The Brightonomicon (Brentford Book 8) (21 page)

And I remember the thunder of an awesome broadside burst of cannon.

And the chaos. And the smoke and flame.

Was it luck, or was it judgement? Was it skill?

I am informed that it was chain-shot, two twelve-pound balls
linked by six feet of chain. Very popular on the
Victory,
was chain-shot. Excellent for taking down the masts of an enemy man o’ war.

It certainly took down Count Otto. And I suppose it was the explosion that took down most of the ballroom. And being constructed mostly of wood, the resultant inferno was hardly unexpected.

Though, as Mr Rune agreed, it was regrettable.

Especially as the penny arcade went with it, along with all those gambling machines.

Apparently, Mr Rune had flung me down into a moored longboat, where I had been caught by a contingent of Moulsecoomb pirates.

Apparently they had not risked catching Mr Rune, fearing for the safety of their longboat.

Mr Rune and I drank rum in the cabin of Captain Bartholomew Moulsecoomb, the Bog Troll Buccaneer. Mr Rune thanked the captain for sailing the galleon out at his request and peppering the pier with cannonballs when signalled to do so.

He had harsh words to say, however, regarding the crew of the longboat.

The Woodingdean Chameleon

PART I

‘Who is your favourite fictional detective?’ Hugo Rune asked me one morning in July as we sat taking in our breakfast.

I use the expression ‘taking in our breakfast’ because upon this morning it was truly something to behold.

Our regular cook, Mrs Rook, who normally provided our morning repast, had recently absconded with the silver cutlery and cruet set,
leaving Mr Rune a bitter note that spoke of‘drunkenness and cruelty’ and the failure to furnish her with wages.

Hugo Rune had therefore been forced to take on a new breakfast cook, and this person had appeared the previous day in the comely shape of Jade, a Taiwanese mail-order bride whom Mr Rune had somehow managed to acquire on a three-month free-trial sale-or-return kind of caper. She was presently serving us as maid – Jade the maid, I suppose. Whether Mr Rune intended to engage her skills in the bedroom, I know not, for it would have been indiscreet of me to have enquired. But as to her skills with the skillet, these we were presently taking in, because they were prodigious.

I peeped over the Jenga-style stack of sausages that rose from my plate and said, ‘Pardon?’ to Mr Rune.

‘Who is your favourite fictional detective?’ the All-Knowing One enquired of me again, which aroused certain doubts in me regarding his all-knowingness.

‘Ah,’ said I, and I rummaged in the pocket of the new grey linen suit that had also lately arrived through mail order and drew out a paperback book. Upon its cover was the lurid depiction of a scantily clad blonde lying prone in an alleyway, whilst a brooding figure in fedora and trenchcoat stood above her in the shadows. The title of the book was:

DEAD DAMES DON’T DANCE

A Lazlo Woodbine Thriller

The author of the book was a chap named P. P. Penrose.

‘Lazlo Woodbine,’ I said to Mr Rune and I tossed the book in his direction. He would probably have caught it had his vision not been obscured by a tower of toast.

‘Lazlo
who?’
he asked, retrieving the book from the carpet.

‘Woodbine,’ I said. ‘Some call him Laz. He was a nineteen-fifties American-genre private eye, the greatest of them all. He wore a trenchcoat and a fedora and always carried his trusty Smith and Wesson. And he only ever worked four locations, the maximum he considered that a genuine private eye should work: his seedy office, where clients came to call; a bar, where he “chewed the fat with the fat boy barman” and talked the now legendary toot, picked up leads and inevitably ran into the “dame that done him wrong”; an alleyway,
where he got into sticky life-threatening situations; and a rooftop, where he had his final confrontation with the villain, who always took the big plunge to oblivion in the final chapter. Oh yes, and all this he did strictly in
the first person.’

‘Sounds positively appalling,’ Mr Rune observed, flicking through the pages of the book.

‘Not a bit of it,’ I said, attacking my sausages. ‘With Woodbine you can always expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a trail of corpses, no small degree of name mispronunciation and enough trenchcoat humour and ludicrous catchphrases to carry you through a month of rainy Thursdays.’

‘Gratuitous sex,’ said Mr Rune, thoughtfully, and he pocketed my book.

‘Why do you ask?’ I asked.

‘Because I have to take a little trip. I will be away for a few days and I am going to leave the practice in your capable hands.’

‘The practice?’ I queried.

‘The offices of Hugo Rune, the World’s Foremost Metaphysical Detective, as is engraved upon the brass plaque on the front door below.’

‘I fear that Mrs Rook absconded with your brass plaque also,’ I said, with some regret. ‘But I am not
exactly
certain of what you are asking me to do.’

‘Come,’ said Mr Rune, and he beckoned. I rose, with difficulty due to the tightness of my stomach, and joined him before his big framed map of Brighton, the one on which the figures of the Brighton Zodiac, the Brightonomicon, were brightly outlined over streets and roads and culs-de-sac and so forth.

‘We have so far solved four cases,’ said Mr Rune.

‘You
have solved them,’ I said, ‘if solved be the word. And you have always done so through possessing prior knowledge that was unknown to myself.’

‘And so I am giving you the opportunity to prove yourself, as it were.’

‘I am
not
a detective,’ I said.

‘But you’d like to be.’

‘Well, actually I would,’ I said. ‘I have certainly enjoyed myself
during the time I have spent with you, although it has thus far been fraught with peril and the wages are nothing to write home about, even if I knew where my home was. Although if I did, I would still have nothing to write home about regarding wages.’

