3 Inspector Hobbes and the Gold Diggers

by Wilkie Martin

  ‘Now, we’re going over to Jeremy Pratt in Sorenchester for an update.’

  The hapless reporter, dishevelled, and paler than usual, appeared on screen, with our house behind him. It was strange how different it looked on the television.

  ‘Good afternoon, Jeremy’ said the newsreader, ‘is there any further news of Inspector Hobbes?’

  ‘Good afternoon. Not much. However, a witness claims to have seen the remarkable inspector in hot pursuit of the fleeing villains.’ He grimaced.

  ‘Are you alright, Jeremy?’

  ‘No, I am not. I have recently been indecently assaulted by a vicious dog, which bit me on the …’

  ‘Thank you, Jeremy! We’ll be back for more, later.’

  It seemed Hobbes was hot news, which was hardly a surprise, for his heroics must have looked truly stunning to anyone who hadn’t previously seen him in action. For me, who’d watched him playing leapfrog with rhinoceroses and arresting a rogue elephant, his behaviour had been, more or less, par for the course. I knew, though, how much he would detest all the publicity. It wasn’t that he was shy – quite the contrary – it was just that he was naturally reticent about his own achievements, which, as soon as they were completed, belonged to the past. He preferred living in the present and looking forward to whatever came next.

  There was, of course, another, huge reason why he never courted publicity; Hobbes wasn’t exactly human. Although I’d never actually worked out quite what he was, I’d accepted his ‘unhumanity’ long ago and it rarely bothered me. When it did, on those, thankfully rare, occasions when he reverted to a wild and savage state, I was still not bothered. I was terrified, and, although he’d never attacked me during one of his little turns, part of me couldn’t help feeling like a lamb in a lion’s den, fearing that one day he’d have me. Most people failed to see past his veneer, the thin layer of policeman. He was a damn good one, even if he did not necessarily adhere too closely to the letter of the law. Furthermore, he was by no means the only non-human in town, for Sorenchester was a weird place and I’d never quite worked out whether he was the source of the weirdness or just a symptom of it.

  I changed channels, switching to a local news programme, which, to my horror, was showing my arrival at 13 Blackdog Street. With my filthy, crumpled clothes, wild hair, muddied face, and the wounds from my battle with the alarm clock and bookcase, I, too, gave off an aura of weirdness, which was quite depressing. However, the look on Jeremy’s face when Dregs nipped him in the bud quickly cheered me up. The clip was repeated in slow motion, before the grinning newsreader joked that the dog had been rushed to the vet with food poisoning. Turning off the television, I headed upstairs for a bath.

  Sometime later, thoroughly soaked and deep cleansed, I went into my room and started putting on clean clothing. The street outside was still packed with reporters and cameramen, as well as a host of sightseers. At least the Black Dog Café down the road was doing extremely well, to judge by the number of cups and cakes I could see.

  Feeling a little warm, I opened the window to let in some fresh air, and was thinking about combing my hair when a huge, horrible figure, wearing well-polished black boots, baggy brown trousers and a scruffy jacket, swung in through the window, and landed on the rug with barely a sound.

  ‘Afternoon,’ said Hobbes. ‘Put the kettle on. I’m parched.’

  3

  Hobbes’s unexpected arrival set my heart pounding, caused instant jelly legs and made me slump onto the bed, where I lay quivering, trying to control my breathing. It took a few moments before I felt able to get up and find my comb. I stared into the mirror, thinking that, despite my usually wispy short brown hair looking relatively neat, my face was not at its best, for although it had lost much of its pastiness and puffiness, my nose was swollen, a tender red split across the bridge merging into the bruise around my eye.

  Before knowing him, I would, no doubt, have been feeling sorry for myself, and would most likely have stayed in bed to mope, but I’d grown accustomed to injury, because, in the same way as Hobbes attracted weirdness, I was a magnet for accidents and minor disasters. Although it would have been a lie to have claimed I took them in my stride, I could usually manage to stumble through.

