The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy Read online

  The Family Brød’s performance was far too short or far too long, depending on the way you looked at it. So far as Romford was concerned, he was glad when it was finally over: sounds, patterns and the inevitable bursts of applause made him feel as if someone had been using his head as a punchbag. Rather like when Mrs Romford put Wagner on the CD player.

  There was a short interval, during which they drank warm orange squash from Mrs Romford’s thermos and ate their sandwiches, and then the lights dimmed once again.

  If the tension had been palpable before the Family Brød’s performance, now it was as if you could have grabbed handfuls of it from the air and used it for chewing gum. Romford’s knuckles whitened around his pipe-stem. Mrs Romford dropped her crême caramel and it lay unnoticed at her feet. The silence was like an encaged beast, pacing the confines of its hated cell, until . . .

  Blue lightning coruscated over the audience’s heads as a blast of thunder shook the floor. One moment the stage curtain was there; the next it was replaced by a blaze of brilliant illumination that almost blinded Romford. A flock of snow-white doves appeared from nowhere and circled cacophonously around the ceiling. Somewhere in the midst of the mêlée there was a haunting strain of music that could have been Egyptian, could have been Korean, could have been just the tape had stretched.

  There was a sudden puff of green smoke in the middle of the stage, and out of it stepped the cadaverously imposing figure of The Mighty Thrombosis. He threw his arms wide as if to welcome himself to the proceedings; the inside of his full-length cloak was golden with, embroidered on it, white doves in representation of those that still wheeled and whirled above.

  “Greetings from the world of the unknown,” the figure intoned. “People will tell you that what you see tonight is mere trickery, but in truth it is a lifting of a veil – the veil that lies between our humdrum lives and the magical kingdom, where truth is falsehood and falsehood truth.”

  As if to prove the point, he pulled out a cauliflower from behind his ear.

  The audience gasped.

  Smiling and nodding briefly in acknowledgement, the Mighty Thrombosis proceeded to yank a string of the flags of all nations from behind the other.

  The applause was deafening.

  The Mighty Thrombosis bowed more deeply this time, then looked to his left, focusing the audience’s attention on the emergence from the wings of a statuesque blonde wearing about three carats of gold and very little else. She too bowed, her unbound hair falling in front of her like a bolt of yellow gauze.

  And then the serious magic began. Packs of cards turned into flocks of wrens; baseball bats turned, mid-juggle, into spitting kangaroos; streamers turned into bunches of chrysanthemums complete with little plastic tags displaying the watering instructions. (At this point Romford checked his pipe nervously to make sure it hadn’t turned into anything.) A casket with the beautiful assistant gagged and padlocked inside it was pierced by swords, cut in half with a chainsaw and finally incinerated using a flame-thrower, and yet she stepped out of the ashes unscathed. The Mighty Thrombosis himself took an iron bar that had been tested for authenticity by half a dozen randomly selected members of the audience and bent it easily into a passable imitation of his own signature. A bucket of water was covered with a red cloth and then, when the cloth was removed, was seen to have become a perfect representation in miniature of the Niagara Falls – whose waters continued to flow despite the fact that there was no visible water supply.

  After an hour or more The Mighty Thrombosis spoke again, for the first time since his brief introduction.

  “And now, ladies and gentleman . . . and others—” there was a little ripple of tamed laughter “—for the finale to my act. Many false magicians the world over have perfected the illusion of pulling a rabbit from a top hat, but I – I, The Mighty Thrombosis – am the only one to use genuine magic to perform the same feat . . . and with, not a rabbit, but a live tyrannosaurus rex!”

  There was a roll of drums and the luscious assistant, bearing a perfectly ordinary-seeming black opera hat, insinuated herself across the stage by dint of controlling muscles that Romford had never even known existed.

  The Mighty Thrombosis took the hat with a grave little nod of thanks and, using both hands, held it aloft.

  Silence fell.

  He turned it this way and that, showing the entirety of his audience that it was indeed empty. He flipped open its lid so that they could see right through it. He pressed it flat and then straightened it out again. He pulled a revolver from his trouser pocket and fired a couple of shots through it. There could be no doubt about it: the thing was as empty as an Aberdeen street on a flag day.

