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  Copyright © Richard Hardie, 2012

  Publerati e-ditions

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published by Publerati, LLC.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Volume One in the Temporal Detective Agency Series.

  Cover design by Tracey Tucker.

  Publerati ISBN-13: 978-0-9850504-0-5

  Publerati ISBN-10: 0985050403

  Find other great works of fiction at www.publerati.com

  Dedicated to Mary, Sarah, Stephen, the Friday Knighters and all the Gang.

  A Bit at the Front

  The Temporal Detective Agency

  Camelot started to fizzle out when Arthur and the lovely Merlin went off to the island of Avalon for an extended honeymoon.

  Okay, so Merlin was a woman…Yawn! …and the fantastic disguise I helped her with every day fooled the whole of Camelot for years, including a very confused Arthur. But that’s another story and this one’s about me and my friends in the Agency.

  Let’s start at the beginning.

  The Knights of the rather worm-eaten Round Table drifted off one by one until there was no one capable of helping Arthur look after the country, and even my friend Galahad was too busy setting up his Olé Grill restaurant chain to be a politician. Of the others, Tristan moved to Cornwall and opened up a tea shop with scones to die for; Iolanthe, Bors and Mordred were busy inventing a machine that could calculate; Gawain vanished one day on one of his adventures chasing the evil Black Knight, while others just got lost and were never seen again. I even heard Guinevere went back to her father’s place in North Wales with a besotted Lancelot hanging round her like a faithful puppy, though to be honest there wasn’t much point in staying round Camelot any more.

  So we didn’t.

  The day after Merlin left, my cousin Unita (Neets to me), Marlene and I started the Temporal Detective Agency, opening for business in the wizard’s old cave. We reckoned it was only right and proper considering we were Merl’s last apprentices and Marlene was her younger sister. I say younger, but she was thirty if she was a day and getting really old and frumpy.

  I suppose we could have moved to another part of Britain and opened up shop, but as we’d done a bit of time traveling with Merl and sort of inherited her Time Portal along with the cave, we decided to base ourselves in the 21st century where the cases promised to be more interesting than just finding missing pets. We also suspected the toilets would be much better than smelly holes in the ground half full of used leaves and wood ash. We even persuaded Galahad to join us so we could use the Olé Grill restaurant as a cover and besides, he made great coffee.

  What we found was that the sanitation and smells certainly improved, but the cases were still mostly dull because good, interesting crimes are few and far between, if not actually nonexistent. Business was pretty slow, but the retrieved felines kept Neets’s cats company and the odd goldfish kept them from getting hungry. We even left business cards in carefully selected centuries knowing that Temporal would only mean On Time to most people. After all, who on earth really believes in time travel, but the only improvement was that we were asked to find a pet saber-toothed tiger and the odd snake.

  Neets and I thought it might be because we sounded a bit old-fashioned coming as we did from fifteen hundred years in the past, so Marlene enrolled us into college until we learned how to fit in and like rap music. No one knew where we came from, of course, but people seemed to sense we were slightly older than them by a few hundred years, and that can be quite off-putting to a young lad who thinks his luck’s in. Still we did our best.

  Nothing changed much until one day…

  Chapter One

  Statues, Tunnels, Cellars and Knights

  One minute I was munching on a bread roll in the 21st century Olé Grill and the next I was in London perched atop Nelson’s famous Column, spitting out crumbs like confetti at a baker’s wedding.

  That’s a bloody awesome view! I thought, and it was. Then I looked down and thought Oh piddle! and I nearly did. I swore some more because Nelson’s statue wasn’t there and I was a hundred-and-fifty-feet above the ground covered in pigeons. My legs turned to rubber and I lay flat out on the platform gripping its edges with my hands and feet as all sorts of gut-wrenching thoughts came to mind. Like, what if Nelson decided to make a sudden return and I got squashed? Like, what if no one noticed I was way up on the Column for weeks and I starved to death? Like, where was the bloody statue anyway and what was I doing replacing it? Like, there’s never a spare pair of knickers around when you want them. And lastly…HELP!