‘I think you have all the makings of a truly great detective,’ said Mr Rune, although I have a feeling that he said it to divert my conversation away from the subject of my wages.

‘A truly great detective, eh?’ said I, taking this remark at face value, because I liked the way that it smiled upon me.

‘And so the next case is yours.’

‘And the next case is … ?’

‘Pick one of the figures of the Zodiac. Go ahead, point one out.’

‘Any one?’

‘Other than those that we have already dealt with.’

‘Naturally.’ As this was clearly ludicrous, I pointed to a figure at random. ‘That one,’ I said, ‘the one that looks like a banana with the mumps.’

‘The Woodingdean Chameleon,’ said Mr Rune. ‘A very bold choice. Do you truly feel up to the challenge?’

I looked up at him. ‘You are having a bubble,’ said I.

‘A bubble?’ said the Mumbo Gumshoe.

‘A bubble bath. You are having a laugh.’

‘I can assure you, this is no laughing matter.’

‘But there is no case,’ I said. ‘Just because I pick out a figure at random … I mean, through considered choice … that does not mean that there is a case to solve. That is not the way things work.’

‘It’s the way
I
do business,’ said Mr Rune. ‘You chose correctly. The case will come to you.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I could have chosen any figure on the Zodiac.’

‘I think not,’ said Hugo Rune.

‘Think
so,’ said I.

‘Not,’ said Hugo Rune and he opened his hand and presented me with the single badge that he held in it.

And on that badge was printed something that left me in no doubt as to the veracity of his words.

*

Hugo Rune packed a pigskin valise, instructed me to keep my ‘grubby mitts’ off Jade, waved me his farewells with his stout stick, marched downstairs and out of the front door and hailed for himself a cab.

The driver’s name, Mr Rune mentioned later, was Colin, and he was a staunch supporter of a football team called West Bromwich Albion, to which side he pledged a filial affiliation that no man could put asunder, even should this man have Cerberus, the many-headed canine guardian of the underworld, on a chain with him and he, Colin, backed into a corner. Colin may well have held to certain metaphysical beliefs that he was more than willing to share with his fare. As to whether he did, and what the eventual outcome of this would have been when it was Mr Rune who occupied the rear seats of his cab, I cannot say with any degree of precision because Mr Rune never told me. I would be prepared to chance my arm at a guess, though.

I sat myself down in Mr Rune’s favourite armchair and loosened the lower buttons of my waistcoat. I pondered momentarily whether Jade would indeed be prepared to make herself sexually available to another, younger, potential spouse, but I felt somewhat bloated and not quite up to the effort. And as I sat and drummed my fingers and whistled a ditty, it did cross my mind that I really did fancy trying my hand at a bit of detective work. Mr Rune would be really impressed if he returned to discover that I had cracked the Curious Case of the Woodingdean Chameleon.

Of course, there would have to
be
such a case.

And this I considered unlikely.

I stroked the badge that now adorned my lapel. Producing it had probably been sleight of hand – Paul Daniels did that sort of thing all the time, pushing Debbie Magee through a letterbox, swallowing gerbils and making Tower Bridge disappear. Had I not read somewhere that it was Paul Daniels who had started the war in Vietnam to win a bet with David Copperfield?

But all that aside, I really did fancy trying my hand at a bit of the old crime detection. Do it the way Laz had done it, back in the fifties, when a man had to do what a man had to do. And walk those mean streets alone. And, I thought,
And!
There was a trenchcoat
and
a
fedora hanging in the wardrobe of my bedroom.
And
I was pretty sure that they were my size. In fact, I
knew
that they were my size because I had tried them on more than once and paced up and down in front of the wardrobe mirror, ‘making shapes’ and being Laz.

Because, to coin a phrase that I would not normally use, gimme a break here, I
was
a teenager!

I made off to the wardrobe and returned looking hot to trot. The trenchcoat’s belt was somewhat tight across my swollen belly, but I would soon work off the bulge with some fist-fightin’, pistol-totin’, dame-diddlin’ big-Dick action. Private Dick, of course, if you know what I mean, and I am sure that you do.

I struck a pose beside the window and awaited the arrival of the client who would soon appear, most likely in a state of extreme distress and in the shape of a beautiful dame, to beg me to take on a case.

At eleven of the morning clock, and fed up with waiting, I took myself next door to Fangio’s bar, which today was called The Laughing Cadaver.

Which I thought most appropriate.

I straightened my shoulders, cocked my fedora to that angle that is known as rakish, straightened the hem of my trenchcoat and entered the bar in
the first person,
in the guise and persona of Lazlo Woodbine, the world’s greatest nineteen-fifties American-genre detective.

The lounge was long and low and lost in a dream that was forever yesterday. The chrome shone like oil beads on a Chevy’s tail fin and the guy who stood behind the counter copped me a glance like he was whistling ‘Dixie’ through the wrong end of a clarinet. I crossed the bar with more aplomb than a pagan pedal-pusher at a podophiliac’s picnic and acquainted myself with my favourite barstool.

‘A bottle of Bud and a hot pastrami on rye,’ I told Fangio the fat boy barman.

‘Good evening, sir,’ said Fangio, adjusting a wig of elaborate confection.

‘Good evening?’ said I. ‘But it is morning.’

‘It might be for you, sir,’ said the wearer of the wig, ‘but not for me – I have become a Dyslectic.’