  At last, I went downstairs to the kitchen, put the kettle on and made tea. When it was nicely brewed, I handed a mugful to Hobbes, who was sitting at the table, with his hand on Dregs’s head.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you back today,’ he remarked, stirring his steaming tea with a great, hairy finger. ‘How is your father?’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘The lass told me he was at death’s door.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, but it turned out there was nothing wrong with him, or at least, nothing a sensible diet wouldn’t cure.’

  ‘I’m happy to hear he’s well.’

  ‘Thank you. I was going to stay there for a couple of days, but I had a little accident …’

  Hobbes chuckled.

  ‘… and after seeing the news, I wanted to get back here.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’ He looked puzzled.

  ‘The gold robbery, of course.’

  ‘Oh, that. It was nothing.’

  ‘That’s not what the press think, and they’ve been showing a film of you in action.’

  He frowned. ‘I was filmed?’

  ‘By someone staying at the Golden Fleece,’ I said, ‘and it’s been all over the news and it seems to have made everyone excited.’

  ‘So, that’s why all those people were loitering outside. I did wonder.’

  ‘If you knew nothing about it, why did you come in through the window?’

  ‘It was open,’ said Hobbes, ‘so I thought I’d take a shortcut.’

  ‘Umm … wouldn’t it have been quicker to park outside and come through the door?’

  ‘It would, had I anything to park.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened to the car?’

  ‘I broke it.’ He grinned. ‘It turns out it wasn’t up to jumping walls, or, rather, it couldn’t cope with landing afterwards. All the wheels came off – even the steering wheel. They don’t make them like they used to. I’ll have to buy another.’

  ‘Won’t the police buy you one?’

  ‘No, we have an arrangement. I get what I want and they don’t tell me how to drive it. It saves Superintendent Cooper a lot of stress.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem fair when you were on police business.’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, I was, it’s true, but I was enjoying myself, too. I could have left the pursuit to the other lads, but why should they have all the fun?’

  ‘Fun? Yeah, OK. But the robbers still got away.’

  ‘For the time being.’

  ‘You might have been hurt. I saw that police car crash.’

  ‘I wasn’t and nor was anyone else. As for the lads who crashed, it’ll teach them to drive better next time.’

  ‘Fair enough, but someone was hurt last night. There was the poor driver of the security van who got deafened.’

  Hobbes scratched his head, sounding like someone brushing their feet on a coconut doormat. ‘The driver wasn’t deafened. I spoke to him.’

  ‘Yes, he was, I saw it on the news. Some guy called Percival.’

  ‘Are you referring to Percival Longfellow? He is most certainly hard of hearing, but he’s been like it ever since getting too close to an explosion years ago in London.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘didn’t that happen last night? And wasn’t he driving the van?’

  ‘I think you are getting confused. The gang did indeed blow the doors off the security van last night, but Percival wasn’t the driver. He hasn’t worked in security for twenty years or more; not since a gang of jewel robbers blew open a bank vault he was guarding. He received a substantial amount of compensation for his deafness, which he invested in a nice flat in town. Nowadays, he manages a boy band.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘A reporter spoke to him about the r
obbery.’

  ‘Reporters have been known to get things wrong. You should know.’

  I nodded, wondering if he’d made a dig at me. For far too many years, I’d been a cub reporter for the Sorenchester and District Bugle, and my failure to move up the pecking order in that time might have been down to the sackful of mistakes I’d made.

  ‘What concerns me now,’ said Hobbes, ‘is how long those reporters are going to stay outside.’

  ‘Probably until you give them a story.’

  ‘In which case, they’ll be there a long time.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, thinking rapidly, ‘it might be better to give them what they want now, because if you don’t, they’ll just stick around and make something up. That’s what I used to do.’ I didn’t mention that most of my fictions had been discovered, sooner or later, resulting in embarrassing exposures to the Editorsaurus’s sarcasm.

  ‘No,’ said Hobbes. ‘It sounds like I’ve already got more than enough publicity and I don’t intend to give them any more.’

  ‘What if they make up something bad? And there’s another thing to be considered: if they can’t get to you, they’ll try pumping anyone who might know you.’

