Deadvent Calendar - December 10th
The detectives go on a bike ride through night-time London, on the trail of an elusive food delivery
Deadvent Calendar is a seasonal murder mystery told in 24 crimes. It follows the adventure of amateur detective Shilo Coombes and his companion as they try and unravel a sinister plot to murder the unChristmassy - a plot that doesn’t seem very Christmassy itself.
A fatal anticlimax.
Mr Austin Wilcox, director of the Bulliver Toy Company and consequently the man responsible for every clattery, glittery, rattly noisemaker and geegaw that every fell out of a Christmas stocking to ruin the mornings of parents everywhere, found asphyxiated to death by the poisonous fumes of a set faulty indoor fireworks. Turns out there is something worse about them than just crushing disappointment.
December 10th
London in the early hours is a strange place. It is suddenly stripped naked. With the crowds gone, it’s secret structure stands revealed. The back is taken off and you can see the workings: the people and things that make the city work but go unnoticed in the day.
Cabbies and bus drivers, kebab shop owners staring forlornly out of empty shops, attendants behind shatterproof glass in all night petrol stations, patiently reciting along to language courses on their smartphones. Whirring beetles of road sweeping machines, picking over the curbs for loose detritus, council workers taking up the roads, tube workers heading down the tunnels. Homeless wanderers and early morning workers. Cleaning staff and overnight deliveries. Foxes and policemen.
And fast food delivery men.
We raced after the Deliveroo rider as he swept down empty streets, jinked through housing estates and rattled down roads still inexplicably cobbled. Then out into a still bustling Brick Lane and a crowd still shouting outside the twenty four hour bagel shop. Round Spitalfields and almost losing him in the knot of still medieval streets by Bishopgate. Then back out again into Whitechapel.
“Not quite taking the direct route,” I gasped at Shilo, struggling to draw level with him. “He’s trying to shake us off,” he said, “Keep up!”
And into the strange, forlorn streets below Aldgate, where London doesn’t quite know what to do with itself and is just busking on a minor theme until it can get to the river.
Then there, on the corner, was a shut up pub, black awnings interspersed with hanging baskets of grimy plastic flowers, and sitting at one of the tables outside was a man in a neat, dark suit. The Deliveroo rider was stopped beside him, handing him a pizza box.
“Quick!” shouted Shilo, leaping from his bike and letting it clatter to the pavement beside him, racing across to the pub as the rider took off again down the road. I raced after him, coming up alongside as he reached the pub and grabbed the pizza box out of the hands of the suited man.
“Oi,” said the man, “That’s mine!”
“Oh, you admit it,” said Shilo, “You admit that this is yours, this… Hawaiian pizza.”
The man unfolded himself from where he was sitting, revealing himself to a good deal larger than he had appeared in the shadow of the awning.
“A questionable choice,” said Shilo, putting it gingerly back on the table, “But each to his own. Just checking. Secret shopper, you know. Bon appetit!”
“Come back here!” shouted the man as we took off back down the street, but evidently his ham and pineapple was inexplicably more interesting than us.
“He’s gone,” I said, regarding the now entirely empty street.
“He’s definitely trying to get rid of us,” said Shilo, “Which at least means that we very much have our man.”
“Had,” I said, “The word you’re searching for is ‘had’.”
“You know my methods,” said Shilo.
“Call me Watson again and I will knock you over,” I said.
“He was trying to shake us off, but he was always heading west,” said Shilo, “Assuming he is under instruction to deliver Mickey’s letter, we can assume that the destination was somewhere in the City.”
“Or beyond it,” I said, “In Ludgate or Aldwych or Westminster or Kensington and Chelsea or Fulham or Hammersmith; or Slough, for all we know.”
“If the worse comes to the worse we can just stake out the deserted factory again,” said Shilo, cheerfully, “Come on, what have we got to lose?”
“Sleep?” I ventured, but he was off again, riding into the London night, and I, like an idiot, followed.
We raced down past the Tower, floodlit, lonely and monumental without the crowds of tourists round it and then up through Fenchurch into the City itself. Shilo slackened the pace now, coasting down the still dark, winding streets, constantly peering left and right down alleys and side roads for any glimpse of our Deliveroo rider.
“So what have we discovered?” he asked as we passed under the shadow of the Walkie Talkie, “Applicants get in touch through the flier and then have to post a letter in a chimney in an abandoned factory. Which is unnecessarily complicated, if you ask me.”
“I thought it was a rather nicely weird touch, frankly,” I said.
“Genius,” said Shilo, “Is often cursed with idiosyncrasy.”
“If you’re referring to yourself,” I said, “I feel I ought to point out that so is stupidity.”
“Then it’s picked up by a courier to be delivered somewhere,” said Shilo, ignoring me, “The question is, where?”
“Over there, I think,” I said, pointing down a street, where a Deliveroo rider in a Santa hat was mounting his bike outside of an anonymous sixties office building.
“Quick!” Shilo took off down the street as the rider raced away and careered to a stop outside the plate glass revolving doors of the building. He leapt from his bike and pushed against the doors. They shuddered, but did not move.
The lobby beyond was in darkness, Shilo pounded on the door, but inside nothing stirred.
“He’s trying to divert us again! Quick!” He turned from the door, looking down the far end of the street where the rider was disappearing round a corner, “Come on, we can still catch him!”
And once more we were off, chasing after the Deliveroo rider as they flitted before us down the narrow City streets and alleys. Which was getting harder now, as the night was turning into morning and the first workers were starting to amble their way to their offices. We swerved and slalomed between them, the green uniform pulling further and further ahead, until we suddenly came out into Bishopgate and there in front of us, Liverpool Street Station was emptying out great gouts of commuters into the thickening streets.
But there it was, chained up outside the station, a bike in Deliveroo livery, and there was the helmet with the Santa hat pushing its way against the flow of the crowd into the station. We abandoned our bikes too and joined the fight, being shoved this way and that as we tried to fight our way inside, following the Santa hat.
And then it was gone - no, there it was, sitting in a bin. And there was a bright blue tabard thrown over a bench on the concourse, and there wasn’t our Deliveroo rider, his identifying uniform discarded, just another anonymous, undistinguished individual, milling with all the all the other undistinguished individuals in the crowded station and gone, quite gone.