Saturday, May the 26th, 2012
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Tarleton, the amateur's amateur, had been missing for a fortnight when one evening he came crashing through the door of his consulting rooms, twitching and shattered.
“Good grief, Tarleton!” cried his sidekick, companion, amanuensis and consulting roommate, Not-Tarleton, “Where in blazes have you been?”
“I have been muffled, wallowing in the sink of vice that is a Limehouse opium den, if you must know,” said Tarleton, “I was in pursuit of a man with a twisted lip.”
“I… I… corwumph!” expostulated Not-Tarleton, who resembled, in both manner and appearance, Old Wilkie from Linbury Court, so much so, indeed, that we shall hereinafter refer to him as Old Wilkie in order to avoid confusion with his near-namesake Tarleton.
“Corwumph! away to your heart's content. You know my methods,” said Tarleton, “The man with the twisted lip was in possession of pelf. I could tell it was pelf because he carried it in a sack slung over his shoulder with the word PELF stencilled upon it in big black block capitals. I pursued him through the streets and mews and boulevards. He was hot under the collar. I dogged his every footstep. The sky was overcast. He entered the stews of Limehouse and still I followed him. He scuttled down an insalubrious alleyway. It was a nest of opium dens. Mayhew surveyed them at one time or another, I am sure.”
“And?” shouted Old Wilkie.
“And I spent a fortnight in an opium-addled daze, from which I have only recently emerged. The man with the twisted lip was nowhere to be seen. But while we were both sprawled upon divans in the Oriental hellhole, I affixed to his ankle, unbeknown to him, a tracking device, which works with light reflecting booster technology developed by L'Oreal. I am going to eat some kippers, and then I shall find out where he is, with his sack o' pelf. Having located him, I will run him to ground. If he digs himself into a burrow in the ground, like the narrator of Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, I will entrap him, as did Quive-Smith, but I shall ensure I do not meet Quive-Smith's sticky end.”
“But how, Tarleton? How?” screamed Old Wilkie.
“By wearing this metal head-harness,” said Tarleton, donning a metal head-harness, “If the man with the twisted lip tries to kill me by shooting an arrow between my eyes from an improvised crossbow, it will ping harmlessly against the metal.”
“I… I… corwumph!” screeched Old Wilkie, “Was the head-harness also developed by L'Oreal?”
But answer came there none, for the amateur's amateur was already gone.
He returned some weeks later, twitching and shattered.
“As soon as I have eaten some kippers, I shall apprise you of my doings,” he announced, and as soon as he had eaten some kippers, he apprised Old Wilkie of his doings. Being, among other things, his amanuensis, Old Wilkie wrote down what he heard, and thus it is that we, too, are apprised of Tarleton's doings, long after he ate some kippers.
It seems that, shortly before seeing the man with the twisted lip hauling his sack of pelf along the streets and mews and boulevards, Tarleton had been approached by Old Farmer Frack. The mad old farmer was distraught, because his eerie barn had been broken into and all his farm implements and equipment, stored therein, his clodding mell and two Kentish binding rakes and a disc coulter and a subsoil pulveriser plough and a potato grading shovel and five Morris's turnip fly catchers and two hand-cranked threshers and a seed rusky and an automatic sheaf tying mechanism and a whin bruiser and Keevil's cheese-making apparatus and a mouldbaert and fan tackle and chogger and a Nellis fork and a plough graip and half a dozen liquid manure pumps and a pair of hedger's gloves and Gilbert's improved iron sack holder and four American butter separators and a cauterising iron and a mouth cramp and a charlock slasher and Blurton's tumbling cheese rack and eight barley hummellers and an adze and a curd agitator and grinding stones and Drummond's iron harvest sickle and a dairymaid's yoke and a clod knocker and Biddell's scarifier and Fowler's self-adjusting anchor and a bitting iron and fifteen creels and two caschroms and a dung hack and a Crees lactator and five horn trainers and a fagging stick and a pea hook and two Lipmann glass stoppers and a trenching fork and Gilbee's horse hoe and a drain ladle and hackle prongs and a flax brake and Hall's smut machine and a heckling board and three flauchter spades and a hay tedder and an Ivel three-wheeled petrol-powered machine and Finlayson's grubber and a potato riddle and four root pulpers and paring mattocks and Morton's revolving harrow and Samuelson's cake-breaking machine and a foot pick and sheep netting and two oilcake crushers and Reade's patent syringe and various instruments for destroying moles and a barrow turnip slicer and a Paul net and a Sandwich clean-sweep hay-loader and probangs and castrating shears and Hannaford's wet wheat pickling machine and a scutching board and a swath turner and a plank-drag harrow, had been stolen.
Tarleton put two and two together. It was blindingly obvious that the man with the twisted lip was the thief. He had sold Old Farmer Frack's barn's-worth of booty to a fence, and put the pelf in his sack. It was, then, a simple matter of finding the fence and bludgeoning him to death using one of the instruments for destroying moles, and restoring to the mad old farmer his rightful possessions.
“Just one question, Tarleton,” said Old Wilkie, “These various instruments for destroying moles. Were any of them developed by L'Oreal?”
But answer came there none, for the amateur's amateur, his mouth stuffed with some more kippers, had fled to a Limehouse opium den, to wallow in vice, sprawled on a divan.