The Greatest Lie Ever Told – chapter 1

The Greatest Lie Ever Told

by Morton Cubberd

 

Chapter 1

“Sorry sir, I’m afraid you can’t drive up to the house,” the police officer said to the driver of a battered old Ford Capri.

Detective Inspector Paddy Rogue, hungover and unshaven, grunted an unintelligible obscenity to the officer. He parked his Capri, stepped out into the torrential rain and stood in a puddle. Paddy growled at the policeman as muddy water filled his Brantano shoe, then took out a hip flask and slugged back a gobful of single malt, before walking up to the house of Professor Maurice Wagon, where he was greeted by D.I. Timmy Keen. Who in God’s name put a public school, Oxbridge, Guardian-reading, houmous-eating twat like him on the case? Paddy thought to himself.

Timmy Keen offered his hand, but Paddy brushed past without shaking it. The two detectives walked into a kitchen that was still warm from the aga. Save for one tiny detail it was typical of any other kitchen in the sleepy Cotswoldshire village of Kilmister-on-Belford, only this kitchen had a dead naked body lying face up on the table.

“It’s a total mystery,” Timmy Keen said, “the neighbours have all said that he didn’t have a single enemy in the whole wide world.”

“How did he die?” Rogue asked, as he slowly walked around the table studying Maurice Wagon’s body, examining the multitude of wounds and purple bruises.

“Beaten to death, probably with a cricket bat,” Keen replied. He winced at the corpse and was shocked at just how unfazed and composed tough old D.I. Rogue seemed to be.

“What’s with the celery?” Rogue asked, as he noticed sticks of the peppery vegetable neatly arranged around Wagon’s bloated body.

“That’s part of the mystery. Whoever killed him seems to have put them there on purpose. I’ve got a team looking into possible coded meanings of celery, you know, like Paganism and Satanic rituals and Dan Brown and all that kind of creepy sort of stuff.”

“Huh. Coded meanings of celery? Is that the rubbish they teach you in detective school nowadays?” Rogue snarled. He despised Keen, in fact he despised any detective who had joined CID without first earning their stripes by pounding the filthy streets at closing time.

Timmy Keen just smiled. To him Rogue was a dinosaur, an old dog, a relic of the old school, a persistent rule breaker and bad to the bone. There was rumour that Rogue was soon going to be forced into retirement, and for Timmy Keen it was a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.

 

***

 

Rookie detective Liz McAubrey took a deep breath as she walked down the sterile corridor of Asstermowth mortuary. The youngest detective in Asstermowth CID, she was a profoundly gifted woman with profoundly gifted gifts who had been fast-tracked to detective on account of her being so profoundly gifted. As a profoundly gifted police constable she had cleaned up at the Annual Police Officers Awards, winning gold medal in ‘Best Victimisation of an Innocent Ethnic Minority Group’ and ‘Best Pepper Spray Attack on an Eco-Hippy’. She took another deep breath as she reached room 6b and knocked on the door.

“Come in!” shouted two voices in unison, and Liz walked in to see Jimmy Jimboy James and Kenny Kennard Kennethson – the two wacky loony medical students in long white coats from Edinburgh who worked part-time in Asstermowth mortuary – aiming a banana skin across the room into a waste paper basket.

“Busy as ever?” Liz asked.

“Well you know us, Liz, and how wacky and loony we are in our white coats and being all crazy and wacky and loony,” Kenny said, and then slapped himself in the face just for the sheer wacky loony fun of it.

Jimmy hopped up off his chair and onto his unicycle. “I’ve been practicing on this for 10 hours every day whilst studying to become an eccentrically brilliant brain scientist. That’s how wacky and loony and eccentric and crazy I am!”

“Well, any chance you two harmlessly eccentric nutters – who are obviously being lined up to be horribly murdered later on in this story – could spare me some time and show me this drowned body?” Liz asked.

“Come on, Liz,” Jimmy joked on his unicycle, “lighten up. You should be a bit more wacky and craaaaazy like me and Kenny. Tonight we’re going out all night drinking alcohol and having a pop music party and doing all those kinds of harmless youthfully exuberant kinds of things.”

Perhaps they were right. Liz knew herself that she could be a little too dour at times, though maybe it was the job getting to her.

“Here he is,” Kenny said, pulling the drawer open from the wall to reveal a cold white corpse, “Jock MacDogkennel, age 32, occupation market trader, single, no kids, cause of death accidental drowning. He got caught out by the tide and the cockle pickers found him washed up on Asstermowth beach. And this is his rucksack that was washed up as well – all that was in it was a pair of Leica binoculars, the Collins field guide to birds, a pack of Lidl caramel crunch bars, a copy of Razzle and a can of Happy Shopper cola. It’s all pretty straightforward.”

“Well I’d better have a look at him anyway, just to please the boss.” Liz studied the body, and soon something began to weigh heavy on her mind. “You’re absolutely sure it was drowning?”

“Absolutely,” Kenny said. “Why, what’s the matter?”

