3
The elevation of Ms Jennifer Naylor the former local librarian, to the posts, not only of town clerk but also chairperson of the town planning committee, had been met with howls of dismay and much bitter resentment by the predominantly male council.
They had always been prepared to find a place for a token female (as long as she confined herself to the taking of minutes or the brewing of tea) but now it seemed to them that they were paying a high price for their generous liberality. Ms Naylor was proving herself to be a force none of them had reckoned with. Loath as they were to admit that she had gained her positions through intellectual prowess and sheer strength of personality, noses were tapped, knowing nods exchanged and phallacious conclusions drawn. The talk was that she had ‘done a turn’ upon some mythical council casting couch.
Acutely alert to the distinctive rattle of tiny minds, Ms Naylor remained unperturbed. Her sights were set upon far higher things, which included Parliament and an eventual shot at the premiership amongst them. Confounding her opposition here in Brentford was, she considered, good practice for what lay ahead.
As she showered upon this particular morning, Jennifer’s thoughts were upon the coming day. She had been up since dawn making a number of very important phone calls. If the Fates were with her today she would shortly be issuing the borough a kick up the trouser-seat such as it had never known before, and carving for herself a place in history, to boot. And then? One small step at a time.
The needles of water became gentle cascades as they struck the contours of a body honed to aerobic perfection. Her shower concluded, she patted herself dry with a peach-coloured bath towel, sprayed deodorant to the appropriate quarters, attended to the minutiae of feminine toilette and finally dressed herself in a confection combining sophistication and understated elegance with provocativeness and heaving sexuality. Just so.
Having examined her image in the cheval glass and found it satisfactory, she strode purposefully back to the bedroom, delved amidst the pale satin sheets and withdrew by the ear a certain bit of rough, by name John Omally.
‘Thank you, John, and time for the off,’ she said, smiling sweetly. Omally, who knew upon which side his particular piece of bread was buttered, dressed hurriedly and without complaint, and made off sans coffee and croissants.
He left as he had entered, with discretion, by the back door, withdrew his bicycle Marchant from Jennifer’s garage, mounted up and pedalled away.
She tossed the bed linen into the laundry basket, set the answerphone, swept up Filofax, executive briefcase and Porsche keys and made her departure from the front of the house.
Omally free-wheeled down Moby Dick Terrace towards the Half Acre, his old sit-up-and-beg whirring away beneath him like a good’n. The oil-bathed ball-races of the new Sturmey Archer purred contentedly and the similarly well-oiled saddle springs afforded John’s bum the contentment of all but concussion-free cycling. Bike and rider moved in harmonious accord and many was the Buddhist monk, who, recognizing this exhibition of dharma, tipped his head towards this perfect union of man and machine. It was a joy to behold. But it had not always been so.
The bike had been with Omally a good many years and for a good many of those years their relationship had been strained and at times positively painful to the both of them. And so it would no doubt have remained had not Chance, if such it was, chosen to intervene. Chance in the person of Professor Slocombe, Brentford’s patriarch and resident man of mystery.
Omally had been pedalling with difficulty across the Butts Estate, an elegant Georgian quarter of the borough, when he had found himself discharged from Marchant’s saddle to land in an untidy heap before the elder, who was standing at his garden door.
Professor Slocombe observed the ‘accident’ and the subsequent violent attack Omally visited upon the prone bicycle and chose to intervene. Having calmed the truculent Irishman, he listened with interest to his tale of woe and requested that the bike be left in his care for twenty-four hours. In order to see ‘what might be done’. John, whose immediate thought was that the ancient was adding the science of bicycle maintenance to his seemingly endless list of accomplishments, gratefully acceded to his request.
