Trusted contact and children’s entertainer Asmodeus the Clown, had telephoned the editor shortly after that to inform him that he had just witnessed the town clerk Stephen Pocklington being conveyed from the borough in a fairy coach drawn by magnified dragonflies.
And then there had been trusted contact Jennifer Naylor, senior librarian, town councillor and resident of the prestigious Brentford Docks Estate, who had apparently awoken in the early hours to sounds of mayhem in her garden. According to her report, twelve red monkeys had stripped down her garden shed, used the timber to construct a rudimentary canoe and then rowed this across the Thames to the gardens of Kew.
Having righteously declined the opportunity to purchase explicit pictures (gained through the medium of a telephoto lens) of the Cheeky Girls making “the beast with two backs”, or in this case four backs, with a brace of local builders in the Memorial Park, the editor drained the whisky bottle dry, knocked the phone off the hook and retreated to his drunken bed.
Leaving only blankness on the Mercury’s front page.
Jim Pooley slept in and awoke rather late to the grimness. Having performed his morning ablutions, he took himself first to the Plume, where he did not enjoy the rather lacklustre breakfast he was served, and then to the library, where he hoped he might just continue with his life as if yesterday had not happened.
Jim would sadly be denied this hope.
Jennifer Naylor, now shedless and not in the best of moods, greeted Jim with cold indifference.
‘Just give me an excuse,’ she hissed, ‘and I will bar you ever more from this establishment.’
Jim grinned painfully and took himself over to the single working computer. Perhaps there would be an email from Prince Goodwill Jeremy. Perhaps today he could pull off the Six Horse Super Yankee. But in all truth, Jim’s heart was not in the latter. Jim was one of those fellows who had always considered that you had to feel lucky in order to be lucky. And today Jim did not feel lucky at all.
He felt that all luck had deserted him.
And the feeling was profound.
‘You can’t use that,’ called Jennifer Naylor to Jim.
‘I promise I will be very, very careful,’ said Jim to Jennifer Naylor.
‘No, you cannot use it, because it is broken.’
‘Broken?’ Pooley gawped at the dark screen before him. ‘But I didn’t touch it,’ he said in his defence.
‘They’re all down,’ said Ms Naylor. ‘My terminal here, my laptop at home. The network has gone down all over Brentford.’
Pooley turned his gaze to the ceiling. ‘Noooooooooooo,’ went he.
‘You’re barred.’
‘No,’ said Jim, ‘please, I have business to conduct.’
‘Business indeed? And yet you told me you only used the computer for research purposes, as in compliance with the rules of the library.’
Jim hung his head, it was true he had led this deception.
‘But…well…but…’ went Jim.
‘It is neither here, nor there,’ Ms Jennifer told him. ‘And, as it happens I have business of my own to take care of. I intend to apply for the position of town clerk. Now that the previous incumbent has become a wanted man.’
‘He will not be easily caught,’ mumbled Jim.
‘What is that?’
‘I think it unlikely that the police will apprehend him,’ Jim said. ‘There is a great deal more to that blighter than meets the eye and none of it good, that’s for sure.’
The senior librarian’s face lost all its expression. ‘We believed in him,’ she whispered. ‘We trusted him. Everyone did.’
‘I know,’ said Jim. ‘He had, how shall I put this, a certain magic.’
‘And it turns out that he is some kind of murderous anarchist. It makes me wonder—’ Ms Naylor’s voice trailed off into silence.
‘What do you wonder?’ Jim asked.
‘About Councillor McCready. He stood up to Mr Pocklington. Disagreed with him. And straight after that he vanished without trace.’
‘Uncle Ted McCready?’ said Jim. And he recalled the chilling episode of the vanishing wee-wee, the banshee calls and the very bright light indeed.
Jim Pooley shivered. ‘I must be off,’ said he.
Jennifer Naylor offered him a smile. ‘I know that you are not a bad man, Mr Pooley,’ she said. ‘You can consider yourself unbarred.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jim and he departed the library.
