Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries

by Barbara Silkstone

  Roy would come back home, if he could. It is the one unarguable fact in Sheila Travers’ life. Why would he not come back? She has an unshakeable faith in Roy’s compulsion to find his way home, as if he were a spawning salmon and south London a sparkling stream. She is alone in this; even her own family are beginning to doubt she will see her husband again soon.

  ‘Sheila, maybe Roy has lost his memory? Or perhaps,’ Sheila’s sister faces the inevitable on her behalf, ‘perhaps he’s not alive.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s alive.’

  Given that Roy’s will to come back is a constant, everything else Sheila has ever believed is negotiable. Sitting in her finery in the upper circle of the Palace Theatre with her sister, trying to take her mind off Roy’s disappearance, Sheila receives a message about him.

  ‘Do you mean someone passed you a note?’ Sheila’s sister is bewildered when Sheila tries to explain as they sip their pre-ordered interval drinks. ‘I saw nothing.’

  ‘It wasn’t a note. It was a message that went directly into my head.’

  ‘The voice of God?’ Sheila’s sister’s lips are drawn very tightly over her teeth and her eyes are small. She disapproves of religious experiences very strongly indeed.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t the voice of God. I’ve always expected that to be like an announcement over a tannoy system, very loud and slightly distorted. It was more like telepathy. I didn’t hear words, even. I just reached an understanding.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘He’s been abducted. He can’t come back because he isn’t free. Someone has taken him.’

  Tickets for West Ends shows are expensive. Sheila’s sister bought them as a treat to try and cheer her up. The two women sit through the rest of the play. Sheila’s sister is furious because Sheila distracts her, sitting and fiddling with her earrings as if tuning them in to some Mayday frequency from outer space. ‘Come in, Lieutenant Uhuru,’ she says when she recounts the story to her husband that night, mimicking Sheila to make him laugh and relieve some of the tension she’s feeling.

  Back at her flat with a cup of tea, Sheila wonders whether there was something special that allowed the message to get through. Were her earrings acting as some sort of aerial?

  Chapter Six ~ Sylvia

  Sylvia Arrow is humming It’s raining men as she kneads the day’s supply of bread. Sylvia was a high wire artiste in her youth, but her hips and thighs broadened as she reached her twenties. She has the kind of body that will always be strong and flexible but she became too heavy to perform professionally. Sylvia remained with the circus for a while, the only life she knew, grounded but content, knitting spangly bikini costumes for the other girls using very fine gauge needles.

  When she grew tired of the performers teasing her about her doughy limbs and pinching her arms and legs to make red dots in the white flesh, Sylvia ran away from the circus. She left behind the only person she’d ever loved, a boy whose superficial resemblance to herself meant Sylvia treated him like a brother, whispering him stories from where she sat knitting in her deckchair as he rested between performances as an acrobat in the big top.

  For five years Sylvia worked as a croupier, salting away the pay and dreaming about the circus. For five more years, Sylvia trained animals, working for the undisputed expert in the field, Venetia Latimer. Then she ran away from that life too. Sylvia’s name is a reminder of the very early days; she chose it for herself when she went into show business. As she flew in the air, spinning above people in the big top, Sylvia had a vision in her head that she was shining and metallic and swift and hard like a silver arrow. The other reminder is the high wire and the net she stretches in the garden sometimes, just to practice, just for old times’ sake. It was as well for Roy she was feeling sentimental the day he flew overhead because the net probably saved him from breaking his neck as he fell.

  In her twenties, Sylvia sometimes thought she didn’t need sex if she could eat fresh bread every day instead. In her late thirties, with cupboards full of flour and yeast, the time and patience to bake every day, and a man who has dropped from the skies to be her companion, Sylvia is pleasantly surprised to find she doesn’t even have to choose any more.

  Mrs Fitzgerald is at home with a cup of black coffee. It is late but she is still working, straining her eyes as she bends over the paper trail she has amassed in her latest investigation into animal welfare.

