HOME | DD

Description
Contracted Out (I)
If Chief Inspector Lee Stainton had been asked to describe his role in the Bureau of Metaphysical Enforcement in three words, he would not have hesitated in his reply.

Overworked.

Underpaid.

Under-resourced.

And if you’d told him that the last one is hyphenated he would have said “Fuck you, too.”

By December 2017 it had been a year and two months since Magic had returned to the world. At least, that was the official line. It had been that long since the ‘Announcement’, when the Great Dragon Ter’Duroin revealed his existence, and the existence of Magic. He’d called it ‘The Revelation’. Lee suspected that Magic had been around at least a short while longer than that – probably by at least six months. But ‘a year and a bit’ was as good a figure as any to work with. What had the Bureau had to deal with during that time?

For starters, there had been a number of magic-related muggings – people with some little talent using their magic to either cause physical assault; to use a magical equivalent of a TASER; to freeze people and literally empty their pockets while they watched helplessly; the methods had been varied but all amounted to the same thing. The media had begun branding the crime as being “robbed at spell-point”. By the time legislation had passed to deal with the problem, and became law, it was the 20th December 2016, and on that same day a bank in Sheffield was robbed with magic – the robbers having walked straight through the walls of the bank and the vault itself.

It was on 2nd January 2017 that the first Bureau of Magical Enforcement was established. The Home Office would have much preferred a location closer to the Capital, but after some ‘advice’ (Lee would have called it ‘interference’) from the Great Dragon, North Yorkshire was chosen as their base of operations.

Since then, there had been the case of a smuggling ring – criminals who used two Mages to create a magical gateway through which they trafficked their contraband into the country. The collaboration between the Serious Organised Crime Agency (S.O.C.A.) and the B.M.E. had successfully brought that operation to an end. There had been the apprehended werewolf at a local shopping centre car park; the escaped convict who almost ripped open a black hole in a warehouse; the near-fatal encounter with the snake-haired Gorgon; the list was growing, unlike the department’s budget. All these cases had been handled solely by the B.M.E., re-named afterwards to the Bureau of Metaphysical Enforcement.

It would have been nice to think that a newly established department would be given a generous initial budget in order to set themselves up. In the case of the B.M.E. they had been given an old and previously decommissioned police station as a base of operations, several older vehicles, second-hand office furniture and supplies, and the faith of the Home Office that they would do an excellent job. Thankfully, most of the officers who had been transferred in to man the department were at the top of their game, and they had two active mages.

Lee had been asking for additional funding for months. It wasn’t as though he was asking for more comfortable chairs in the police station offices, better facilities for his officers, or food in the cafeteria that actually tasted of something, even though all of these things would have been improvements to the working environment. What he had asked for was funding for an in-house mechanic and a maintenance budget in order to keep his department’s vehicle fleet on the road.

Of the eight Incident Response Vehicles in their fleet, three were off the road completely, and a further two were experiencing intermittent faults. Only three were fully operational. Of their four Transit vans two were non-starters. The Bureau was supposed to be considered fortunate by having four motorcycles as part of its fleet. Though not strictly U.K. Police vehicles, they had been repurposed specifically for the Bureau. None of them worked.

With more than half of the ‘fleet’ off the road, Lee had written to the Home Secretary asking how he was supposed to maintain the front line against metaphysical threats with faulty vehicles, and had made his requests for a mechanic and a maintenance budget.

He was not pleased with the response he received.

The Home Office acknowledged the important work of the B.M.E. and while they understood his concerns, funding was strictly limited. However, they offered a compromise – to put a contract out to ‘tender’ for local businesses to bid on, with the bid that gives the best ‘value for money’ to be given the contract to maintain the Bureau’s fleet.

“Best value, my arse,” Lee had spat. “That’s political bollocks for ‘cheapest’.”

The Home Office had sent out the tenders, reviewed the bids, and awarded a contract to a small local firm called “Matty’s Motors”, which sounded to Lee more like a second hand car outlet than a workshop. At least Lee had Home Office agreement on one clause of the tender – that the winning firm would give the Bureau a dedicated mechanic for the duration of the contract.