To his surprise he discovered two bearded men outside awaiting him. They were two particularly dishevelled looking bearded men. Some might have said that they both looked a trifle shagged out.
‘Good morning guv’nor,’ said the bearded John who had once been known as Dave. ‘We thought we might find you here. You being so regular in your habits and everything.’
Jim Pooley nodded his head.
‘We’re all done,’ said the other John. ‘Tarmac up and cobbles exposed and we want our twelve hundred quid.’
‘One thousand quid,’ said Jim. ‘But I am very impressed. You did the job quickly and well.’
‘And we took down the old street signs and put up the silly little new ones,’ said John the ex-Dave. ‘So it’s eleven hundred quid all told.’
‘And that,’ said Jim, ‘is exactly what I have left in my pocket and frankly I am glad to see the back of it.’
He brought out the wad of folding stuff and handed it to a John.
‘You might want to invest some of it in shirts and perhaps, jackets,’ said Jim. ‘It’s coming on to rain.’
And it was.
That thin depressing drizzle that seems to get inside your very bones. It seeped from the grey unpleasing clouds, dampening spirits and washing all colour from the streets.
The penniless Pooley turned up his collar and dreamed of a pub that gave credit.
Neville gave credit where credit was due. But that was all the credit you’d get at the Flying Swan. The part-time barman kept a firm hold on his pennies. And to spare the shoulders of his immaculately laundered white shirt, with its celluloid collar and clip-on dicky-bow, he now had an equally firm hold upon the handle of his umbrella.
Neville stood before the saloon bar entrance, staring in a manner expressive of a grim resolution towards the lorry that was parked at the kerb beyond.
A big, bright, shiny, modern lorry it was. With the brewery’s name and logo on the side.
The lorry driver climbed down from his cab stepped around the front of his vehicle and opened the passenger door. As Neville looked on a diminutive person was helped down from the cab. Neville’s good eye widened. The little figure dusted down a sharp designer suit. Neville’s good eye started to twitch.
‘Hello, barman,’ said Young Master Robert.
Not fifty yards along the road another lorry stood. Parked before the corner-shop of Mr Norman Hartnell.
Norman had been up since very early that morning. Not only to number up papers, for that was a daily task, but to sponge off the egg stains and the very rude slogans that had been daubed across his window. Happily the looting and the torching of his premises had been forestalled by the timely arrival of the Special Air Services task force. But there was always the chance that the mob might return this morning, each member of same demanding raffle ticket recompense. But so far none had come to badger Norman. But if they did? Well Norman knew, he’d give their money back. Life, in the shopkeeper’s opinion, was far too short to be spent stitching people up and making them unhappy. That wasn’t Norman’s way. For was it not true that an honest man’s tie is a finer thing than a profiteer’s cravat? Goo goo g’joob? Norman considered it was. Everything had been a little out of kilter yesterday. Things would sort themselves out. They always did.
The lorry driver smiled at Norman, then consulted his clipboard. Norman greatly favoured a clipboard, especially one that had a pencil attached to it by a length of string.
As did this driver’s.
‘Three boxes of sugared flying saucer
s,’ said the driver. ‘Three boxes of black jacks, three of fruit salad, three of sherbert lemons, three of rhubarb and custard, three of Pontefract cakes. One box of liquorice pipes, three sweet smoker’s outfits. Five pharaoh jars. One tub of Spanish wood. One hundred Bazooka Joe bubble gums. Twenty—’
Norman sighed. The list read like a litany, invocative of childhood joy. It was dull and grey without perhaps, but then, hadn’t it pretty much always been dull and grey back in the nineteen fifties?
‘Now, regarding the fags,’ said the driver. ‘You just wait until you hear what we’ve got for you.’
‘You are going to really love what I’ve got for you,’ said Young Master Robert.
Though Neville was a man of peace and rarely brought to violence, he truly hated Young Master Robert, the brewery owner’s precious son and heir. If Holmes had his Moriarty and Hugo Rune his Count Otto Black, Neville had the young master. Arch enemy. Malevolent foe. Animus-made-flesh.
