Mumford-under-sea (15 minute read)
“Kind of conspicuous for a private detective, aren’t you?” The man delivered his statement and then stood by my table, as if he expected me to reply.
It was a Monday and I was slumped in a chair in the Portway Heights Humanist Club. I was hard at work, nursing some bruises, sipping gin and watching the sun rise.
Or I had been. Now I took time to look out through the open glass walls, I noticed that the sun was well up, floating over the azure sea like a fat drop of molten gold.
The man was still standing there, watching me expectantly. “I mean, it’s a tad theatrical, wouldn’t you say?”
I checked my reflection in the mirrored drinks cabinet against the wall.
Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac.
Yeah, the girl’s a time bomb.
Actually, I didn’t have a Cadillac, but I did have a necktie with piano keys on it, and I figured that was almost as good in the present circumstances.
The man was still standing there. My plan to let him get bored and wander off wasn’t working, so I took some time to properly notice him.
He was right about one thing, I was a detective, and it was my job to notice things.
I don’t mean that he was about average height with skinny arms and legs. Dark grayish-brown skin, a thick, salt and pepper beard and liquid, dark eyes behind chunky glasses. That kind of thing is not what makes people memorable. I prefer to capture the essence of a person, so that if I share it with someone, they have no trouble remembering the person I’m talking about.
He looked like a nineteenth century philosopher on a tropical holiday.
He wore antique styled tan chinos, lurid blue, green and gold Hawaiian shirt, deck shoes and held a straw boater between his hands.
Maybe he thought it made him look nautical, or something.
Then I noticed the Republican pin on the lapel of his shirt and sighed. This wasn’t a lost tourist, it was work. Sierra had told me she was sending a bloke to meet me this morning and this was him apparently. “Mr. Patel, I assume?”
Maybe he was frowning. I hadn’t seen his face without the current configuration of lines, so I wasn’t sure if it was a frown, a leer, or just his natural resting bitch face.
He put his hands on his hips. That was like a full body frown, so that helped. “Oh, so you are awake?”
“Just resting my eyes. I had a hard night.”
He sat down without asking and motioned to the empty glasses on the little breakfast table in front of me. “I can see very well.”
“No, not that.” I heaved myself up in the chair, trying to work some life back in to my bruised side. “I haven’t been to bed. I was doing double duty as a constable. Had to break up a sex slavery ring down by the old Bridge. Things got... messy.”
He took out an elaborate e-pipe from his bum bag and lit up, again without asking. Did I mention the bum bag? Definitely memorable.
He sat and puffed on his pipe, his hands busy fiddling with the controls. The people I dealt with often needed time to nerve themselves up to talk to me. Maybe he was embarrassed about something. Maybe he was deciding what lies to tell me.
I sat back and let the morning run out, as I had been doing before he arrived.
I adored the club, it was my favorite place to come and sit after work, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. It was almost empty, the lights down low. A few locals sat around the small breakfast tables eating, or just passing time like me.
An elaborate spiral staircase led upstairs to a suite of individual rooms that could be reserved for events or functions. Two of the walls were covered in a thick, rich emerald growth of plants which gave the room a refreshing feeling and absorbed the sound of conversations better than acoustic foam. The other two walls were floor-to-ceiling glass panels on runners which could be swiveled and racked, leaving the room totally open.
Beyond the open doors there was a bamboo grove that partly surrounded the building. It was still wet from last night’s rain. Our neighborhood committee had planned every aspect of the Club. I had spent weekends working on it with my own hands.
He looked at me sideways as he puffed and said; “How does that work?”
“I’m sorry?” My mind had wondered. What had we been talking about?
He sat back and smiled. The lines on his face were still there. They seemed to be a permanent feature. “How do you have an anarchist policeman? Or should I say police woman?”
“You can say whatever you like.” I reached down beside the table and brought up a couple of bottles. I mixed myself a Gin Sunrise and sat back to enjoy it, as much as such a thing can be enjoyed.
I looked at him over the rim of my glass. “Being from the Republic, I think you might have a confused idea of what an anarchist society involves.”
He blew a stream of smoke and looked around as if searching for something. “Actually, I’m not as much of a stranger to this area as I appear. I used to live down in the valley, before...” He gestured out of the window.
I looked beyond the grove to the cliff top. Beyond that was the Humber Estuary, risen so high now by coastal erosion and melting arctic ice that the old town of Mumford-on-sea was under the brackish water. At low tide you could still sometimes see a few old rooftops and ruined walls. “You used to live in the old town, before the Surge?”