  Hobbes shook his head. ‘I’ve got nothing to say. I was just doing my job.’

  ‘They’ll hang around and hassle people, at least until the next big story pops up. Think what it’ll be like for Mrs Goodfellow when she goes shopping. By the way, where is she?’

  ‘She’s gone to Skegness for a long weekend.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything to me.’

  ‘Because you weren’t here. The lass thought she’d take the opportunity to visit her cousin Ethel, who runs a guesthouse. They normally only see each other once a year.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I said, stricken with a horrible realisation. ‘What are we going to do for supper?’

  ‘We’ll manage.’

  I groaned, remembering past culinary disasters when the old girl had been away, most of which had been my fault, or to be more truthful, all of which had been my fault.

  ‘Tonight, for instance,’ said Hobbes, ‘I have been invited to dine by my friend Sid. Have you met him? Sid Sharples? He came to see me after I’d been shot the last time.’

  ‘Umm … I might have done … I think. Well, I guess you’ll be alright, but … umm …what about me?’

  ‘That will not be a problem. Sid won’t mind an extra body at the table and he’s always glad of new blood in his circle. However, he’s an old-fashioned sort of gentleman and likes his guests dressed for dinner.’

  ‘If you’re sure he won’t mind, that’ll be great. I think there’s a dinner jacket and bow tie at the back of my wardrobe.’

  One of the advantages of living at Hobbes’s was that I’d acquired a whole new wardrobe and, more to the point, the clothes to fill it. They had once belonged to Mrs Goodfellow’s husband, Robin, who, so far as anyone knew, was in Tahiti, attempting to found a naturist colony. Although most of his stuff might have been considered a trifle old-fashioned, I liked to believe it was classic tailoring, and was sure it gave me an air of distinction. I hoped so, anyway. Nonetheless, I still found it spooky that everything fitted as if made to measure.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Hobbes. ‘He expects us at eight.’

  ‘Does he?’

  He nodded and poured himself more tea. ‘There is,’ he said casually – a little too casually – ‘something I ought to tell you about him.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Sid is a vampire.’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ I said, trying not to look like a victim, my muscles turning to mush.

  ‘But, don’t worry, he won’t hurt you, or harm you in any way, and he’s a good cook and a generous host.’

  Despite my best efforts, and Hobbes’s reassurance, my hands shook. I was going to dinner with a real vampire; it had been bad enough meeting a wannabe vampire, in the form of my former editor’s deranged wife, who had bitten me, leaving her false teeth sticking in my neck. If I looked under bright lights, I fancied I could still make out the scar.

  When I felt able, I got up, walked calmly to the sink, picked up a cloth, returned to the table and wiped up the pool of tea I’d spilt when he told me. He watched, smiling wickedly, as I rinsed out the cloth, hung it over a tap, and returned to my seat.

  ‘Sid,’ he said, ‘is quite harmless.’

  ‘So, he won’t want to drink my blood?’

  ‘No. As is well documented, vampires only drink the blood of virgins.’

  ‘That’s alright then.’ I forced a smile as if reassured.

  Hobbes laughed. ‘You have a very expressive face. I should tease you more often.’

  ‘Is he really a vampire?’ I asked, recalling numerous occasions when he’d made me fall for tall stories, although in fairness, some of the tallest had turned out to be true.

  ‘He really is, though there’s nothing to worry about, because although of the vampire race, he can’t stomach the taste of blood.’

  ‘So, what does he eat?’

  ‘He particularly likes soup.’

  ‘Soup?’

  ‘Correct. He’s getting on a bit, and finds it easy to digest and much more palatable than blood. No doubt he’ll cook one for us tonight.’

  ‘Umm …’ I said, ‘what sort of soup?’

  ‘He usually goes for the meatier varieties, such as oxtail.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, slightly reassured, having had a horrific vision of him serving up a large bowl of something warm, red and frothy and passing it off as cream of tomato soup.

