1. A NEW COMMISSION

THE CASE OF MERCURY RISING, 1

I felt the warmth of her breath on my face as she sighed in the night. It had been a cold, frigid day and I desperately wanted a sleep that wouldn’t come. Sheep: I tried counting them but they just kept on coming, crawling across fields like huge fluffy ants then leaping like no real sheep ever did over gates and through hedges until I thought the whole world might be leaping, topsy-turvy, into some kind of unwanted oblivion.

But I would think like that on this particular day, wouldn’t I?

You may not have known, but my name is Royston Williams, a retired police sergeant, obliged to retire early from the force as a consequence of a tendency I have of blacking out at inappropriate moments. I am employed at the Curmudgeon detective agency along with the source of the warm breath sighing next to me in her sleep during this sheep besotted night.

She is Angelina, a perky young police constable foisted on the half blind owner of the agency, one Blinky Curmudgeon, in order to make sure that his limited eyesight didn’t bring the reason for it to the eyes of the press and thus the public at large. There had been an accident in the firing range and he had suffered badly as a consequence of it. Now he is freelance and occasionally in the need to employ someone else’s eyes, which is where Angelina and to a lesser extent myself come in.

My restlessness is almost entirely due to what I have to do tomorrow, and it’s all down to a twenty-first century caveman who calls himself Igor.

He was a scientist until he saw where science was going and he became disillusioned. He had created, and nobody knows exactly how, only that some kind of microwave was involved, a means of recording just about anything unseen and without complicated equipment in a world where even a mobile phone constitutes complicated equipment, and he knew that he had to destroy that means before it wreaked havoc on the planet by showing the global public what they maybe shouldn’t see.

He knew one thing, that we all need heroes. We all need Saints to love or gods to pray to. We all need leaders who are without blemish and who we can respect for all the right reasons, and recently he had observed that many leaders of nations were far from free of blemishes. As he saw it this was especially true of his own Prime Minister who, it was rumoured, and he had evidence to prove it beyond doubt, was possible best described as a moral mess.

With these thoughts uppermost in his mind, Igor set about trying to find a way of totally destroying the diamond that contained the unsavoury truth about the PM, and by using the adverb totally he meant totally. Apparently he tried using a hammer, but to no avail. The diamond’s mounting would be destroyed, for it was soft gold, but the diamonds themselves were untouched, unbruised, remained as perfect as the day he created them.

He tried fire, with the same result. The crucible he placed them in glowed white hot and then shattered, but the diamonds, once cooled, were as perfect as ever and their contents, the data encoded in them, untouched by heat.

Nothing would touch them. No amount of pressure or fire would even degrade them. In the end he knew there was only one solution: the power of the atom itself. But although he knew how to design and maybe even construct a nuclear bomb (for that would be what was needed), he decided it would be one venture too far due entirely to the danger element.

But, and he explained this to me as if it was an obvious and simple solution, the sun was the kind of nuclear device that just might work.

“Royston, my boy,” he said, dressed as he was in bright teal with contrasting red patterning boxer shorts and a fairly white tee-shirt, “Royston, I must send the diamonds to the sun. That’s what I must do. I must smash the little devils into the big burning thing in the centre of our solar system and once there I reckon they might finally be destroyed, or if not, out of harm’s way.” He grinned at me, “a bit like Frodo’s ring as he teetered on the edge of Mount Doom,” he cackled, referring to the destruction of the one ring in Lord of the Rings.

The he looked me straight between the eyes and I couldn’t help blinking under his gaze.

“That’s where you come in,” he said, “if Blinky can spare you, that is.” As I already intimated, Blinky Curmudgeon was the leader of our trio of investigators and I knew one thing about him: he wouldn’t agree to any more requests from Igor. He wanted the sort of commissions that were both profitable and safe, and the last one had taught him that working with anything to do with Igor was unlikely to be either.

“You want me to shoot the diamonds towards the sun?” I asked, foolishly.

“Precisely,” he grinned. “I want you and possibly a colleague to shoot a dozen diamonds in a tin box into the sun so that they are destroyed for all eternity. Hopefully.”

“Hopefully?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Well, there’s never any certainty when you can’t actually see what’s going on, but yes, it should work. The unbelievable conflagration in the sun should be able to cope with a dozen or so crystals of carbon, don’t you think?”

“And I’ll need a mighty powerful gun,” I pointed out.

Then he adopted what I can only describe as a canny look, and grinned.

“Yes, you’ll need a really powerful gun,” he nodded, “and more, much more: you’ll have to get a bit closer to the sun than this cave.”

We were in his home, a cave lost in the back of beyond, at the time, and as it was rarely particularly warm inside it, not even on a summer’s day with full climate change focussing the sun’s rays, it seemed, on the lands around.

“Like up a mountain?” I asked, and the whole idea of clambering up a mountain struck me as a big no-no. I am subject to unpredictable black-outs that are almost as debilitating as Blinky’s periods of blindness, and the thought of having one of those on a narrow crumbling ledge far above sea level scared the living daylights out of me.

“No. Not a mountain,” he murmured, “mountains, not even Everest, aren’t anywhere near enough to the sun.”

“Then where?” I asked, and he produced a photograph.

“Look at what I have made,” he said.

The photograph showed what I can only describe as a metal oversized rugby ball in a skirt, the sort of thing I used to love reading about in science fiction stories when I was a boy. And he was there in the picture, standing proudly by it, this time wearing lemon yellow boxers and smiling as if he’d just fathered a baby.

“A flying saucer?” I gasped, “a bloody great flying saucer? Let’s get this straight. You want me to go into orbit…?”

He shook his head. “Not close enough,” he said, “to be sure of the diamonds not missing their target.”

“Then where? The moon?” I gasped, going white as a sheet. I could see my reflection in a mirror he’d thoughtfully hung on the cave wall, so I knew how pale I’d gone.

He shook his head. “Same problem,” he said, regretfully, “no, Royston my friend, and I want you to take someone you trust with you, though it would be best if it wasn’t Blinky on account of his eyesight. And I want you to take a powerful gun into the shadow cast by the planet closest to the sun, and shoot the gemstones from there. Straight into the heart of what, that close, is a bit of a fiery monster, so big you couldn’t miss it even if you tried.”

“Mercury?”

He nodded. “And when you return,” he said, “from what should be a simple little jaunt I’ll pay you handsomely. Or at least the Government will.”

“They will?”

“Of course!” he laughed, “they’d do anything to squash embarrassing rumours about the love life of the Prime Minister and I reckon I could screw at least a million out of them for you.”

“A million?” I gasped. “What? Pounds?”

“Probably. Or Euros. I reckon they’ve got quite a few of those going spare. So how about it, Royston? Take Angelina with you if you like and go for me into deep space where you can watch Mercury rising!”

© Peter Rogerson, 13.02.20