Evil Machines (2 page)

‘Yes,’ said the superintendent, ‘but there are one or two things that we should keep confidential, just between you and me.’

‘I see,’ said Constable Robinson, ‘that’s OK by me.’

But the business with the Truthful Phone was not quite over.

‘Oh, by the way,’ said the superintendent, ‘there’s a message on the answering machine for you.’

Constable Robinson recognized the voice on the answering machine at once. It was the Truthful Phone. ‘Listen, Constable Robinson,’ it said. ‘Just in case I do get disconnected, I think you should know the truth about Mrs Morris’s husband. He didn’t disappear under mysterious circumstances in the Campsie Fells. He was poisoned in his own home. With weedkiller.’

Constable Robinson shuddered. All his working life in the police force he’d dreaded this moment when he would be confronted by a real criminal and would have to make an arrest. Of course, he’d given out the usual speeding fines and he’d reported several cars for going through red traffic lights, but he generally managed to avoid any contact with proper criminals.

Now here he was faced with a criminal of the worst sort: a murderer – possibly a murderess! But Constable Robinson didn’t hesitate. He knew what his duty was and he went straight to his superintendent, and told him the story. The superintendent immediately leapt into action.

‘We’ve no time to lose!’ he said. ‘She may be armed and dangerous!’

‘Who? Mrs Morris?’ stuttered the Constable, who was having difficulty imagining that dear little old lady wielding a machine gun.

But the superintendent was already on the phone. ‘I want six squad cars and an armed escort a.s.a.p.!’ He yelled and slammed the phone down.

In less than an hour, the police had arrived at Mrs Morris’s home. Several armed officers jumped out of a van, wielding machetes, and broke down Mrs Morris’s front door. Four sprang up the stairs and broke down all the doors up there, while six ran through the ground floor, knocking down any door that happened to be shut and one or two that weren’t.

They opened Mrs Morris’s cupboards and pulled all her clothes and personal belongings on to the floor. They pulled all the tins off her larder shelves and ransacked her fridge.

‘The suspect seems to have skipped it!’ reported Officer Tait to the superintendent.

‘Somebody must have tipped her off!’ exclaimed the superintendent. ‘Which means she’s not operating alone! Quick! Send reinforcements!’ he barked into his radio.

In the meantime, some police officers dug up the lawn and rose beds looking for dead bodies and others raided the unfortunate late Mr Morris’s garden shed.

‘Suspect’s shed is full of suspicious gear!’ reported Officer Tait, and he took the superintendent to see the metal-working lathes, mechanical saws and smelting furnace.

‘Looks like she’s been cutting up her victims and burning them in the furnace!’ exclaimed the superintendent. ‘No wonder we didn’t find any dead bodies buried under the lawn or rose beds! She could be the greatest mass-murderer of all time! Quick, send more reinforcements! This is going to be all over the press tomorrow! Well done, Constable Robinson! I can see promotion ahead for all of us!’

‘I can still hardly believe it,’ murmured Constable Robinson. ‘She seemed such a sweet old lady. But look! There’s the weedkiller, just as the phone said!’

‘Take that as evidence!’ exclaimed the superintendent. ‘And that garden fork is an offensive weapon.’

By the time the helicopter had arrived there were something like fifty police officers crowded into Mrs Morris’s house and garden, most of them armed.

‘Now where is that phone?’ asked the superintendent. ‘It’s our key witness.’

‘It’s gone!’ gasped Constable Robinson. ‘She must have taken it back to the shop!’

‘No time to lose!’ shouted the superintendent. ‘We may yet apprehend the suspect, before she can escape the country!’

***

All this while, Mrs Morris had been making her way back to the electrical shop where she had bought the Truthful Phone. She went via the park, where she always spent a pleasant hour feeding the ducks and pigeons. She then stopped at the greengrocer to order some leeks and potatoes. The greengrocer himself wasn’t to be seen, however, as he was hiding in the back of the shop, so she told his assistant to give him her best wishes.

