I entered the penny arcade at a speed that surprised even myself. The robot followed hard upon my fleeing heels, overturning the gambling machines that spilled out pennies, which I was presently disinclined to gather.
I hastened into the ballroom, with its Lloyd Loom and its potted palms, marvelling that its doors were open at this time of night. And that its lights were still on.
And up ahead I spied out Mr Hugo Rune.
‘Pacey-pacey, Rizla,’ he called. ‘You won’t win a maiden’s heart of oak by getting wood in her window box.’
But I was in no mood to deal with that.
I was young and I was fit, but I was now all in. Sweat ran freely down my face and my feet felt as if they were dragging bags of sand.
Behind me came the monster of metal, chugging, clanking and emitting amplified laughter and another burst of gunfire.
‘This way,’ cried Mr Rune. ‘Please get a move on, do.’
And so I ran, through the ballroom and out on to the sundeck, moonlit now, and onward and onward.
Until.
I reached the railing. Where stood Mr Rune. With nowhere left to run.
‘Over the rail,’ cried Mr Rune, ‘and jump.’
‘Jump?’ My eyes gaped down towards the sea, all black and cold and merciless. ‘Jump?’ I wailed. ‘I cannot jump. I cannot swim.’
‘Have no fear,’ said Mr Rune.
And then it was upon us. It tore through the rear of the ballroom, splitting the wooden panels and destroying a stained-glass window that was the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It drew itself up to its terrible height and swiped aside a potted palm. And the sound of that horrible laughter came to my ears once more.
‘Backed yourself into a corner, Mister Rune,’ came words amongst the laughter, as weaponry angled down upon us. ‘Should I shoot you, or stamp you to the oblivion you so rightly deserve?’
‘Surrender,’ said Mr Rune, braving it up with considerable aplomb. ‘Surrender and I will spare your life.’ And Hugo Rune took from his pocket an oversized green gingham handkerchief and held it aloft.
‘It’s a white flag for surrender, you oaf,’ called the voice of Count Otto Black.
‘It’s a green flag for “go”,’ replied Mr Rune. ‘Climb down from your cockpit, or I will drop the flag.’
‘Insane.’ Count Otto did some more laughing.
‘I will count to three,’ said Mr Rune.
‘You’ll be dead before you’re able.’
And then the steely monster came at us.
And Mr Hugo Rune let his ‘flag’ drop with a flourish.
And it is funny what you remember and what you do not.
I do remember Mr Rune grabbing me by the collar and hauling me over the rail. And I remember the terrible fall and the overwhelming fear of hitting the water.
But I do not actually remember hitting the water.
But then, perhaps I never actually hit it.
Because I was not wet afterwards.
Although I was a bit confused.
I think Mr Rune hit the water, because moments later I saw him very soaked and most upset.
But I certainly remember the galleon. It was The Saucy Spaniel, and it had been lying at anchor off the pier’s end, awaiting the green-flag signal of Hugo Rune.
And I remember the thunder of an awesome broadside burst of cannon.
And the chaos. And the smoke and flame.
Was it luck, or was it judgement? Was it skill?
I am informed that it was chain-shot, two twelve-pound balls linked by six feet of chain. Very popular on the Victory, was chain-shot. Excellent for taking down the masts of an enemy man o’ war.
It certainly took down Count Otto. And I suppose it was the explosion that took down most of the ballroom. And being constructed mostly of wood, the resultant inferno was hardly unexpected.
Though, as Mr Rune agreed, it was regrettable.
Especially as the penny arcade went with it, along with all those gambling machines.
Apparently, Mr Rune had flung me down into a moored longboat, where I had been caught by a contingent of Moulsecoomb pirates.
Apparently they had not risked catching Mr Rune, fearing for the safety of their longboat.
Mr Rune and I drank rum in the cabin of Captain Bartholomew Moulsecoomb, the Bog Troll Buccaneer. Mr Rune thanked the captain for sailing the galleon out at his request and peppering the pier with cannonballs when signalled to do so.
He had harsh words to say, however, regarding the crew of the longboat.