  Animal welfare is of such great interest to young people in Britain that it has been estimated that at any given time, up to fifteen per cent of casual workers in zoos and circuses are undercover agents working for animal rights organizations. Although the elaborate concealment of fragile miniature video cameras can occasionally restrict their capacity for heavy work, the majority of them can make themselves useful with a spade. Given declining ticket sales, it’s doubtful whether the zoos and circuses could survive without the contribution made by these young people.

  Following her seminal report about the circus industry, published to wide acclaim ten years ago and credited with being in part responsible for growing public distaste at the spectacle of performing animals, Mrs Fitzgerald is acknowledged as something of an expert in the field of animal welfare. Mrs Fitzgerald’s current investigation aims at the heart of the supply of performing dogs and other animals – to Mrs Latimer. Mrs Fitzgerald is not the sort to arm herself with a pair of dungarees and a pitchfork to monitor the daily care and feed of the animals. Reports from America suggest that Doris Day has been visiting the new homes of dogs adopted from their local pound. She rakes her film star fingers through the animals’ fur looking for fleas and she goes into the owners’ kitchens to check on the freshness of the water in their drinking bowls, although whether she tests this by actually drinking the water is not clear.

  Mrs Fitzgerald does not operate like this. In the first instance, she asks the questions and tracks down the answers from her office and her home in Brixton, visiting the suspects’ premises in person only when she needs to collect forensic evidence.

  Mrs Fitzgerald has checked Venetia Latimer’s animal balance sheet; elephants in, elephants out. ‘Where has she hidden that elephant?’ Mrs Fitzgerald asks, over and over again. There is one elephant that has not been accounted for.

  Mrs Fitzgerald looks into the accounts and assesses the quality and supply of feed, the integrity of the relationship with the supplier, the regularity and nature of medical care, the turnover of staff and the provision of training. She enquires into the pressures created by client expectations; she collects anecdotal evidence from past and current employees. Mrs Fitzgerald is a professional investigator, with all the resources of her profession at her fingertips. Mrs Latimer is a professional animal trainer, treading the fine line between discipline and cruelty. As Mary Chipperfield once famously remarked of an elephant in her care, ‘I’m not beating it, I’m encouraging it with a stick.’ If Mrs Latimer crosses the fine line, Mrs Fitzgerald will find out. Mrs Fitzgerald cares very much about animals.

  In Paradise, Sylvia is dreaming about the circus again. On special nights like this, images of the twentieth century’s greatest and most dazzling aerialistes and high-wire performers thread through Sylvia’s dreams. Sometimes they appear as they were in their heyday, strong men and women in their sparkly costumes performing one more time for her benefit. More often than not Sylvia sees them as the active elderly people they grew into before departing the temporal world for their final destination.

  They come in to the dream all together, gray-haired and limber, dressed gracefully in loose-fitting jersey and cotton leisure-wear. Their hands are linked and their arms extend from their sides, forming a vee with each other. They dance, forming a chain, pointing with the left foot, bending their knees and kicking up with the right heel, heads turned, smiling, hair flying all in the same direction with the motion of the dance. Then they come back again, pointing with the right foot, kicking with the left.

  Sylvia tries to recognize them as they pass. There is Judith G
ordon Innes who died aged 87. In the thirties she topped a human pyramid on a high wire as the only British member of The Great Wallendas. There is Joseph Hodgini who died aged 102. His wife Etta Davis is next to him. She had a high-wire and knife-throwing act with her twin Rita before marrying Joseph and joining him in his comedy riding act.

  When he has been dancing in Sylvia’s dreams in Paradise, Joseph Hodgini sometimes finds his way to where Venetia Latimer is sleeping in her house in West Sussex. He is Venetia’s favourite animal trainer. She chose her son’s name as a tribute to him. As a boy Joe Hodgini rode horses bareback in German and Russian circuses as Miss Daisy, a female impersonator. In the fifties he worked with a dog troupe, the first man ever to successfully train Dachshunds for the circus. Venetia Latimer’s dreams are male-dominated, as the profession of animal training tended to be in those earlier years. It is not something that troubles Venetia, she has never yearned for female companionship. She would rather enjoy the company of Jack Smith, unrivalled trainer of big cats and bears, the man who prepared the lions for their role in the film Quo Vadis, as he trades circus gossip with Poodles Hanneford who, in an earlier era, delighted audiences with his comedy riding turns.