She then went on to the electrical shop, and was surprised to find that it had a helicopter hovering above it.

‘There she goes!’ whispered Constable Robinson, peering out from the police van, on the other side of the street. ‘That’s her!’

‘Suspect entering shop now!’ radioed the superintendent. ‘OK, men, we’ll go in all together and take the suspect by surprise. Wait for my countdown.’

When Mrs Morris handed the Truthful Phone back to the shopkeeper, he nodded. ‘I didn’t think you’d like it,’ he said. ‘The truth is often very unpleasant.’

‘You are quite right, young man,’ replied Mrs Morris.

‘But wait a minute!’ said the shopkeeper. ‘You’ve got it set all wrong! Look!’

And he pointed to the switch on the side. When you looked closely you could see in tiny letters the words ‘True – False’. The switch was turned to ‘False’.

‘It’s been telling you lies!’ exclaimed the shopkeeper.

‘And not just me!’ said Mrs Morris.

And that was the moment when six specially trained officers jumped out of the helicopter on to the roof of Baker’s Electrical Shop, smashed their way through the ceiling and abseiled down on to the counter.

At the same time, fifty armed officers burst into the shop, spraying bullets at the ceiling. They pounced on Mrs Morris, handcuffed her, put a bag over her head and bundled her into the back of a van.

***

The story was, indeed, all over the press some weeks later, but I’m afraid neither Constable Robinson nor the superintendent got their promotion. The case was thrown out of court on the grounds that the Truthful Phone was not a reliable witness.

In his summing up the judge said, ‘Since Mrs Morris only purchased the phone that morning, it could not have been a witness to the events it described. It was simply spreading malicious gossip.’

As for Mrs Morris, she successfully sued the police for wrongful arrest and, with the £84 she received in compensation, she was able to buy a very nice telephone. It was red, and it said exactly what anyone who used it said and nothing else.

The Truthful Phone itself disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The police claimed it had escaped from custody when they proposed charging it under the defamation laws. But there were rumours circulating that the superintendent had paid one of his friends to tie it to a lump of concrete and drop it off  Westminster Bridge.

Whatever happened to it, everyone agreed that they were well rid of such an evil contraption.

But all the same, Mrs Morris felt she’d been lucky; as she said to her friend Mabel, ‘Goodness knows what would have happened if that switch had been pointing to “True”!’

The Nice Bomb

The bomb landed in the middle of the Johnson family’s living room during supper.

‘Well, you’re very lucky!’ said the bomb. ‘Normally my make and model goes off 100 per cent of the time. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Mr Johnson, who to tell the truth was still more than a little shaken by a bomb dropping through the ceiling into the family living room.

So the Nice Bomb picked itself up and bustled round making tea for the Johnson family. Meanwhile the Johnsons turned on the telly and watched the news, which was all about how bombs had been dropping all around London. Apparently a little-known terrorist group was dropping them as a protest against the inefficiencies in the postal system.

The news reporter was interviewing a masked man who said, ‘A second-class letter can take up to a week to arrive and even first-class letters have no guarantee of arriving the

next day! This is something that we in MADIPOS will not stand for!’

‘MADIPOS?’ asked the Interviewer.

‘Movement Against Deficiencies in the Postal Service’ said the masked Terrorist.

The Johnson family were all nodding in agreement with the Terrorist, when the Nice Bomb brought in the tea.

‘I’ve buttered some scones as well. You all look as if you’ve had a bit of a shock.’

‘Well, yes, we have,’ said Mrs Johnson. ‘It isn’t every day a bomb lands in your family living room.’

‘But I must say, for a bomb, you are very pleasant,’ said Mr Johnson.

‘Thank you,’ said the Nice Bomb. ‘I like you too.’ And it settled itself back on the sofa.

They all watched television for the rest of the evening. There was a quiz show during which the Nice Bomb guessed all the right answers long before any of the contestants.