  Way below, a man was stammering through some sort of loudspeaker and I reckoned the odds were he was shouting at me. Gritting my teeth and fighting down the remains of the bread roll, I moved my arms and legs one at a time until I was in a sitting position as near to the middle of the plinth as possible. I gave a thumbs-up sign, though I don’t know whether he saw it or not because there was no way I was going to look vertically down.

  While things got sorted out below I chatted to the pigeons…anything to take my mind off where I was because four-square-feet is loads to dance around on when you’re on the ground, but sweet nothing when you find yourself a hundred-and-fifty-feet up in the air without a net.

  The birdy conversation was getting a bit one-sided when a cage on the end of a long arm appeared with the loudspeaker man crouching inside. With my keen detective insight I could tell he wasn’t at all happy with life, mostly because his face was green and he was looking very sick.

  “Hello.” I probably said it too loudly considering he was only a couple of feet away, but his attention was definitely elsewhere. He opened an eye, looked at me sitting cross-legged in front of him and gagged. Okay, so I wasn’t at my windswept best; I was wearing a robe covered in weird symbols, was in my early- to-mid teens, and sitting exactly where Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson’s statue had stood for more than a hundred-and-fifty years. But I’m not that bad looking for a time-traveling girl and yet the stupid man closed his eye again.

  “Oi, you! Wake up.” I clapped my hands because nobody goes to sleep when I’m talking or I soon become their worst nightmare. “It may be a great view from up here, but it’s bloody chilly. So if you’d be so kind as to open the gate on that box thing I’ll join you and we can both return to solid ground.” I carefully stood up, wobbled a bit to give the folks below something to gasp at, took a short run-up and launched myself across the two-foot gap, or to be more exact the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot drop into a sickening void, and grabbed the top of the cage. I swung inside and tapped the man on the arm.

  “Hi, I’m Tertia from the TDA. What’s your name?”

  “Smollett.” It wasn’t all that clear because he was throwing up as he said it. I pitied those below.

  “Just Smollett?”

  “Inspector Smollett.” It didn’t look like he was going to tell me his first name, not that I was really concerned because I knew enough about police ranks to realize that an Inspector could make life very difficult. On the other hand, so long as we were suspended in the cage and the copper was losing his breakfast, I had the upper hand.

  Inspector Smollett muttered something that sounded like, “Where’s the bleedin’ statue? You nicked it, we know you did. Retch. Where’ve you bleedin’ hidden it? It’ll go easier for you if you tell us. Retch.” I ignored him because he was obviously delirious. Besides I don’t think his heart was in it and his stomach was certainly otherwise occupied.

  “So
, where do you come from, Inspector?” Small talk seemed a good idea. “Somewhere nice? Been on vacation this year yet? Did you fly?” The cage gave a lurch. “Sorry, wrong time to ask that. Still, you can see a lot from up here.” I was standing by the open gate, holding onto the mesh roof with one hand and pointing to various buildings with the other. After the fright of the plinth I was beginning to feel a whole lot better. “What’s that place?”

  Inspector Smollett opened one eye. “Buckingham Palace.” Retch.

  “Nice! What’s that one then?”

  “Westminster Abbey.”

  I pointed at another.

  “Houses of Parliament.”

  “Really?Looks different from up here. What’re those two big holes over there?”

  “Marble Arch,” he muttered. “Oh Gawd!” Any remaining color disappeared from his cheeks almost as completely as Marble Arch had from Hyde Park. We both stared at Speakers’ Corner where there were two perfectly good rectangular holes but definitely no arch.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. “You can get up now, Inspector.”

  “I can’t. You don’t understand, I hate heights.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  “I know and I do sympathize, but we’re back on the ground and there are lots of people looking at you. People with notebooks and pencils mostly and some with cameras.” I’d picked up a thing or two about journalists on my travels and already knew what the headlines would be on Monday morning.

