The Brentford Chainstore Massacre (2 page)

And a great wind came out of the East, as it were a burning cloud consuming all before it. And the sons of Man did weep and wail and rend their garments, crying surely this is the breath of Pooley.

“Surely this is the breath of Pooley?” Jim Pooley reread the computer print-out. “How can this be?”

The obese genealogist leaned back in his creaking leather chair and clasped his plump fingers over an expanse of tweedy waistcoat. “How it can, I do not know,” said he. “But there you have it, for what it’s worth.”

Jim, now breathing into his cupped hands and sniffing mightily, said, “I might well have the twang of the brewer’s craft about the gums myself. But as to a burning cloud consuming all before it, that’s a little strong.”

“Hence all the weeping and wailing, I suppose.” The genealogist grinned.

“Are you sure it isn’t a misinterpretation or something? These ancient scribes were subject to the occasional slip-up, you know. A transposed P here, a wayward ey round the corner.”

Mr Compton-Cummings shook his bulbous head. “I’m sorry, Jim,” he said. “But it looks as though your forebears were notable only for their extreme halitosis. They put the poo in Pooley, as it were.”

Pooley groaned. “And this vile smear upon my ancestors you propose to publish in your book, Brentford: A Study of its People and History?”

“It would be folly to leave it out.”

Jim rose from his chair, leaned across the paper-crowded desk, knotted a fist and displayed it beneath the snubby nose of Mr Compton-Cummings. “It would be a far greater folly to leave it in,” he suggested.

Mr Compton-Cummings put a thin smile upon his fat face. He was a Kent Compton-Cummings and could trace his own ancestry back to the Battle of Agincourt. “I would strongly advise against a course of violence, Mr Pooley,” he said softly. “For it is my duty to warn you that I am an exponent of Dimac, the deadliest form of martial art known to mankind. With a single finger I could disfigure and disable you.”

Jim’s fist hovered in the air. A shaft of sunlight angling down through the Georgian casement of the genealogist’s elegant office made it momentarily a thing of fragile beauty. Almost porcelain, it seemed. Hardly a weapon of terror.

Jim chewed upon his bottom lip. “Sir, you wind me up,” said he.

“I never do,” the other replied. “Schooled by no less a man than the now legendary Count Dante himself, inventor of the Poison Hand technique. Perhaps you know of it.”

Jim did. “I don’t,” he said.

“To maim and mutilate with little more than a fingertip’s pressure. It is banned now under the Geneva Convention, I believe.”

Jim’s fist unfurled.

“Good man.” The fat one winked. “Reseat yourself. I’ll call for tea and crumpets.”

Jim sat down. “It’s just not fair,” he said.

“We cannot choose our parents, nor they theirs. Such is the way of the world.” Mr Compton-Cummings strained to rise from his chair and made good upon the third attempt. To the sound of considerable wheezing and the creak of floorboards, he manoeuvred his ponderous bulk to the door and coughed out a request for tea to a secretary who sat beyond, painting her toenails with Tipp-Ex.

Pooley’s unfurled hand strayed towards a heavy onyx ashbowl. A single blow to the back of the head and a sworn testimony on his own part that the fat man had merely tripped and fallen were all that would be required. But the obscene thought passed on at the moment of its birth. Jim was not a man of violence, and certainly not a murderer. He was just plain old Jim Pooley, bachelor of the parish of Brentford, man of the turf and lounger at the bar counter of the Flying Swan.

He had hoped so much that he might have been more. That perhaps somewhere, way back down the ancestral trail, there might have been one noble Pooley, who had achieved great ends, performed mighty deeds, written the poetry of passion…

Or left an unclaimed legacy!

But no.

Jim had been shafted again.

Not, as was usually the case, by the quirks of cruel fate, or the calumny of strangers, but by one of his own tribe, and a long-dead one to boot. It really wasn’t fair.

Mr Compton-Cummings ladled himself back into his reinforced chair and smiled once more upon Jim, who leaned forward.

“Listen,” he said. “What if, for a small remuneration, you were to change the name in the manuscript?”

“Change the name?” The genealogist puffed out his cheeks.

Jim nodded enthusiastically. “To, say…” He plucked, as if from the air, the name of his closest friend. “John Omally,” he said.

“John Omally?”

“Certainly. I’ve often heard John complain about how dull his forebears were. This kind of notoriety would be right up his street.”

Mr Compton-Cummings raised an eyebrow. “But that would be to hoodwink and deceive the common man.”

“It is the lot of the common man to be hoodwinked and deceived,” said Jim. “Believe me, I speak from long experience.”

