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CHAPTER THREE

 

 


Chapter Three Spreading the Linctus at Daybreak

 

 

Dash raced up the stairs and, with one bound, vaulted the candy stripe tape holding the prying costers at bay. Tube had ceased his kindly ribbing of the Stout Oak and was not far behind.


Once at the casement, and pressed shoulder to shoulder the two Detectives looked out across the Thames basin and reflected on the great uncertainties. The incandescence of the Radcliff Highway lights flickered feverishly like a demented fairy procession where the fairies had all fallen over.


Tube produced his commonplace book from an inner pocket of his travelling coat.

“In such Beauty, we find terror. In Hope, the despair ….”

Dash nodded in agreement with Pascal’s poignant Thought but with Anglo-Saxon practicality was already making a precise sketch of the study of Number 45, Megilp Square,


"the escritoir (with fresh ormulu in cedar and jade);


the upright grand (a Bodfish with heavy pedal action);


the mantles


the cheap figurines (terminal herms and putti on strings);


the passage to the toilet (marked with an enamel comic sign)


the casement shutters (Liberty’s with pierced heart motif clotted to the sill.


the ornate walnut holder for magazines (the Radio Times, and a knitting patterns for a tank top)


the Roll Top desk (Indian Army with green baize curtaining the privates);


the Dress uniform on an ebony stand (Bum Freezer of the Fifteenth Fighting Temeraires),


the untuned radio (a Murphy Mungo with exterior aerial disguised as a firescreen)


complementary firedogs ( two youths blowing kisses across the embers) ;


the corpse (male, late fifties, seated with crossed legs, headless for several hours)


the trajectory of its working juices (because of the incline of the floors and the provision of various conduits, leading to the casement and beyond into the night descending from the overhang of the first floor to the Square beneath where a small mutt lapped undisturbed....."


These houses in the Square had since the 1530’s been occupied by the Foremen in the Leather Trade ( the Wazzas mentioned by Thackeray in the first chapter of The Esmonds). On hot afternoons, the old Wazza essences seemed to return imperceptibly to the noses of the tourists. In latter days, the indigent, the Foreign Students and the Down at Heel had colonised the properties, prepared to overlook their meaness of accommodation and inadequate staircases. Only the improvement in urban mass travel permitted by the Overhead Shaker had caused the properties around the Square to take on a new attraction.

The Nice Old Gentleman (NOG) was typical of the single retired minor bank official, superintendant of minerals, and successful seedsmen who had a little put away who discovered in the pitted sooty space of the Square, an affordable rented accommodation that could be presented to friends as ‘comfortable’ and ‘genteel’. . A cursory survey of the box room and locked cabinets demonstrated clearly to Dash and Oak that this was no ordinary Gentleman, and neither, judging by the apparatus discovered (of which more anon) did he conform with what we associate with the word ‘Nice”. Dolly with her tray of slightly tasteless grapefruit had, Dash judged, made a marvellous escape from his clutches.
Dash explained to Tube that the NOG had been grooming her for inclusion in his deviant practices, a kind word here, a small coin there, a simple request for help, a recourse to fantasy


“Now just what do you think this is for? Dolly… dear?”


“Lawks, Mister Gee – you wouldn’t stir yer tea, with it, would you now!!”

 

“While you are waiting, just try this on for size… you are about the same build as my Daughter, Trixie.”


The sequence is a familiar one to all of you who take an interest in such matters. Tube again fingered his revere at the mention of grooming but, much to Oak’s secret satisfaction, Dash made it clear it had no overtones of sartorial standards.


“Grooming, mon inspecteur…” said Oak with not a little satisfaction.

“Faites vos jeux!” came Tube’s good humoured riposte.



The palsied grasp of Malignant Evil, bottled and compressed by the Towering Genius of Crime, the Emperor of Perpetual Evisceration… Just when I thought…” his voice trailed off in a distant wistful whisper.


“Fair turned my stomach, Boss, fair turned me over.” Oak swept his pate with a despairing gesture that spoke a volume of his deadliest dealings in this World. “Missus Oak came over unpleasantly as well, may I add. And it didn’t do much for the Aunt on the settle.”


“What was that, Inspector?” Said Bernard who seemed to occupy the whole doorway with his square shoulders and flat head, only his feet projecting over the casement.


“Nothing, my artless proletarian… merely rumination.”


Bernard smiled innocently with his canary cradled in an oily palm. “Little Flitty knows no wrong, he chips away at the millet, and shites as he pleases.”


Tube looked meaningfully at Oak, and shrugged his narrow aristocratic shoulders.


His Tipless Sobranie was held like a delicate flower, unlit between his slim steady fingers.

“Have one of mine, Inspector.”

Tube ignored the offer and once more held the absorbent police pad under the sperm oil lamp.

“ Dastardly. Utterly dastardly and probably more.It’s not even blood. He was not even allowed that dignity. If the leaching of blood can indeed be termed a dignity.”
Bernard scratched his head, swayed twice , and Oak was forced to hold him erect as he struggled to absorb the new and tumultuous revelation. “Not blood? Not blood? What can this mean?” He was delighted only in that Dolly was quite beyond it all, rocking childishly in her stays before the fire, cocoa in mug, being cosseted.


“He was a delicious old codger. Nobody rounds here knew his name.” Bernard grinned sheepishly. “We’s a called him Frog Spawn on account of his complexion.” Bernard shook his head at their irreverence in the face of breeding and a private income. “ Every Tuesday night availed himself of Doll’s grapefruit or figs. Tipped a tuppence to the urchins whenever he encountered their outstretched needs. Gave me his old papers and a tot on a Bank Holiday.”


Tube knew that the garish cavalcade of Manifest Evil had slowly unwound itself again into his life. That feverish infection the Cabinet belived had been extinguished was now among them once more. There, behind the Moon. There down in the scum of the Battersea Butts and beyond.


Dastardliness stalked the fields and coppices of old London.


Ghastliness took its hand and they ground the defences of the decent to dust.
Fantomas was here in the vicinity..he could be smelt in the sugary almond paste and sense of ineffable gloom.


Twas is if Bernard had heard his unspoken thoughts, His normal pallor was substantially peppered with red spots, and his etes stood wide open so it was possible to see the sockets. His voice was stuck on the single note and little Flitty lay broken in his vast grasp, beak one way, little yellow claws the other.


“Oak, Oak. “ Tube seized Bernard by his grasp and tried to break the smothering clutch on little Flitty. No one of such sensibility was going to shift the vice like hold on the fragmented canary.

One severed leg dropped into his top pocket.


“AAAAAGH!” shouted Bernard, looking back into the Chamber of Death.

Oak was slow to appreciate the cause of such mortification but Tube already had assembled his camera on a police issue 360 degree tripod.


The headless corpse seated at the extensive dining table, his jacket buttons deliberately inserted in the fretwork of the Chippendale chair , with hands protruding from the folds was slowly writing with a three foot quill and red ink on the perfectly clean table cloth.