Monday, July the 5th, 2004

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Some Hotels, a Hollyhock, the Ponds

I—Some Hotels. There are seven hotels. Their names are Crone, Crustacean, Flask, Infection, Miasma, Unbearable and Vagabond. Each is built of cheap and rusty metal and perched on the edge of a precipice. There are seven precipices, over each of which a scientist of note has plunged to a watery death during the past two weeks. In chronological order, those who plummeted were a botanist, a physicist, a phrenologist, an horologist, a laboratory git, a bacteriologist, and an uproariously-moustachioed vivisectionist. Each had been a paying guest at one of the hotels, though none of them hurtled over the precipice upon which their own hotel teetered. The phrenologist, for example, breakfasted upon porridge in the Hotel Miasma, then threw herself from the pocked and crumbling cliff-face adjacent to the Crone Hotel. Or was she pushed?

It is in hope of answering this question that the indefatigable Hungarian detective Bulent Hellbag has trudged on to the scene. He is seven feet tall, sports a raffish windcheater, and has booked in to all seven hotels within the space of half an hour, using a variety of aliases and disguises. At the Infection Hotel, he is known to the desk staff as Mr B McGrewge, a Scottish safety engineer of sober mien and modest wealth, his only luggage a small orange tote bag. At the Hotel Vagabond, he has them convinced that he is Baron Glubb Von Glubb, a fanatical winter sports enthusiast, lewd and boisterous, who displays a fine array of bobsleigh championship medals upon his turquoise tunic. For these, and for his five other identities, Detective Hellbag has all the required documentation: forged passports and letters of transit, doctored photographs, beetle diagrams, and other seemingly personal paperwork.

At four p.m., firmly established in all seven hotels, he is to be found pasting a piece of blotting paper at head height to the outside wall of the Crustacean Hotel laundry room. Such attention to detail is the mark of the great detective, and Hellbag is in no doubt as to the sheer magnitude of his ratiocinative genius. As ever, he has imposed upon himself a strict timetable for solving this case. He is confident that he can wrap it up within forty-eight hours. Indeed, such is his arrogance that he has overlooked one startling fact. The major domo at the Hotel Unbearable is Hellbag's brother Rolf, whom he has not seen for ten years. The last time they met, in vegetation and in awe, they made a handshake last for hours. Then, two days later, Rolf was sentenced to hang for the brutal slaying of a Loopy Copse ship's captain, whose skull he smashed to pieces with a stolen windigo.

II—A Hollyhock. The most luxurious of the hotels is the one beginning with B. Its tremendous gardens, festooned with foliage, were until recently tended by a retired cake person whose glaucoma and rickets gave him increasing gyp. Following a series of incidents involving his shark or his cardigan, he was

[None of the hotels has a name beginning with B. Discard and resume.]

The least repugnant of the hotels is the one beginning with F. Its gardens are neither tremendous nor foliage-riddled, nor tended by a half-blind, shark-owning person of cake. Indeed, it can hardly be said to have a garden at all. The floor of the lobby is covered in soil or mud, and ridiculous chaffinches witter from the rooftops, but the only foliage to be seen in the Flask Hotel is a huge cement hollyhock in the dining room, placed there by a permanent resident, Imber Sedge by name, whose often truculent gob ill befits a man of the cloth.

Cleverly concealed atop the very pinnacle of the cement hollyhock is a sliver of pugsley, imbued with monstrous properties. It is at once refulgent and calcareous, dismaying and arcane. In years past, those who sought to possess it had had their heads boiled. Three weeks ago, the surly Sedge implanted the hollyhock in the hotel which he called home, and proceeded to paint it with a thick impasto of gaudy colours. He had stolen the paint from a wooden hut next to one of the nearby ponds, not realising that in doing so he was burgling the nerve centre of Rolf Hellbag's frantic and unholy criminal schemes. Within days of Sedge's theft, a stench of vinegar hung in the air about his head, and his tongue grew furry.

III—The Ponds. On Wednesday, Bulent Hellbag toured the nearby ponds. His bakelite satchel contained the tools of his trade: an adze, brooches, chalcedony, a dubbin tray, experimental poultices, Fontoons, gewgaws of every description, hat paste, illegal Spode, a javelin, kaka, lettuce, monkey puzzles and night soil, old gas, potato peel, quartz, recent newspaper cuttings, stigmata, a tapeworm, uncanny torchlight, vestiges of trouser, wild goo, a xiphoid rug, Yorkshire pudding and zibeline. He knew his onions.

The wind came in from the sea, echoing with the wails of the ghosts of perished scientists. Hellbag placed his satchel on a knot of furze, and carefully untied the rope with which he had bound the massive cement hollyhock to his body. Easing it to the ground, he spat and spat and spat. Then he hurled the hollyhock into the deepest of the twenty-six ponds.

Preening in the drizzle, Hellbag congratulated himself on another case successfully concluded. Minutes earlier, a ferocious pack of half-starved brontosauruses had been unleashed from his brother Rolf's laboratory in the cellars of the Hotel Unbearable. As the great detective puffed on a cheroot, they lurched over the brow of the hill, lumbering towards him, relentless and vast.