  Venetia Latimer never sees herself in these dreams but it is enough that her heroes are there, chatting as informally amongst themselves as if they were guests being treated to a fork supper at her house in Sussex.

  In Brixton, every one of the twelve hundred dancing bears in captivity in India parades through Mrs Fitzgerald’s crowded, horrible dream. Helplessly, she watches them twisting their tortured bodies to earn a few rupees for their owners. Even in her dream she knows she’s too far away to help them slip the chains attached to their nostrils by rings sunk into the tender parts of their flesh.

  From Spain, herds of stampeding bulls thunder into Mrs Fitzgerald’s dream, blood spraying from the puncture wounds in their slippery, sweating hides where they have been speared and stabbed deep into the muscle underneath. Flecks of foam fly from between their bared teeth. The doses of strychnine they have been given have dulled the pain, not the fury. Their eyes are wild. As Mrs Fitzgerald watches, they start to tumble, front legs buckling first, then the hind legs, animal piling on top of animal as they fall.

  She turns, restlessly, half awakes, then falls back to sleep. There is no respite. North America’s diving mules rain from the skies in her dream. Tempted by as little reward as a carrot, they risk death or serious injury by jumping from high platforms into shallow pools below, urged on by the showmen who make money from their recklessness. Mrs Fitzgerald watches them come down, splayed hoofs splashing as they hit the water, jaunty straw hats floating away as they scramble to the edge of the pool, ready to jump again for another meager reward.

  When she wakes next morning, Mrs Fitzgerald sets to work early, redoubling her efforts to help the suffering creatures within her circle of influence in mainland Britain.

  Chapter Seven ~ The Zebra

  A group of her employees are putting the dogs through their paces in a muddy field near Mrs Latimer’s house. They jump extravagantly through hoops. Repetition makes perfect. The trainers are as enthusiastic as the dogs. It’s sometimes difficult to tell who enjoys the games more – the men or the animals. Everyone in the field is terribly pleased with the results.

  A lad with a zebra stands and watches the dogs for a while. As the training session reaches its ‘towering inferno’ finale, he notices he’s desperate for a pee. The walk back to the lavatory in the house is a long one and he has nowhere to park the zebra once he gets there. He walks over to the edge of the field, where the dogs have been taught to leave their mess, and fishes inside his combat trousers. In neat and tidy Amsterdam the phenomenon of ‘wild pissing’ is a nationally-acknowledged problem, the streets flowing with smelly urine as the local men relieve themselves in public after a night on the beer. The lad smiles as he remembers his cousin’s stag night in that city. A drop of virgin’s water on the straw here in Sussex won’t hurt.

  The zebra keeper and some of the other young men who work at Mrs Latimer’s have discovered that one of the medicines she feeds to the animals works well as a recreational drug. It’s better than E. And it’s free. This discovery has had a profound effect on their behaviour. They are all agreed on the need to keep the old lady sweet so she doesn’t check up on them and start putting the stuff under lock and key. No-one has stepped out of line, or given her any lip or even so much as turned up late for work since they started experimenting with the animals’ drugs. It is vital to ensure the supply doesn’t dry up until they can find out what’s in it and work out a way to get cheap copies made by the people who run the underground drugs factories, in Amsterdam or north London. In the meantime he and his friends have been stockpiling for the party next week. They are all really looking forward to it. It’s going to be pretty crazy.

  The young zebra keeper privately celebrates being able to hold his cock in a field and relieve himself without having to flash his arse to the world - one of the many advantages of being a man - by trying to spray as wide an area of the straw as possible as he pees.