“I’m not sure.” Liz stared hard, her instincts telling her that something was wrong, but she just couldn’t put her finger on it. “Toxicology tests came back negative?”

“He was as clean as a whistle,” Jimmy said, still balancing on his unicycle.

Liz bit her lip to force herself to concentrate. Her mind was reaching out for the answer, grasping, getting ever closer. And then suddenly it slapped her right in the tits. “Oh my Lord,” she whispered, then crossed her chest, a childhood habit she’d never managed to break, “both of you come here.”

Jimmy hopped off his unicycle and joined Liz and Kenny by Jock MacDogkennel’s body.

“Do you see that?” Liz pointed to Jock’s chest.

“What?” the two wacky dipshit medical students both asked.

“There’s a massive fucking kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. That big black thing is the handle,” Liz said, reaching into her coat for her special detective’s notebook to write down some special detective’s notes.

“Oh, is that what that is?” Kenny said. “We thought it was some kind of growth or a birth mark or something.”

“What do you reckon happened to him, Liz?” Jimmy asked. “Do you reckon he drowned and then a massive discarded kitchen knife somehow wedged itself violently into his rib cage?”

“I hate to spoil your fun, boys, but if I’m not mistaken, I think that Jock MacDogkennel was… was murdered.”

 

***

 

“Bad day at the office, D.I. Rogue?” Tony the barman asked.

Paddy Rogue tipped his head in acknowledgement, then sat down with his drink in the bar of the Slippery Pigeon pub. He was getting too old for this goddam job. Maybe soon he was going to retire and get that plot of land he’d dreamed of, and maybe he was going to marry a sweet girl from Kansas and raise a family on that there plot of land. But the job always dragged him back. The damn job! His whole life had been about the force. He’d left school at seven and joined up as a beat bobby when he was eight. By eleven he was in CID and at thirteen he was already a legend. And now he didn’t know how to do anything other than be a detective, a damn good detective, the best in the goddam force. But what did he have to show for it? Lungs lined with tar, a swollen liver and a fridge full of Skol. He slammed his hand down onto the table and cursed his rotten life.

There had once been a sweet girl, back when he was cutting his teeth with the force up in Asstermowth. And then there was the Processed Meat Wars of ’82 between the MacTool and the MacSpanner famlies, his first major case, and Rogue just got too goddam involved. He always just got too goddam involved. The job took over his life and that sweet girl left, emigrated to Australia and married a wicker basket maker in Queensland. Rogue started drinking to forget about her, his moods became dark and confusing, like a pig in a phonebox. Then one day, drunk out of his skull, Rogue caught a young lad trying to break into his beloved Ford Capri and so he beat him to within an inch of his life. Rogue’s old boss threw the book at him, and Rogue’s name was mud in Asstermowth, so he was sent down to England and the Cotswoldshire CID, the laughing stock of British policing.

“It could have all been so different,” Rogue muttered to himself and knocked back his pint.

Five hours later Rogue was waving his fists at a group of students, yelling at them to get a job. Tony the barman grabbed the rancorous old soak and kicked him out of the Slippery Pigeon. “That was your last chance, Rogue. Don’t come back, you drunken old bum! Just look at the state of you, you pissed up old tosser!”

Rogue picked himself up off the pavement and staggered down the road towards home, stopping at Threshers to pick up six cans of Kestrel Super, a big pouch of Drum baccy and some liquorice Rizlas.

 

***

 

The next day dawned bright and Monty Quim left his house on the North Yorkshire coast to head out on his usual walk along the clifftop path to check out his local patch. There were Redwings moving overhead and he wondered if there had been an arrival from the frozen continent. After walking the hedgerows and seeing very little, he sat on the ground out of the cold December wind and looked out to sea. Gannets were heading north and a Little Auk brightened up an otherwise quiet morning. By ten thirty he decided to head home and come back out again in the afternoon. He took a short cut along the edge of the wood and realised that since he left the clifftop he was being followed by someone. Monty stopped and looked back across the fields and saw an immensely tall figure moving fast along the hedge towards the wood. Monty used his bins and saw that the seven foot figure was actually a woman dressed in black, and with bins around her neck she was obviously a birder. Monty decided to walk back and have a chat with her, just in case the stranger had found something decent.

“Eh up, you seen much this morning?” Monty asked her.

“Are you Monty Quim?” the stranger asked.

“That’s me. I’ve not seen you out birding around here before.”

“You know too much, Quim,” the stranger said, “and you’ve been telling people about the secret.”

“What secret? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Quim began to look around for something to defend himself with.

“We know everything, Quim, we use staff from News International to hack your emails and check your voicemails.” The stranger then pulled out a cricket bat and a length of rope from inside her black leather Gestapo trenchcoat.

Two hours later a dog walker found Monty Quim’s naked, blood glistening body hanging by his neck from a branch at the edge of the wood.

 

***

Next chapter

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Tagged as: Detective Story, Greatest Lie Ever Told, Non-fiction, novel, tom mckinney