It was therefore much to his surprise when arriving on the morrow he received for his troubles a large piece of parchment upon which was penned thirteen stanzas of archaic English. These read like the prophecies of Nostradamus and to John made precisely the same amount of sense. The Professor told him that, should he follow these requirements to the letter, he would find things very much to his advantage. Omally perused the parchment, his forehead furrowed with doubt. Whilst he was so doing, the Professor added that regular oiling was a necessity as was a change of brake blocks, a realignment of the dynamo and a set of new mudguards. Whenever possible the bicycle was to be left facing west when parked, sunshine being preferable to shade, that it was never to be left alone at night, but always in the company of another wheeled conveyance (or at the very least a lawn mower), that it was to be repainted vermilion and referred to at all future times by the name ‘Marchant’.
Omally peered furtively at the old man. This was a wind-up surely, in fact the wind-up to end all wind-ups. The Professor, who read not only John’s aura but also his thoughts, raised a finger, slim as a twig, and said simply, ‘Trust me, John.’
Omally left Professor Slocombe’s that day leading Marchant thoughtfully by the handlebar. It really didn’t seem worth the candle. It would probably be better simply to dump the old bike and acquire another (Omally being one of those who considered an unpadlocked bicycle public property). But his trust in the Professor was implicit, so before he was half-way to the Flying Swan he had resigned himself that he would take up the challenge.
The parchment proved a great attraction to the lunch-time patrons and a distinguished panel of semanticists, Old Pete, Norman and Omally’s closest friend Jim Pooley, set about its translation with relish. As the instructions were teased into twentieth-century Brentonian, their curious nature became apparent. Stanza nine, lines three and four, proved of particular interest:
Ne’er Widdershins shall Marchant go
Lest peril and ill luck bestow.
Old Pete, who had recently joined the local coven, picked up on it almost at once. ‘It means,’ said he, ‘that the bike must never be ridden around left-hand corners, on fear of terrible consequence.’
Omally buried his face in his hands. To plan one’s route whilst only ever turning to the right was not only ludicrous, it was downright dangerous. Especially upon drunken nights when the gutter led the way home.
But power to the Irishman’s elbow, he had persevered, and many a late-night reveller was left to wonder at the madman upon the vermilion cycle crying, ‘Homeward Marchant!’ as he drove about in ever-decreasing circles, eventually to vanish like the Oozalem bird of ancient myth into his own back passage.
They had been difficult times and no mistake, but now as Omally pedalled effortlessly up the steep incline of Sprite Street, they were no more than memories. He and Marchant were en rapport, as the garlic eaters will have it, and the degree of this was remarkable in the extreme. For, to the trained observer, skilled in such matters as bicycle propulsion, watching the cyclist’s easy motion as he crested the hill, one thing would have been readily apparent: As man and bike moved in fluid harmony, one vital something - hitherto considered an essential prerequisite to bicycledom - was missing. The pedals turned, the wheels did spin, but nothing whatever moved between the chain-wheel and the Sturmey Archer cog . . .
Omally’s bicycle Marchant did not have a chain.
4
Ted McCready blew his whistle, waved his flag and watched with absolutely no interest at all as the early train pulled out of Brentford Central. He was precisely sixty-six days from his gold watch and retirement speech and he no longer gave a monkey’s. In fact, like many an old locoman who had gone before him, he had ceased to give a monkey’s with the passing of the age of steam.
Ted could recall the young boys who clambered on to the footplates of the great locos, or lined the bridge parapets to be bathed in steam as one of the mighty King Class thundered beneath at full throttle, whistle blowing. But that had all gone now. The romance of railways was behind him and with it had gone the pride. No-one could honestly feel for an electric train. It had no personality, no being, no glory. It was just another carriage, but with a motor in it.
Half-heartedly, Ted offered a two-fingered Harvey Smith towards the departing train and shuffled away to his cosy office, his morning cuppa and the next chapter of Farewell My Window (a Lazlo Woodbine thriller).