“Out of the question. I have my reputation to think of.”

“And I mine, such as it is. Listen, if this gets out I will be the laughing stock of the borough.”

“I sympathize, of course. But it is my bounden duty as scholar, researcher, writer and gentleman to do all within my power to ensure absolute accuracy in the book I am compiling. Such is the standard I have set for myself – a standard which, were you to view it from a more objective viewpoint, you would find admirable and worthy of emulation.”

“I doubt that,” said Jim, making a grumpy face.

Mr Compton-Cummings turned up his pink palms.

“What more can I say? After all, it was you who answered my advertisement in the Brentford Mercury for local people, who felt that they might have had ancestors who played a part in the making of this fine town, to come forward and have their ancestry traced, for free. You who plied me with talk of blue blood coursing through your veins. You who swore upon your mother’s life that it was a Pooley who had won the land upon which Brentford now stands in an I-spy-with-my-little-eye competition with Richard the Lionheart. You…”

“Enough,” cried Jim, waving his hands. “My motives were entirely altruistic.”

“Then we are kindred spirits.”

Jim once more took up the computer print-out and perused its dismal details. Back they went, an unbroken chain of Pooleys, marching through time. Well, hardly marching, slouching was more like it, with their heads down, probably to mask their evil breath. Peons and peasants, sanitary engineers and shovellers of sh…

“Ah, here’s the tea,” said Mr Compton-Cummings.

The secretary held Jim’s towards him at arm’s length. Her face was turned away.

“Thanks very much,” said Jim.

“Look on the bright side,” smiled the genealogist, sipping at his Earl Grey. “My book will be a very expensive affair, pandering to an elite minority. The scholastic fraternity, Fellows of the Royal Society, the intelligentsia. Hardly the class of folk to be found flinging darts in the saloon bar of the Flying Swan. The chances are that your rowdy drinking chums will never even see a copy, let alone purchase and read it. The secret of your malodorous predecessor will most likely remain just that.”

Jim sipped at his own tea. The cup smelled strongly of Dettol. Mr Compton-Cummings was probably right. John Omally rarely read anything heavier than the Morris Minor Handbook. Archroy was a Zane Grey man and Neville the part-time barman subscribed to SFX Magazine; Old Pete stuck to the People’s Friend and Norman of the corner shop to the Meccano Modeller. Though wise words were often spoken within the Flying Swan, those words derived not from books but rather from personal insight gained through the observation and intuitive understanding of natural lore. He was safe. Of course he was.

“Well, thus and so,” said Jim. “You are no doubt right, I’m sure.”

The genealogist offered Pooley one fat smile for luck, the two shook hands and Jim took his leave.

As he trudged up Moby Dick Terrace towards the Ealing Road and the Flying Swan, Jim sighed a great deal inwardly, but put his best foot forward. So what if he hadn’t sprung from noble stock? So what if he came from a long line of nobodies? So what if the only Pooley who had merited more than a statutory birth, occupation and death mention in the parish records had been some kind of brimstone-breathing ogre? So what indeed! Jim, though often daunted and done down, was an optimist ever. He rarely opened his eyes upon a new day without a sense of wonder and excitement. Certainly, on more than a few occasions, those eyes were somewhat bleary and bloodshot and the brain behind them still blurred from drink, but life was life and life was now. And Jim lived his life to the fullest he could manage.

Jim breathed in the healthy Brentford air, scented with honeysuckle, jasmine blossom and sweet pea. The sky was blue as a blue could do and the sun beamed down its blessings. Alive was a wonderful thing to be on such a day as this. Jim pulled back his shoulders, thrust out his chest, put a pace into his stride and found a tune to whistle. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world of Brentford.

Pooley had a fair old skip on by the time he reached the Flying Swan. He put his hand to the saloon bar door and pushed it open, to find himself confronted by a most bizarre spectacle.

Old Pete’s half-terrier, Chips, lay upon its back in the centre of the floor, a paw drawn across its canine snout. It appeared to be shaking with mirth. At the bar counter, several customers had handkerchiefs tied cowboy-bandit fashion about their faces. Two old fellas from the estate sat at their domino table holding their noses and fanning their beer, while John Omally stood with his arms folded and a Vick inhaler stuffed up each of his nostrils.

Neville the part-time barman stuck his head up from beneath the counter. He was wearing a gas mask. “Wotcha, stinker,” he said in a muffled tone. “Just breezed in from the East?”

And then the Swan’s patrons collapsed in helpless laughter.

Pooley stood, slack-jawed and shaking, slowly clenching and unclenching his fists. “Compton-Cummings,” he said in a cold and deadly voice.

