* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER TWO
CRAPWING IS A SMALL seaside resort, riddled with dunes and jetties, some twenty miles north along the coast from my family home. Huts and kiosks on the promenade display for sale all sorts of beachy items: hats, nets, rock, ice cream, paper flags for sandcastles, twizzle-sticks, lotions and potions and what-not. The franchisee, if that's the word I want, of one of these kiosks was a man named Fig, who had once been employed by my father as a sort of part-time private detective. He was sour and rheumy, but had a first-class brain stuffed to the brim with suspicion, misanthropy and pessimism: it saddened me to see him reduced to peddling buckets and spades to screeching infants.
The morning after Patch's tearful whimperings, I telephoned Fig and summoned him to the mansion.
"Fig," I said to Fig later that day, as he slumped on the edge of my bed, out of breath and removing his bicycle clips, "Do you remember the time when you traipsed the county running to earth my father's bakelite pipe-rack engraved with scenes from The Courier's Tragedy, which had been burgled from the house by a rascally weekend-guest?"
"Eh?" muttered Fig. Did I mention that he was hard of hearing?
"Or," I continued, raising my voice, "When you solved the mystery of the poisoned pancake, a matter far too delicate to entrust to the local constabulary?"
It was at least twenty years since my father had last made use of Fig, and I wanted to test his memory before venting my plan.
"Of course I remember, you young chit!" he yelled, collapsing into a paroxysm of wheezing, "I was acting as a confidential agent for your father before you were born! God rot his soul!", he added, "He still owes me fourteen panes, eight soilings and sixpins!"
"You shall have your money, and much more besides," I said cheerily, handing him a fifty pane note. Then I told him what I wanted him to do. He gave me a look as if I were a stain on his trouser leg.
"Yes yes yes," I gabbled, "I know it was fifty seven years ago, and I know that the police forces of several countries failed to find either Underlip or any of the loot, and I know that you are over eighty years old, sour and rheumy, and I know that the chances of success are slight, but," I shouted triumphantly, "If anyone alive can find Mister Patch's album, you are that man, Fig!"
He swigged at the bottle of cough syrup which Brewster had delivered during my little tirade. He scowled at me, and then at the fifty pane note. I took another one from under my pillow.
"That's your first week's wages," I said: which did the trick, of course.
Six hundred panes later Fig had nothing to show for his labours except a series of thrilling adventures which could fill two or three paperbacks of the cloak-and-dagger sort. Believe me, I had to listen to Fig telling me every last detail of "the case", as he called it, during the weekly visits he made to collect his money and keep me up to date. I was interested to know how he was getting on, of course, but not that interested. I was lucky that my mother was demented, or she may have wondered at the amount of her money which I was ostensibly spending on my stamp collection.
The new year dawned, and I celebrated the first anniversary of my homely bedbound convalescence. Mister Patch and I had a little party, to which we invited Brewster, who was developing encouraging signs of gruffness and insubordination. Halfway through the second bottle of Cut-throat's Whetstone Malt, my mother flitted in to the room.
"Hello dear," she mumbled, "The postman delivered a letter for you last week. I've got it here somewhere." She rummaged distractedly in the gigantic portfolio of monument-plan drawings which she always carried. Half an hour passed before Brewster snatched it from her roughly and extricated a filthy envelope which bore the unmistakeable signs of having been chewed by a hound.
"Thank you, mama," I rapped, hoping she would vanish. Instead she took out a tape measure and wound it once around Patch's skull. He was too far gone by now to protest: to watch his dereliction was more than I could bear. Brewster, who I was beginning to like enormously, took immediate charge of the situation. Roaring like a maniac, he whipped the tape measure away, hustled my mother from the room, deposited her in some far-flung wing of the house, and locked and bolted my bedroom door upon his return, by which time I had torn open the envelope and read the terrifying message contained therein.
"Read this, Brewster," I said, in a very serious voice, "And tell me what you think."
"I can strangle chickens, jemmy the soundest lock, imitate birdsong, nail on a horseshoe, and preen my moustachios like a freeborn Italian," replied Brewster, "Reading, however, is not among my accomplishments."
"Oh," I said, "Forgive me, Brewster. Listen, then. The note reads as follows: Fig is bound & gagged in a dank cellar. We are toying with the idea of visiting unimaginable tortures upon him. Five thousand panes in used banknotes will give us pause. Deliver this sum in a sack to the foot of the tallest larch in Bodger's Spinney at four o clock in the morning on the tenth of January. Upon receipt, Fig will be found at the foot of the mightiest cedar in Bodger's Spinney exactly one hour later."
