Fic: Taken for a Ride (1/2)
Title: Taken for a Ride
Author: john_elliott
Characters: Romana (author created), Canton Everett Delaware III
Rating: All ages
Word count: ~4330
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" characters belong to the BBC.
Author's notes: This is the same Romana as in my previous eleven_romana story, Among the Jarveys of the Metropolis.
Summary: Canton Everett Delaware III is asked to track down a mysterious woman (spoilers for The Wedding of River Song).
Also uploaded to Teaspoon, awaiting moderation at the time of posting.
I could tell she was trouble the moment she walked into my office.
It was a warm April afternoon, and the time was two minutes past five. With my feet on the desk and a glass of Bourbon in my hand, I was sitting back in my swivel chair wondering how I'd manage to pay the rent, let alone Polly's wages. I did that a lot: business had been slow for weeks. Months, maybe. Sometimes it even felt like I hadn't had a case in years, or centuries. Outside the window, a couple of ballooncars were hovering. I recognised one. It belonged to the local debt collectors, and to my way of thinking it was hanging around my office like a pterodactyl circling a dying aurochs.
Then she walked in. She wasn't much to look at: pint-sized, blue, dressed not much different from any other Mikorian I'd seen. But comparing her to everyone else I'd seen that day was like comparing a panther to housecats. You don't last long as a private detective if you can't spot trouble coming your way - and this chick was trouble with a capital everything.
"Mr Delaware-Three?" she asked.
"Delaware the Third," I said.
"Oh, so there aren't two more of you elsewhere in the building?" Her voice hadn't been what I expected; she'd sounded like a society hostess wondering if I'd make up the numbers at some garden party, and certainly not like she wanted me for anything important. For a moment I wondered if she wanted me to find some missing pooch, and I started to get my speech together about how the Delaware Detective Agency doesn't do lost dogs -- unless the money's right, of course. But then she spoke again, and I realised there was more to this thing after all.
"There's someone I want you to find."
I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward. "Take a seat. Now, Miss...?"
"Just call me Fred." She sat down, facing me across my desk, and looked at the litter of papers. "I hope I'm not distracting you from more important business."
"It'll keep," I said. "Who's this person you're looking for?"
She shrugged. "That's the trouble. I can't describe him. Or her."
"You mean you've never seen them?" It was possible, I supposed. "You mean there's a gang or something that's got a down on you, but you don't know who the guy at the top is. Something like that?"
"Not quite. I'm pretty sure I've met them. At least, I can deduce that I must have done. But try as I might, there's hardly anything I can remember about them. Just a feeling of missing time." She glanced at the wall clock. "Of course, you probably wouldn't feel even that. You can't miss what you've never had, can you?"
I looked at the clock, but I couldn't spot anything wrong. Two minutes past five, just like it should be.
"See here, lady," I said. "What you've told me isn't a case, and I can't take it on. I'd just be wasting your time and mine."
"You don't have any to waste," she said. She didn't say it like it was a threat, just a casual statement of fact.
"That's as maybe." I sat back and studied her, trying to work out if she was in her right mind. Problem is, when someone's a blue alien the size of a nine-year-old, it's not easy to tell what they're supposed to behave like in the first place. "Are you sure you shouldn't be seeing a doctor?"
She hid it well, but I was sure I'd got through to her then. Her fingers tightened on the arms of her chair.
"Quite sure," she said.
I poured out another slug of Bourbon. "So what d'you want me to do? Apart from find someone you can't remember if you've met or not?"
"Well, that's the thing. I'm pretty sure there's someone else mixed up in all this. A woman with an eyepatch. I saw her just before I met... whoever it was."
"And you want me to find this dame with the eyepatch? You reckon she knows something?"
"That's about the size of it."
"Can you describe her?"
"Middle-aged, with dark hair. May I?" She took a pencil from the tobacco tin on my desk, and an unpaid grocery bill from my in-tray. On the back of the bill she sketched a picture of the woman she'd been talking about. Even in the sketch, you got the notion that this wasn't the sort of dame you'd want to mess with.
Fred, if that was her name, waited until I'd studied her drawing, then asked "Is this a case now?"
"I'd say it is, lady." I coughed politely. "But we'll need to discuss terms."
She nodded. "That shouldn't be a problem, as long as you don't need to stage a naval battle in the Millennium Amphitheatre. I've got a few savings."
