Tuesday, July the 18th, 2006
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Here is the final instalment of our thrilling serial.
The March, then, of my forty third birthday. On the first Monday in the month, in the windy afternoon, a youngster in the full flush of his hobbledehoyhood rang the bell of an imposing house in Blister Lane, a hundred yards from the Bodger's Spinney Hotel. The lad picked his nose while he waited. No one answering, and noting that the door was ajar, he crept inside, roaming cautiously through the hallway, the parlour, the ping pong room, and the larders, thinking he might find some theftworthy item in what appeared to be a deserted household. Tiptoe, he went from pantry to washroom; opened a creaking door and entered a large lounge, in which he was amazed to find a display of objects which his tatterdemalion brain could not quite grasp: a quartz wigwam; eggs of rubber tied by a thong to a yolk; an urn upon an ingot of ochre; a punnet of aspirin; a sprig of dahlia encased in a fluoride and gum hod; a jam-smeared khaki lozenge, zipped to a xylonite cake; a vellum bladder; a nugget of marzipan; a metal nose on a bust of Voltaire; a collection of x-rays depicting the zygoma of a lapdog; a kemp jupon; hyssop germinating on a fescue drill; a siphon of ambergris; pods of onyx in an ingle; an udder of yapp, the trophy of resurrectionists; and an embrocation made of wax and quince. In the midst of these startling exotica, sprawled across the carpet in a pool of his own gore, lay the corpse of the philatelist Istvan Plunkett.
The boy ran from the house to the police station. A constable ran from the police station to the house. The constable made a telephone call. A detective ran from an ice hockey stadium to the house. Imagine here the bluster and disappointment of constabulary spadework. The detective rubs his chin.
“There is only one thing for it, constable,” he mutters.
“Sir?” asks the constable.
“To the telephone, man!” cries the detective, “This is a job for Plankton Chews!”
Chews arrived some days later, accompanied as ever by the preposterous Dr Boilbag. After a brief visit to the police station, where they were fed chocolate pudding by the constable, they checked in to the Bodger's Spinney Hotel. I was carrying my bongos through the lobby, about to wheel myself into the dancehall, when I saw the unmistakeably corvine figure of my Tundist mentor, carefully examining a minuscule stain on the carpet.
“What is it, Chews?” Boilbag was asking.
“Human saliva, my dear Boilbag,” replied the sleuth, “And if I am not mistaken, the human in question is a man in his mid to late sixties, rather overweight, who wears a maroon blazer, works in a sordid insurance office, visits his dentist with alarming regularity, subscribes to The Daily Lantern, has a dachshund named Spinach, continually mislays his library tickets, once pondered becoming a Jesuit priest, will have no truck with new-fangled kitchen utensils, swats energetically at flies, uses a box camera on his sightseeing tours, and is fond of radishes. Oh, and his wife has left him and run off to join a circus.”
“By heaven, Chews!” spluttered Boilbag, “How on earth—?”
“Come, come Boilbag, you know my methods. Apply them,” said Chews.
Fortunately for the reader, it was at this point that I interrupted. Casting aside my bongos, I called across the lobby to my mentor, overjoyed to see him. Leaving the doctor to puzzle over his inhuman genius, Chews bounded over to me. We embraced.
“Chews, Chews, what are you doing here?” I babbled.
“Your police, my dear, are idiots,” he replied, “This Plunkett business has them running around like ballbearings on the deck of a ship in a storm. Incapable of solving the case, they had no option but to call me in. As I wolfed down the chocolate pudding they kindly provided for me and my assistant here” — Boilbag had now joined us, and was boswelling frantically in his notebook with a cheap biro—“they furnished me with the details of the murder. The philatelist Plunkett had been found, shot through the brain, in the large lounge of his high house in Blister Lane. He had been dead for about four hours when the corpse was discovered by an urchin bent on felony. An examination of the house yielded nothing of consequence. Chopped up in the mortuary, the cadaver elicited on item of interest—an undigested turnip eked from the stomach. The police made a note of it, but its significance eluded them. Ha! It is always thus. Halfway through their bumbling account of the murder, I had already solved it.”
“Hell's teeth, Chews!” exploded Boilbag, dropping his biro, “Are you saying that you know the identity of the fiendish and merciless killer?”
“Come, doctor, we are both in possession of the facts. I have merely deduced from them the only possible solution. You could do the same, using the ratiocinative method.”
Boilbag spluttered and frothed.
“It is a simple enough case,” continued Chews, “Although it has one or two singular features which amuse me. Shall we repair to the hotel bar so that I can show off over a pint of brandy?”
Boilbag and I assented, and once we were sat around our table, Chews with his brandy, the doctor with a tumbler of cranston, and me with my habitual decoction of fuming slops, the amateur detective held forth. Oh, he went on and on and on, with an excruciatingly tedious self-preening tidal wave of drivel. Stamp collecting and turnips, Ecuadorian banditti, the process of digestion, a plot to disgrace an exiled monarch… it made no sense whatsoever, but there was the loyal Boilbag, scribbling it all down at ferocious speed.
I had to pay attention at the end, however. Clamping his hand on my shoulder, Chews announced that I was the culprit, and sent Boilbag off to fetch the coppers. Minutes later, Woolworth, Shuddery and Beerpint duly crashed into the bar, brandishing their handcuffs and knuckledusters. I was dragged off to prison, where I stewed for six years, until I was released following a clerical error which inadvertently included my name in an amnesty.
There is no need here to protest my innocence. Plankton Chews is dead now, and the reputation he once had is largely forgotten. That he was a great Tundist I still avow. But I never forgave him, and I never saw him again.
Let that be the end. The wind is coming in, and I have work to do.