"Crikey!" said Brewster.
"Hm," I replied.
"Nodwabedoo pike poon," gurgled Mister Patch.
"Well, Brewster?" I asked.
"Leave it to me," he said.
And I did.
On the eleventh of January I received a further message from the fiends I had come to think of as "Fig's captors". I should point out that, with a few soilings promised him, the postman had been instructed to barge his way past my mother and to deliver all the mails directly to me. I had not only soilings ready for him, but a half-share in a bottle of Snapper's Delirium.
The second message was exactly the same as the first, except that after each mention of Fig was added & Brewster, is became are, and him was amended to them.
"What do you suggest I do now, postie?" I asked the postman.
"Leave it to me," he replied.
Touched as I was by this selfless offer, I was loth to receive a further message, with & postie inserted after Fig and Brewster.
"Tell me," I said, after patting the gallant postie on the head and refusing his offer with many thanks and a refilled tumbler, "Tell me, would you happen to have access to a stash of, say, five thousand panes in small denominations, so remarkably counterfeited that even the Gubernatorial Board of our National Bank would be hard-pressed to tell them from real ones, apply what tests they may?"
Long. Hard. These are the words to describe how the postman thought about my enquiry. While he was so engaged I rang for the latest Patch/Brewster figure, a long-limbed, angular, crestfallen fellow with a metal fitment on his skull. His name was Scrimgeour, and I asked him to fetch up from the cellars a crate of vintage Burmese Knife-thrower's Tipple. As he pranced off, the postman ceased his cogitations.
"I seem to recall seeing such an item hidden behind a filing cabinet in the postmaster's office," he said, "And I think I might be able to pinch it if you were to provide me with a dangerous and illegal firearm."
"Consider it done," I replied.
Three days later, Fig, Brewster, and the postman were apprehended boarding a ferry from Crapwing Pier. When searched, they were found in possession of a dangerous and illegal firearm, a blood-smeared postmaster's uniform, and four thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine panes in forged banknotes. Asked to stand bail for them, I had them summoned to my room, whence they were accompanied by a formidable giant of a man, heavily tattooed and bristling with weapons, who introduced himself as Captain Git of the Customs House.
"Any of you lot make a wrong move," he grunted, "I fell you with me axe, got it?"
They got it: even I was terrified as he ran his fingers lightly along the impossibly gleaming blade.
I had rehearsed my speech carefully. I wanted to know two things: why were they attempting to skip the country, and why had postie retained all but a pane of the counterfeit cash? At the same time, I wished to impress upon them the dreadful sense of betrayal I felt, that three men whom I had valued, trusted, and held in the highest esteem had acted so despicably, leaving me abandoned in my bed while they frolicked off to foreign shores, no doubt to wassail and carouse in dens of vice and sinks of sin. Thus I asked my questions in a tone so plaintive, so bereft, that I swear I saw a tear drop from Captain Git's gimlet eye.
There was no such reaction from the dastardly trio: they stared at me aghast. Then they all began to speak at once, making themselves quite unintelligible, until, noting my consternation, they elected Brewster as their spokesman. He spoke at length, and I will not bore you with a verbatim record. I had, it appeared, placed quite the wrong construction upon their behaviour. It took him twenty minutes to put me right, but nestling in Brewster's babble lurked five salient points: one, their captors were foreign, extremely stupid, and easily duped, so that it was child's play to convince them that the words "one pane" writ upon a banknote meant, in our language, "five thousand panes"; two, seconds before being captured, Fig had come upon an important clue in the search for Mister Patch's album, and had been on the point of following it up; three, the clue led to a toothpaste factory in the Port of Tongs; four, the quickest way to the Port of Tongs was via the Crapwing ferry; and five, both Brewster and the postman, brains bedizened with the glamour of detective work, had volunteered to join Fig on his mission. Oh, and six, how could I be such a numbskull as to doubt their almost painful integrity?
I am happy to tell you that I wept. When I had wept, I shoved enough of a bribe into Captain Git's paw to make him forget that a postmaster had been maimed or murdered, and shooed him away. Soon afterwards, Fig, Brewster and the postman hurtled off to Crapwing Pier to catch the evening ferry to the Port of Tongs.
* a novel by frank key *