Sunday, August the 7th, 2005

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The Agony in the Garden

There was a man in my back garden and he was in agony. I am going to tell you why. This man had speared his foot with a garden fork. One of the very sharp tines of the fork had plunged through his boot and sock and foot and more sock and the sole of the boot and into the muck, forced downwards by the man's other foot, or rather by the muscular power of his leg, bent at the knee. He was wearing a pair of butcher's trousers, this man, but he was not a butcher. He was a clumsy thief, inexperienced in the use of gardening implements.

It was the middle of the night, and there was no moon, or I should say the moon was hidden by monstrous black clouds, so it was very, very dark. Nonetheless, one would have thought the thief who clambered over a fence to steal things from my back garden would have carried a torch or some other means of illuminating his criminal intent. But not only was he a clumsy thief, he was a thief who lacked foresight. Because the day was still light when he set out from the hut o' ne'er-do-wells where he lived, he seems to have assumed it would still be light when he approached the wooden fence which divides my back garden from the old muddy lane. But it was no longer light. I lived so far away from the hut that it took him hours and hours to reach my garden. His route was crooked and even convoluted, for he hugged the hedgerows and dared not stride across open fields, nor follow main roads, and nor did he risk using any of the public transport systems available, the pneumatic railways or the canal barges, for, being bent on crime, he did not wish to be seen.

He may have been clumsy and lacking in foresight, but the man in my back garden whose foot was impaled by a fork was a master of stealth, I will give him that. In all the hours he skulked across the land, in his butcher's trousers and pastry-maker's jacket and Dusty Springfield hat, he was not seen by a single other living being, except for some cows in a field, and a passing goat, and attentive birds, and countless tiny things that creep and fly and hover and buzz, but none of these can speak, unlike human beings, who, had they seen the thief, might have denounced him to the police.

For all his stealth, however, and irrespective of the cackhandedness of his fork-digging, the clumsy thief's crime would never have succeeded. He had not made rigorous plans. Had he done so, he would have learned that I am a detective, whose tenacity in tracking down malefactors is legendary. One of the things that makes me so good at my job is the fact that I never sleep. As a child, at a fairground, on a hot September day, I toppled from the top of a helter skelter and landed on my head. I have never since then visited the Land of Nod. The metal plate in my skull is barely visible, and it has been one of the incidental pleasures of my life to amass a collection of strikingly colourful eyepatches.

So it was that in the middle of the night, when all sensible people are fast asleep in their beds, I was wide awake. I can't remember what I was doing, darning an eyepatch or sharpening a pencil, perhaps, or carrying out experiments on a badger. When I heard the telltale sounds of a wrongdoer climbing over the fence from the old muddy lane, I went over to the window. My working eye is a superb mechanism, and I watched as, in pitch darkness, the thief grabbed the fork from the pile of forks, searched the lawn for the big chalk X underneath which was buried the booty of the Blister Lane bank robberies, and with his very first fork-thrust, speared his foot, and howled. I promised to tell you how there came to be a man in my back garden, a man in agony, and now I have done so, and you can't say fairer than that.