Upon the platform a solitary figure remained, the only passenger to alight from the morning train. He was tall, gaunt and angular in appearance, clad in a Boleskine tweed three-piece. From his right hand hung a heavy pigskin valise, from his left a black Malacca cane with a silver mount. A small white ivory ring pierced the lobe of his left ear and a pair of mirrored pince-nez clung to the bridge of his long aquiline nose. A pelt of snow-white hair turfed his narrow skull. Such was the singular appearance of this solitary traveller and such it was that had put the wind up many a case-hardened veteran of the criminal fraternity. For this was none other than that doyen of detectives, that Nemesis of ne’er-do-wells - Let evil doers beware, let felons flee and varlets vanish, run the sound, roll the cameras, cue the action - enter Inspectre Hovis of Scotland Yard.
The man behind the mirrored specs turned his sheltered gaze upon Brentford Central. ‘You there!’ His voice tore along the platform, striking Ted McCready, who was turning into his sanctum sanctorium, from behind.
‘By the love of St Pancras!’ The station master clutched at his palpitations and lurched about.
‘That’s right, I mean you, porter chappy! Up this way at the trot, if you please.’ A shaft of sunlight angling down through the ironwork of the footbridge held the great detective to perfection.
‘You talking to me?’ choked Ted, squinting towards his tormentor.
‘That’s right, my man, at the double!’ Hovis indicated his pigskin valise. ‘Let’s be having you.’
With bitter words forming between his lips, Ted humped the heavy case down the platform. He’d had a trolley once, but it had rusted away. He’d had a porter once, but he had been cut back. He’d had a hernia once ... With his free hand Ted felt at his groin. He still had a hernia.
Ahead of him the spare frame of Hovis bobbed along to an easy stride. A voice called back across an angled padded shoulder. ‘Pacy pacy, Mr Porter,’ it called. ‘Tempus fugit.’
Ted McCready stared daggers into the receding back. He was the first man in Brentford to encounter the great detective and by this token, the first man to really hate him. He would by no means be the last.
5
Omally turned right at the traffic lights, right again and finally right into Ganesha Lane. Marchant rattled over the uneven cobbles and John spread wide his legs as they swept down into the alleyway that led past Cider Island to the weir, the abandoned boatyards and the venerable Thames.
John dismounted as they reached the weir. Weird and wonderful Marchant might have been, but he did not include the climbing of steps as part of his metaphysical repertoire. Omally shouldered his bike, skipped up the steps and continued on his way, whistling brightly.
Suddenly, the bright and breezy, devil-may-care jauntiness of his step vanished, to be replaced by a furtive, shifty, quite definitely guilt-ridden scuttle. Omally was up to something.
A slowing of pace, a quick shufti over the shoulder, a sudden movement. A section of corrugated iron swings aside and a boy and his bike vanished from the footpath and were lost to view.
Beyond the iron fencing, the long-abandoned boatyard slumbered. The pointless walls of the derelict buildings were decked with festoons of convolvulus, the windows swagged with cobwebs. Here and there the tragic debris of the once proud trade showed as tiny islands amidst a grassy ocean. Here a crane, strung like a fractured gibbet, there the gears and gubbins, over-ripe with rust. Capstans and winches, pulleys and blocks, blurred with moss, weatherworn and worthless. At a quayside beyond, the dark hulk of an ancient barge wallowed in oily water.
Once the glittering island boatyards, strung like a necklet about the borough’s throat, had prospered. Here the barques and pleasure boats, the punts and Thames steamers had taken form from the hand-hewn timbers, fashioned with the care of craftsmen. Now it was no more, here and there a yard survived heavily secured with barbed wire and night-prowling dogs, knocking out plastic dinghies or casting fibre-glass hulls for Arabian moguls. Floating gin palaces for camel jockeys. The life had gone, and that particular form of melancholia which haunts places of bygone commerce washed over the buildings in waves of lavender blue. For blue is the colour of tears and water, sea and sadness.
Omally left Marchant to rest upon a handlebar, the reflected glory of the early sun cupped in his headlamp. Hitching up his trousers, he set out to wade through the waist-deep grass towards the ancient barge.
Upon reaching the edge of the wharf he again paused to assure himself that he remained unobserved. When so assured he dropped down on to the barge and tapped out an elaborate tattoo upon the hull.
