Burke and Blades in: A Painful Rebirth

Inspector Blades surveyed the tea room. Detective Burke, meanwhile, surveyed the cat-heads and follow-me-lads of a tea girl, Shilly, named no doubt for her failure of decision. 'Well, erm, it's like this, Mr Burke... or is it? Oh dear, I wish I knew...' At least she wasn't hysterical, Burke thought. Goodness, he and Blades were shallying worse than Shilly. 'That's all well and good, Miss' he said, 'but I ain't asking much now, am I? All I want to know is, did you see the professor 'aving a collie shangles with the meater or not?'  

'Well, yes, I did. He called 'im a mutton shunter, did the professor, and I was about to chuck 'im out for such a sordid accusation...'  
 
'Sordid?  
 
'Well of course, sir! To think that a nice young man like Mr Wallace, meater or not, would shunt a bit of mutton in a respectable tea room like this!'  
 
'Madam, a mutton shunter is a policeman.'  
 
'You mean you coppers are at it 'n' all?! And you a married man, Mr Burke! Your poor wife must tremble to serve you Sunday lunch...' The conjoined perversions of bestiality and necrophilia not being high on his list of qualities to be credited for, Burke changed the subject. 'What happened after the accusation was made?'  
 
'Well, Mr Wallace sort of blushed and said that such a thing could make a stuffed bird laugh. Then just as the professor was about to strike 'im with his stick, 'e (by which I mean the professor) clutched 'is heart and then, well, 'e seemed to just explode like a dandelion 'ead, only there was this blinding light and then 'e was gone.'  
 
'And what 'appened to Wally?'  
 
'Poor chap fainted. I've still got 'is muckender in me blouse.' She pulled from her bosom a yellow bit of cloth, designed with white petals. Taking it from her and looking at it, Burke shook his head. He wouldn't be surprised if that Oscar Wilde fella 'ad been up the lad's molly 'ouse, so to speak. With a wave of one gloved hand Blades dismissed the gaggle of sergeants by the door. 'No clues to be found, then?' said Burke, 'what was it, a case of spontaneous combustion?'  
 
'Yes and no. For you see, my flatfooted friend, the late Professor Taildown did spontaneously combust, but he's not out of print and in the arms of our Lord. He time travelled. Illegally, I might add, given the revocation of his licence.'  
 
'And what about Wally?'  
 
'He's how I'm sure what this is. I've seen him skulking about the yard for weeks now. The chief said his training's in Linear Violations.' Not long later Burke and Blades were in a hospital room normally reserved for criminals. Mr Wallace sat upright in his striped pyjamas, sipping a cup of tea. 'So tell me, what happened to Professor Taildown?'  
 
'I barely understand it myself; do you really think it'll make sense to a couple of rumbumptious rusty guts like you?  
 
'I'll pocket that affront' said Blades, 'try me.' Wallace put his cup and saucer on the bedside table. 'I asked to be put on the Taildown case because the old man had been travelling not just into the future, not even by century or millennia, in fact, but had found a way to make his machine go by millions upon millions - heck, maybe even billions - of years. His journals are all coded so I can't figure out how he did it, and I've requested they be burned so no-one can decipher them. But I know that he reached a point in linear time where human beings had, well, how can I put this... left their physical bodies and become immaterial.'  
 
Burke and Blades looked at each other. 'You must be passingly familiar with Darwin. If we evolved from one thing, we can evolve into something else. Anyway, these immaterial humans, they time travel using small discs like pocket watches. They appear to be triggered by a mixture of extreme emotion and images in the mind. To put it simply, if you're very angry and thinking about a field in Yorkshire you visited ten years ago, you might suddenly find yourself a decade earlier, in the freezing cold, shouting at sheep.' So long as nobody's shunting them, thought Burke.  
 
'When Taildown confronted you in the tea room he was very angry...' said Blades. Wallace gulped. 'The thing is, sometimes the traveller's emotions can get mixed up with the thoughts of nearby people, and when he started threatening me...' He clutched the bedsheets. 'I'm one of those rare people who remember their time in the womb. If I'm scared I'll think back to before I was born...' Blades' eyes widened and he stood up slowly. Burke almost dropped his copper's notepad. 'You mean to say that this professor, a six-foot 72-year-old man in coat and top 'at, is going to appear in your mother's belly, like a lit stick o' dynamite stuck up a turkey?'  
 
Wallace fainted for the second time that day. 'Burke, old boy' said Blades, 'run along to the library and search their periodicals for me. I have a feeling I know what the headline will be on this young man's birthday...'  
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE This story uses words and phrases from Victorian English slang, which can mostly be looked up in these articles:  
 
- https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53529/56-delightful-victorian-slang-terms-you-should-be-using  
- https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manly-slang-from-the-19th-century/  
 
The tea girl's name is a pun on shilly-shallying, meaning to be indecisive. The names Burke and Blades were themselves chosen because of "berk", meaning stupid, and the name of a fictional gentleman's club, respectively. Blades Club was made up by Ian Fleming for the James Bond novels, especially Moonraker, in which the secret agent is invited to the club to beat villainous Hugo Drax at bridge.  
 
If you're interested, these flash fictions - including Time Travel in the Victorian Age: https://deepundergroundpoetry.com/poems/386235-time-travel-in-the-victorian-age/ - were inspired by a couple of alternative Sherlock Holmes short stories, by the late American sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe. Wolfe's stories feature Holmes as a robot in the distant future and explore extremely complex scientific theorems in an understandable, entertaining way. On the other hand, my "Burke and Blades" tales are just ye olde English and knob gags, with one or two half-remembered concepts from Star Trek: The Next Generation tossed in.