When Stella went back into the warehouse, it was already filling with smoke, and the heat felt like a physical force pushing her back. She avoided the flames, kept low, and headed into the office. Thankfully her mother had already left with the teenagers. She thought Stella was dealing with the gangsters and waiting for the police. She would not be pleased to learn Stella had deliberately gone back into a burning building.
Actually, her mother might be fine with it, if it was for a good enough reason, if she gained something worthwhile. The end justified the means, after all. Well, for her mother, it did. For her bibi-daj… oh, her bibi-daj would cascade spiral into an aetherium overload when she found out Stella had deliberately gone into a burning building.
She would have to make her bibi-daj some tea.
Stella searched the office as quickly as she could, because the flames were getting closer, and the heat was starting to feel painful. Unfortunately, there was no incriminating information, no sheets of paper listing the kidnapped teenagers or why they had been taken. No documents naming every bad person involved in this entire scheme. There were accounts books filled with numbers and codes she didn’t understand, but she didn’t have the time to crack a code with the building on fire, so after a moment she left those alone.
Investigating was hard. After sixty seconds, all she’d uncovered was a letter about a coal delivery from Europe. It seemed unusual to be getting coal from the continent when there was perfectly good English and Welsh coal at home, but perhaps they had found a really nice deal? The coal wasn’t important; what mattered was that the letter mentioned the name of the company that owned the warehouse. This was a clue! Perhaps investigating wasn’t hard, just annoyingly slow and really dangerous with the fire blazing ever closer.
Which meant that without the fire, investigating was going to just be annoyingly slow. She was going to hate finding out who was behind this, but she would, and then she would punch them.
She slipped the letter and the office’s telephone handset into a convenient pocket that formed in her clothes and then sealed itself, and slipped out the office window to return to her pile of criminals. The fire brigade would be here soon, and they would bring the police. She needed a specific officer to find these men, which meant she had to stash them somewhere. The fire brigade would take six minutes in total to be alerted and arrive. She had maybe three minutes remaining until the first fire engines turned up.
To make a little extra time, she moved the men behind the warehouse. All that was there was some grass and the canal, so the fire brigade likely wouldn’t look closely. They’d be focused on the burning building. She could already hear the sirens in the distance and was considering just dumping the men in a bush, when she spotted the half-sunk canal boat sticking out of the dark water. It had clearly been long abandoned, and was half submerged, but parts of the cabin were still dry, and it didn’t sink as she went aboard.
Step one, hide the evidence, complete. Six men with charge sheets stuck to their foreheads, and two bureaucratically innocent men, shoved in a canal boat cupboard so the police wouldn’t find them and ask awkward questions Stella would rather not answer.
Step two, call the police.
Her bibi-daj had cracked a Junction Box before their evening jaunt had begun, and she headed towards it now. A fire engine screamed past her as she reached it.
The Junction Box had been left open and her bibi-daj had marked several parts of it, so Stella quickly found an active line. With copper wires, she carefully attached the handset she had rescued from the burning building to the active pair and immediately heard the operator. It had worked!
Well, of course it had worked. Her bibi-daj had drilled her on it often enough. Stella could connect a handset to a Junction Box in her sleep, probably. This was just her first time doing it in the wild, as it were, and those infernal sirens seemed to impart urgency to everything, even though she was no longer on a deadline.
“Number, please,” the operator asked again.
“East one seven zero two. Limehouse police station, please.”
“Connecting you now.”
After a moment, the call was answered. “Limehouse police station.”
“I must speak with Detective Inspector James Donald,” she told the prim voice on the other side of the line. The voice tried to argue that any officer would do, but Stella was insistent. She had information for Donald, no one else. She eventually had to lie and say she was Donald’s informant.
Which wasn’t a lie, as such. She was Donald’s informant. She’d been giving him anonymous little tips all month, just to see what he would do with them. He’d solved crimes and arrested criminals; it was very gratifying. He was such a good detective!
