Jack Nimble Mysteries, Part 1, The Tiger in the Lane

This short-story is the first of a series I hope to be able to keep up for some time, I've only written a bit on it so far so suffice it to say that I'll learn as much about the characters with each new issue as you will.

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Despite the thundering skies above, the scene in the street had a certain peace to it.

Lying at an angle unnatural to the living, the broken body of the tiger reclined in death in the street, tail snaking off to the gutter, paws, or those few it had left, lying splayed out on the concrete. Rain thundered down from on high to meet the pavement with an almighty roar.

Yellow cordon tape, blazing bright and gold in the light of the streetlamps, formed a ragged square, like a frame when the story within has escaped. In stark contrast with the reflective pennants of tape, the two men standing within the square of sagging yellow tape, seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Their hats buckled against the onslaught of the rain from above and their clothes clung to their forms like wet toilet paper. Black toilet paper.

“Not much left of him, is there?”

A forlorn cigarette, still clinging to its last vestiges of glowing life, drooped from the lips of the speaker. As the man spoke, the cigarette jounced and flared into a brief pinprick of red light before subsiding once more into smoldering ennui. From the nostrils above curled an exhale of colorless smoke.

The man who had spoken, was dressed drably in grey, which you might have realized at a glance if he had not been standing out in the rain for the past hour and thusly had his suit, hat and coat drenched black by the downpour. He had the air of an undertaker about him, intensely somber and possessing of respect to be respected. He had a face like the cusp of gray ash left in the hearth after a long, bright fire, a religiously polished black cane and a pair of round black wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of a lengthy nose. He also had hooves.

“Not really, no” replied the other man. This man wore black, made still blacker by the rain. His coat, trousers, shoes and leather gloves all utterly drenched, giving him the air of a skeleton caught out in the rain on his way to a fancy dress party.

The dark hat he wore had, against all odds, withstood the downpour so far. It perched stolidly atop the man’s head, rainwater draining off of its rim onto the street in disturbing profusion.

“Still,” he continued, not taking his eyes from the crumpled corpse in the rain, “not surprising after the means of death.”

“You’re quite sure it was murder?” the undertaker asked, eyes trained on the body.

“I don’t call an exploding pen natural death, Solomon.”

“Well, neither would I, but suicide cannot be ruled out quite yet, can it?”

“No, but mining the pens and pencils usually isn’t the way suicides go. Usually it’s mundane sort of stuff, a dive off a building, cleaning fluids in the soup, driving an oil tanker into a building construction.”

“Don’t talk about that last one.”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

“Past cases aside, shall we return to the matter at hand?”

“Absolutely, like to take a closer look?”

“Might as well.”

A shaft of white light lanced out, shearing the darkness in two and shining down on the corpse of the tiger. The sight was not a pleasant one.

The undertaker’s legs bent. In two places. Unsurprising in goat’s legs. He crouched wetly beside the body, examining the corpse.

“They have the pen still?”

“What’s left of it,” replied the man in black, waving the flashlight he held in a resigned sort of gesture. Raindrops plunged through the beam of light towards the pavement as though tired of life.

“It did explode, there isn’t much to search for clues if that’s what you mean.”

“Pity” said the undertaker, flexing his trouser clad goat’s legs and rising from his sitting position, “well, there isn’t much else to be seen here. We might as well leave the rest to the Authorities. Fancy a coffee?”

“Not terribly.”

“A brandy then, from the office.”

“Lead on,” the man in black replied.

As they turned to depart the ragged square of tape, the man in black turned to look back at the body. It lay forlorn and skinny, drummed by the onslaught of the rain. Then he switched off the flashlight and followed his companion beyond the boundaries of the tape and into the thronging masses of flashing blue-white lights and rushing forms in the rain. Soon he and his strange friend were lost to sight, veiled by the rain and the crowd.