  Again the drums rolled as with his right hand he held the hat out in front of him, so that the audience could see it was well clear of his body. With his free hand he waved a blue-spotted handkerchief so that everyone could see that it, too, was guileless. Next he lowered the handkerchief down over the upturned aperture of the hat.

  Pause.

  Then, every eye glued on his hand, he slowly drew away the handkerchief.

  The assistant simpered but was ignored.

  Dragging out the seconds for dramatic effect, The Mighty Thrombosis reached into the hat and produced . . .

  . . . a severed hand.

  Someone screamed. Blood dripped. The gorgeous assistant collapsed pneumatically, unnoticed by all save Romford, who was sitting forward in his seat, staring intently.

  The Mighty Thrombosis himself looked utterly aghast. “This . . . this was not . . . intended to happen . . .” he stuttered in an Essex accent, quite unlike the voice he had earlier projected.

  Then the curtains closed swiftly.

  It was the first orthodox event since the start of the wonder show.

  “I was on my mobile phone immediately, as you can guess,” said Romford, looking pointedly at his empty glass. Obediently I picked it up, went to the bar and replenished it with Old Peculiar. Once we were settled again he looked up at me; his hands were clenching and unclenching.

  “Sergeant Mutton had lads there within seconds – the hall’s just round the corner from the nick, as you know. Even before they’d got there I’d had the staff seal the whole place up. A mouse could have got out of there without our knowing about it, but not a very fat mouse.”

  He took a ruminative gulp.

  “The Mighty Thrombosis – Albert MacGregor as he really is – was still standing on the stage looking at the thing when we got him,” he continued. “Hadn’t even gone to help his assistant up off the floor – Missus R had to do that.”

  “Whose hand was it?” I said.

  “That was, of course, a problem – but not such a problem as we’d have thought it might be.” Another gulp. “Thrombosis – MacGregor – told us himself. There was a ring on its finger that he recognized: made out of cast bronze and showing a dragon eating its own tail.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said he’d recognize that ring anywhere, and his wife – his assistant – confirmed it as soon as she was feeling properly herself again.”

  “And?”

  “The hand was that of The Even Mightier Spongini – a.k.a. Gerald Dukes – the greatest of all MacGregor’s rivals. There was some palaver in the upper – inner, I s’pose – echelons of the Magic Circle five years back, you may have read about it in the newspapers, MacGregor claiming Dukes was stealing the secrets of his tricks, in particular something called The Collapsible Hippogryph, you know the sort of thing. The two men hated each others’ guts. And there was more to it than that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Dukes was messing around with MacGregor’s wife, Zelda. Common knowledge backstage, we was told. That was what the real argument was about – not the tricks, stolen or otherwise.”

  This time it was me gulping down beer. So Thrombosis had offed Spongini and was creating an elaborate smokescreen to muddle up the coppers, eh? Still seemed it was an open-and-shut case, if Romford was to be believe
d.

  “But all they did was identify the ring,” I said, just for something to say. “That doesn’t mean it was Spongini’s hand the ring was actually on, does it?”

  Romford looked at me in disgust. “We thought of that. Took fingerprints. Faxed ’em to the Yard. Asked ’em if they were Dukes’s. Answer came back within the hour. They were Dukes’s, all right. No doubt about it. He was on file because of a bit of pot twenty years ago when he was young and foolish.”

  He looked down at his flexing hands, then up again.

  “And all this time, mark you,” he said, “we had the whole place locked up tighter than a nun’s . . . well, you get the drift. We had trained men searching it from top to bottom, rafters to basement. Because, you see, there was something missing . . .”

  “A body,” I said. Even if I hadn’t known this already – that empty hopper – it’d have been pretty obvious.

  “Precisely. Or even a man with one hand missing, ’cept people tend to make a hell of a lot of a fuss if someone chops a hand off of them, you know. And that hand was fresh – it was still bleeding when MacGregor hoicked it out of the hat. So it was really a body we was after. A corpse. A stiff. Anything. But not a whisper.”

  “You interviewed everyone, I assume?”