  ‘Marble Arch disappears!

  Leaves big hole in the ground!

  Inspector Smollett says:

  “Police are looking into it”!

  I patted his hand, smiled and prepared to give the first interview of my life. I turned to the reporters, gave a genteel cough and began.

  “Well, it all started like this…”

  I decided not to tell the whole story. To be honest no newspaper in the world would have printed it and anyway my friends wouldn’t have been impressed. That meant I had to leave out about ninety percent, but the rest was pretty good stuff and stubby pencils scratched away busily. All the time I was talking, Smollett kept pulling at my sleeve trying to interrupt and using the words loved by all coppers, “You’re booked, kid.” I smiled at him sweetly.

  As the last scribble ended, I took out an old metal cup and spoke into it, ignoring the thermos of tea and handcuffs offered by my Inspector as well as the astonished looks from the crowd of journalists. A muffled reply came from the cup and seconds later an ultraviolet archway materialized in the middle of the column’s fountain. It wasn’t the most convenient of places, but with a wave and a smile I splashed into the arch followed by the Inspector’s increasingly distant words “Stop in the name of the Law. Oh, bugger… where’s she gone?” and disappeared.

  Zzzzzp.

  Going through the Time Portal is a bit like flying through a tunnel…bloody narrow and best done in films. Looking back I could still make out the shrinking Inspector sloshing around in the Trafalgar Square fountain trying to arrest a ghost and, at the other end, my friends were coming towards me like a train. I’d used the Portal loads of times, but when I ended up on Nelson’s Column it was the first time I’d literally been sucked through it to somewhere not of my choosing. Come to think of it I wanted to know where Nelson’s statue had gone and whether Marble Arch’s disappearance was a fluky coincidence. The copper obviously didn’t think so and had me pegged as a statue and monument thief. I was well out of it and dead pleased to be on my way back home to the pleasures of a hot cup of tea and dry clothes.

  It was then that things went all fuzzy as I shot off on a sort of temporal branch line and ended up sprawling on a cold stone floor. I lay very still in case I was on yet another column and slowly opened my eyes half expecting to see more pigeons, but it was less than twilight dark and there were no birds, just stuffy darkness.

  I was in a room staring at a boy, which seemed a promising start. He was crouching down behind a moldering packing case and mumbling what sounded like “Stop, stop! Oh, please stop! Lords above, what have I done? Oh, crap!” He didn’t seem in control of things and by the look of it I wasn’t the only unexpected thing to have come out of the Portal. Damaged wooden boxes and smashed pottery littered the place while dust rose into the air as though there’d been a mini-explosion. After a minute of silence, the boy peeked out from behind his crate, inched forward on all fours towards a candle and swore as he burned his fingers on the still-smoking wick. He fiddled with flint and tinder and eventually managed to relight the candle stub.

  The room was small with a solid-looking oak door, had no windows and hardly any light to speak of other than the dim shimmer from the boy’s candle and an unholy ultraviolet glow coming from the Portal archway. I never really liked that glow. The brick walls were bare and dripped with what looked like green slime, or really cheap hospital paint, but aside from the odd packing case and bits of broken crockery the room was empty and held nothing of interest except me lying on the floor covered in white dust.

  The boy walked nervously towards the archway, ignoring me for some reason, and put out a hand to touch the switch that still glimmered to one side of the ultraviolet Portal. He pushed it up and dove full length across the cellar floor sliding to a halt by the door with his eyes shut and his hands over his ears. He probably thought the Portal was going to explode, suck him into some hellish netherworld, or slit his body down the middle and turn him inside out so his guts would slither over the floor like half-set red jelly. Which I suppose considering what had just happened to me and Nelson wasn’t so crazy. All the boy got was silence as the Portal’s whine wound down to a stand-by hum and the ultraviolet light blinked out.