“Hold the line.” It only took the voice forty-five seconds to find DI Donald. Stella had counted her heartbeats in her wrist whilst she waited. Her at-rest count was twenty six beats per minute, but right now she was at thirty four. Still high from the fire and the fight. Her heartbeat was an old, comfortable feeling, like her brown blanket. Still, forty-five seconds was a good response. She was definitely describing herself as an informant in the future.
“Who is this?” Donald said as he answered the phone. His voice was gruff, and there might have been some pain leaking into the tone. Or impatience. Or tiredness. He always seemed tired.
“You’ve been asking questions. I have answers.” Yes, perfect. Short statements. No questions. This is what she had, this is what she wanted, this was what would happen, exactly as her mother did it.
“What questions?”
“Ronnie Staunton. The night he attacked you. What else you saw that night. Oak Lane Warehouse.” Enough answers now to make him need more, and then an address where he could get the rest. Perfect. This conversation was actually going exactly the way she had thought it would in the best versions of her rehearsals. Conversation attempts nine and seventeen were winning.
“The one that’s on fire?”
That was not what he was supposed to say at this point. Conversation attempt nine had him coming immediately. Conversation attempt seventeen had her tell him she was the one with the anonymous tips, and then he came. None of them involved a building being on fire. “Oh, um, you know about that? Uhh. It, um, it wasn’t me. The fire, I mean, I didn’t set the warehouse on fire. I wasn’t even in the, uhh, the neighbourhood, or London at all, really. Anyway, I have to go now. No, wait, I have answers; you need them. The canal boat behind the warehouse. Don’t worry, the boat’s not on fire and definitely won’t be.”
There was silence on the other side of the line.
“I would hardly save you then only to hurt you now,” she pointed out, worrying that he might feel threatened. The poor detective.
“You had better have answers.” He ended the call.
Well, that had gone swimmingly. There was a little point in the middle where it had almost fallen apart, but she had of course saved the day, as she always did. She left the handset attached to the Junction Box as she walked away, then had to go back and remove it, because the poor operator had been calling out hello like she was the only person left in the world.
Twelve minutes after she called him, Detective Inspector James Donald turned up. Twelve minutes was good for an old man who was still recovering from his injuries. He had to be at least thirty and was using a cane. Well, thirty wasn’t that old, he was younger than her mum and her bibi-daj, but he seemed a lot older. He had the presence of a much older man, or the tiredness, borne down by the pressure of the years. He was slower than the fire engines, of which there were now two, and the other police who had turned up. Slower than the crowd of dockworkers, who were observing the fire with quiet cheer, cracking jokes and drinking beer they’d brought. Several prostitutes called out lewd comments to firemen as the overwrought constables tried to impose order or, at least, distance.
Stella watched it all from up a tree to one side. It took a reporter eight minutes to arrive and start asking questions as his photographer sidekick searched for the perfect image.
Eventually, DI Donald arrived. She watched as he looked around, then surreptitiously attempted to sneak behind the warehouse. It was adorable; both the fire brigade and reporter noticed, though neither did anything yet.
Stella dropped soundlessly from the tree and went to play with her detective.
He stopped a little before the boat and muttered that the only reason it wasn’t on fire was because it had sunk. “Alright, I’m here,” he called out. “I want answers.” He rested on his cane in the grass, glancing around.
She stopped behind him, a few yards back. He was two inches shorter than her six feet, and his black hair was barely more than stubble. His dark face often held the remnants of smile lines, but he wasn’t smiling tonight. This far from the fire, with only the grass and the canal and the slightly sweaty scent of Donald himself, she could smell his stress.
“DI Donald,” Stella greeted him. “Thank you for coming.”
Previous Chapter: Chapter Three
Next Chapter: Chapter Five
Author’s Note
I told you there wouldn’t be a queerguide on every chapter. Totally skipped chapter three. It’s almost like I know what’s coming. Anyway, I have a craft chat on originality at the queerguide if anyone wants to check it out.
Leave a comment if you want to thank DI Donald for coming. Manners cost nothing 🙂
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