Thanks for the supportive comments everyone. I'll keep working on the 1960 update and make some decisions over the holiday.
In the meantime, I'm going to break one of my own rules and follow up with an older interlude that I always meant to conclude. The first part is here.
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Interlude: Flotsam and Jetsam
===London, 1960===
Once you got off the IDEC roads, and away from the new city, the drive across London was a long one, rerouted round bomb craters and construction sites. The planners' new highways didn't make it easy to visit some places, like they were slowly walling off the past with concrete and roaring tires. Charlie must have dozed off with the motion and the hot, dusty blast of the heater, because suddenly the sharp bite of brakes shook him back awake. His hat flew off his head and hit the windshield; only quick reflexes stopped him following it.
“Christ, Ivening," he complained, rubbing his thickly scarred knee where he'd hit it on the dash. "I've still got feeling under here you know."
Ivening blushed, from the criticism, or the curse, or the invocation of his deformity. She reached for the gear lever, eyeing the car that had appeared in front of them. Charlie retrieved his hat.
"Sorry, sir, he came from nowhere." They'd been bouncing down a narrow alley to the riverside and the new car must have pulled round the corner abruptly.
The other car made no sign of moving, but stood idling, its exhaust steam rising around its chrome fins in the chill air. Charlie sighed. “Go on, reverse then.”
“Yes, Inspector.” She peered over her shoulder, edging back cautiously with a whining of the transmission. She backed up until there was space to pass. The big black saloon, an Imperial Motors model more luxurious than their own, edged past them, flashing its lights in thanks. Goodlight watched their reflection pass in its mirrored windows.
Ivening resumed her course. OD4 - Occupation District 4 - ran from Poplar to Limehouse, down the Isle of Dogs, round the old docks. Officially the OD system had been retired a decade ago, but it was still easy shorthand. The district was, in the euphemistic terminology of New Scotland Yard, 'underpopulated'. Years of Syndicalist isolation had been hard on the Docklands, slowly strangling them from the life of trade. Most of the wharves already stood empty by the time the liberators had bombed them into smithereens. Ivening parked them up on a moldering wharf. A patrol car and a mortuary van told of the body lying on the mud below.
The engine ticked as it cooled. Charlie turned to Ivening.
"You can stay in the car if you want.”
"Sir?"
"The body."
He could see her bristle, though she tried to hide it. He'd offended her, he realized.
"...or you can come," he added.
"Yes, I'll come," she said with a sharp little nod.
"All right," Goodlight shrugged, reaching for his door handle. Girls hadn't been the same as Ivening when he'd been young, but then the youth of today lived in a very different world. Hard and earnest, the Empire brought them up with all the sharp, machined utility of a battleship or bayonet. Of course she'd want to see a dead body. Why wouldn't she?
They stepped out onto the damp cobbles. It was still raining, the cold gloom strangling the day. Ivening turned up the collar of her uniform coat. Through the fog, the skyscrapers and lights of the new city rose above the curve of the Thames. It smelled like fish and river. Somewhere out on the water, a tugboat hooted mournfully, headed for the new docks they’d built further east. The bones of the past lay all around: bombed out tenements, and the rusting wreck of a landing craft part-sunk in the muddy shallows. The struts of a new elevated highway stepped gingerly over the scene, like a lady pedestrian tiptoeing over dog mess. The roadway was still a spectral suggestion, concrete and rebar terminating in nothing. IBOL billboards between the war ruins promised technicolor apartment blocks and airy boulevards. Here and there, the first signs of construction ordered the rubble. A seagull took a leisurely shit on a fading Syndicalist mural, half-toppled in the dirt.
They descended some slimy wooden stairs. Two constables and a pathologist looked down the body where it lay on the low-tide mud. Something in the shape told Goodlight it was a female before he could quite make it out. He sighed.
"Well?" he asked as they joined the group. The pathologist's eyes ticked to Ivening, but she fixed him with a look of hard-jawed imperiousness, as if daring him to object to her presence.
"Girl," the pathologist said instead. "Colored. Youngish. 20, 22. There's a birthdate on that, but it's water-logged."
He handed Goodlight the sodden remnants of a cardboard identification card. The pasted picture had detached, and most of the information washed away, but the serial was just about legible. Goodlight handed it to Ivening for safe keeping.
"So she wasn't robbed."
"Not of her card at least."