5
The Curious Case of the Woodingdean Chameleon
The Woodingdean Chameleon
PART I
‘Who is your favourite fictional detective?’ Hugo Rune asked me one morning in July as we sat taking in our breakfast.
I use the expression ‘taking in our breakfast’ because upon this morning it was truly something to behold.
Our regular cook, Mrs Rook, who normally provided our morning repast, had recently absconded with the silver cutlery and cruet set, leaving Mr Rune a bitter note that spoke of‘drunkenness and cruelty’ and the failure to furnish her with wages.
Hugo Rune had therefore been forced to take on a new breakfast cook, and this person had appeared the previous day in the comely shape of Jade, a Taiwanese mail-order bride whom Mr Rune had somehow managed to acquire on a three-month free-trial sale-or-return kind of caper. She was presently serving us as maid – Jade the maid, I suppose. Whether Mr Rune intended to engage her skills in the bedroom, I know not, for it would have been indiscreet of me to have enquired. But as to her skills with the skillet, these we were presently taking in, because they were prodigious.
I peeped over the Jenga-style stack of sausages that rose from my plate and said, ‘Pardon?’ to Mr Rune.
‘Who is your favourite fictional detective?’ the All-Knowing One enquired of me again, which aroused certain doubts in me regarding his all-knowingness.
‘Ah,’ said I, and I rummaged in the pocket of the new grey linen suit that had also lately arrived through mail order and drew out a paperback book. Upon its cover was the lurid depiction of a scantily clad blonde lying prone in an alleyway, whilst a brooding figure in fedora and trenchcoat stood above her in the shadows. The title of the book was:
DEAD DAMES DON’T DANCE
A Lazlo Woodbine Thriller
The author of the book was a chap named P. P. Penrose.
‘Lazlo Woodbine,’ I said to Mr Rune and I tossed the book in his direction. He would probably have caught it had his vision not been obscured by a tower of toast.
‘Lazlo who?’ he asked, retrieving the book from the carpet.
‘Woodbine,’ I said. ‘Some call him Laz. He was a nineteen-fifties American-genre private eye, the greatest of them all. He wore a trenchcoat and a fedora and always carried his trusty Smith and Wesson. And he only ever worked four locations, the maximum he considered that a genuine private eye should work: his seedy office, where clients came to call; a bar, where he “chewed the fat with the fat boy barman” and talked the now legendary toot, picked up leads and inevitably ran into the “dame that done him wrong”; an alleyway, where he got into sticky life-threatening situations; and a rooftop, where he had his final confrontation with the villain, who always took the big plunge to oblivion in the final chapter. Oh yes, and all this he did strictly in the first person.’
‘Sounds positively appalling,’ Mr Rune observed, flicking through the pages of the book.
‘Not a bit of it,’ I said, attacking my sausages. ‘With Woodbine you can always expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a trail of corpses, no small degree of name mispronunciation and enough trenchcoat humour and ludicrous catchphrases to carry you through a month of rainy Thursdays.’
‘Gratuitous sex,’ said Mr Rune, thoughtfully, and he pocketed my book.
‘Why do you ask?’ I asked.
‘Because I have to take a little trip. I will be away for a few days and I am going
to leave the practice in your capable hands.’
‘The practice?’ I queried.
‘The offices of Hugo Rune, the World’s Foremost Metaphysical Detective, as is engraved upon the brass plaque on the front door below.’
‘I fear that Mrs Rook absconded with your brass plaque also,’ I said, with some regret. ‘But I am not exactly certain of what you are asking me to do.’
‘Come,’ said Mr Rune, and he beckoned. I rose, with difficulty due to the tightness of my stomach, and joined him before his big framed map of Brighton, the one on which the figures of the Brighton Zodiac, the Brightonomicon, were brightly outlined over streets and roads and culs-de-sac and so forth.
‘We have so far solved four cases,’ said Mr Rune.
‘You have solved them,’ I said, ‘if solved be the word. And you have always done so through possessing prior knowledge that was unknown to myself.’
‘And so I am giving you the opportunity to prove yourself, as it were.’