That ‘dedicated mechanic’ slouched on a chair in Lee’s office opposite the Chief Inspector. To Lee, the kid looked like he’d just dropped out of college into a puddle of motor oil, and turned up on the Bureau’s doorstep. He wore a dirty set of overalls that had been shrugged off his shoulders and been tied around his waist with the sleeves. A bright orange T-shirt with brown sleeves, equally caked in oil and dust, proclaimed “I’m Here Because You Broke Something”, and on his head he wore a dirty blue baseball cap with the company logo on the front.

Sceptically, Lee reviewed the file his officers had compiled on the youth.

Pete Ellis was actually twenty-four years old, though he looked younger. He had studied mechanical engineering and motor vehicle maintenance at a technical college, and worked for a few years at the contracted firm. A check on his criminal record had revealed a clean slate, though to look at him, Lee would never have guessed that was possible. The Chief Inspector looked up from the file at the young man, who was rolling his eyes and looked bored.

“Am I keeping you from something?” Lee asked.

“My job,” Pete retorted.

Lee looked down at the file again. The only thing he saw on paper that could really have caused him any degree of concern was a note from his employer, ‘Matty’.

“Peter does exhibit something of an attitude problem, especially when it comes to figures of authority. However, his work ethic and results speak for themselves.”

Lee read that line to Pete.

“Yeah?” Pete asked.

“Any comments?” Lee asked and shrugged his shoulders as though a more comprehensive response was obviously required here.

“Look pal,” Pete began.

“Pal?” Lee raised his eyebrows at the kid’s audacity.

“What ya want me to call ya? Boss? Gaffer?”

“How about ‘Chief Inspector’?” Lee could feel his last nerve being tested.

“Look, Chief,” Pete restarted, but his use of the single word bristled Lee further, “I wouldn’t wanna tell you how to catch criminals, and I don’t wanna be told how to fix cars. That’s all I wanna do. Point me at a car and I’ll fix the fucker. Job done.”

Lee bit his tongue before replying.

“We’re not just talking about cars,” he said with a frown. “We’ve got…”

“Cars, trucks, vans, bikes,” Pete interrupted. “That’s what I meant. Just point ‘n’ click and leave me to it. You win, I win.”

‘It’s not like I’ve got a fucking choice,’ Lee mused in his own head. “Right then,” he said as an idea came to him, “Let’s show you the scope of your workload.”

Lee stood up from his chair and Pete did the same, and followed the C.I. into the corridor outside of his office, up a flight of stairs, left, and into another corridor. The sign above the security door ahead of them said “EXIT”, although that was a throwback to the original layout of the building before it had been assigned to the Bureau. Beyond the door, which was flanked by two CCTV cameras, was an elevator to the other levels of the building. As they approached, the elevator doors opened and a young police officer stepped out.

Billy Denton opened the security door and saw Lee and the ‘mechanic’ approaching.

“Shall I h….h..hold the door, Lee?” Billy called.

“Nah, it’s fine, Billy,” Lee called back. “Pete here needs to know the security code anyway.”

“Okay,” Billy nodded and walked towards them.

“I’ll take you down to the garage,” Lee said to Pete as they passed Billy in the corridor. He turned his head to look at the young mechanic, and paused.

Pete had turned his head to watch as Billy had passed them, and was now half-turning his whole upper body to get a better look, watching the young officer walk back the way that they had come. Lee raised an eyebrow when Pete let out a very soft wolf-whistle to himself as his eyes dipped down to Billy’s backside, and a smile broke out across his dirty face. It was the first time since Pete had arrived at the Bureau that Lee had seen him smile.

“O…KAY,” Lee raised his voice a little, and Pete’s head snapped back around.

“Sorry, you were saying, Chief?”

Lee stared at Pete. The young man’s frown and almost defiant expression had gone completely. His eyes were open wider, and his attention was focused.

‘What do I do, what do I do?’ Lee’s mind raced. The dark sense of humour inside his head was crying out to ask ‘Did you see something you like, kid?’ but he knew that would be offensive, either to Pete, to Billy or to both. But he knew that he had seen something in that moment as it passed – something that had changed Pete’s attitude completely. Shit, Lee didn’t know if Billy was even gay, despite the fact that he’d moved into the young constable’s apartment and had been living there for the past three months, while he looked for a suitable place of his own.

Some things, though, were pretty obvious, especially to a Copper like Lee. He might not have known if Billy was gay, but he would have staked his pension on the fact that Pete was.

‘Maybe half my pension,’ he corrected himself inside his head.

Pete was still looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer.
“I’ll show you where the garage is,” Lee eventually replied.