He nodded. “I used to work in the bank, back when we still had private banks.”
I laughed. It seemed like a million years ago. “A lot has changed since then, and I don’t just mean the water level. Don’t rely on your memories for a guide around here.”
A friend walked past and I waved to him before returning my attention to my guest. “Mumford was one of a dozen crappy slums, built to house climate refugees in the first half of the century. When the old town sunk beneath the waves, we climbed the hill and started over.”
I remembered those days with a mix of longing and weariness. Seeing his attentive face, I continued. “At first, it really was anarchy. There was no one in charge. No one keeping order and no one with any plan what so ever. The government had collapsed, as you’ll remember, along with the economy, and no one had any cares for a drowned town full of refugees.”
He leaned forward in his chair, his eyes shining behind his thick glasses. “It sounds absolutely frightful!” He was probably filming. I heard that many Republicans kept their smart glasses running night and day, capturing every moment for posterity and possible litigation.
I decided I didn’t care.
“It was certainly something to see. But in time we started to organize ourselves. We found we didn’t need any managers or overseers. We didn’t need any lawyers or politicians.”
Was he frowning again? Yes. He was one of those men who frowns with his beard; lips compressed, chin thrust out. He looked around again, searching.
“We didn’t need waiters either. There’s booze in the cabinet over there, or I can fix you up a sunrise.”
“Isn’t it a little early to be drinking?”
“No, Mr. Patel. It’s very late. Like I said, I’ve been working nights.”
I mixed him a drink at his request and he dropped a couple of pink colored o-notes on to the table. I left them where they lay. He had almost certainly done nothing to earn those notes, and I didn’t feel good about spending unearned work-shares.
“What we sometimes need though are citizen police to dispense justice to the kind of horrible bastards who want to break everything we’ve built. And sometimes we need trained investigators to make sure the people on the receiving end of that justice are truly deserving of it.”
He shuffled around anxiously on his chair. We were coming to the point when he would have to deliver his part of the script. He coughed and put his untouched drink on the table. “Maybe you can help me investigate something then.”
“Maybe I can.” I wasn’t going to help him. Whatever he wanted, I probably wasn’t going to like it. Occasional handholding for foreign dignitaries and tourists was part of my public service, but not part I liked much.
“As I said, I used to work here, in the bank. And I was wanting to get back in touch with an old friend.”
Yes. A very believable tale, worthy of another drink. The bottle was empty though. No help there.
“An old friend? From the bank?” I asked him.
He sat and blinked. Grinned nervously through his beard.
I continued, “From fifteen years ago, before the Surge and the Chaos and the Civil war.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly sweaty. I’d hate to play poker with him. It would be almost too easy. “Well... it wasn’t much of a war. We call it the Rebellion, down South.”
He pushed a sheet of smart paper on to the small, crowded table. It currently showed mug shots of a large, thin, brutal looking man. He looked like a starving polar bear from old news. Rangy but still dangerous.
“Douglas McGinty. It’s rather important that I get in touch with him soonest.”
I peered at him through a mounting haze of gin and bone tiredness. Waited for him to add some more details, like who this McGinty character was supposed to be, what he did for a living, where I might find him, useful things like that.
He looked back at me, and then down at the paper. Smiled.
I stood up. Whatever this was, it was sure to get worse before it got better. “If I see him, I’ll be sure to let you know, Mr. Patel. Soonest.”
As I turned to leave, he touched my arm. “It’s been a very illuminating conversation. I’d love to interview you properly sometime.”
The golden morning light reflected off his big, nerdy glasses so that I couldn’t see his eyes, just two big lenses. The feeling of being observed and recorded was unnerving, so I started towards the door, but he continued. “There’s one thing I wondered about...”
“Yes?”
He stammered, stuck between his weird voyeurism and nervousness over his other reason for talking to me. “Saxifrage isn’t a very Indian name, is it?”
I sighed. I brushed my short bob of messy hair out of my face and adjusted my hat. “Well, I’m not very Indian either, so I guess that’s OK.”
He looked at me questioningly, his lips working, but nothing coming out.
“Look, this may be hard for you, coming from the Republic. I know how you lot feel about culture and tradition and so on down there. A place for everyone, and everyone in their place... But it’s not like that here.”
I probably put my hands on my hips. It was something I always did when I got in my flow.