  “Everyone. Started with the Finns – they’re from Belfast, by the way, Finns ain’t what they used to be, I said to Sergeant Mutton – and worked our way on downwards. Me and Mutton tackled all the interviewing ourselves, we did. Had to let them go in the end, every last one of them. No one knew nothing. Well, maybe . . .”

  “There’s a lot of room in that ‘maybe’, my friend.”

  “Well—” he let the word hang for a few moments, shifting his gaze towards where two drunks were trying to get it together to score a game of darts “—maybe, on reflecting on it, there was something. Zelda.”

  “The Mighty Thrombosis’s wife?”

  “ ’Xactly. The lady herself. She seemed to be in shock – seemed to be – so it was no picnic trying to get much sense out of her, but the missus told me afterwards over the cocoa that Zelda appeared a deal less disorientated than you’d have expected when she came out of her faint. If it was a faint.”

  “So you think she might have known something about it? Might have been warned it was going to happen?”

  “Yes. Except that only makes matters worse. ’Cause Dukes was her hanky-panky merchant. So if she’d known about things aforehand she’d have done her best to stop ’em, and if she didn’t know about them then she’d have been more in shock, not less.”

  “Maybe she’d fallen out with him? You know, when the slap and tickle has to stop sort of thing?”

  “She said she hadn’t. She was totally open about the whole affairs, said her husband was—” Romford’s eyes glazed briefly, as if he were reading from invisible notes “—was a right bastard, brute and utter plonker, used to play practical jokes on me when he’d got a few inside him, which was most of the time, wish it was his head came out of that hat, not Gerry’s hand, no wonder I looked elsewhere for virile masculine affections, officer, and found them in the brawny arms of my svelte-thewed lover’.” He looked glum. “Or words to that effect. Quite a lot of ’em.”

  “Which means that the only person you know about with a motive to kill Dukes was The Mighty Thrombosis? The whole business with the severed hand was just a smokescreen, a bluff? The only person who could have got the hand into the hat was MacGregor himself?”

  “ ’Sright.” He looked gloomier than ever. I wondered how many pints he’d sunk before I’d got to the Heart & Sickle. “So we did the only thing we could do.”

  “Took him into custody?”

  “Yup.”

  “For further questioning?”

  “Yup.”

  “And he’s not talking.” This time it wasn’t a question.

  “Yup. And you know . . .” His voice trailed off on a meditative note.

  “Yes?”

  He rallied. “You know, I think the reason he’s not talking is that he hasn’t got anything to tell us. Unless he’s the best actor in the world – and you never can tell with these stage johnnies, of course – he’s every bit as mystified as the rest of us.” Romford suddenly grinned, wearily. “Seems a bit ironical, if you get what I mean: the mystifier mystified, the conjuror out-conjured, the prestidigitator presti—Um. Oh, hell, anyway.”

  “What about Mrs Thrombosis? MacGregor, I mean.”

  “The pheromone-packed wife? Tell you, Victor, she’s got—”

  “Zelda.”

  “—Like bleeding prizewinning marrows, and an—”

  “The assistant.”

  “—On her that’d give even Billy Graham a—”

  “Get back to the point, Romford.”

  He shook his head, as if dazed, but soon his eyes refocused. “Ah, yes, current whereabouts of the suspect’s missus. Yes.” He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Well, we had to let her go, didn’t we? Nothing to keep her in for. No way we could book her as an accessory or anything. ’Sides, the way young Mutton was looking at her I reckoned putting her in the cells overnight might mean the end of things between him and his Sabrina.”

  “Or you and the Missus?” I said quietly.

  He flushed angrily and snorted. “Never any question of that, my lad,” he said emphatically. “I’ve had me chances, I can tell you, but me and her we’re just like lickety-split when it comes to malarking on the side, so it’s none of your how’s your father ’sfar as I’m concerned.”

  “Leaving that aside, where is she?” I persisted.

  “I imagine she’s still at the Old Bull Hotel,” he said, clearly glad to change the subject. “That’s where the concert party was booked in – her and him and the bloody Irish Finns. Finns ain’t what they—”

  “You said that.”

  “Yes, I did. How’d you know? To Sergeant Mutton, in point of fact . . .”

