Later that night, returning home, Mog told himself that if he had the chance he would lay to rest Ved Shurston's worries about Sir Humphrey Nairn and whether or not satisfaction would be demanded for falling down on the job. Of course, Buster Grimes was still walking the streets of Hythe when he ought at least to have been hospitalised. There was no denying that. Yes, thought Mog, I'll either give that broadcaster a pasting myself and let old Ved have the credit, or square the account with Nairn some other way. Mog believed that Ved Shurston was one of the lower priorities occupying the mind of the millionaire who was rumoured to be behind that shadowy force INTEG that everybody these days was calling 'resurgent'.
Whatever the state of play, Mog would go the mile for a mate like Ved.
But he had no need to, because as he arrived at his digs he was greeted by the ancient landlady. The drab had just experienced a severe shock.
'I should never have let 'im up,' she muttered.
'Who? Ved?'
'No, the other one—with the pot-hole gimlicks. He went up to see your Mr Shurston.'
'What? Had he been here before?'
'Never, so far as I know. And now he's sneaked away after perpetrating his doings and he's ruined the name of this house with the laws. Spoiled a room! Ruined the carpet! The laws are on their way....'
As she stood chewing her lips and picking her fingernails Mog dashed up the stairs. The door to his room was open. What he saw had to be the work of one of Nairn's footsoldiers. The police bullhorn could be heard as Mog went further into the room and approached his friend lying there with arms outstretched. Fresh air was where his skull pan had been. Brains, gore and pieces of bone littered the hovel.
Mog looked round the room quickly, searching for any detail that might have a bearing on the cause of Ved's demise. Knowing it would do him no good to have an interview with the authorities he got his bag from the cupboard, threw in a hair brush and other toiletry articles and made his way down the corridor to leave via the back entrance.
Once outside he moved carefully along the passageway which threaded through the decaying tenement. At the end of the tunnel he peered around to see the front steps up which he had come not long before. A police wagon and an ambulance stood at the kerb.
In the night sky were the tiny coloured lights of military aircraft winking and the sequined patterns of the illuminated windows of the passenger cars of a couple of civil inflatables sailing gracefully along their routes.
Mog couldn't be questioned by the police—they would be sure to grab him as the most convenient suspect. The landlady would support him, of course. It was obvious to her that the killer was the man with deep-set eyes she had let in to her luxury apartments—but her views were unlikely to be taken seriously.
No particular fuss was being accorded to the death of Ved Shurston. A pair of white-jacketed orderlies brought the body forth on a stretcher, slammed the ambulance doors on it and drove away.
What looked like a plain clothes man came down the steps of the tenement shaking his head at something the landlady was saying. She was probably asking how she would get a replacement rug for Mog's room.
Though Mog thought the man with the 'pot-hole gimlicks' had been sent by Nairn, he couldn't be sure. Maybe it was a killer sent by an enemy of Mog's and Ved had been mistaken for the tenant of the room. It was also possible that the man had been sent by Nairn to deal with Mog as well as Ved. At any rate, things were heating up in Hythe and Mog Probert needed to move on.
UK writer K.M. Dersley runs the Ragged Edge website and has three poetry chaps out from Bill Shute’s amazing Kendra Steiner Editions of San Antonio, Texas. The latest is a collaboration with Adrian Manning: Next Exit: Six.
Many poems, stories and reviews printed in magazines over the past thirty years and several books out including the 200-page collection of articles and stories, Sketches by Derz.