“Got him in one,” declared Neville, removing his gas mask and mopping tears of laughter from his eyes. “He phoned here five minutes ago, plugging his latest book. Thought we’d all be keen to buy a copy.”

Jim Pooley left the Flying Swan and went home to find his old school cricket bat.

The judge, in his final summing up of the case, described the attack as vicious and cold-blooded. He said that for all his long years at the bar, he could not recall an incident of similar barbarity. He drew the jury’s attention once more to the horrific photographs taken by the police scene-of-crime photographer, which showed in gory detail the full extent of the victim’s injuries. He displayed the broken blood-stained cricket bat and spoke of the long drop from the second-floor window to the pavement below.

He spoke of escalating violence, the influence of television, the need to be firm (but fair), the need to see justice well and truly done and the need to clear the streets of inhuman monsters and make them safe for dear little white-haired old ladies to walk upon.

And then he added that in his personal opinion the attack was totally justified and dismissed the case out of hand. He also dismissed Mr Pooley’s claim for one million pounds’ compensation. Mr Pooley, he said, had got the hiding he deserved.

“As a practitioner of Dimac myself,” the judge said, “and a fellow Freemason in the same lodge as Mr Compton-Cummings, I would have dealt with you far more severely.”

Bang went the gavel onto the block, the court cleared and Jim was left alone in his wheelchair.

At a little after lunchtime closing John Omally arrived to push him home. “Look on the bright side, Jim,” he said. “At least you were on legal aid.”

Months passed, bruises healed and bones knitted themselves back together. Out of respect for the punishment Jim had taken, the patrons of the Flying Swan made no further reference to winds from the East. And after the brief excitement of the court case, the borough of Brentford settled itself down to do what it did best. Nothing. With style.

It was almost a year to the day of Jim’s beating that a large brown envelope tumbled through his letter box and came to rest upon a welcome mat that had long worn out its welcome. Jim plucked the item up and perused it with interest. He hadn’t ordered anything and it wasn’t his birthday. A present from a well-wisher? An admirer? Ever the optimist, Jim took his treasure into the kitchenette, placed it upon the stained Formica worktop and worried it with the carving knife. Away came the wrappings and out came the book.

The book!

Brentford: A Study of its People and History.

Jim stared at it in disbelief. Compton-Cummings had actually had the bare-faced brutality to send him a copy. It beggared all belief.

“You bastard” Jim snatched up the book and stared it in the glossy cover. “I just don’t believe this.” He put a foot to the pedal-bin pedal and raised the lid. A noxious stench rose from within, possibly even as noxious as the infamous, and now publicly chronicled, “breath of Pooley”. Jim released the pedal and fanned his nose with the book. “I’ve been meaning to empty you,” he told the bin. He carried the book over to the cooker. “But you’re gonna burn!”

It had been a slow month financially for Jim. The gas had been disconnected.

Jim carried the book to the sink. “Drown, then,” he said, then shook his head. Drown a book? He sat down at the kitchen table and thumbed the pages. They fell one upon another with the silky flow of an old school Bible. Jim sighed once more and with weary resignation flicked through the index for P.

His finger travelled down the page.

Plague Origin of Black Death traced to Brentford.

Planetary Alignments Astrology invented here.

Plasma Vortex Engine Invented here.

Plastic Ditto.

Platform Tickets World’s largest collection housed in museum.

Pooley’s finger travelled further down.

Plot Guy Fawkes’s confession fingers Brentonian.

Pocahontas Born here.

“Eh?” said Pooley.

Pomegranate Farming Doomed attempt by local man.

Poor House Location of.

Pooley’s finger went up, then down again. “I’m not here,” he said with some elation. “He’s left me out. He’s a decent fellow after all. Well, what about that? He sent me a free copy just to show there were no hard feelings about taking him to court for beating the life out of me. What a gent! I wonder if he signed it.” Jim flicked forward. “No, he didn’t. But I think he should. I’ll go round there now, I’ve nothing else on.”

And so saying, he did.

For the reader who, now thoroughly won over by Jim’s personality, is eager for a description of the man, let it be said that Jim Pooley looked the way he always has looked. Except when he was younger, of course.

A man of average height and average weight, or just a tad above the one and underneath the other. A well-constructed face, a trifle gaunt at times; a shock of hair. Well, not a shock. A kindly countenance. His most distinctive feature, the one that singled him out from all the rest, was of course his

“Golly,” said Jim. “Whatever is going on here?”

He had reached Golden Square, a byway leading from the historic Butts Estate. A Georgian triumph of mellow rosy brick, once home to the wealthy burghers of the borough, now offices for solicitors and other folk in “the professions”.

