The ex-police superintendent dozed peacefully in the well-worn armchair.
When he came to, he found himself in his old office in the city. It was dark outside, obviously late at night. He went to the window and saw the lights of traffic crossing the familiar bridge. As he looked on, the lights seemed to swirl around making strange, coloured patterns that rose slowly into the air. After a while, a great shimmering platform of these hovered immediately outside the window. With no contact from him, the window swung open. As though it were a perfectly natural thing to do, he climbed out and stood on the illuminated mass and continued to take in the view. Gradually, the structure beneath him moved away from the building and rose up even further into the night sky, taking him with it. Remarkably, none of these strange events caused him any concern at all. As the moonlit clouds above grew closer he could see within them structures, and people moving about.
Then, in a blur, he found himself in a room. It was a large room with several tables having numerous items carefully laid out. Although this was not a place he recognised or had any memory of, so many of the items it contained were all too familiar. He spotted his old handcuffs at once, along with his original typewriter. He stood looking at them with a wistful smile. Moving around, he found that one table was full of items recovered from crime scenes and house searches carried out over so many years. He took his time passing among the exhibits. There were letters and envelopes used in evidence, newspaper clippings of old cases, pieces of rope, knives, guns, parts of homemade bombs, inert sticks of dynamite, pieces of recovered shrapnel, a number of gloves and masks that had been used in the commission of crimes, bottles of poison, tablets, several forgery implements, and all manner of containers used for smuggling.
At the far end he found a long, narrow table with a series of mug shots lined up. As he walked along the row of photos, they seemed to move of their own volition. They became faster and faster, until they created a passing animation of black and white and grey. As he watched, he too started to spin. His vision became hazy, then cleared.
He was back, slowly returning to ground level peering down at a small assembly.
It was the sight of his own coffin being slowly lowered into the freshly dug grave and the familiar faces, and the uniforms of those gathered around it, that enabled him to come to terms with the fact that he was dead.