The pathologist blew on his cold hands before he gestured dispassionately to the face; the river had leeched away the blood, leaving the shattered flesh grey and spongey. The eyes were pecked out down to the bone. “Gulls did a number on her. Doubt you’ll find much with that.”
“Take a few anyway,” Charlie instructed the constable standing by with the instant camera. The bulb flashed, bright whiteness seeming to linger round the wharves. Charlie took the prints and put them in his coat pocket to develop.
The corpse wore a light dress, hard to tell what the original color was. She’d have been cold for the time of year.
“Knickers and everything...intact?”
Charlie avoided looking at Ivening. The pathologist nodded briskly.
“Knickers are still there. Couldn’t tell you whether she was interfered with though. Not after this long.”
“Cause of death?”
“There’s a blow to the head,” the pathologist said. He gestured for the constables to turn the body over, which they did with a wet squelching sound. Charlie ignored the worms and wriggly things that moved in the depression the corpse had left. He could see the injury.
“So either someone whacked her over the head and threw her in, or she fell in and whacked her head.”
“No smell of alcohol, but it could’ve washed away. Hard to tell how long she was in there with the water so cold. I can do tissue tests, and the lungs will show whether she drowned or not.”
“Alright,” Charlie nodded. “Cart her in. Come on, Ivening.”
He stated walking down the beach, leaving the pathologist and the constables to their grim task. Ivening hurried after him, her low heels clattering on the pebbles and mud.
“What’s she missing?” He asked as she reached him.
“Sir?”
“You want to be a detective don’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“What’s she missing?”
“I don’t...”
“Negro girl. Where’s she from?”
“Probably the Caribbean, sir.”
“Migrant worker. Hot in the Caribbean, cold and damp here. Think she’s walking around in just that dress this time of year?”
He scanned the misty waterfront, trying to look past the grey mud and the rotting flotsam.
“There sir,” Ivening pointed to a dark mass further downstream.
Charlie nodded. “Go on then.”
“Uh, yes sir,” Ivening said, gingerly going forward and retrieving the sopping, stinking thing. She came back, holding it at a safe distance. She reached into the slimy pockets, rummaging around.
“Well?” Charlie asked.
Ivening pulled something plastic out. “It’s a...” she blushed slightly. “It’s a prophylactic, sir.” She handed it to him. Charlie looked at the condom. Officially hard to get these days, unless you were in uniform or had an IBOL doctor’s note saying you’d already done your part for the Three Child Policy. The Black Market was thriving of course.
Ivening reaches into the other pocket and pulled out a small pearl necklace. No, too small for a necklace. A bracelet.
“Rubber and some costume jewelry. What does that say to you?”
“Prostitute, sir. Except...” she held the pearls up to her ear and rubbed them together, listening. To his surprise, she then rubbed the one of the dirty things against her teeth. Not squeamish this one. “...I’m fairly certain these are real.”
She handed them to him. He couldn’t have told the difference. Maybe having a woman around had its uses.
“How much for a set like this?” He asked.
“40, 50 dollars,” Ivening said. A week’s wages for your average john.
“Anything in the inside?”
“No...A label.”
She turned it out to him. Fabriqué en France d’Outre-Mer.
Imperial French fashion. Expensive jewelry. Rubber in the pocket, and dead in the river. Charlie was forming a picture, and it gave him a headache. High end girl meant high end clients. High end clients meant high end problems.
They went back to the car, their wetness steaming up the windows. Ivening turned on the heater.
“Are you all right?” Charlie asked.
She nodded. “Yes sir.”
“You’ve seen a body before?”
“Yes sir.”
“In training?”
“When I was a girl. In the Liberation.”
Charlie nodded. Stupid question.
She reached into her uniform and drew out a paper wrapped tube. She undid it, revealing a column of candies, and popped on into her mouth. She held it out for Charlie.
“Peppermint?”
Charlie took one. “Thanks.” He hadn’t realized how the smell of decay had lodged in his nose.
“Back to the Yard,” he told her, changing the subject.
Ivening reached for the ignition.
The City slowly came alive again as they drove toward the center. The Planners, in their godlike omniscience, desired a great imperial capital and the key to impressive architecture these days was density, or at least so Charlie read in gushing government editorials. London’s pre-war population was slowly being resettled on half of its original footprint, the outer ruins bulldozed into parkland or leafy suburbs for the heroes of Empire. Charlie looked out on the wet and busy street, the glowing advertising hoardings, the Christmas lights, and the government signs blurring neon in the rain. He spotted the red, blue and white rounded of an Elevated Station.