Description
Contracted Out (I)
If Chief Inspector Lee Stainton had been asked to describe his role in the Bureau of Metaphysical Enforcement in three words, he would not have hesitated in his reply.

Overworked.

Underpaid.

Under-resourced.

And if you’d told him that the last one is hyphenated he would have said “Fuck you, too.”

By December 2017 it had been a year and two months since Magic had returned to the world. At least, that was the official line. It had been that long since the ‘Announcement’, when the Great Dragon Ter’Duroin revealed his existence, and the existence of Magic. He’d called it ‘The Revelation’. Lee suspected that Magic had been around at least a short while longer than that – probably by at least six months. But ‘a year and a bit’ was as good a figure as any to work with. What had the Bureau had to deal with during that time?

For starters, there had been a number of magic-related muggings – people with some little talent using their magic to either cause physical assault; to use a magical equivalent of a TASER; to freeze people and literally empty their pockets while they watched helplessly; the methods had been varied but all amounted to the same thing. The media had begun branding the crime as being “robbed at spell-point”. By the time legislation had passed to deal with the problem, and became law, it was the 20th December 2016, and on that same day a bank in Sheffield was robbed with magic – the robbers having walked straight through the walls of the bank and the vault itself.

It was on 2nd January 2017 that the first Bureau of Magical Enforcement was established. The Home Office would have much preferred a location closer to the Capital, but after some ‘advice’ (Lee would have called it ‘interference’) from the Great Dragon, North Yorkshire was chosen as their base of operations.

Since then, there had been the case of a smuggling ring – criminals who used two Mages to create a magical gateway through which they trafficked their contraband into the country. The collaboration between the Serious Organised Crime Agency (S.O.C.A.) and the B.M.E. had successfully brought that operation to an end. There had been the apprehended werewolf at a local shopping centre car park; the escaped convict who almost ripped open a black hole in a warehouse; the near-fatal encounter with the snake-haired Gorgon; the list was growing, unlike the department’s budget. All these cases had been handled solely by the B.M.E., re-named afterwards to the Bureau of Metaphysical Enforcement.

It would have been nice to think that a newly established department would be given a generous initial budget in order to set themselves up. In the case of the B.M.E. they had been given an old and previously decommissioned police station as a base of operations, several older vehicles, second-hand office furniture and supplies, and the faith of the Home Office that they would do an excellent job. Thankfully, most of the officers who had been transferred in to man the department were at the top of their game, and they had two active mages.

Lee had been asking for additional funding for months. It wasn’t as though he was asking for more comfortable chairs in the police station offices, better facilities for his officers, or food in the cafeteria that actually tasted of something, even though all of these things would have been improvements to the working environment. What he had asked for was funding for an in-house mechanic and a maintenance budget in order to keep his department’s vehicle fleet on the road.

Of the eight Incident Response Vehicles in their fleet, three were off the road completely, and a further two were experiencing intermittent faults. Only three were fully operational. Of their four Transit vans two were non-starters. The Bureau was supposed to be considered fortunate by having four motorcycles as part of its fleet. Though not strictly U.K. Police vehicles, they had been repurposed specifically for the Bureau. None of them worked.

With more than half of the ‘fleet’ off the road, Lee had written to the Home Secretary asking how he was supposed to maintain the front line against metaphysical threats with faulty vehicles, and had made his requests for a mechanic and a maintenance budget.

He was not pleased with the response he received.

The Home Office acknowledged the important work of the B.M.E. and while they understood his concerns, funding was strictly limited. However, they offered a compromise – to put a contract out to ‘tender’ for local businesses to bid on, with the bid that gives the best ‘value for money’ to be given the contract to maintain the Bureau’s fleet.

“Best value, my arse,” Lee had spat. “That’s political bollocks for ‘cheapest’.”

The Home Office had sent out the tenders, reviewed the bids, and awarded a contract to a small local firm called “Matty’s Motors”, which sounded to Lee more like a second hand car outlet than a workshop. At least Lee had Home Office agreement on one clause of the tender – that the winning firm would give the Bureau a dedicated mechanic for the duration of the contract.

