My NanoWriMo — Chapter Three

As I said, I had at that time absolutely no knowledge of what was going on at the headquarters of Hang Gao Stilts Corporation. In fact I had never even heard of Colonel Claudius Flintlock-Estuary. But I was about to.

“Have you ever heard of Colonel Claudius Flintlock-Estuary?” my father asked.

“No,” I replied, for I hadn’t.

“Well, you’re about to.”

“Well I just did, really.”

“Ah, touche.” My father smiled. “You always were quick on the uptake.” I blushed — it was true, I had. “Here,” he went on, “is the last known photograph of Colonel Flintlock-Estuary.”

He pushed a large glossy print across the desk for me to examine. I saw a bluff, elderly gentleman, with a lined face that was nevertheless filled with an ineffable, vibrant energy. His neck was thick, with attractively bulky veins pulsing within it, above a powerful barrel chest and astonishingly small yet indescribably lovely hands, which were in the photo engaged in piecing together several blocks of Lego.

I mused on the picture. “How long ago was this taken?”

“This morning. About half an hour ago.”

“So the last known photo of him was quite recent, really.”

“Oh yes. He’s an extremely public man, photographed very frequently. Strange, don’t you think?”

“What’s strange?”

“That I’ve been sitting here for so long and you haven’t offered me a drink.”

“A drink?” I felt anger rising within me, like an angler fish filled with hydrogen. “You think I should offer you a DRINK?” I punched my inkstand. “Dammit, Dad, I’m a detective, not some kind of AI fridge! Why must you tear down everything I’ve worked for?”

My father gave me a long, cool look, before sliding off his chair onto the floor. He lay there, staring up at me with his big red eyes. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said.

“What?” I was, as always, bewildered by my father’s habit of changing the subject right at the moment when I was most infuriated by his snide remarks about my hospitality.

“Ten thousand,” he repeated, dropping a grape into his mouth.

“Who gave you those grapes?”

“Ten thousand dollars on retainer. A further fifty thousand if you find her.”

I was thoroughly confused by now — none of my other clients barged into the office, lay on the floor and started saying numbers. Usually we began with niceties — how are you, what a nice day it is, are you pregnant or is that a large cyst, etc — and then moved delicately on to the case at hand. Often the client wouldn’t have the gumption to state their problem outright, and would dance around the topic with euphemisms, like, “I need you to find my lost puppy — he cleaned out my bank account and went to Belize”, or “I think my china hutch is cheating on me — see if you can take some photos of it having sex with my allen key.” Then we would move on to payment, which I would specify by writing an amount on my own forehead and asking the prospective client to kiss me if they agreed to it. This was all standard operating procedure for a private detective, and it was jarring to see my father so flagrantly ignore convention in these matters.

“Fifty thousand…” I stammered. “Dollars?”

“No,” he retorted. “Crab cakes.”

There was an awkward pause while I considered this new development. I wasn’t sure what to say next. I eventually went with, “Really?”

“No, you moron. Fifty thousand DOLLARS. If you find her. Plus expenses.”

“Where am I going to find expenses?” At this my father stood up and slapped me lightly around the head for several minutes. It was just what I needed to pull myself together. Blinking rapidly at the light above my head, I tried to process everything I’d heard. One question seemed especially pertinent: “Find who?”

My father sat back in the chair and stroked his long blonde beard. He pulled a small cassette player from his pocket and pressed Play. The overture from Die Fledermaus filled the office with its stately grandeur. We sat and listened in rapt delight. When the overture finished, he hit stop and sipped his juice before speaking.

“Your sister,” he drawled.

I gaped. I goggled. I glared. I giggled. I gibbered. I grizzled. I groaned. I gasped. I glamped. I guffawed. I grumbled. I gambolled. I gallivanted. I grew.

It was quite a shock.

“You mean I have a sister?” I managed to wheeze through my surprised trachea.

“Yes, obviously I mean that,” my father replied. “What else could I possibly mean?”

“I am shocked,” I said, shocked. “I always thought my fifteen brothers and I were your only children.”

“You were wrong. As wrong as an idiot.”

“I have so many questions.”

“Like what?”

I bit my lip. I had overplayed my hand. In fact I had very few questions, and now I risked looking quite the fool. Suddenly, a brainwave. “Like, how old is she?”

“She’s twenty-one.”

I did some quick mental arithmetic. “But twenty-one…that means that when mum had her, she was…dead?”

“I have some more news for you, Stanley,” my father said quietly. “The woman you thought was your mother — ”

“Oh my god!” I cried. “She wasn’t really my mother?”

“Will you shut up and let me finish?” Dad sounded positively peevish. Maybe because he knew I was already mentally billing him. “I was going to say, the woman you thought was your mother actually IS your mother — ”

“Oh my god!”

“BUT — Jesus Christ, man — BUT, she didn’t die like I told you. There never was a dragon boat crash. She left me.”

“Oh my — ”

“Shut up. She left me. And in my grief-stricken state, I embarked on a mad fling with your Aunt Viola.”

