The Phantom
I work at the regional Police HQ: not as part of the police force, but as civilian support in the computer department. I do all sorts of things associated with the maintenance of databases and other such rather tedious tasks. That was until one day I was asked to sort out a database of all members of the force who had served with us within the last twenty-five years. You see, the Chief Constable was retiring, and as he was pretty much in charge of things around here, he therefore deserved a big expensive party. We were going to invite all those who had served within his term of office, whether or not they were still serving. It was my job to ensure no-one was forgotten.
I started looking through the file of ex-officers, and something caught my eye: the year 2010 seemed a good year for retirements, particularly the month of July. In fact, the number was higher than any other month in the entire period. Curious, I set about finding out why. The reasons were well buried in the personnel archives. I started looking through them all and saw that nearly all of them were for medical reasons. Had there been some sort of disaster that had injured a lot of people? I hadn’t a clue, so I looked at the medical reports file. The first one was a woman officer aged twenty four, and my eyebrows lifted when I saw the words ‘Discharged due to high myopia’.
I rattled through the rest of the file: all but two out of at least thirty I looked at were either this or similar wording. Men and women, but slightly more women than men. I sat back, amazed at what I had discovered. Why on earth had so many people suddenly gone highly myopic? There was no answer on the files I had. Anyway, I collated the appropriate names and addresses and sent it all to the printers to get the invites sorted out.
The day of the party arrived. I knew the names of some of the high-myope ex-police officers that had been invited. Hopefully some of them would be there, and I would try to find out what had happened in June 2010. I went into the hall which had been booked for the party, and found that there were at least a hundred people there already, and it was in full swing. The guest of honour was there too, enjoying himself immensely. I enjoyed myself too, chatting with people I knew and others I didn’t. But where were the high myopes? They seemed very thin on the ground considering how many I’d found. Could they all have not come? I became increasingly disappointed.
And then I saw one: she was around 5'8" tall, wearing a slinky cocktail dress in red and shades of pink, pretty but quite obviously from her posture and build that she had been a WPC in the past. And the glasses, oh, just as I thought they should be for any and all of those afflicted by what had happened: jaw-droppingly thick, at least minus 30, with myodisc lenses that filled my eyes and my thoughts, as well as her oval metal frames. I headed over, trying not to behave too much like a Cruise Missile.
Her name was Judy, and she was very pleasant to talk to, especially being as she wore those glasses! She quite soon started talking about her career in the police force. I asked her,
‘how is it that you wear such thick glasses? Surely you could not pass the eyesight test for the police force without them?’
I could tell from her expression that I’d touched a sore nerve. She smiled a little, and gravely replied
‘I didn’t enter the police force needing this much correction. My eyesight was perfect. These came later, and are the reason why I am no longer a serving officer. I need minus 32 correction in both eyes, and I cannot see so well even with them. My visual acuity with them is only 20/80, I cannot drive nor pass the eyesight test with them, let alone without them.’
I then asked,
‘when did this happen?’
‘June 2010.’
“Bingo!” I thought. It was my chance to find out what happened! I asked,
‘so, what happened?’
‘Well, there was this man called James Stone who…’
She never got the chance to finish her sentence, being as she was grabbed by a colleague who started talking to her as if she had only moments to live. I shrugged, and drifted away, hoping to bump into Judy again sometime later.
Alas, I did not. I started to wonder if I could get close to the retiring Chief Constable, but I couldn’t until much later when he headed for the toilet. This was my chance! I followed him, and while standing at the urinals, I commented,
’there’s a lot of retired officers out there who remember you fondly.’
‘yes, that’s true. Some have been dear friends to me for a long time.’
‘what about James Stone?’
‘I can’t remember an officer with that name.’
Then he flushed, as if remembering something. He looked at me sharply as if I had asked him something silly, but then he seemed to realise what I was asking. He hissed at me,
‘please… If you know what’s good for you, don’t say any more.’
He left, leaving the plot thicker than before.
The next day at work I determined to track down the crime records for the month in question. And, of course, the mysterious James Stone. Of course, as I’d half expected, there was no sign of him. But the crime records were interesting, not for what they said about myodisks, glasses or James Stone, because they mentioned not a word of any of these things, but after some painstaking hours of search and deduction, despite me being no Sherlock Holmes, I realised that some of the records had been tampered with! The same kind of phrases came up over and over again, bluntly describing petty crimes of similar types in slightly less detail than should have been required, and it seemed some had been removed and others put in all at the same point in an attempt to cover up the shortfall. It was amazing! There had been some sort of cover up. By whom? And why? At the moment, I had no answer.
I resolved to try getting into contact with Judy. She seemed willing to tell me something about what it was all about, even if she had been prevented at the party. By the means of accessing her personnel data, I found her address and phone number. I didn’t know quite how to do this, nor what to say: should I write first and warn her? Or should I just jump straight in and phone her? I decided on the latter, but all I got was her answering machine. I left a message saying who I was and that I’d like to talk, with my phone number.
When I got home there was a message on my answering machine from Judy: she suggested we met in a shopping centre on Saturday. I don’t know what she thought I was going to do or say, but when I got there I saw her immediately: she had done her best to look pretty good, as far as someone with her vision and strong glasses could. Lipstick, high heels and new-looking clothes, a light blue stretch top and black trousers, with a jacket thrown over. I hoped she was ready for the fact I simply wanted to know what had happened in June 2010. I had to get amazingly close for her to realise I was there. She saw a sort of fuzzy lump waving: it was me. She smiled at me when she realised who I was, and thus kept smiling intermittently. We headed straight for the nearest coffee shop. It seemed to me she was expecting a little romance: well I would normally be straight in there, but this time I had other things on my mind.