That ‘dedicated mechanic’ slouched on a chair in Lee’s office opposite the Chief Inspector. To Lee, the kid looked like he’d just dropped out of college into a puddle of motor oil, and turned up on the Bureau’s doorstep. He wore a dirty set of overalls that had been shrugged off his shoulders and been tied around his waist with the sleeves. A bright orange T-shirt with brown sleeves, equally caked in oil and dust, proclaimed “I’m Here Because You Broke Something”, and on his head he wore a dirty blue baseball cap with the company logo on the front.

Sceptically, Lee reviewed the file his officers had compiled on the youth.

Pete Ellis was actually twenty-four years old, though he looked younger. He had studied mechanical engineering and motor vehicle maintenance at a technical college, and worked for a few years at the contracted firm. A check on his criminal record had revealed a clean slate, though to look at him, Lee would never have guessed that was possible. The Chief Inspector looked up from the file at the young man, who was rolling his eyes and looked bored.

“Am I keeping you from something?” Lee asked.

“My job,” Pete retorted.

Lee looked down at the file again. The only thing he saw on paper that could really have caused him any degree of concern was a note from his employer, ‘Matty’.

“Peter does exhibit something of an attitude problem, especially when it comes to figures of authority. However, his work ethic and results speak for themselves.”

Lee read that line to Pete.

“Yeah?” Pete asked.

“Any comments?” Lee asked and shrugged his shoulders as though a more comprehensive response was obviously required here.

“Look pal,” Pete began.

“Pal?” Lee raised his eyebrows at the kid’s audacity.

“What ya want me to call ya? Boss? Gaffer?”

“How about ‘Chief Inspector’?” Lee could feel his last nerve being tested.

“Look, Chief,” Pete restarted, but his use of the single word bristled Lee further, “I wouldn’t wanna tell you how to catch criminals, and I don’t wanna be told how to fix cars. That’s all I wanna do. Point me at a car and I’ll fix the fucker. Job done.”

Lee bit his tongue before replying.

“We’re not just talking about cars,” he said with a frown. “We’ve got…”

“Cars, trucks, vans, bikes,” Pete interrupted. “That’s what I meant. Just point ‘n’ click and leave me to it. You win, I win.”

‘It’s not like I’ve got a fucking choice,’ Lee mused in his own head. “Right then,” he said as an idea came to him, “Let’s show you the scope of your workload.”

Lee stood up from his chair and Pete did the same, and followed the C.I. into the corridor outside of his office, up a flight of stairs, left, and into another corridor. The sign above the security door ahead of them said “EXIT”, although that was a throwback to the original layout of the building before it had been assigned to the Bureau. Beyond the door, which was flanked by two CCTV cameras, was an elevator to the other levels of the building. As they approached, the elevator doors opened and a young police officer stepped out.

Billy Denton opened the security door and saw Lee and the ‘mechanic’ approaching.

“Shall I h….h..hold the door, Lee?” Billy called.

“Nah, it’s fine, Billy,” Lee called back. “Pete here needs to know the security code anyway.”

“Okay,” Billy nodded and walked towards them.

“I’ll take you down to the garage,” Lee said to Pete as they passed Billy in the corridor. He turned his head to look at the young mechanic, and paused.

Pete had turned his head to watch as Billy had passed them, and was now half-turning his whole upper body to get a better look, watching the young officer walk back the way that they had come. Lee raised an eyebrow when Pete let out a very soft wolf-whistle to himself as his eyes dipped down to Billy’s backside, and a smile broke out across his dirty face. It was the first time since Pete had arrived at the Bureau that Lee had seen him smile.

“O…KAY,” Lee raised his voice a little, and Pete’s head snapped back around.

“Sorry, you were saying, Chief?”

Lee stared at Pete. The young man’s frown and almost defiant expression had gone completely. His eyes were open wider, and his attention was focused.

‘What do I do, what do I do?’ Lee’s mind raced. The dark sense of humour inside his head was crying out to ask ‘Did you see something you like, kid?’ but he knew that would be offensive, either to Pete, to Billy or to both. But he knew that he had seen something in that moment as it passed – something that had changed Pete’s attitude completely. Shit, Lee didn’t know if Billy was even gay, despite the fact that he’d moved into the young constable’s apartment and had been living there for the past three months, while he looked for a suitable place of his own.

Some things, though, were pretty obvious, especially to a Copper like Lee. He might not have known if Billy was gay, but he would have staked his pension on the fact that Pete was.

‘Maybe half my pension,’ he corrected himself inside his head.

Pete was still looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer.
“I’ll show you where the garage is,” Lee eventually replied.