The Midnight Cleaning Company

Chapter 1

The Midnight Cleaning Company

Milo Tamm

Chapter 1

The call came through in the very early morning. The bored voice of a child spoke only to give an address. We were ready to go. We had a very small window of time in which to operate.
The team had gone through the motions so many times that the ritual had become muscle memory. We climbed into the unmarked black van in silence. The only sound was the rapid shuffling of boots and the screech of tires.

Arriving at the address, we poured from the van, silently retrieved our equipment and entered the building so rapidly that to any potential observers we were shadows gliding across the brick wall.

The caller had evidently been having a celebration. The location was a large town-house in Mayfair. The huge front room had been destroyed. Silver buckets of champagne still contained some ice, showing how recently the mayhem had occurred. The living room door dangled on one hinge, leather sofas had been shredded, and the floor was carpeted in broken glass.

Every upturned surface was covered in blood. It collected in pools on the hardwood floor in which shards of broken glass floated like miniature icebergs. The walls and high Georgian ceiling had been spattered by opened arteries.

My stomach groaned as it churned, but not from repulsion. The smell and sight of the carnage was so overpowering that I did not notice the Human remains until one of my colleagues unceremoniously stuffed the first into a body bag. I caught a glimpse of the pale form as the zip rose. The mutilation made it difficult to discern whether the remains were even Human at all. The condition of the second body told me that there were multiple killers. The body was sufficiently intact so I was able to tell the gender and that she had once been pretty. She wore a black lace bra and one high heeled shoe. This kill was motivated by sex, and the other by hate.

I pushed the thought from my head and pulled on my leather gloves to get to work.
It was none of my business.

We had transferred the bodies and broken furniture to the van and extracted all the liquid blood by the time we heard the police sirens. They were responding to the noise complaints about the event that had transpired prior to our arrival. Judging by the use of sirens and the speed of approach, their caller had far more urgency than ours.

It had taken mere minutes for the team to clear away the evidence but there was still traces of the crime. One of the team stopped pressure hosing the blood spatter off the ceiling to subtly barricade the door by spraying quick dry cement onto the door frame from an aerosol can. We continued to strip the remainder of the bloodstained wallpaper, uninterrupted by the sound of the police car pulling up in the road outside. We hurriedly stuffed the last fragments of soggy paper into bags and passed them to a colleague through the side window.

The police declared their presence from the doorstep. We had removed the ripped and bloodied curtains so I could see their silhouettes through the bay windows, illuminated by the street lights behind them. They tried to kick in the front door. The cement held. They retreated to get a battering ram from their car.

My colleagues took advantage of the distraction to slip out the side window to hide in the shadows of a neighbouring house, their tools concealed in black hold-alls slung over their shoulders. The door survived a few bombardments from the battering ram while I took the time for a final survey of the room. The walls and ceiling had been stripped down to plaster and all debris removed. The huge room was now empty and spotless.

Four police officers burst into the hallway as soon as the front door gave way. I leapt through the window at the same time. I was unable to make it unseen to the parked van while the police were in the front section of the house, so I dug my nails into the bricks and pulled myself up onto the wall above the side window.

The police officers separated to search the house for signs of the reported disturbance. I listened to the creak of the floorboards in the front room. The officer's breathing was fast and heavy as he examined the empty space. He peered through the open side window. He was so close I could hear his adrenaline fuelled heartbeat and smell the mint of his chewing gum. The officer looked left and right before shutting the window. I listened to his breathing relax and the sound of footsteps on floorboards recede as they moved towards the hall before I quietly lowered myself from my perch and crept towards my colleagues waiting in the van.
The driver took the hand-break off and I pushed the van down the residential street before he started the engine. The back doors opened and I was pulled inside. A job successfully completed.

We pulled into the ground floor of the office and parked alongside an identical unmarked black transit van. Two of my colleagues carried the body bags and debris to the disposal vats to be obliterated.

The office was minimalist and efficient, reminiscent of a bare-bones fire-fighter's station. It was an old warehouse on Belsham Street, a small forgotten road that cut between two grey complexes of concrete high-rise council flats in Hackney in London's East End. From the outside it resembled the neighbouring disused warehouses, and inside was not much different. The walls were faded red brick, the windows boarded up and barred, and the floor bare.

The ground floor consisted of the two large parked black vans and locked metal cupboards stuffed with equipment. There was a side room with three large vats crammed inside for complete disposal of evidence through erosion by alkaline hydrolysis. A slightly rusted metal spiral staircase in the corner snaked upwards to the second floor, where eight wooden desks filled the room in crooked rows; six of which were covered in stacks of paper, illuminated by the blue light from small laptop computers. The other two were empty apart from old metal lamps with no bulbs. There was a large fridge in one corner with a microwave balanced on top. The spiral staircase also led down to the basement, where we all slept. Our minimal possessions stored in a trunk at the foot of our single beds.

"Don't get settled in yet Fleming",  Richard, a colleague who had not come on the cleaning job, called out to me.

"He has finally talked", he continued as I walked into the disposal room where the rest of the team were reducing the collected evidence into liquid.
He extinguished the flame of a blow torch and gestured to the charred and bleeding man tied to one of our desk chairs. Through his melted and mutilated features I could see the shame and despair in the captive's eyes.

"Are you sure the information is accurate?" I asked.
"Certain", replied Richard, proud of his work.

I nodded and placed my hands either side of what remained of the captive's face and twisted sharply to the left until I heard a sound like splintering wood.

Richard untied him from the chair, and together we threw his body into one of the vats on top of the pile of half digested debris.