“All that identarian crap is what let things get as bad as they did. It was a self inflicted injury; we divided and conquered ourselves. We let the oligarchs run our world to ruin for their benefit, even though we outnumbered them a million to one.”
He looked at me, his mouth open. Maybe this was coming across as a bit of a rant, but if he was going to take his recorded observations home with him to the Republic, I really wanted him to have our side of the story. “What makes us different isn’t important. I’m me, and you’re you, and we’re both Human beings. I’m not defined by my skin color or where my great grandfather lived.”
As I walked out in to the grove I turned and looked back. He was still standing there, holding his straw hat. “Where are you staying?” I asked him.
“At... at the men’s hostel on Rockford Avenue.”
I sighed and handed him back his pink o-notes.
“Go on over to Bullingdon Street. There’s a nicer dorm there. Quieter and cleaner, and they have a few private rooms.”
I opened my handbag and drew out a business card, and set it on top of the notes in his still open hand. “If I find this friend of yours I’ll call you. Why don’t you contact me if you remember anything more?”
It was about a week later that I finally picked up a lead. I was in the police committee building attending a scrum session. All the constables had come together to discuss the week’s business, flag any issues and assign people to cases. It was different to the daily scrum because this was when we shared local news and compared notes on our individual cases.
I was sitting with Sierra and a couple of other investigators. We were drinking coffee.
No booze on work hours.
“I got a line on that McGinty character you were asking about, Sax. Are you still interested?” Sierra asked me.
She was a short, athletic woman. Very rural. She never wore makeup and her blue eyes and rosy cheeks make her look forever fourteen years old, even though she was pushing forty. She was famous for riding her horse around all day. She didn’t have much time for people, especially men, but she loved that horse.
I sipped my coffee, very good. Beans from the Algarve, I thought. “I dunno. I haven’t heard back from that Patel chap. I think maybe he went back home.”
She sat up and took a biscuit. “Hmm... that’s interesting. I had someone from the Republic calling about him today, wondering when he was coming back. I better look in to that. But you should hear about McGinty. It sounds right up your alley.”
She told me that a woman had been in to the station that morning with a request to find her missing ‘boy’.
“She hadn’t heard from her precious little cherub in a couple of days, which was strange she said, because he doted on her.”
I pulled out my minicomp from my handbag and opened up a notesheet. “What did she look like; Mrs. McGinty?”
“She looked like a battleship with another battleship parked on top. All hard angles and scrubbed decks. Her head followed me around the room like a turret full of heavy artillery.” We both smiled. It was a game we played, trying to keep the people we dealt with from blurring in to anonymity. The official description would be on file somewhere, if I cared to look for it.
“And her precious baby boy, I guess it was our man, McGinty?”
She nodded. “Yep. She was upset that we couldn’t launch a manhunt to find a grown man, so she tried the abandonment angle.”
I frowned. “That’s only applicable if she’s an elderly dependent, and even then it only applies in Republican law. We’ve got universal services up here, everyone’s entitled to the basics, whether they work or not. You don’t need a pension or charity from your relatives.”
“Yes, I gather they are both from down South. They came up here recently and she’s not aware of that. I sent her off to a community outreach center and told her we’d look out for her son.”
A group of junior detectives went past, laughing. They were off out on the beat, looking for cats stuck in trees and that sort of thing. The other investigators at our table were engrossed in their own chatter.
“Do we know more about the son?”
“Yes, he’s 48 and originally from Southampton. A very shady bloke, we haven’t got any file because he’s from over the border, but she showed me his picture and it was on his army service card.”
I exhaled sharply, this didn’t sound like an old friend from the bank. “Territorial or regular army?”
“Get this. He was in the Royal Marines. Some kind of hard nut, specializing in underwater operations.”
I sat a moment, thinking and then I stood up. “Listen. I’ve got a few things to check out. Why don’t you look in to the Republic connection and we’ll meet back here in a few hours?”
She nodded and I left in a hurry.
I had been in the army. Almost everyone had.
When the country descended in to Chaos, the people running the show had tried to keep a grip on things by reinstituting national service. Decades of austerity policies had reduced the regular army to a skeleton operation, good at covert ops and overseas terror raids, but useless for maintaining order in a nation falling apart at the seams.
They gave us two weeks of training and a gun. Sent us out to police the bedlam that gripped the whole world right then.
They had us protecting property rights.
I spent two days in a boat, guarding a mansion which was now underwater. Then I rowed back to shore with my squad and we demobbded, just like everyone else. Took our guns and walked home.
