Hammerport

Earlier that afternoon, they had found Grimmer. They had been told that Grimmer had been in contact with the renegade bitch, the foot-long thorn in their side. Of course, if Mr. Alpha had kept his fucking eyes on the ball in first place then they would not have needed to find Grimmer and they would still be assigned to the Weave as every Clothman is meant to be.

They dragged him out of his house by his hippy mane of hair, in front of his wife and children who Mr. Alpha, to his credit, shut up with a good, hard stare that would have made Medusa and her pretty sisters proud. They took him to the fifth floor of an abandoned block of flats, carefully decorated with graffiti and the colourful detritus of the broken lives of the homeless and the drug-bound. Strike one.

There were so many derelict buildings in the vicinity to choose from – it was more like the town itself had been abandoned, suffering from an unending economic quarantine after Thatcher’s government had put a bullet in the head of the coal industry. Grimmer had chosen his bolt-hole well. Or perhaps it had been that bitch who had done the choosing.

Mr. Omega strapped Grimmer to a faded sofa with a non-threatening flower design. Real flowers would have withered and died by now, but these flowers were consigned to a living death in discarded furniture, fabric trapped in a town where inconvenient lives had been conveniently brushed under the carpet. Mr. Omega used some aerial cables they had found lying around to lash Grimmer to the sofa in a makeshift arrangement that should have been sufficient to immobilise him. He asked Mr. Alpha to check the knots were tight. Strike two.

“My name is Mr. Omega. My partner here is Mr. Alpha,” opened Mr. Omega.

“Hi,” said Mr. Alpha.

Sniffing back tears and mucus, Grimmer said meekly, “Hello.”

“Where is she?” Mr. Omega asked.

Grimmer cried them a river, his unkempt beard becoming matted and salty in the process. “Please, please, oh my God, don’t kill me!”

“Where the fuck is the whore?” Mr. Alpha interrupted with a grandiose delusion of authority. Mr. Omega glared at him, irked because he told Mr. Alpha, in very precise and moron-proof terms, to keep his trap shut. They wanted to go back to the Weave and could not afford to screw this up.

“Please! I want to see my daughters grow up! Please! Please!” pleaded Grimmer.

Mr. Omega said, “We are of men of the Cloth. We do not hurt others out of desire, only need.”

“Not like you, you piece of shit,” Mr. Alpha spat, intervening again, rising so far above his station that if he slipped and fell back down to his station by some unfortunate mishap he would have broken his neck, and Mr. Omega would have been just fucking fine with that. “You probably want to see your sweet, pretty daughters grow up so you can touch them once they bloom. That’s what people like you do, isn’t it? When you’re not blaspheming in your hand, you’re blaspheming in your head, aren’t you? You fucking heretics make me sick.”

(Later, Mr. Alpha had tried to explain to Mr. Omega that he wanted to try out a good cop, bad cop strategy. Mr. Omega had glowered at him, retorting that they had higher standards than fucking cops.)

“Please! I don’t know who you’re talking about! Who is this woman you’re talking about? I haven’t done anything! Please, I love my wife so much! Oh sweet Jesus, please!” begged Grimmer, his face all sweat and tears. All he was missing was blood so Mr. Omega punched him in the nose.

Mr. Omega followed this with a kind request. “Will you please stop saying please?”

Grimmer was extremely apologetic, his face all blood, sweat and tears, and switched to saying sorry profusely instead. They did not have time for a long drawn-out interrogation so Mr. Omega said to Mr. Alpha, “Time for needles.”

His younger partner got out his needle-case, took a brief peek inside it and admitted, “Shit. I’ve only got a couple left.” Strike three, mate, you’re out.