As I expected, I had to help her with the menu behind the counter, and as she went to sit, she stumbled noisily over a chair leg. She smiled at me as I sat, then sighed, saying,
‘oh, I wish I could see better. These glasses help so much, but I’ve lost so much peripheral vision. If I’m not careful, I end up falling flat on my face.’
That was hardly surprising: to get such a strong prescription, the bowl piece of the lens had to be smaller than for gentler myodisc lenses. They looked very hard to use. I watched her stare straight at the coffee as she stirred it and brought it to her lips.
I then asked her,
‘so, how did you become so myopic?’
Although she remembered me, she did not recall speaking to me about her glasses before. She replied,
‘well, it happened when I was in the police force about five years ago. We were chasing around after this nasty creep called James Stone: he’d invented this gun thing that could instantly make people myopic. We spent weeks trying to catch him: every time he robbed a bank or something, he only had to shoot people with his gun, and they were instantly rendered helpless by severe myopia. That included us police, too. No wonder he got away with it. We started calling him the “Phantom Vision Stealer”, or just “The Phantom”. It was so easy for him to escape, because if you’re suddenly and unexpectedly afflicted with high myopia, you aren’t in a fit state to see anything much, let alone chase him.’
She paused to sip her coffee, and then continued,
’things were getting bad, several officers had been affected by him and there seemed no way to get the better of him. But then someone came up with a radical plan: it seemed to whoever it was who’d thought of it that he could only have a limited power supply in his gun: maybe if were drained enough, it would become useless and he’d be helpless. People thought the scheme ludicrous. We would have to be cannon-fodder for his myopia-inducing gun, there was no proof the idea was sound, and if it was, we had no idea how many shots he had in his gun.’
I was intrigued by this: no doubt such a dangerous scheme would have had to be approved by someone pretty high up. Judy immediately confirmed this by saying, ‘it went right up to the Chief Constable, you know: it took him some time to come to a decision about it. Eventually he decided to try it, because The Phantom was stealing this or that, and picking off officers as he did so. So, one night in June a massive operation was planned to corner and catch The Phantom. I was one of the police officers there, one of over a hundred in a small area.
As soon as he was sighted, we all converged on him. I was with my friend Suzie, bless her. We found a policeman groping around, obviously he’d been shot by The Phantom. Suzie stayed to guide him towards help, and I went on alone to try to find The Phantom. I found him not far away, running up a street. I gave chase, and he turned and fired at me. Instantly everything simply went black: I thought he’d completely blinded me, but soon found out I’d simply been rendered night blind.’
She looked rather desolately at me though her strong lenses, then continued,
‘of course, I had no hope of catching him. I simply ground to a halt, leaned on a wall and called for help. I could only tell where I was from memory. Eventually Suzie came to help me. I got taken to hospital, I was so glad to see light there, anyway. They put me in a room with a couple of other policemen who’d been “shot”. After another couple of hours we heard the news that we’d hoped for. The Phantom had shot his bolt, run out of power in his gun, and had been cornered and arrested. But the cost had been so high, in the final showdown another twelve had been affected, including my friend Suzie.’
She inhaled, and then continued,
’the doctors examined my eyes that night, and monitored me for a few days, and then I had an eye test. My RX was pretty much what it is now, minus about 31 each eye. After a couple of weeks I got my first pair of glasses. They were really horrible things. Big thick lenses, myodisked and ugly, but I had no other option in order to see the world. Even with them, my AV is dreadful. The bottom half of the eye chart was just a mystery to me. Everything is so shrunken and distorted. But at least I can sort of function, even though I can’t drive. I and all the other officers affected were pensioned off. I couldn’t pass the eyesight test with my new glasses, let alone without them as I should have been able to. So much for glasses, the ugly, awful things,’
she concluded bitterly. I replied,
‘oh, don’t say that. You don’t look so bad, really.’
She smiled, and replied,
‘you know, that’s the first time anyone’s said that to me. Thank you…’
I then returned to the story, asking her,
‘so what else did the Chief Constable have to do with this?’
She looked at me rather oddly, as if I was talking Chinese. Then she began to realise that I knew a little more than perhaps was good for me. She sighed, and said
‘OK, I’ll tell you.’
She lowered her voice, and said
‘James Stone is his nephew. If that got out, he’d be ruined. I’ve always wanted to expose him, but I didn’t dare: I thought my pension would be cut off or something, and I had no evidence to back me up. I’d love to have revenge for all those who were affected that night in June 2005 by his stupid decision to sacrifice our vision for his vanity.’
I couldn’t believe that, yet it all made sense. The cover up in the records had been done so inexpertly, something that someone with authority but little computer expertise would have done. I said to Judy,
‘OK, then, I’ll do it. I’m not a serving police officer, just a civilian employee in the computer records department: I have a private pension, and if I can prove the truth, which I have no doubt that I can, then I have nothing to worry about.’
Judy smiled at me in affection and pleasure, the coke bottles in her myodisk bowls shimmering in the light.
So, Judy and I set out to bring the former Chief Constable to account, putting our version of the events into a newspaper with proof. It caused a sensation, and a storm. Of course, we were at the centre of it. Of the libel action brought against us by the Chief Constable I will say little, except that it was lengthy and for us ultimately victorious. And of Judy and I? Well, we got married quite soon after, with her looking resplendent in a white dress and her thick glasses.