The two men shared but a single thing and that was mutual contempt.
Neville glared the young man daggers, the brewery owner’s progeny returned a big smug smile.
‘Let’s have it down then,’ he called out to his driver. The driver took himself to the vehicle’s rear.
‘I’ll bet you can’t guess what it is,’ grinned the brewer’s boy.
Neville shook his head. The driver was out of sight and there was no-one else to be seen. Perhaps he could make it look like an accident. A fatal accident.
The rumbling of a descending tailgate lift-loader thingamajig brought Neville back to cold reality. The part-time barman viewed the fork-lift truck and the bulky packing case.
The twitching of his good eye gained acceleration.
There had always been a certain twitchiness about John Omally. But the man of Eire kept it where possible out of public view. John was essentially honest, in the broadest sense of the word, but he was a natural ducker and diver, always hopeful of making the now legendary fast buck.
John stood in his garden in the miserable drizzle a trowel in his hand and a grim look on his face. There was still plenty of money left in the buried briefcase. Enough to invest in one likely scheme or another. Although nothing involving roadworks, the demolition of magical monuments, or lottery tickets.
John dug into the dampening earth. He’d move the money to a bank account, perhaps seek professional advice on investment possibilities. John uncovered the briefcase and hefted it away to his kitchen table.
‘You won’t be able to heft that huge packing case through the Swan’s front door,’ said Neville, smiling benignly as he did so. ‘You’d best reload it and take it away before the rain gets in.’
‘Oh it will fit,’ said Young Master Robert, checking with a tape measure. ‘Have no fear of that.’
Neville had every fear of that. ‘I’m sure whatever it is, is a very good idea,’ he said. ‘But there’s just no room in the Swan.’
‘There’s plenty of room. I know just where it will go.’
The driver swung the fork-lift truck around, demolishing one of Old Pete’s topiarised towers of knowledge.
‘Careful there,’ cried Neville, though he was actually pleased to see the back of it.
‘Full steam ahead,’ cried Young Master Robert. The packing case went through the doorway, inches to spare and the driver steered the fork-lift into the bar.
Young Master Robert followed it in and Neville stood a moment making fists.
‘To me, to you, to me, to you,’ came the young master’s voice, and shoulders hunched the part-time barman closed his umbrella.
Whistling that Abba song about money, John Omally sought to open the briefcase. But to his surprise and dismay the briefcase would not be opened.
‘Locks got a bit rusted up I suppose,’ said John, seeking a hammer and chisel in his toolbox.
Using one of those special hammers that you can’t buy in Sainsbury’s Homebase, the driver set about the packing case with a vim and a vigour that Neville found disturbing. As indeed he did with the manner in which the young master was rubbing his nasty little hands together.
Thoughts of murder came once more to Neville. For after all, he was on home turf here. He could make it look like two accidents. Or say that the brewery men had argued over something which had ended in a fight to the death.
The driver lifted away the front of the packing case, exposing a great deal of bubble wrap.
‘Time for the big reveal,’ said Young Master Robert.
‘Time I think for a change in direction,’ said John Omally, aiming the hammer at the chisel, whilst holding the chisel to the lock. ‘Time to make a name for myself in the city.’ A couple of hearty clouts at the chisel and up and away flew the lock.
‘Off and away!’ Young Master Robert tore aside the bubble wrap to reveal—
‘Oh dear God no,’ cried Neville.
‘Oh dear God yes,’ cried the brewer’s son. ‘It’s the very latest thing in retro design. It’s called—’
‘I know what it’s called,’ said Neville in a still small voice. ‘It’s called a Captain Laser Alien Attack Machine!’
John viewed the contents of the briefcase. He viewed them once and viewed them once again.
‘Oh dear God no!’ cried Omally.
For where there had so recently been so very, very much money, now there was nothing left to be seen but a heap of rotting leaves.