“Pull over,” he said. “I need to run an errand.”
Ivening complied. Charlie got out, and spoke to her through the window.
“Go back to the Yard; have the Turing Department run that identity card number as best they can, and try and get a name.”
She nodded. “Yes sir. Shall I collect you from somewhere or?”
“You know the Dog and Pond? On Shelton Street?”
“I can look it up.”
“Meet me there at 5.”
He tapped on the roof, and watched her drive off, traffic parting for the police plate like a knife through butter. Then he hopped up the Elevated stairs and rode the rattling, swaying train to Charing Cross. They crossed the foggy river, and the imposing edifices of the new city rose like canyon walls. They said, like an iceberg, most of the work was underneath: a forest of pilings, pinions, pourings and drains keeping London from reverting to its natural swamp. The ghost of the old city was still here; rubble and bones plowed into new foundations, the past poured down the cracks until the future stood stable.
He descended from the station, sidestepping the tourists and travelers, and walked across the wide expanse of Veterans’ Square. The great columned facades of national institutions framed its sides: the Ministry of Culture, the Central Veterans Hospital, the Imperial Gallery, New Admiralty Arch. The Statue of the Unknown Soldier towered over the center, the damp day misting his chromed musculature. The eternal flame at his feet hissed and popped in the rain. A choir of schoolchildren in neat uniforms sung Christmas songs around the base of a handsome equestrian statue of the King-Emperor. An old woman in the sash of the Women’s Home Service Auxiliary pressed a collection tin toward him. “Christmas Fund for the Union’s War Widows?”
Charlie reached into his pocket and obediently handed over ¢50.
“God Save the King!” she exclaimed.
“God save him,” Charlie said. A host of the Dominion of Britain’s white Reconciliation Flags snapped and cracked in the winter wind.
He walked up Haymarket, and down a series of narrower streets, until he’d left the wide boulevards with their Christmas shoppers and imperial monuments behind. Soho was a foggy, twilight world, where hoardings buzzed in the shadows of the taller buildings and Elevateds rattled overhead, showering sparks onto the cobbles. Pre-War buildings were more common here, disreputable restaurants and crowded little shops. In a few places, you could still see the painted over street names of the Syndicalist era: Chartists Square, Tradesmen’s Walk, Republic Road. As if in answer, a government poster thundered GOD SAVE THE KING, taking up the full-frontage of an office building. These streets were crowded with sailors and soldiers, revellers crawling home, or just getting going. There was music, and women’s laughter. Charlie stood on a corner, and lit a cigarette. A police car crawled by, monitoring, but not intervening. Even the Empire had its vices.
He blew out smoke. If the girl was what he thought she was, someone here would know her. This was the great melting pot: every traveling salesman, every sailor with a ship in port, every soldier on leave ended up here. Young aristocrats, scions of industry, Pioneer School types blowing off steam. Old trade unionists, incorrigibles, down and outs, and attaindered Syndicalists. If there was one thing he’d learned, it was that people weren’t that different from each other as they liked to think. And neither were their sins.
He stamped out his cigarette, and crossed the street. A neon Empire-Cola hoarding glowed over the steamy intersection, and beside it a pneumatic, twenty foot tall blonde advertised Christmas vacations in the Sandwich Islands. The British damp had started to loosen the poster, giving her a crumpled face and washing out her sunny backdrop. He walked down the alley some distance, coming to a shabby looking pre-war house. He knocked on the door. After a second, a narrow slot opened, a pair of eyes looking out.
“Yes?”
“Charlie Goodlight. Here to see Annie.”
The eyes disappeared. The panel scraped shut. Charlie saw some official with a sense of humor had pasted a dozen IBOL posters over the frontage; a glum looking sailor with a thermometer in his mouth. VD IS NO JOKE! the text warned. STAY FIGHTING FIT!
Locks unbolted, and the door swung open. A youth of seventeen or eighteen peered at him. “Got an appointment, guv?”
Charlie reached into his pocket, and flashed his warrant card. The boy went quite pale at the sight of the EDWARDVS VIII D.G. REX IMPERATOR stamped on the shiny bronze.
“Let me in, lad.”