‘I am not a detective,’ I said.
‘But you’d like to be.’
‘Well, actually I would,’ I said. ‘I have certainly enjoyed myself during the time I have spent with you, although it has thus far been fraught with peril and the wages are nothing to write home about, even if I knew where my home was. Although if I did, I would still have nothing to write home about regarding wages.’
‘I think you have all the makings of a truly great detective,’ said Mr Rune, although I have a feeling that he said it to divert my conversation away from the subject of my wages.
‘A truly great detective, eh?’ said I, taking this remark at face value, because I liked the way that it smiled upon me.
‘And so the next case is yours.’
‘And the next case is … ?’
‘Pick one of the figures of the Zodiac. Go ahead, point one out.’
‘Any one?’
‘Other than those that we have already dealt with.’
‘Naturally.’ As this was clearly ludicrous, I pointed to a figure at random. ‘That one,’ I said, ‘the one that looks like a banana with the mumps.’
‘The Woodingdean Chameleon,’ said Mr Rune. ‘A very bold choice. Do you truly feel up to the challenge?’
I looked up at him. ‘You are having a bubble,’ said I.
‘A bubble?’ said the Mumbo Gumshoe.
‘A bubble bath. You are having a laugh.’
‘I can assure you, this is no laughing matter.’
‘But there is no case,’ I said. ‘Just because I pick out a figure at random … I mean, through considered choice … that does not mean that there is a case to solve. That is not the way things work.’
‘It’s the way I do business,’ said Mr Rune. ‘You chose correctly. The case will come to you.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I could have chosen any figure on the Zodiac.’
‘I think not,’ said Hugo Rune.
‘Think so,’ said I.
‘Not,’ said Hugo Rune and he opened his hand and presented me with the single badge that he held in it.
And on that badge was printed something that left me in no doubt as to the veracity of his words.
*
Hugo Rune packed a pigskin valise, instructed me to keep my ‘grubby mitts’ off Jade, waved me his farewells with his stout stick, marched downstairs and out of the front door and hailed for himself a cab.
The driver’s name, Mr Rune mentioned later, was Colin, and he was a staunch supporter of a football team called West Bromwich Albion, to which side he pledged a filial affiliation that no man could put asunder, even should this man have Cerberus, the many-headed canine guardian of the underworld, on a chain with him and he, Colin, backed into a corner. Colin may well have held to certain metaphysical beliefs that he was more than willing to share with his fare. As to whether he did, and what the eventual outcome of this would have been when it was Mr Rune who occupied the rear seats of his cab, I cannot say with any degree of precision because Mr Rune never told me. I would be prepared to chance my arm at a guess, though.
I sat myself down in Mr Rune’s favourite armchair and loosened the lower buttons of my waistcoat. I pondered momentarily whether Jade would indeed be prepared to make herself sexually available to another, younger, potential spouse, but I felt somewhat bloated and not quite up to the effort. And as I sat and drummed my fingers and whistled a ditty, it did cross my mind that I really did fancy trying my hand at a bit of detective work. Mr Rune would be really impressed if he returned to discover that I had cracked the Curious Case of the Woodingdean Chameleon.
Of course, there would have to be such a case.
And this I considered unlikely.
I stroked the badge that now adorned my lapel. Producing it had probably been sleight of hand – Paul Daniels did that sort of thing all the time, pushing Debbie Magee through a letterbox, swallowing gerbils and making Tower Bridge disappear. Had I not read somewhere that it was Paul Daniels who had started the war in Vietnam to win a bet with David Copperfield?
But all that aside, I really did fancy trying my hand at a bit of the old crime detection. Do it the way Laz had done it, back in the fifties, when a man had to do what a man had to do. And walk those mean streets alone. And, I thought, And! There was a trenchcoat and a fedora hanging in the wardrobe of my bedroom. And I was pretty sure that they were my size. In fact, I knew that they were my size because I had tried them on more than once and paced up and down in front of the wardrobe mirror, ‘making shapes’ and being Laz.
Because, to coin a phrase that I would not normally use, gimme a break here, I was a teenager!