21
The first man to make the grim discovery that the money given to him by Jim Pooley was not all it should be, was the chap with the beard and the man-bun, who ran the internet café in Ealing Broadway.
This was the man who had stung Jim for exorbitant computer fees and a Kindle that lacked for a charging cable, although containing the collected works of P.P. Penrose. Works, it must be remembered which involved Jim and John and other Brentonians getting into all manner of sticky situations in all manner of Far-Fetched Fiction.
This bunned and bearded bloke had thrust Jim’s money into a rearward pocket in his short-trousered jumpsuit. Thus avoiding the unnecessary annoyance of ringing it up in the till. Upon the realisation that Jim’s money was nothing more than rank and rotten leaves, this man experienced more than the merest fission of displeasure.
It was a displeasure more than equalled by Neville.
Still reeling from the installation of the Captain Laser Alien Attack Machine, which the versatile driver had actually welded into the wall, to “avoid any tampering that might inconvenience your good self, barman” as he so helpfully put it, Neville’s good eye was all but brought to tears by the disclosure that Jim Pooley’s twenty pound note (the only twenty pound note that Neville had put into his disabled cash register in the last six months) was no naught but mouldy foliage.
The financial losses experienced by the bearded bun wearer and the part-time barman, when added together, fell somewhat short of that experienced by the bearded Johns. Those valiant uppers of tarmac and alfresco-bedders of beautiful babes.
That their sudden wealth had been brought with equal suddenness to ruination, caused these volatile artisans to swear great oaths of vengeance. With plans to take and shrink Jim Pooley’s head.
John Omally’s landlady, who had travelled widely in her youth and actually lodged with the Jivaro head-hunters of Ecuador during her gap-year, was a woman well acquainted with the sacred art of head shrinking. And, as she stood in the checkout queue at Buyrite in Pooley Plaza, to discover that her purse no longer contained the money notes that Pooley had forked out to cover his best friend’s overdue rent, her thoughts mirrored those of the bearded Johns.
But all this, grave indeed though it be, was but the tip of the financial iceberg when set against the profligate spending of a certain John Vincent Omally.
Jim had viewed the expensive wristlet watch, but not the plans. Jim had at the time marvelled that when the street names were being given out, John had modestly chosen John Omally Square, the area before the Town Hall. But then Jim had not
at that time seen the plans. The plans for the great gilded statues of himself which John had commissioned to adorn the square that would bear his name.
And there had been other extravagances.
Oblivious to the thoughts of those who would plot his demise, Jim Pooley plodded over cobblestones en route to the cash point. Jim had remembered that his bank account was still in the black and that he had a cash card.
The drizzle now had turned to rain and Jim with his collar up, trudged on with grim determination. His thoughts for a speedy withdrawal of funds were now somewhat shot to ribbons by the queue. And the raised voices.
A lady in a sodden straw hat was holding forth and as Jim approached words came to his earholes.
‘It’s the work of the New World Order,’ she said. ‘A global banking conspiracy. It’ll be the Bilderbergs and the Rothschilds and the Medicis too I wouldn’t wonder.’
‘I blame it on the bossa nova,’ said the bicycle messenger, who wore his helmet extra low to protect his frontal lobes. ‘For it is after all the dance of love.’
The lady in the straw hat was having none of that.
‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Yesterday they takes our money.’ Heads bobbed up and down to this. ‘We fork out our hard-earneds for a bogus lottery—’ Jim took the taking of the now legendary low profile, ‘—and today, having filched away our finances, they deny us access to what we have left.’
‘I blame Brexit,’ said the bicycle messenger, whose helmet-cam had sadly ceased to function. ‘We are all going to hell in a handbag.’
‘Do you mind!’ the lady in the straw hat made the sternest face she could. ‘My husband and I both voted for Brexit. We even had tea on the Brexit battle bus. That Mr Farage is a lovely man and he promised he’d stop the space aliens coming here and stealing our wheelbarrows.’