‘How do you know all that stuff?’ asked Kevin, Mr and Mrs Johnson’s son.

‘I’m what they call a “Smart Bomb”,’ said the bomb.

‘You could be on the show!’ said Loretta, Mr and Mrs Johnson’s daughter.

‘Oh no, I couldn’t!’ replied the Nice Bomb. ‘I’m only a bomb, don’t forget.’

‘But you are a very nice bomb,’ said Mrs Johnson.

‘Unfortunately, I think you’ll find that, according to
The Quiz Show Rule Book
, bombs aren’t eligible to participate in TV game shows,’ replied the Nice Bomb. And it was right.

***

The next day, the Nice Bomb helped Mrs Johnson get the children off to school.

‘It must be very exhausting for you – doing all this work day in day out,’ said the Nice Bomb to Mrs Johnson. ‘I could take a load of it off your hands.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Mrs Johnson, as the Nice Bomb loaded the dishwasher, hung the clothes out to dry, and spring-cleaned the entire house.

‘But don’t tire yourself out, my dear,’ added Mrs Johnson, as she drank her twelfth cup of tea while flipping through magazines on the sofa.

‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ said the Nice Bomb cheerily. ‘Us bombs have no concept of
tiredness
.’

When the children came home from school, the Nice Bomb made them a snack and then supervised their homework.

When Mr Johnson came in from work, the Nice Bomb cooked a particularly tasty supper of chicken in tomatoes and chilli.

‘You may be only a bomb,’ said Mr Johnson, ‘but you can’t half cook!’

‘And it’s finished off my knitting for me,’ said Mrs Johnson, holding up a beautiful Fair Isle sweater that the bomb had created that afternoon out of a rather pedestrian pattern that Mrs Johnson had been working on for months.

‘You’re a very nice bomb,’ said Mr Johnson.

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But the next day there was bad news. Mr Johnson came home from work and said that another group of terrorists had blown up the factory where he worked.

‘They were protesting against the parking restrictions,’ he said regretfully. ‘And while I thoroughly agree with them about relaxing the waiting and loading regulations in Casper Street, it does mean I don’t have any work and will not be able to buy any Christmas presents this year.’

‘Oh dear!’ said the Nice Bomb, when it heard all this. ‘Perhaps I can help. I may be only a bomb, but I’m very good at fixing computers.’

So the Nice Bomb, in addition to doing all the housework, and feeding the children and supervising their homework, started an Internet business repairing computers.

Every day more and more computers arrived to be repaired, and the bomb was able to fix them in no time at all – in between rearranging the living room and bleaching the bed-sheets.

To begin with, Mr Johnson used to get up early and set off to look for a new job.

‘As soon as I find a new job, you can relax,’ he said to the Nice Bomb.

‘Oh! That’s all right!’ replied the Nice Bomb. ‘Us bombs don’t know the meaning of the word
relaxation
!’ And it cleaned the oven, washed all the windows and made a soufflé for supper, while at the same time mending a dozen more computers in its spare moments.

As the weeks went by, however, Mr Johnson started going out later and later to look for work, while the Nice Bomb’s computer business went on from strength to strength, and the money poured in.

‘I’d give you a hand,’ said Mr Johnson, ‘only I don’t know the first thing about computers.’

‘That’s all right,’ said the Nice Bomb. ‘Us bombs don’t mind a bit of hard work!’

So Mr Johnson joined Mrs Johnson, sitting on the couch and leafing through magazines all day, while the Nice Bomb scuttled around the house, darning, sewing, dusting, cleaning, and mending the furniture – all the while fixing broken computers, digging the garden, washing up, shopping and doing a spot of ironing.

‘You be careful you don’t overdo it, my dear!’ shouted Mrs Johnson from the couch.

‘Ooh! Don’t worry about me!’ the Nice Bomb called back. ‘I’m only a bomb, I can’t overdo anything.’ And it finished washing the car, gave it a quick wax, repainted the outside of the house and built an extension to the garage.