They went down the stairs. Someone had done a good job dressing up the basement with drapes and lamps, an approximation of warmth. The wafting smell of perfume didn’t quite hide the tang of damp. A few girls danced on tables - fairly tame stuff at this time of day. A few sailors, a dozing drunk of a businessman. A pretty girl in a sparkling black dress sang a listless song from the stage. There was no accompaniment, but she kept the tune. She looked at him and smiled.
Annie waited, leaning against the door of her office. She was plump and kindly-looking in an ordinary kind of way, grey haired but not unattractive in the face. She wore rouge, but compared to the table girls, her dress was positively matronly. Out of curiosity, Charlie had pulled her file once. Turned out she’d been a ward sister at a training hospital before the War, swore allegiance to the Chairman in a batch ceremony in ‘39. Minor public servants of her type had been rehabilitated mostly, but not her. Blacklisted. Grade 5 - Minimal Public Assistance, Do Not Employ. The rest of the file was black with redaction.
“Inspector Goodlight. Figured it was you,” she said. “Calm down, Bob,” she told the frightened looking boy who’d led him down. “He’s a tame one."
“Most of the time,” Charlie confirmed.
“Get Mr Goodlight a drink,” Annie instructed him.
“Just a small,” Charlie said. He glanced back at the girl on the stage. She had a nice voice; the song was German, modern. He didn’t know it. She smiled again. He turned back and saw Annie watching.
“Shall we?” he asked.
She took Charlie into her office, a cramped little desk shoved between battered filing cabinets. No doubt Vice Squad and Imperial Intelligence would
like to get their hands on the files within, which was why, in a way, they didn’t. A watercolor of a farmhouse sat by the grimy window. She lit a cigarette, and didn’t offer him one.
“Got a girl for you,” he said.
She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Living or dead?”
“Dead, I’m afraid.”
She breathed out a cloud of smoke. “Aren’t they always.” She knocked ash into an ashtray. “This city’s gone to hell.”
“Always was to someone.”
“Go on then.”
“It’s not pretty.”
“I’ve seen it all,” she said, and for a moment beneath the affable exterior, he believed she had.
He took out the Polaroids and slid them to her. True to her word, she didn’t flinch, but made a regretful clucking sound with her tongue. He let her look for a moment.
“Not one of yours?”
She looked up. “Not one of mine. No one I know. Black? Or Indian?”
“Black.”
“I don’t have any black girls. You sure she’s a working girl?”
“Seemed as good a guess as any. Why?”
“Conservative that lot. Upright. And they get jobs easy.” Resentment for the Empire’s imported workers simmered under the surface in some quarters, sometimes boiled over. Might be a line of enquiry.
“You’re saying I’m wrong?”
“Didn’t say that. I know of an outfit. Over by the Yank embassy.”
“The AUS embassy?”
“Big one in Pimlico. When they’re away from home and prying eyes, some gents like the forbidden fruit, if you understand me.”
He nodded, to show he did.
“No one more perverse than a godly man in my experience.” She smiled thinly, her foundation cracking around the wrinkles of her eyes.
He pulled out his pad and made a note. “Know the name of this outfit?”
She stopped smiling. “I’m not the type to cause trouble.”
“I’m just here to do right by the girl. A crime’s been committed.”
The door opened, Bob with Charlie’s drink. His hand shook as he handed him the watery whiskey and soda.
“Thank you,” Charlie said. Bob smiled quickly, and retreated as quickly as he came.
Annie was watching. “See that? You lot are the crime most of the time.”
“Probably afraid of my face.”
“Afraid of the borstal.”
“Go on, Annie. I’ve always done right by you. Kept the rest off your back. Do me a favor. What if it was one of your girls?”
She looked at him for a long moment. Finally, she sighed, and scribbled an address on a piece of paper. She tore it off, but paused in midair.
“I don’t want to hear of no raid. Or you’re not welcome here anymore. And you’re not the only one who does right by me,” she warned.
He leaned forward and took the paper from her outstretched hand. “No raid.”
He drained his glass, and stood. “Thank you.”
She seemed to relax a little. “Sure you won’t stay? I could fix you up with her for a while,” she said, nodding toward the sound of singing and the girl Charlie had met eyes with. “Moira. Nice girl. Irish.”
“I don’t sample the wares.”
“Just for a drink,” she urged brightly. “Company.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “She’s very good with scars. Lot of gentlemen have scars these days.”
Charlie put his hat back on his ruined head. “Maybe another time.” He turned to leave. “Keep your hands clean.”
Annie chuckled. “Always do.”
