Prosaic: Dairy Dependent Detective

I'm having a bad week, so no follow up to last week's article yet. Instead - here's an old Prosaic story, and it's one of my favourites. Thanks to my godfather this is possibly the weirdest set of story ingredients yet. Late at night when I couldn't sleep, somehow the story became even stranger than the sum of its parts...

Smoking gnu - Canoe - Tiramisu

It was a moonless night in the city, the orange glow of the street lamps illuminating the clouds from below. They were not the only things glowing orange that night, as out in the middle of the river a small fire burned for a moment, crackling sparks flying out over the water like short-lived fireflies. A passer by glanced at it, admiring it for a moment before noticing its true nature. With a frantic squeak he pawed at the screen of his phone to dial the emergency services.

Across the city, in a small second floor office, Detective Inspector Alpine Marmot secretively opened his desk and took out the contents. As a member of the police department he knew what he was doing wasn’t strictly illegal, but it wasn't exactly socially acceptable.

Dairy produce was in something of a moral grey area. Dairy isn't meat, so it wasn’t considered evil, but, when they thought about the provenance, most of the population would think of it as ‘icky’; and the less said about eggs the better. DI Marmot took exception to this public opinion, but didn’t want to stand out. So he would secretly satiate his dairy habit in the middle of the night when no one was around to see, and today’s dessert was his favourite – tiramisu.

He savoured the aroma, eyeing it lovingly before producing a small spoon. He dipped it through the cocoa dusting and the mascarpone, ensuring to take a piece of the marsala wine soaked biscuit below. He lifted it to his mouth and savoured the first taste, enraptured by the flavours. Just as he was about to dip his spoon again, the phone rang.

Cursing to himself at the interruption, he answered the call, “DI Marmot.”

“Alpine? We’ve got a body in the Thames – a weird one.”

“Carnivore?”

“Always an option, but it’s hard to see what’s been done to this poor sod. Get down there and check it out, the team is setting up on this side of Lambeth Bridge”

“Yes chief,” he said with a small sigh.

Looking at his forlorn dessert he knew what he had to do. If it was left it would spoil, and he couldn’t have that. He wolfed the rest of it down, almost tearfully as he dialled another number. He was wiping the last remnants of it from the silver hairs around his mouth when Talpa picked up the phone

“Hello?” He said blearily.

“Talpa? It’s Alpine. Case time buddy – body just pulled out of the Thames.”

“Do you know what time it is?” His irritation was palpable

“C’mon Talp, I thought your species was nocturnal.”

“Alp that’s just specist. You ever work a nightshift? ‘Course you do, so shush and just tell me where to meet you.”

“Lambeth Bridge.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________

It was three in the morning when the pair reached the crime scene. An area near the ebbing tide of the river was brightly illuminated by lamps, the surrounding darkness frequently punctuated with the blue flash of the patrol car lights.

Alpine ducked under the police tape. Talpa on the other hand was easily short enough to walk straight under it. They went straight to the on scene pathologist. Dr Gecko was closely examining the scene from every angle in a way only a gecko could.

“Doctor!” called Alpine, “What have we got”

She clambered down the underside of the bridge to the ground to join the investigative pair, pulling a clipboard from her backpack and tossing it to DI Marmot. Talpa scampered up his shoulder for a better look.

“One victim. Male. Ungulate. Horns put the victim’s age at twelve years old. Middle aged for a wildebeest” She began, speaking the way only members of the police force can, offending good sentence structure with frequent stops.

“Cause of death?” squeaked Talpa, not bothering to skim down to the details.

“Unclear. Victim shows clear bite marks to the torso, possibly with missing flesh which suggests a carnivore attack, but that’s not the problem. She jerked a digit over to the heart of the crime scene, “Come have a look.”

It wasn’t the sight so much as the smell. Alp had to fight to keep his contraband dessert hidden secretly away in his stomach. Talpa was lucky he didn’t have time for breakfast.

What was left of the victim was a blackened husk of what it had been, a blackened shrivelled thing when compared to the majestic creature it used to be. It was sat in what appeared to be a bright yellow canoe, but the fire had left it impossible to tell where the flesh stopped and the boat began, the two melting together at their edges.

“It was quite an accelerant used on the body. It didn’t burn long before we extinguished it and even now it’s still smouldering in places.”

Alpine and Talpa looked closer and could see small rivulets of smoke still rising from the blackened corpse. They looked at each other and shuddered slightly.

“Any ID yet?” choked out Alpine

“Actually, yes, we dug into the canoe from underneath and it preserved the lower half of the torso from the flames, including his wallet, which contained an only slightly blackened driver’s licence.” She produced an evidence bag from her backpack.

“So? Name?”

“Gnu. Gnicholas Gnu. We got the guys over at the station to run the name seems he was a driver, pulled one of those old fashioned cabs around town for tourists for some outfit called Hansom Ltd.”

“Seems as good a place as any to start,” Alpine said, “see if anyone there knows why he was killed, and any reason why anyone felt the need to give him a low budget Viking funeral.”

Talpa chuckled nervously.

“Come on Alp, the game is a hoof!”