The Brightonomicon

by Robert Rankin

  By me. The detective.

  Well, if he was there, I could not see him. And so I lounged in the ‘alleyway’ and enjoyed the closing moments of the match. The scores were even up on the big board – six hundred and sixty-five points each. If Father Ernetti could not whack his bollock through the last Hoop of McVenus before the ref blew his whistle, there was every chance of it going into extra time, possibly even ending in a penalty hoopout.

  I glanced up once more to the big scoreboard. The final seconds were ticking away upon the big digital clock. It was an early precursor of those liquid-crystal-display jobbies that were soon to become all the rage. Its internal workings involved a small boy with a skill for counting seconds and a deft hand for slotting up a numbered card.

  Thirty seconds left of the match time.

  And a little twinkle.

  I did the old double-take, as Laz himself would probably have done, but in a more prosaic manner. What was that little twinkle? I delved into my trenchcoat and brought out Mr Rune’s brass telescope, the one through which he had viewed Captain Bartholomew Moulsecoomb’s pirate galleon during the Lansdowne Lioness adventure. I had taken quite a shine to it, and when the opportunity had presented itself for me to acquire it for my own professional use, I had taken up this presented opportunity with gusto.

  I put the telescope to my eye and did focusings. And there I spied, upon the rooftop up above the big scoreboard, a crouching figure clad in black and peering through a telescopic sight.

  A telescopic sight that was mounted upon a very long rifle indeed.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said to none other than myself. ‘A sniper.’ And I angled my spyglass from his rifle to the pitch. He was aiming for Father Ernetti.

  And I confess that at that moment, I did not know what to do. Cause a distraction? Run on to the pitch? I could rip off all my clothes and streak. Streaking was all the rage nowadays. Folk did it all the time, at football grounds and race meetings, in supermarkets, in cinemas (although no one noticed these streakers much).

  Lazlo Woodbine never streaked, I told myself, although he did once take off all his clothes in The Blonde in the Burberry Body Bag (A Lazlo Woodbine Thriller). But that had been to display his regimental tattoo to a dame that inevitably done him wrong.

  But I was in serious trouble here. My air pistol did not have the range or the requisite ballistic capabilities to bring down a sniper.

  And I did not know how to fly a Mustang.

  And my chances of ever starring in a Broadway musical were, to say the least, remote.

  So I would have to come up with something else.

  Or in this case, it seemed, I would not, because the ref blew his whistle and the entire crowd in the stadium rose to its collective feet and cast its collective headwear into the air. Which somewhat obscured the sniper’s view and allowed the good Father Ernetti to leave the field of play unshot and head off to the changing rooms. Probably for oranges, a pep talk from his manager and a Hail Mary Haka before engaging in extra time.

  Which gave me some extra time.

  I headed off up the ‘alleyway’ in search of a stairway or something.

  Looking back on all this now, I probably would have been better going directly to Father Ernetti’s changing room and informing him that there was a rooftop sniper intending to ‘take him out’. But I figured (well, in retrospect, I suppose it must have been what I figured at the time) that it was not the way that Laz did business.

  Laz always went for the final rooftop confrontation.

  And it never failed him once. In one hundred and thirty-two best-selling thrillers.

  I steeled myself to do what must be done, and fell into genre to do it.

  The alleyway was colder than the heart of an errant wife.

  My footsteps echoed hollow as a hooker’s moan of passion.

  But a man must do what a man must do to save another’s life.

  And a stylish trenchcoat’s never out of fashion.

  ‘No,’ I said to myself, with more snafu than a kamikaze catamite at a coprophiliacs’ convention. ‘This is not the time for poetry. This is time for action.’

  And I found myself in the stadium’s bar, which was filling up with thirsty sports fans. I elbowed my way between two who did not look particularly psychotic and called out to the barman.

  ‘Which way to the scoreboard?’ I called. ‘I need to get up there in a hurry.’

  ‘Would you mind doing that in verse for me?

  And I’ll serve you with alacrity,’

  said the barman. ‘Only I have recently converted from the Tadpole of Dyslexia to the Church of Poetic Pronouncement, and I now only communicate in rhyme.’