“You mean…”

“That’s right, Stanley. Your sister is your cousin.”

I leaned back in my chair. This was a lot to take in, especially on Good Friday. I made the sign of the cross and asked, “And she’s missing?”

My father burst into tears, like some kind of strange woman. “Yes!” he burbled. “She’s been missing for a week now, ever since she went to take up an internship at Hang Gao Stilts. Your sister, you see, she…she loved stilts.”

I nodded. Somehow, I’d always suspected she would.

“The last text message I got from your sister was three days ago.” He slid his phone across the desk. I looked at it. The screen read HI DAD HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME AT HANG GAO STILTS LEARNING SO MUCH ABOUT THE ELONGATING ARTS EVERYONE REALLY NICE HERE AND NOBODY MENACING AT ALL SO I AM IN NO FEAR FOR MY LIFE WHATSOEVER LOTS OF LOVE SEE YOU SOON UNLESS I SUDDENLY DECIDE TO CUT MYSELF OFF FROM ALL OF MY LOVED ONES FOR NO REASON MEG.

I was stunned. “My sister’s name is Meg?” I asked incredulously. I had not seen this coming.

My father continued. “The message seemed off to me — Meg usually hates capital letters — so I went around to her house, and she didn’t answer the door.”

“Maybe she was at the movies.”

“I went to the movies. They said they hadn’t seen her.”

“Maybe she went in disguise.”

“Stanley, you are wasting time here.”

“Look, I’m just trying to eliminate the obvious here,” I said, leaning nonchalantly back in my chair and crashing backwards through the window. After re-entering the building and climbing the stairs back to my office, I continued: “Occam’s Razor, you see: the most obvious explanation is usually the correct one.”

“Well, then, what’s the most obvious explanation?”

“She’s in the bath.”

“She never took baths. Only showers. She said baths were the domain of the depraved and the disease-ridden.”

“No baths, eh.” I stroked my billiard-ball-smooth chin. This was worrying. That a young woman might be enjoying her bath too much to answer the door was plausible enough, but enjoying a shower? Something wasn’t right here. “So you never got into her house?”

Dad shook his head. “This morning,” he said. “I broke a window.”

I gasped. “You vandal!” I shrieked, pointing a condemnatory finger.

“This was an emergency, dammit!” he shouted, slamming a fist down on top of his own head.

“Everyone has an excuse,” I said sadly, musing on the utter degeneration that society had fallen prey to.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I broke a window and got in. Meg was nowhere to be found. But in her bedroom, I found…this.” He reached into his manbag and pulled out a VHS tape. Blood was spattered across it.

I took the tape and turned it over in my hand, feeling its weight, enjoying the mixture of smooth and rough surfaces that it embodied. As I gripped it tighter and tighter I felt a terrible burning in my loins, the unquenchable lust that always came upon me when I held obsolete technology. All I wanted was to take this tape home and fuck its brains out. But professionalism…I dropped the tape on the desk and shook my head. I had to pull myself together. My sister’s life was at stake.

“What’s on the tape?” I asked, trying to silence the insistent voice in my head whispering, hopefully me, soon…

“I don’t know,” my father shrugged. “Nobody has VCRs anymore. I was hoping you might be able to play it. But that’s definitely her blood.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He flew into a rage. “You think a father doesn’t know his own daughter’s blood?” he cried, leaping to his feet and hurling his chair furiously into the ceiling, where it stuck in the soft asbestos. “I know that blood like I know my own.”

“And how well do you know your own?”

“Oh you know, fairly well I guess. I’m pretty strong on the colour, at least.”

“Which is?”

“Red.”

“Ah.” His story checked out: the blood on the tape was indeed red.

“So can you play it? I thought, since your office was so old-fashioned and dirty and your clothes were so out of style and the ad you put in the paper was so ineptly typeset and your face is so ugly that you might have a lot of obsolete technology at your disposal.

If only you knew, the voice whispered. But dammit, although I had plenty of relics of simpler times at home for…whatever reasons, a VCR was not among them. “I’ll have to try to track one down,” I said. “It’s important we find out exactly what this tape is. In my experience bloodstained tapes found in empty houses are almost always clues of one sort or another.”

“Good,” my father replied. He seemed relieved. “I’m so glad you’re taking the case, son. I…I always believed in you.” He was clearly feeling some powerful emotions. Tears filled his eyes, his voice became choked, and he curled up on the floor and went to sleep.

I gazed at him tenderly. He had done me wrong in the past, but seeing him now, so peaceful, a sweet smile playing on his unconscious lips, I couldn’t help but feel a wave of affection for this terrible, terrible, attractive man. He was, after all, my father, and no matter what a father does to his son, the production of sperm entitles a man to some respect.

I watched him serenely for what seemed like hours, and what was, in fact, hours, and was just about to leave him to start the hunt for a working VCR, when the building was rocked by an explosion and I suddenly found myself in an unfamiliar position: flying through the air before being buried in rubble.

It was an awkward moment.