Temporal Exploring 101 - Deep Future

IV.23 Public nuisance

It was definitely another first for me: I had never spent a night at a police station before.

The night before, I had been arrested – or perhaps merely taken into custody – by the Hardington local police. Somebody had witnessed me scaling the facade of that apartment building and called the police, but by the time they had arrived and set up a searchlight, I had already been on my way down, so they had not actually seen me enter or leave the apartment of Tyler Roth.

Having established that they were dealing with an adolescent girl – that is to say, with a minor – the police officers had taken me to the station to interrogate me. Rather than escape unnoticed, my idiot friends had come forward and attempted to talk to the police on my behalf, explaining to them how I, coming from the United States, had this weird hobby called urban climbing, how to their great dismay I had spontaneously decided to try and scale the apartment building, and how they had failed to dissuade me from that extremely stupid idea.

If nothing else, it convinced the police that I was not a cat burglar but only some fool girl from the States. Which was good as it stopped them from searching me: the map I had taken from the tycoon's apartment was still safely hidden in my bra.

Nevertheless, they had insisted that they had to take me into custody, even after Nancy had told them that I was visiting her family at Kerrington Manor. No, they could not simply let me go, they pointed out to her, not even if his Lordship himself were to show up at the police station. I had committed a public nuisance at the very least and it remained to be determined if and what kind of charges were going to be pressed against me.

Thus, Natty, Nancy, Madison and Melanie had been left with no choice other than to return to Kerrington Manor, leaving me to spend the night in a holding cell at a Harington police station.

It was not that I had been treated badly there, or anything like that. On the contrary, the night shift at the police station – one sergeant,  one constable and a young woman named Amanda who typed up my statement – had gone out of their way to make me feel comfortable, after they had all severely scolded me for having put my own life in danger by climbing the facade of a building.

Constable Hastings had made a sandwich and a hot cocoa for me, and Amanda had chatted with me and even teased me a bit while I had had my dinner. Their friendliness notwithstanding, I had experienced a considerable degree of anxiety when the cell door had closed behind me. I had read novels about pre-Cataclysm prisons that had gone to great lengths to describe dark, moist, rat-infested cells and unfortunate prisoners suffering the most cruel sort of treatment at the hands of sadistic wardens.  Never mind that everybody had been acting nothing but kind towards me and that the holding cell was warm and outfitted with a pallet that looked almost like a normal bed.

Nevertheless, after lying down on the narrow cot I must have fallen asleep almost instantly, for the next thing I remembered was waking up the next morning to the booming voice of Sergeant Bowers telling me to get up and 'face the music', as he put it.

"What do you mean, 'face the music'?" I asked, rubbing my eyes.

"There's a visitor for you," was all he would tell me.

Permitting only a quick detour to the bathroom, the man led me to the main room of the police station which served both as a reception area for visitors and as a common room for the personnel.

I half expected to actually face a somewhat annoyed Lord Kerrington, or at the very least, his chauffeur James.

But the impeccably dressed gentleman who was waiting for me with a strained smile on his face was neither Nancy's father nor James, though I knew him well enough. It was Mr Francis Taylor, junior partner of Taylor, Hampden and Clark, the agency that had been commissioned to take care of mail and financial matters and all sorts of other things related to my enrollment and stay at the St. Albert's boarding school for girls.