  ‘Fangio,’ I said. ‘It is you.’

  ‘Was that iambic pentameter?’ asked the barman. ‘Or was it a haiku?’

  ‘It could be either, I do not know.

  I need the stairs, I have to go.’

  ‘Very good,’ said the barman.

  ‘A fine piece of verse.

  It could have been better.

  But I have heard worse.

  ‘Are you a practising Pronouncist yourself?’

  ‘What are you doing behind the bar?

  You have a ticket. And also a scar.’*

  ‘I’m most impressed sir,

  A pint would it be?

  We’ve draught BP Super

  Or plain G and T.’

  ‘What are you doing behind the bar?’ I asked the versifying barkeep.

  ‘In confidence,’ said Fangio, ‘working a bit of a flanker. The barman in residence, Colonel Mortimer (the best shot in the Carolinas) had to pop upstairs upon some pressing business. He bunged me fifty quid cash to fill in for him. Damn, none of that rhymed, did it? There once was a barman called Mortimer/Who—’

  ‘Fange, this is serious business. Which way did he go?’

  ‘Who went up the stairs for a shortener. No, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? But do you think it matters? I can’t be having with poetry, myself. I mean, what is poetry? Song lyrics without musical—’

  I reached across the bar counter and grabbed Fangio by the throat. Which did not go down particularly well with all the sports fans who were crying out for drink.

  ‘Unhand that barman, mister,’ said one – a Cockney, by the look of his vest and braces. ‘We want serving here.’

  ‘This is serious,’ I said. ‘This is a matter of life and death.’

  ‘They always say that,’ said a lady in a straw hat.

  ‘Who do?’ asked the wearer of the vest and braces.

  ‘Vegetarians,’ said the lady. ‘The bane of my existence, they are. Always hovering around the meat counter in Sainsbury’s when you’re trying to buy cutlets, wearing those shoes they wear and going on and on about meat being murder and that if sheep were left alone and never sheared they’d grow bigger and bigger and then float off into the sky to become clouds.’

  ‘I’ve heard that about sheep,’ said he of the vest and braces. ‘And gorillas. They’d all grow to the size of King Kong if you left them to it. Which is why I always shoot the blighters if I see them in a zoo.’

  I had not relinquished my hold upon Fangio’s throat. ‘Which way did Colonel Mortimer go?’ I requested to know once again.

  Fangio made gagging sounds, which I found less than informative.

  ‘Let that barman go,’ said the Cockney. ‘Extra time will be starting in ten minutes.’

  I let Fangio go. ‘Tell me which way the colonel went,’ I shouted at him, ‘or I will shoot you dead.’

  And to add some weight to my words, I drew out my pistol and flourished it all about.

  Which had a most remarkable effect on the crowd.

  Who immediately drew out theirs.

  ‘That,’ said the lady in the straw hat, ‘is what you call a Mexican stand-off.’

  ‘The Scottish invented that,’ said a well-informed member of the gun-toting crowd.

  ‘I will shoot the barman,’ I said. ‘Then
none of you will get served.’

  ‘We’ll help ourselves,’ said the Cockney.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said Fangio.

  ‘Well, obviously,’ said the lady in the straw hat. ‘I think I’ll have a double Pernod and lemonade. I’ve never been able to afford that.’

  ‘Fange,’ I said to Fangio, ‘I do not want to shoot you, really. I just want to know where the colonel went.’

  Fangio pointed across the bar to a sign above a doorway that read ‘TO THE SCOREBOARD ONLY’.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘No problem, sir. Now, who wants serving?’

  I went through the door and then up a flight of steps. Although they will not receive a mention here as Lazlo Woodbine did not work steps. Unless they were in alleyways, of course, like those retractable iron fire-escape jobbies that are always to be found in New York alleyways. And indeed figured large in The Bride Wore A Concrete Wedding Gown (A Lazlo Woodbine Thriller) where Laz held a week-long stakeout on just such a set of stairs, watching the rear door of Tony Gallenti’s nightclub The Blue Nipple, and was rewarded by witnessing Deaf Boy Helligan, the blues singer, being gunned down by one of the Carrachilo Brothers, about which he was able to testify before the grand jury. Although this was done as a footnote. Because Laz did not do courtrooms.