A head popped up from the inner depths and a voice, that of Jim Pooley, owner of the head, called out, ‘Watchamate John, you’re late!’ Omally shinned through the hatchway and down into the bowels of the wreck.
The interior presented a most surprising and unexpected appearance. Over a period of many months Pooley and Omally had effected a conversion of a most enterprising nature. The superannuated vessel now housed a distillery, a series of grandiose fish tanks, wherein lazed river fish of prize-winning proportions, a storehouse for ‘re-routed’ goods and a comfortable salon for the entertaining of special guests.
A line of portholes below waterline looked out upon a string of elaborate fish traps set above the distillery cooling tubes. This was the headquarters of what was known to a select few as the ‘P and O Line’. There was much of Captain Nemo’s ‘Nautilus’ to the thing, but there was a good deal more of Fagin’s kitchen. Although, in evidence for the defence, it must be stated that John and Jim drew the line before coining, or the manufacture of hard drugs.
Pooley and Omally took their morning coffee in the forward salon. The style was essentially eclectic. A hint of Post-Modernism here, a touch of rococo there, several boxes of video cassettes just behind the door. A pair of blown glass vases, signed by Count Otto Boda himself, adorned a chromium table of the high-tech persuasion. An antique paisley swathed a gaudy sun-lounger, three china ducks flew nowhere.
Omally stuck his feet up on the Le Corbusier chaise and Pooley leant upon the Memphis-style cocktail cabinet dunking a breakfast biscuit.
‘Well,’ said Jim when he finally tired of the sight of his partner’s inane grin. ‘Good night, was it?’
Omally’s smile resembled that of the legendary Gwynplaine. ‘Propriety forbids a disclosure of details,’ he said as he dandled his demi-tasse, ‘but it was magic.’
‘I’m so glad.’
The two drank on in silence, Omally mentally replaying selected highlights and Pooley glowering with evident envy. When he could stand no more of that Jim said, ‘We got four, they must be five-pounders easily.’
Omally raised his eyebrows and smiled his winning smile. ‘Well now, Neville will take one for the Saturday sarnies and another for his freezer, I have no doubt.’
‘Wally Woods will take the other two then.’
Omally frowned - briefly, for the effort vexed him. Wally Woods, Brentford’s foremost purveyor of wet fish, was a cold and slippery little customer. ‘No,’ said John. ‘We’ll do them off in Ealing, at the King’s Head or the Fly’s Home.’
‘As you please.’
Omally finished his coffee and refilled his cup from the snazzy-looking percolator. ‘How are the accounts shaping up?’ he asked, in a tone of casual enquiry.
Jim raised an eyebrow of h
is own. He was well aware that the Irishman had logged within his curly head the dismal sum of their current assets. ‘If this business was legitimate,’ he sighed, ‘we would be in for a tax rebate.’
Omally shook his head. ‘Sometimes I think that we slave away so hard in our attempts to avoid honest toil that we shall work ourselves into an early grave through the effort.’
‘You are not suggesting we . . .’ Pooley spoke the dreaded words in a whisper, ‘get a job!’
Omally winked. ‘Not a bit of it. We are free men, are we not? And is freedom not the most valuable possession a man can own?’
‘Well. . .’ said Jim. A sudden image of Jennifer Naylor’s Porsche unaccountably filled his mind. ‘Well
‘Of course it is,’ Omally went on. ‘We live life to the full and do you know why we do it?’ Pooley thought that he did, but suspected he would not get the opportunity to say so. ‘We do it for the craic,’ said Omally, confirming Jim’s suspicion.
‘Ah!’ said that man, ‘the craic, that lad.’
‘That lad indeed and,’ said John, who was evidently in loquacious spirits, ‘I will tell you something more.’
‘I have no doubt of it.’
‘At ten o’clock, Jim, you will walk into Bob the bookies.’
‘I always do.’
‘But today will be different.’
‘It always is.’
‘Because today you will place a bet which on the face of it will appear so ludicrous that he of the golden gonads will rock to and fro upon his chair doubled up with laughter.’
The Sprouts of Wrath Page 2