  Chapter Eight ~ Jeremy

  Harvey keeps his mobile phone switched on while he waits for some friends in Old Compton Street in Soho. Known locally as Queer Street, it is a flourishing centre for coffee bars, kitsch household items and minimalist restaurants serving light lunches. A cursory visit to the area suggests gay men’s lives revolve around ornaments and cappuccino. Perhaps they do.

  ‘Harvey?’

  ‘Jane? You sound echoey.’

  ‘I’m upside down over the kitchen sink, Harvey, dyeing my hair. I think I’ve left the bleach on too long. My scalp has gone red and it’s burning like a bastard.’

  ‘Get the hairdryer on and come and meet me, you silly mare.’

  Jane drives round and round Golden Square in Soho before she finds a parking space. She gets out and leans against the locked car door, scrabbling to retrieve her mobile phone from her handbag before it stops ringing. It stops, just as her hand closes on it.

  A young man with blond hair appears and stands very close to her, one hand on the warm bonnet of her car. ‘The birds in the hedgerows are singing out of tune. They mimic the sounds of mobile phones and car alarms. They can’t hear properly because of the volume of traffic. It makes it difficult for them to mark their territory and find a mate. Did you know you were stopping the birds from singing with your car and your mobile phone?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’

  He is powerfully built, handsome and passionate about birdsong. The dress he is wearing shows off his thighs and the muscles in his arms, like a Roman centurion’s costume in a Hollywood epic. He smells of fresh sweat and Nivea. Jane contemplates taking a break from her relationship with Philippe Noir. Philippe shaves his head and wears black jeans and white T-shirts. He doesn’t love her and Jane doesn’t love him. She hasn’t looked for love from a man since being betrayed by her first boyfriend, also a journalist. He was disfigured when he crashed the blue Ferrari he was driving on Hong Kong’s treacherous South Bay road, while engaged in a sex act with an heiress.

  ‘I could do something. What do you want me to do? Do you want publicity?’ She watches him think about what she’s said. ‘I could get it for you, if that’s what you want. I’m a journalist.’

  ‘We’re going to turn back time. We’re going to hold London to ransom until the capital turns back the traffic.’

  Jane thinks If I put my hand inside the dress where it’s open at the neck, and touch my fingertips to his collar bone, would the contact make a faint squeaking noise like polishing glass, or would my fingers glide over the sweat where it shimmers on his damp skin? She says ‘That sounds very cryptic. Turning back time. Do you want a drink?’

  Jeremy follows Jane Memory to a fashionable gay bar she knows in Soho, so that he can outline his plans for stopping the traffic to her before she joins Harvey for lunch. Gay m
en go to some trouble to establish bars, restaurants and cafes where they can meet in the West End without jostling at the bar against puking soccer fans every time they want to get a drink. Then young women start coming in, for much the same reason, and also so that they can drink dry white wine together and say ‘What a waste’ every time a gay man walks past. Then straight men start coming in so all the gay men leave and set up somewhere else. This cycle is one of the many burdens of fashionability borne by gay people.

  ‘That’s very visual,’ says Jane, more than once, as Jeremy outlines his plan. Perhaps she will two-time Philippe rather than finish with him, so that he can help her pitch the idea for a forty minute TV programme that follows Jeremy and his rabble as they prepare to stop the traffic.

  The restaurant in Old Compton Street is crowded but Jane squeezes easily past the other diners to where Harvey is waiting at a window seat. She is wearing tight, shiny black trousers in man-made fibres that twitch across her fleshless buttocks when she walks, accentuating her cinched waist. She has very small buttocks, a masculine characteristic like many others in her emotional and physical repertoire. Jane Memory is masculine, but in a ball-breaking, sassy, ambitious way that is attractive to men. She’s not mannish. She dyes her hair blonde and can talk at length about women’s issues. Almost every single one of her close friends is homosexual.

  ‘I’m trying to find a way of dealing with this fear of the unknown. I think I need to confront it first,’ Harvey tells Jane over lunch.