  But I digress.

  A rooftop is a rooftop, said the greatest Dick of them all, but a dame with a handlebar moustache will never be Queen of May. I eased open the rooftop door and peeped through the crack, my pistol in my hand.

  And there he was, lying there, Colonel Mortimer, the best shot in the Carolinas. Henchman of the evil Count Otto Black. There was no doubt in my mind of that.

  The door had less squeak to it than a mouse with laryngitis and I crept over the rooftop like a floor-fetishist at a tiler’s tea party. And then I heard the crowd go crazy. The players were back on the field.

  I saw the colonel stiffen and take aim.

  And I crept up upon him with a smile on my face that would have won me a first prize at Crufts had I been a spaniel and had spaniels’ smiles been a speciality event.

  ‘Oh, sod it,’ I said to myself. ‘I will shoot the blighter in the leg and have done with it.’

  And so I shot him.

  Just like that.

  And missed.

  And Colonel Mortimer turned his head and, I have to say it, glared somewhat at me. And then he turned not only his head, but the rest of his body, too, including his rifle.

  ‘So,’ said he, rising to his feet, ‘what do we have here?’

  I was frantically trying to reload my pistol.

  ‘You are under arrest,’ I said. ‘Do not do anything hasty, such as shooting me. You are surrounded.’

  ‘Really?’ The colonel looked most unconvinced. And I do have to say that he did not look much like a colonel. I had always imagined colonels as having military bearing, and big sideburns, of course, and looking very much like Lionel Jefferies. This fellow looked more like Rondo Hatton.

  ‘And who might you be?’ asked the look-alike of Hollywood’s greatest actor.

  I chewed upon my bottom lip. ‘The name is Woodbine,’ I said, ‘Lazlo Woodbine,’ adding the now-legendary words, ‘Some call me Laz.’

  ‘Mister Woodlouse,’ said Colonel Mortimer, which was at least in keeping with the books, in which Laz’s name was always mispronounced, but not altogether impressive, because Fangio had already done that one. ‘Mister Woodlouse, we meet again.’

  ‘We do?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, indeed. Surely you recall in Death Is A Rotund Redhead (A Lazlo Woodbine Thriller) that we had a shootout in your office. I was disguised as a Persian dwarf and you as a fiddler’s elbow. I escaped down the laundry chute, leaving you with egg on your face and fluff on your gramophone needle.’

  ‘I do not think I remember that one,’ I said, scratching at my fedora.

  ‘Perhaps I just made it up, then. But it doesn’t matter either way, because I’m going to kill you.’

  ‘Look out behind you!’ I shouted. ‘Zulus, thousands of them.’

  But curiously to no effect.

  It has always been the way with me that when caught in moments of extreme panic, I have a tendency to flap my hands and spin around in small circles. So far during my time with Mr Rune, I had somehow managed to avoid doing this, possibly because I was always in his company when the big trouble got on the go. But who indeed can say for sure?

  But what I must confess here is that those hands of mine were really beginning to flap.

  ‘Trying to fly away, are you?’ Colonel Mortimer advanced upon me. ‘You chose the wrong day to be Woodbine. Today, I’m afraid, is a Tuesday.’

  I tried to stand my ground, but it was not easy. My hands were flapping freely now and I was beginning to spin.

  ‘Let us talk about this,’ I managed to say. ‘You really do not want to shoot me.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ said the colonel. ‘I really do. And then I’ll shoot Mister Grimsdale.’

  ‘Mister Grimsdale?’ I said. ‘Who is Mister Grimsdale?’

  ‘The referee,’ said Colonel Mortimer. ‘The swine who has been shagging my wife.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That Mister Grimsdale.’

  ‘Well, obviously that Mister Grimsdale. What other Mister Grimsdale did you think I’d be lying on this rooftop trying to shoot?’

