Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [0]
MIKE TUCKER AND ROBERT PERRY
Dedicated to the memory of
Howard Tucker,
father and friend
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
'London, England, November 1940. Three months in this dumb assed country and not a sniff of a case. I wish I'd never shipped out of Chicago... except I had to. Too many people in Chicago wanted me out of the way permanently. A new start in an old country. Figured I could clean up in sleepy old England. I was wrong. The hoods are too slow and the cops are too fast. Its all smalltime. All the real crooked talent is away fighting the Nazi or running blackmarket eggs in from Suffolk.'
Cody McBride pulled back the edge of the blackout curtain, an stared out over the rooftops of East London.
Below him the city was dark and empty. He scowled. This was not how a city ought to be. He was used to people, noise, and bright lights. Now all the noise and light came from the bombers overhead, and the gunners trying to shoot them down.
In the distance he could see tracer fire arcing into the night sky the glow of fires. The city was dying just as surely as its people and McBride hated it. He craned his neck round to catch glimpse of St Paul's Cathedral, silhouetted against the glowing night sky. How long before that became no more than another pile of rubble in a London street? He was amazed that it had weathered this blitz as long as it had it stood out like a beacon He hoped it survived. Too many landmarks were being erased from the face of London.
He glanced at the stack of newspapers piled under the window The Lurker. Somehow in the middle of all this chaos some fruitcake had taken it upon himself to start carving people up. A real psycho. The Limehouse Lurker, the press had dubbed him He'd left a trail of disembowelled, disembodied, and generally messy corpses scattered around East London for the past two months. He was even managing to grab headlines from the Luftwaffe. It was strange, McBride thought: even when death was raining indiscriminately from the skies every night, the Lurker had still managed to spread panic among the population. Give death a human face and somehow it all becomes so much more horrific. The police hadn't come close to catching him: Cody McBride hadn't even tried. That would be a coup to catch the Limehouse Lurker. McBride laughed to himself. How could anyone solve anything when the Nazis kept bombing the crime scenes?
His attention shifted to the paintwork that read CODY
MCBRIDE PRIVATE DETECTIVE across the top of the glass. The paintwork was already beginning to peel, even though it was barely three weeks old. It seemed that it wasn't only the criminal talent that was away fighting the Nazis.
He let the curtain swing back and contemplated his darkened office. Even by his standards it was sparse. A couple of large filing cabinets stood against one wall, a freestanding safe against another. A couple of trench coats and a hat hung on a stand in the corner, next to an old table with an even older typewriter on it. In front of him was his desk, a large walnut affair, bare save for an ink blotter, a telephone, a bottle of whisky and his shoes. The shoes were full of his feet; the bottle was empty.
He took a long, deep drink of the whisky in his hand, swilled the last mouthful around in the bottom of the glass, and leaned back in his creaky old swivel chair. He really shouldn't be here during an air raid. He should be in the shelters with everybody else. He had watched as the streams of people made their way across the street while the sirens had droned out their warning cry; watched as, one by one, the lights of the city had been extinguished. Staring down at the tide of people, he had shut off his own light, pulled the blackout curtain, and proceeded to get drunk.
At first he had complied with the regulations, sleeping on tube platforms and stairways as the Germans bombed seven bells out of London, but the oppressive atmosphere, the proximity to people who were slowly having all the hope drained out of them, had proved more than McBride could stand. As the