That was it, the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one.
I thought about that time spent sitting in a boat in the rain with millions of pounds of treasure below me.
I thought of an expert diver and a man who had intimate knowledge of a bank in old Mumford-under-sea.
Entering the wide, airy building, with its roof covered with solar panels was like walking in to a North African souk from the century before last. Inside, I was nearly bowled over by a noisy procession. One of our famous wild chickens followed closely by a gang of equally wild little boys. An older sister or cousin ran along behind trying to do babysitting duties. She was shouting at the boys to stop, but they kept on running and squealing with delight.
I walked past a section of stalls groaning with bales of locally produced smart silk, like my suit was made of.
I scanned from side to side, looking for the flinty face from the mug shots. I pushed through a crowd and strolled out in to the market square. A multitude of different kinds of men and women moved through the square. Clothes of every description, from formal, to casual, to ceremonial. Skin, hair and eyes of every color, and all of it tanned or bleached by the sun and salt air. Most people spoke different dialects of English, in varying levels of fluency, laced through with a million little expressions which didn’t quite translate.
Work-shares changed hands. The pink of o-notes and the green of p-notes, but also various scripts from the other cities; Manchester’s red Roubles, which people miscalled Rubies. The round bio-plastic tokens they still liked to use in York. Even a few Parisian Eurobucks. In exchange, people walked away with armfuls of colorful smart cloth from our mills. Fruit and vegetables from the island’s greenhouses which produced food for eleven months of the year.
Bundles of seaweed and bricks of aquacultured protein.
It was far more than we could ever need for ourselves, but never enough for the appetites of our trading partners.
There were a few clever little gadgets from Newcastle, the Silicon Valley of the North, and a couple of big boxy appliances from the industrious workshops of Manchester and Leeds being carried away to new homes.
Most things were not new, but recovered or repaired. There were reconditioned bikes and powered scooters, and even a restored gas guzzling motor car, which would be next to useless on the narrow streets of Mumford Hills, even if you could find fuel for the engine.
I stood and wondered how they even got it over to the Island, but then two local boys reached down and picked it up. They carried it through the crowd on their shoulders. I could see that it was a hollow shell, perhaps an ornament for some bar or restaurant, or maybe part of an art exhibit.
I walked around asking a lot of questions about someone trying to offload a lot of jewels or jewelry. Any gold bars being sold? I flashed the picture of Douglas McGinty and acted like a dumb copper.
I stopped at a stall selling cheap knockoff tech items and bought a pair of smart glasses, similar but inferior to the ones Patel had been sporting.
I kept up the game for a long time before I finally acquired a shadow.
I walked until I entered a rundown area. I ducked in to an abandoned storage shack and waited.
After a while he walked in.
In person, Douglas McGinty, ex-captain of the Royal Marines, exuded an aura of competent menace. Like many ex-military men he looked strange out of uniform. The dark shirt and jeans he had chosen as civilian attire still looked like one.
“You’ve been looking for me.” He flexed his forearms. They were skinny, but corded like steel cable and they ended in hands that had fingers as thick as carrots.
I put on the smart glasses and looked at him.
Saying nothing.
He clenched his hands. “Where did you get those? He recorded it didn’t he? Damn. I should have thought of that.”
“Did you have to do it?”
He stared at me. Red light shone in the window of the shack and illuminated the side of his face. His eyes were in shadow, but I doubt I could have read anything in them.
He lunged at me, his hands going to my throat, pushing me up against the wall.
I still wake up sometimes, thinking of those cold, meaty claws around my neck.
I wasn’t going to talk my way out of this.
Through a narrowing field of vision I caught his eyes, kept them on me. “Your mother...” I mouthed at him. His face twisted. He bared his teeth, gripping harder.
I jerked my hands up and gripped my tie. I had just enough strength left. I tugged on it and it came away in my hand like a lizard's tail.
The collar suddenly expanded and went stiff.
He shifted his hands, trying to beat the smart cloth.
He failed.
I drew air into my lungs.
The tie had curved in to a short, striped baton when it was torn away.
I jabbed the thick end of it into his side, under an arm and it discharged its stored energy in a flash of lightning that sent him sprawling across the room.
I dropped to my knees gasping.
As he lay there unconscious, the door burst in and Sierra stood panting, mouth open.
I pointed to McGinty. “You figured it out too? Good. He’s all yours.”
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