  Although I did have a vague memory of Sid’s visit, I couldn’t picture him, yet my mind insisted that he was tall and slim, with slicked back hair, sharp teeth and a strange accent. Still, I told myself, he was only a vampire, so why worry? After all, I knew a family pack of werewolves quite well and, although they occasionally made me nervous, especially at night, particularly around full moon, they’d never hurt me, or, so far as I was aware, anybody else. They hadn’t even bitten the postman. The worst I could say about them was that they had once given me fleas, and I’d still not completely recovered from the ignominy of being tricked by Mrs Goodfellow into sharing a flea bath with Dregs, who’d also been infested. Besides them, I’d eaten crumpets with the Olde Troll and was slowly learning not to give in to prejudice and to take people, of no matter what persuasion, on their individual merits.

  Hobbes, finishing his tea, downed his mug, loped from the kitchen and returned a few moments later. ‘Those reporters are still out there and showing no signs of moving on, so we’ll need to get past them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll think about it, but not now. I’m going to take forty winks. It’s been a long night and day.’

  As he left, Dregs approached, sat by my side and tried to persuade me to take him for a walk. My attempts to ignore his hypnotic gaze soon crumbled.

  ‘Oh, alright then,’ I said.

  Jumping up, thrashing his tail, he fetched his lead from the hook, waited for me to clip it to his collar and dragged me to the front door. In my naivety, I hadn’t expected to spark much excitement, since I obviously wasn’t Hobbes and looked relatively normal. I was wrong. As soon as I opened the door, we were confronted by cameras, flashing lights and thrusting microphones. However, Dregs’s earlier actions had earned him a right of passage, and he only had to growl for the crowd to part, leaving a clear route. A nervous-looking Jeremy Pratt, dried slobber on his trousers the only evidence of his canine encounter, lurked towards the back of the mob as, ignoring the questions and the cameras, I let Dregs lead me to Ride Park.

  Thankfully, no one followed us far and Dregs and I were able to pass an enjoyable hour or so. He chased squirrels, without ever getting near one. For him, all the fun was in running free and barking up the wrong tree. I mooched along, feet sore from the long trek, my leg muscles still aching, and appreciated the late afternoon sunshine, the buzz of insects and the changing tints of the trees, tryin
g not to think about later, but wishing I’d asked Hobbes more about the robbery. I also wondered if I’d be on television again. I hoped not.

  Despite my best intentions, one question kept buzzing round my head, as annoying as a wasp at a picnic: could a vampire really be as safe as Hobbes had suggested? I tried to believe him, to convince myself he wouldn’t really put me into a dangerous situation, at least not on purpose. I knew, of course, that if I ever got into danger, he was the best person to get me out of it, but I was far from comfortable with the idea of visiting a vampire, even one with a preference for soup. Despite recognising my fear was based entirely on prejudice, my knowledge gleaned only from horror films, it was, nonetheless, genuine.

  At length, all the squirrels having been treed, the evening approaching, and the temperature dropping, I called Dregs, clipped him to his lead and returned home, running the gauntlet of reporters. Again he proved invaluable and we got back inside without too much hassle.

  Hobbes was already up and dressed. Having never seen him in his dinner jacket before, I was impressed. He looked almost smart and quite respectable, despite wearing a bow tie, a relic of the sixties I assumed, that looked as if a large velvet bat had seized him by the throat. Dregs apparently thought the same and growled and bristled until Hobbes let him sniff it. Then, relaxing, he waited for his dinner. While Hobbes was feeding him, I took a bulb of garlic from Mrs G’s pot and secreted it in my pocket; I had an idea it might be useful.

  ‘You’d better get ready,’ said Hobbes.

  ‘OK. Umm … have you worked out how to get past that lot outside?’

  ‘Yes, though I suspect you might not like it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  He refused to elaborate and I went upstairs in a state of extreme trepidation. I’d already been shaky and his manner had really set me on edge. On reaching my room, I turned on the light and ferreted around in the wardrobe, finding a pair of black, sharply creased trousers, a crisply pressed dress shirt, and a dinner jacket. I laid them on the bed, and started to dress, popping the garlic bulb into my jacket pocket, finding its pungent aroma strangely reassuring.