We haggled for a bit and settled on a daily rate that would keep me in drink and cigarettes for a while, with maybe enough left over to pay Polly's back wages. Plus a finder's bonus if I came up with the goods. She left me a number I could call if I had any news for her, and then saw herself out. I watched her from the window. There was a black cab waiting for her outside the street door; as soon as she got in, it lifted off and joined the queue of ballooncars waiting to get into the East Circular stream.
*
They say all monorails lead to London, and everyone in the world ends up there sooner or later. Finding one dame with an eyepatch in the middle of all that lot wasn't going to be easy. But if I'd wanted easy, I'd never have left Pope Richard's personal guards in the first place. And finding a needle in a haystack is always easier when you can ask the hay.
Once I'd seen my client safely away, I went out to make a tour of some of the bars I knew, drinks courtesy of her first down payment. They weren't the sort of place you'd want to take your date -- at least, not without a couple of guns each and a team of Viking mercenaries to watch your back. But when you're looking for information, you have to get it wherever it grows.
I didn't have any luck at the Inferno, or at the Kaiser's Head. All the talk in the Wooden Torch at Canary Wharf was of a treasure galleon that Lord Cochrane had captured -- plenty of eyepatches there, but no-one had seen one on a woman. When I got to the Vauxhall gardens, I found the place closed. The man on the gate said a Stuka had made an emergency landing there with a full load of bombs, and they were waiting for UNIT to make the area safe.
I finally got what I was looking for in the basement of the Bear Garden in Southwark. Officially, there isn't any such place, but if you know the right door to knock on and the right things to say, you can find yourself down several flights of stairs, drinking mead with the sort of people who know more than they like to let on. With the girl I was talking to this time, that included her name. Unless she really was just called 'Ace'.
"Long time since we've seen you here," she said. "What are you looking for?"
"Who says I'm looking for anything?" I said.
Ace laughed bitterly. "Do me a favour. No-one comes here unless they want information. Or bear guts. Tell me it isn't bear guts."
"Why not?"
"'Cos I haven't got any to sell." She shrugged. "'Course, I could always tell you who has. That worth anything to you?"
"You don't give anything away, do you?"
"A girl's got to eat." She shivered, and pulled her threadbare bomber jacket tightly around herself. By the look of her she'd been living on the street for a while, and I wondered when she'd had her last proper meal.
"So maybe I'm not after bear guts. Suppose I wanted information?" I took out my wallet. "One florin a question?"
"Three and twopence."
"Half a crown." I tipped out a pile of change on the table.
She looked hungrily at the money. "Done."
"Right. Do you know this woman?" I showed her the sketch.
"Yeah, I do."
"Where can I meet her?"
"Don't know why you'd want to." She took a swig of mead.
"That wasn't an answer."
Ace sighed. "Try Smithfield. But seriously, you don't want to."
"Why not?"
"Because people who try and get hold of her don't come back."
"Who's been trying to do that?"
"Sixpence a name?" She looked at my face, and shook her head. "Nah. The names wouldn't mean anything to you. They're not coming back, that's all."
I settled up with Ace and left quietly. I didn't risk calling Fred until I was half a block away from the Bear Garden. I checked that no-one had followed me, ducked into the doorway of a cigar divan, and put the call through on my mobile.
"I've got what we want," I said.
"Not before time - oh, except that doesn't really apply to you, does it? Where is she?"
"Smithfield. At least, that's what I've heard."
"Then I'll meet you there. Shall we say at two minutes past five?" It sounded like she found it funny, but I didn't get the joke.
"I suppose so." I tried to think of somewhere we could be sure of finding each other without looking conspicuous. "See you under the clock in the meat market. But I need to tell you what my informant said-"
"Tell me when we meet." She hung up. I glanced down at the telephone, and then back at the door of the Bear Gardens. A couple had just come out, and by the look of them they hadn't been there for the bear guts either. The woman was a redhead, dressed in black. Nice legs, I supposed, if you liked that sort of thing. The man with her worried me more. From his clothes, you might have said he was a workman, but every time he moved you could see he wasn't. He was alert, glancing about everywhere for danger. I wasn't sure if he'd been in the police, or the Navy, or the Legions, or all three.
But I was sure of two things. First, I'd seen those two somewhere before. And second, whoever they were, they were on the same trail that I was.