Cantharides.

I started when the custodian told me his name, and the custodian half-smiled.
"It's more of a title than a name," he said. "Cantharides stimulates his mind."

"It's poisonous!" I said, and the custodian nodded.

"This is the five-hundred and thirteenth Brother Cantharides," he said. "Some last longer than others."

"And what is he doing?" I said, puzzled, and a little concerned.

"Keeping the flowers in full bloom."

I left the Temple again that afternoon, and as I reached the gate in the walled garden leading outside, I turned once more and looked at the Temple, the impossible chaos of towers and walls and chambers that somehow stretched upwards without falling and defied gravity and the scouring of the wind and the erosion of the rain, and then I looked at a small figure at the main doors to the Temple, the custodian, and I didn't ask my question, and he didn't answer it. But the answer was as clear in my mind as the ringing of the silver bell in the sanctum of persistent inner peace, and I wondered just how far this all went. And as I struggled across the sticky mud, I asked myself if I would be content, in that situation, with keeping the flowers in full bloom.