Story: The Disappearance (IV)

(Parts III , V)

The night was long and uncluttered with dreams. I rarely dream in the middle of a case, or at least I don't remember it if I do, as reality is so much stranger than any twisted fantasy brought out by the unconscious. That's the way it goes for us out in the 'silly squads', lampooned in the media as 'biscuit twitchers' and cranks of the first order. I wondered then if our citizens would continue to think that way if they knew about Fred and Cheryl lying in the recovery room after an armed evidence grab, or the numbers of disappearances and weird phenomena.

Weird phenomena... I flashed back to what had started this sequence off: A cooling trace on a pavement where a man - or of course a woman - had been vanished from this world into some other time and place, perhaps never here to be seen again. It was a gloomy concept in a farcical situation. Not for the first time I wondered how on Earth any of this could be happening and why it was linked to biscuits of all things. Biscuits! Plain chocolate digestive BISCUITS! It was farcical and ridiculous and even just a little grotesque in its stupidity.

The agents sent in to retrieve our biscuit evidence had proven something though: The situation was real and not just a collective figment of the imagination. That was good to know. Also, there were agents to be involved, and probably somewhere there was an origin to this nonsense. For years there had been discreet investigations into the biscuit makers and their factories. We knew that certain brands were statistically linked to the phenomena but they claimed total ignorance and never a shred of evidence was found to link them to anything. McGonagle Biscuits in particular had a haze of biscuity suspicion baked all over them but were also known to be the most scrupulous in their production. Ingredients were checked, equipment inspected, technicians placed undercover for long-term observation and nothing was seen or heard, or even tasted of smelled.

Lying there, it became clear that the whole thing was impossible. That we were being led a merry chase by a much bigger phenomenon we knew nothing about. Biscuits were just twice baked flour concoctions, with a layer of chocolate melted on top. Something else was infecting them with a chaotic power and that was what we had to isolate and contain. And we had to find the poor vanished man with a minimum of clues, and we had to find those masked agents and apprehend them with a minimum of unacceptable force.

Once you accept that something real is impossible it becomes much easier to deal with. There were conventions of biscuit theorists who wove fanciful webs of imagination and deduction on the subject of the PCD disappearances, when they weren't haunting the back rooms of pubs or corner snooker tables in clubs across the country, or common rooms in Mathematics departments across the country. We had some academics who regularly sent us theories that claimed to answer everything but never quite came through. Maybe it was time to visit someone after work and really get into the grit of the mystery again. Maybe it was time to become a theorist myself once again and go back to the old school.

Before all that though, it would be time to get the update on Fred and Cheryl and endeavour to identify that poor man. Only after would it be time to go back in time and become a professor once again.


There shall be more...