The October Man

There was a statue on the lawn outside the institute of a woman, hand on breast, looking mournfully upwards as if contemplating the death of a loved one and the amount of paperwork it was bound to cause.

Gaston was a short, bulky man in his late fifties who favoured tight jeans, studded belts and sleeveless T-shirts, the better to show off the tattoos on his own arms. Only the absence of a mullet or a purple Mohican saved him from a breach of the EU directive against egregious cliché embodiment.

“Police work,” said Stefan, “is ninety per cent paperwork, nine per cent bullshit and one per cent horror.”

Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who’ve figured out how to start a sentence but don’t know how it ends.

Dressed in a checked shirt and tight jeans, he looked like one of those men who had reached middle age in their teens only to realise their mistake and seek to hang on to their twenties as long as possible.

“But my point is that everyone I know speaks a bit of English.”
“How else are we going to talk to the Swedes?” I said.

Before I did anything else, I unshipped the Geiger counter and checked the bottom of the ditch—nothing. I’ve never actually got a positive reading but, as Mama says, far better to be safe than radioactive. Mama used to be a radical Green, which is how she met my father. She assaulted him, he arrested her—it was love at first handcuffing.

And that’s where the case ended. Except for the paperwork, which only took a month and a half to complete.