  He got up and by the remaining light of his candle stared at me as though he was trying to see if I were a statue, or just dead. I thought he was going to wet his pants when I sat up, rubbed my eyes and said, “Where am I?” Understandable, I suppose. I coughed, beat at my robes causing billowing dust clouds, then held out both arms at full stretch as though magic were going to ripple from my fingers, as he hesitantly approached again.

  “Stay where you are, boy.” I stood up and gave him a threatening prod with my forefinger. “One more step and I’ll turn you into a rabbit. I can do that you know, because I’m a wizard. Or pretty well nearly a wizard.” Amazingly the boy seemed to believe me, or at least he decided to stand back. “Tell me where I am and be quick about it. It doesn’t do to keep Tertia, the nearly-wizard, waiting,” I glanced at my clothes, “even when I look like a used duster. If you’re going to open and close your mouth like a fish, then for pity’s sake get some words out and answer my question.” I looked around. “Ok, this is not Merlin’s cave, or the Olé Grill, so where am I and what do you know about disappearing statues?”

  I made the last words a stinging command and the boy sprang to attention although he managed to stop short of saluting me. “Y-you’re here.” He spread his hands wide. “You’re in my father’s cellars and we’ve no right to be here. He’ll skin us both alive if he finds us down here, especially after what I’ve done.” He looked as though he expected to hear his father’s footsteps at any moment. “Honest, I don’t know anything about statues. I only pulled a couple of switches and this devil’s machine went mad. Things went flying round and all sorts of garbage got spewed out. Present company excepted,” he added quickly and very wisely.

  So far I hadn’t actually made any attempt to turn him into a rabbit and he was probably feeling slightly braver, so I decided to seize the initiative back. “Enough of your tomfoolery, boy. How dare you talk like that to a nearly-wizard member of the Temporal Detective Agency! I’ve a mind to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.” Giving him the choice between an angry father and a vengeful me seemed to have the desired effect as a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. “However, as you seem to know where I am and presumably how I got here I shall let you off and trust that your manners will improve. In consideration of my leniency, boy…”
>
  “Bryn,” the young man said quietly. “My name is Bryn, not boy.”

  I ignored his mumbled resentment. “…you’ll tell me where we are and what you’ve got to do with Nelson’s missing statue and Marble Arch.”

  Bryn looked at me suspiciously. “You’re not from round here are you? I can tell. If you’re from the Tax and Excise people the best thing you could do would be to jump back through that archway thing.”

  “I told you, boy,” (there was a muttered “I’m Bryn”) “my name is Tertia. Actually I’m not sure if I did mention it, but it is,” I waved dismissively as though names were unimportant, “and I have no interest in taxes of any kind. I try to avoid them like any sensible person.”

  “Oh, so you’re a girl then,” said the boy called Bryn with remarkable insight, “which round here would make you quite acceptable if you weren’t English and appeared out of my father’s Time device. Personally, I’ve got nothing against girls, even if you do think you’re a wizard and wear strange clothes. I’m quite open-minded and after all, this is the eighteenth century.”

  “Twenty-first,” I said without thinking. “This is the twenty-first century. You’ve got to add a century onto the actual year, not take a couple away. A lot of ignorant people make that mistake.” I was busy brushing dust off my robes when I noticed the look on Bryn’s face, which roughly said I’m getting out of here. This girl’s a loony or I’m an Englishman! I watched him edge back against the wall and realized almost too late that he was feeling his way towards the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going, young man?” I was watching Bryn like a one-eyed lizard. “Either you help me get out of here, or I take you with me through that infernal archway to whatever fate awaits us.” I flicked the switch on the side of the Portal and spun a small wheel with numbers on it that made the thing hum. I smiled when the archway started to shimmer as the familiar whine reached a point just above human hearing and the ultraviolet pulsing glow throbbed into life. “Amazing! I’m not normally very technical. I usually leave things like this to my cousin. Now, boy, the decision is yours.”