  The beer was beginning to take its toll. Most of the people who live and work in Cadaver-in-the-Offing flinch if I as much as go near them, but Romford didn’t react at all when I put my hand over his and leaned forward to look him close-up in the eyes.

  “I’m willing to bet you a month’s salary that you won’t find her in the Old Bull,” I hissed. “You ask me, she’s hopped it. Her and The Even Mightier Spongini together, is my guess.”

  “You think he’s alive?”

  “I know he’s alive. Unless he got run over by a car or gored by an escaped bull afterwards, he’s as alive as you or me. Probably more alive than you, right now.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense! If he’d a been there we’d have found him. I tell you, we searched the whole of St Boniface’s Church Hall until there wasn’t anything left to search. And no one could have got out of there – we’d got it sealed off tighter’n a nun’s—”

  “He walked out in full view of your officers,” I said.

  “Impossible! We interviewed every single member of the audience! I even had Sergeant Mutton interview the Missus, just in case there was charges of favouritism afterwards. She didn’t like that much, but the ibuprofen’s doing wonders.”

  “You interviewed all the stage staff as well?”

  “Course.”

  “My friend,” I said, standing up and preparing to leave, “it’s not my job to solve your cases for you. I’m not a character, like everyone else in Cadaver-in-the-Offing, so I can’t even give you useful leads. All I am is the sweeper-upper – dirty job but somebody’s got to do it, sort of thing. But what I will do, what I’m allowed to do, is offer you a hint that might prove useful to your life in general.”

  “Wossat?” he slurred. He’d drunk enough beer to be reaching the point of tearfulness.

  “I can remind you, my friend,” I said, patting the back of his hand, “of the importance of temperance.”

  It was quite late that evening when Romford, all traces of the beer gone from his voice, phoned me. He didn’t waste any time in telling me wh
at I already knew.

  “Temperance,” he said.

  “Yes. And a very good thing it is.”

  “Makes a man think of an old sixties/seventies pop group, it does.”

  “That’s what it made me think of, too.” I blew on my fingernails.

  “They were called the Temperance Seven. But the great gimmick about the name was that there were actually nine of ’em.”

  “Yes.”

  “The family Brød got the nickname. ‘The Seven Deadly Finns’ because someone liked the pun, and they kept it – used it in their advertisements – on the basis it made folk remember them.”

  I breathed out smugly. “When you were describing their performance to me, I realized that in fact there were only six of them. Three on the bottom row of the pyramid, two on their shoulders, and one more on the top – that makes six, not seven.”

  “And me a trained observer. I just never noticed it myself. Doubt you would of, either, if you’d been there. It was a hell of an act. Apart from that bit at the beginning, when the curtains opened, I couldn’t rightly have told you how many of the buggers there were – it was just arms and legs and other bits everywhere. One of those cases where it’s easier to see something if you’re not an eyewitness.”

  I grunted agreement. Whoever said seeing is believing was talking out of his elbow.

  “We weren’t much interested in those bloody Irish Finns, so Mutton just interviewed ’em in a bunch. ‘Seven Deadly Finns’, he was told, so he made sure there was seven of ’em and let ’em go. Never thought anything of it, until I asked him after I left the pub, but, yes, a couple of ’em had kept their hands in their pockets the whole time.”

  “Except that one of them, we now know, was a hand short.”

  “Precisement, as the Frogs say.”

  “Where did you catch up with Spongini . . . Dukes?”

  “At the Old Bull Hotel, done his packing and sitting on the suitcase, all neat and ready to do a runner from the country with Zelda tonight, after dark. It was him and her planned the whole thing. She cut off his hand for him while The Mighty Thrombosis was doing all his puffs of smoke and things, then they cauterized the stump on the backstage stove. They’d already cold-bloodedly killed, cooked and eaten the tyrannosaur. She was the one got the hand into the top hat – stupid of me to think that MacGregor would be the one to set up his own props. The idea was to make old Thrombosis look bad in our eyes for just long enough that we’d keep him in the nick until safely after the young lovers had fled the coop. The Finns were in on it as well, of course – Zelda and Dukes ain’t the only folks on the circuit who can’t stand The Mighty Thrombosis: he’s made enemies all over the place.”