I made off to the wardrobe and returned looking hot to trot. The trenchcoat’s belt was somewhat tight across my swollen belly, but I would soon work off the bulge with some fist-fightin’, pistol-totin’, dame-diddlin’ big-Dick action. Private Dick, of course, if you know what I mean, and I am sure that you do.
I struck a pose beside the window and awaited the arrival of the client who would soon appear, most likely in a state of extreme distress and in the shape of a beautiful dame, to beg me to take on a case.
At eleven of the morning clock, and fed up with waiting, I took myself next door to Fangio’s bar, which today was called The Laughing Cadaver.
Which I thought most appropriate.
I straightened my shoulders, cocked my fedora to that angle that is known as rakish, straightened the hem of my trenchcoat and entered the bar in the first person, in the guise and persona of Lazlo Woodbine, the world’s greatest nineteen-fifties American-genre detective.
The lounge was long and low and lost in a dream that was forever yesterday. The chrome shone like oil beads on a Chevy’s tail fin and the guy who stood behind the counter copped me a glance like he was whistling ‘Dixie’ through the wrong end of a clarinet. I crossed the bar with more aplomb than a pagan pedal-pusher at a podophiliac’s picnic and acquainted myself with my favourite barstool.
‘A bottle of Bud and a hot pastrami on rye,’ I told Fangio the fat boy barman.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said Fangio, adjusting a wig of elaborate confection.
‘Good evening?’ said I. ‘But it is morning.’
‘It might be for you, sir,’ said the wearer of the wig, ‘but not for me – I have become a Dyslectic.’
‘You cannot become a Dyslectic,’ I rightfully protested. ‘You either are one or you are not.’
‘Well, I am one now,’ said Fange, ‘which rather proves my point, don’t you think?’
‘Okay,’ said I, ‘I will go along with this. How did you become a Dyslectic?’
‘Answered an ad,’ said Fangio, ‘in the Weekly World News. It’s a religious sect – fastest-growing religion in America. I’ve seen the Light of the Lard. I’ve been made Hull. And they give you a special enchanted omelette and everything.’ And he pointed to something cheap and nasty and plastic that hung around his neck.
‘That is not an omelette,’ I said. ‘That is an a
mulet.’
‘See,’ said Fange, ‘it’s working already. And I got a badge.’ And he now pointed to something pinned upon his lapel.
‘That is not a badge,’ I said. ‘It’s a budgie.’
‘That would explain why it squawked so much when I did the pinning on.’
Oh, how we laughed. Till we stopped.
‘Enough of this gay repartee,’ said I.
‘Are you implying that I’m a choirboy, sir?’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘if the shirt fits, lift it.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, young Razzler.’
‘Ah,’ said I, ‘it is not young Rizla any more, for while you are now a member of the Temple of Dyslexia, I—’
‘It’s the Tadpole of Dyslexia,’ Fange corrected me.
‘Quite so. Well, just as you are presently a member of that, I, for my part, am now a practising detective of the nineteen-fifties persuasion, hence the trenchcoat and fedora.’
‘Ah,’ said Fangio, ‘so that’s it. And there was me thinking that you were “having a bubble”.’
‘A laugh?’
‘No, a bubble. From a dyslextic perspective, of course.’
‘Any sign of my bottle of Bud and hot pastrami on rye?’ I asked.
‘None at all so far,’ said Fangio. ‘So, are you going out on your own, then? Have you been giving your arching morders by Mister Hugo Rune?’
‘I do not think “arching morders” is dyslextic,’ I said. ‘I think you will find that to be a spoonerism.’
‘Is it that time of year already?’ Fange asked. ‘I’ll have to put the decorations up.’
I mused upon that, but failed miserably in the attempt.
Oh, how we laughed once more.
‘So I am no longer to be referred to as Rizla,’ I continued. ‘I am now to be known as Lazlo Woodbine, private eye. Although actually, you being a practising Dyslectic will come in handy here, as one of the running gags in the Lazlo Woodbine books is that people always mispronounce his name.’
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