  ‘The one in the Norman Wisdom movies?’

  ‘What, the one played by that fine character actor Rondo Hatton?’

  ‘Rondo Hatton did not play Mister Grimsdale,’ I said. ‘It was that fine character actor Edward Chapman who played Mister Grimsdale.’

  ‘Well, that’s neither here nor there. He has to die and so do you.’

  ‘Well, actually, I do not,’ I said. ‘You see, I thought you were up here to shoot Father Ernetti.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The captain of the Benedictine Bears.’

  ‘Oh, that Father Ernetti.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That one. But if you are only going to shoot the referee, that does not matter to me. I will leave you to get on with it. It is none of my business.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure,’ said I. ‘If he has been having sex with your wife, then he deserves it. Go ahead. It is nothing to do with me.’

  ‘You won’t have another go at me when I lie down again to take aim?’

  ‘Not at all. I will lie down with you, if you want.’

  ‘No,’ said the colonel. ‘You don’t have to do that. I’m going to shoot myself afterwards. I shot my wife earlier, and when I’ve killed Grimsdale, I’ll do away with myself.’

  ‘You know your own business best, then,’ I said. ‘Far be it from me to go butting in. I am sorry to have interrupted you. No offence meant.’

  ‘None taken, I assure you.’

  And I went on my way.

  Well, sort of.

  I read the Argus the following day to see how he had got on. Not too well, as it happened. He may have been the best shot in the Carolinas, but it had been Tuesday and he had not even managed to wing that Mister Grimsdale.

  Apparently, whilst taking aim he had slipped and fallen off the roof above the big scoreboard, and had not fared well when he had hit the crowd beneath, injuring a Cockney and bothering a lady who wore a straw hat.

  ‘And so,’ I said to Mr Rune, upon his return a few days later, ‘through quick thinking and no small degree of bravery, with little thought for the danger to myself, I kicked his rifle aside. The shot missed Father Ernetti, whom he had sought to assassinate, being an evil catspaw of Count Otto Black, and no one was harmed. The struggle that followed on the rooftop was of the life and death persuasion, but I persevered and he took the fall to oblivion.’

  Mr Rune sat back in his chair. He was clearly very impressed.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said to me, at length.

  ‘You can say that I am a damn fine detective,’ I suggested.

  ‘I could,’ h
e said, in ready reply. ‘Or a most creative liar.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘I solved the case of the Woodingdean Chameleon – at least give me credit for it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mr Rune. ‘Other than for the fact that the case was not set in Woodingdean and did not involve a chameleon.’

  ‘I explained that,’ I said. Because I had, earlier. ‘Fangio confused Withdean with Woodingdean and Count Otto Black was there in the crowd, somewhere, overseeing his evil business in disguise, like a chameleon.’

  Hugo Rune raised one of his hairless eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ I said. ‘I am rubbish. I did not solve it.’

  Mr Rune smiled broadly and then he said, ‘Yes, you did, even though the Father Ernetti you sought so bravely to protect is not the same Father Ernetti who invented the Chronovision. Although it was an easy mistake to make. And the gunman was not aiming at Father Ernetti. Nevertheless, you did solve the case.’

  ‘I did?’ I said. ‘I did?’

  ‘I know that things did not happen as you have described them because a chum of mine, the Scottish groundskeeper, did observe exactly what happened and reported everything to me. The grounds-keeper saw you up-end Colonel Mortimer into the stands whilst the colonel was busy taking aim at Mister Grimsdale.’

  ‘It is true,’ I said. ‘That is what really happened. Well, I could not let him shoot Mister Grimsdale, could I? Norman Wisdom would have been most upset. But tell me this: you knew that he was not aiming at Father Ernetti. How did you know that?’

  ‘Because I know Colonel Mortimer, and his wife. He did not shoot her dead, either. He lied to you about that. She left him for another man. And it wasn’t Mister Grimsdale. It was me. I’ve just spent a most pleasant few days away with that very woman in Eastbourne. And I’ll probably be seeing a lot more of her, now that her husband is safely behind bars.’