Jim stopped short and stared. There was an ambulance drawn up in front of the offices of Mr Compton-Cummings. His door was open and out of it a number of men in paramedic uniforms were struggling beneath the weight of something spread across two stretchers. Something covered by a sheet.

Jim hastened forward. The genealogist’s secretary, the one who had handed Pooley the teacup, stood on the pavement sobbing into a handkerchief. A crowd was beginning to gather. Jim pushed his way into it.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Robbery,” said somebody. “Bloke shot dead.”

“He was never shot,” said somebody else. “Axed, he was.”

“Garrotted,” said yet another somebody. “Head right off.”

“Talk sense,” said Jim.

“Some big fat fellow’s died,” said a lady in a straw hat. “Myocardial collapse, probably. It’s always your heart that gives out if you’re overweight. I used to be eighteen stone, me, but I went on a diet, nothing but roughage. I…”

“Excuse me,” said Jim, pushing past. He caught the arm of the weeping secretary. “Is it Mr Compton-Cummings?” he asked.

The secretary turned her red-rimmed eyes up to Jim. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, between sobs. “I remember you.”

“Is it him?”

The secretary’s head bobbed up and down. “He had a heart attack, just like the lady said.”

“Told you,” said the straw-hatter.

“And he’s dead?”

“I tried to, you know, the kiss of life, but he…” The secretary sank once more into tears. Jim put a kind arm about her shoulder. It was a pretty shoulder. Well formed. Actually, all of her was well formed. The secretary was a fine-looking young woman, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by Jim. “Come inside and sit down,” he told her.

The paramedics, now aided by several members of the crowd who were eager to get in on the action, were forcing the lifeless sheet-shrouded corpse of Mr Compton-Cummings into the back of the ambulance.

Jim led the secretary up the steps and through the front door. In the outer office Jim sat the secretary down in her chair. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I came here to thank him for sending me a copy of his book, and for leaving the bit about me out of it.” Jim placed the book upon the secretary’s desk. Unsigned it would always remain.

“He felt bad about that,” sniffed the secretary. “And about beating you up. It played on his mind. He was a good man, I liked him a lot.”

“I’m sorry. Can I get you a cup of tea, or something?”

“Thanks.” The secretary blew her nose. “The machine’s over there.”

Pooley applied himself to the task of dispensing tea. He’d never been very good with machines. There was a knack to technology which Jim did not possess. He held a paper cup beneath a little spout and pressed a button. Boiling water struck him at trouser-fly-level.

“It does that sometimes,” sniffed the secretary.

Eyes starting from his head and mouth wide in silent scream, Jim hobbled about the office, fanning at himself with one hand while holding his steaming trousers away from his seared groin region with the other.

“I’ll make my own then,” said the secretary. “How do you like yours? Two lumps?”

Jim hobbled, flapped and held out his trousers.

“It was horrible,” said the secretary, handing Jim a paper cup.

“It still is,” croaked Jim.

“No, Mr Compton-Cummings, dropping down dead like that.”

“Oh yes. It must have been.”

“One moment, big jolly bear of a man with his trousers round his ankles, the next…”

“Hang about,” said Jim. “You don’t mean that you and he were…”

“Well, of course we were. It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but…”

“We always do it on Tuesdays.”

“What? You and him? I mean, well, you’re so… and he was… well, I mean.”

“A Mason,” said the secretary.

“Eh?”

“A Freemason. I always helped him dress for the lodge meeting on Tuesdays. Here, you weren’t suggesting…”

“Perish the thought,” said Jim, crossing his heart with his cup-holding hand and sending tea all over his shirt. “Oh, damn.”

“You’re very clumsy, aren’t you?”

“I try not to be.” Jim plucked at his shirt and shook his head. “So he died while he was putting on his Masonic regalia.”

“It was the way he would have wanted to go.”

“Was it?”

“Well, no, I suppose not really. But you can’t choose how you die, can you? It’s like you can’t choose your parents. No offence meant.”

“None taken,” said Jim. “So he just dropped down dead while you were helping him on with his apron and whatnots.”

“I never touched his whatnots.”

Jim looked the secretary up and down. She was a beautiful young woman, but she was clearly not for him. Jim had never harboured a love for the toilet gag or the double entendre. The entire Carry On canon left him cold. Imagine having a relationship with a woman who could turn anything you said into a willy reference. Nightmare.

“So,” said Jim, once more and slowly. “You think that the exertion of putting on his Masonic vestments caused him to have a heart attack?”

“Well, it was either that or the blow job.”