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'Why do I get the idea,' the marionette growled, his strings quivering in the theatre's greasepsin scented draft, 'that you aren't taking us seriously?'
Among the essential components of a reporter's toolkit: a good camera, the right hat, and the ability to meet a source on his home turf, whatever ludicrous exegesis that might entail. All the same, I was having difficulty keeping a straight face and I couldn't entirely blame it on the hallucinogens.
After all, I'd snatched enough time to glance over the whistleblower's research notes and knew that that Smile Remedy had no effect on the aural senses. So the irritation in the voice of one of Scotland Yard's finest, Detective Inspector Regan, was the genuine article; and as I consider acting as a gadfly to authority one of the great pleasures as well as responsibilities of the profession, well, that's the sort of thing that gets me out of bed in the mornings.
'Do I look dead? Do I look like I've turned up my dainty little toesies and taken my marching orders to a better place? Not that either of us would wind up there,' he added, by way of afterthought. The third party on the theatre stage, mute Sergeant Carter, gestured a consoling affirmation from within the confines of his invisible box. We both ignored him.
'Now, there is absolutely no need to take it so personally,' I said, rather judiciously I thought. 'I reported on a story. Now that's press perogative! It's not as if I pulled the trigger myself-'
He hit me with a trash can lid. Quite why the hands remained fleshy, even human looking, when the rest looked like bits of wood, polyester and cheap plastic was a point of neural cognition that would no doubt have interested Professor Ravenscroft; this impromptu field testing of his brainchild by a trained observer was producing a lot of testimony I would have been happy to pass on.
'Happy to pass on, if not for the whole being dead part,' I said, without entirely meaning to. Another factoid for the tape recorder. The mute made a gesture they don't teach in clown college.
Meanwhile, with my seersucker jacket reduced to a state of wreckage, the marrionette drew back and began circling me. I leaned the metal chair back, as far as I dared, until the floor creaked like a gunshot.
Immediately subsequent, the mute fell down with a rather natty chartreuse stain blossoming on his shoulder- and I mean chartreuse, a delicate green very vivid against the white and black of the uniform. Empty-handed, there was obviously no way I could have done it, a piece of logic I would have been happy to point out had I not immediately been knocked unconscious.
When I came to- not more than ten minutes, according to the round of liquorice on my wrist- the marionette was cradling his partner like some kind of circus pieta. I daresay the weathered boards had never witnessed such a performance.
The mute coughed out a string of plush bunting, dripping with fresh red paint. 'With a hamster? A bloody hamster?'
Which was enough confirmation for me that Carter had also been exposed to the Smile Remedy, with heaven only knew what long term consequences- I hadn't reached that part of the file. It was certainly not going to make this discussion any easier, dealing with a hallucinating police officer-
'A triple threat hamster,' Regan said morosely. 'Sings, dances, shoots.'
Ah.
'And baby makes three,' I said brightly. 'Gentlemen, would it help settle your minds if I explained that you have inadvertently inhaled an industrial-strength bioweapon?'
Regan considered that, his jaw opening and closing woodenly a couple of times.
'No,' he said, and punched me again.I couldn't help but feel that a drug as potent as this ought to have some ameliorative effect on the business of bodily pain, but, well, it just didn't. 'No, and you know why? Because we were only put on the Ravenscroft case this morning, and your paper ran my obituary yesterday. But I tell you what. Quit prancing around, tell us what happened to the research notes, and we won't arrest you on your way to Heathrow.'
What bodily exercises he could possibly be imagining I was up to while cuffed to a chair, I could scarcely imagine. Point to the Yard all the same; the detective had managed to do some detecting. I had kept the secret of tonight's meeting well under my hat, and there had been no obvious trail following me to this out of the way location. 'I stashed them back under the same floorboard where I found them. Third from the back, the one that squeaks.'
That actually handling the papers, contaminated with the substance they handled, was only going to make their condition worse, I felt was too obvious to require explanation. Besides, the British taxpayer was footing the bill for exactly this sort of derrying do, which technically I am not, according to my editor's rants on the subject.
'Third,' Regan said, squinting a painted eye. 'The one that squeaks.'
'Right,' I said helpfully. 'A little more to the right- yes, that's it-'
There was another sound like a gunshot. Carter squealed like an eight year old who's dropped an ice cream on his flipflops.
'Shut up,' Regan said, ruffling through a stack of finely embroidered quilt squares. 'Nobody shot you this time, I was watching Kolchak.'
The new chartreuse stain suggested that Regan was in fact wrong about this, but as the mute didn't actually say anything I had no way of confirming my suspicions. 'Of course, I was going to make sure those papers got to the proper authorities.'
'After you'd broken laws on both sides of the Atlantic by getting your byline into the evening edition.'
'Now would that have been so very remiss of me- yes, yes I suppose I can see how it might be construed that way,' I said hastily, as the marionette brandished a celery stick in my face. I didn't know where it'd been, after all. 'But it would have been with the best of intentions. Free speech and all that, huzzah.'
'We're not bloody Americans,' Regan said curtly. If he was getting anything out of the quilt squares, I would have been surprised; I had found them tough going cold sober. 'So let's see if I have this straight. You were already daffy when you wrote that obituary last night, is that what happened?'
I considered that. 'I have absolutely no idea what you mean.'
'I do,' Carter piped up; his costume was shifting, slowly but inexonerably, into the scaly gloss of a reptile's thick skin. A skilled craftsman could have turned him into half a dozen excellent imitation alligator skin handbags and had enough left over for shoes to match. 'You think that this reporter was on this stuff yesterday, and that's how he invented your funeral? I'm more surprised he could figure out how to work a typewriter while going cuckoo like this, then that he came up with that kind of nonsense.'
Regan nodded a very stiff nod. 'Now that makes some sense.
A sound hypothesis, with only one small snag; it was flatly and absolutely wrong. Because I had not been on Smile Remedy yesterday, while killing time in one of London's most illustratious graveyards; the funeral had been sober black, mournful, and without a single person dancing on strings that disappeared into thin air.
And while I could not exactly be said to be an objective observer at the moment, I could also be very, very sure that if I had been like this yesterday, I would have noticed immediately.
On the other hand, Regan's jaw was relaxing into a sort of grim amusement, a grin if you were feeling very charitable towards it. 'Right. We'll call in the boys, get this banana to a hospital for treatment. I'll hang on to these papers until I know the difference between Special Ops and a hole in the ground, job done, case closed.'
'But Ravencroft's murderer? What about the industrial espionage ring and all that?'
'Already in the nick,' Carter said. 'This was cleanup, you were just small potatoes compared to the bloke planning to put this stuff in the Thames.'
Wounded though my vanity was, I felt it best to concede the point.
Regan thwacked my shoulder, the way idiots do to express inarticulate kinship to other idiots, and that was about when I decided that I wouldn't press the point regarding his death. Never mind that I happen to have done about as much research on the supernatural as anybody, or that I'd whiled away the morning looking up phantom funerals at the British Library after the London INS editor had wrathfully asked why I had reported the death of a still living police detective. Never mind that I had found exactly the accounts I had been looking for, many a quaint and hoary tale of terrified bystanders witnessing rehearsal processions for a death that had not yet occurred- but which was very, very close indeed.
After all. It was his funeral.