by steve higgs
I made a cup of tea and joined the Dachshunds who had already claimed prize spot on the sofa. I turned the TV on and settled down to do nothing, just like the doctors had told me I should. Once again, I fell asleep without drinking my tea and woke up to the sound of the dogs barking.
There was someone at the door. At least the dogs believed there was, so as usual they were making lots of noise and dancing around in front of it. It had taken me twice as long as it usually would to make my way from the sofa to the porch and I could not find the effort to shoo the dogs back into the kitchen, so I just opened the door and let them go. I was fairly confident the person outside would not get savaged by them.
It was my parents. The dogs climbed their legs.
I said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello, Tempest,’ replied my mother. ‘Do you have a lunch plan?’ They were both dressed for church. I checked my watch to find that it was 1317hrs. I had slept for over an hour. My parents had been to church, probably stayed for tea, biscuits and a chat and then come directly to me.
‘I do not. I hadn’t given it any thought actually. I was probably just going to grab something from the fridge.’
‘Your father and I thought that might be the case, so we are here to take you out for lunch.’
Excellent.
‘Would you like to come in while I find my shoes and coat?’ I asked.
They nodded and followed me back into the house. The dogs plopped back over the door sill so I could close the cold air outside. I considered leaving the dogs behind as they could be a little bothersome in a pub at lunchtime – all the interesting smells getting them going, but I wanted them around me as often as I could manage it and I estimated that I could slip them a few small pieces of roasted meat without ruining their dinner or upsetting any of the other patrons. As if reading my thoughts, they happily stuck their heads in their collars as I offered them.
Sunday Lunch at The Hen and Pheasant, West Farleigh. Sunday, October 23rd 1351hrs
A thirty-minute drive later, the car tyres crunched across the gravel carpark of the Hen and Pheasant in West Farleigh. As we exited their car, mother handed the keys to my father and instructed him that he was driving home. He did not bother to put up an argument, it was a well-rehearsed charade because dad always drove home if it was daylight. His eyes were not too good at night and mother did ninety percent of the driving, so he got to be the designated driver whenever they went out for lunch.
At the bar, I ordered a bucket of wine for my mother and non-alcoholic beers for my dad and I. Non-alcoholic beer was not something I would typically imbibe. I got used to drinking it in Iraq many years ago when someone decided it would be an acceptable substitute for the real thing which, of course, was not allowed: Young, excitable and potentially irresponsible men, plus weapons, explosives and alcohol are not a recommended mix. The beverage failed to taste like the real thing in my opinion but was not awful provided one accepted it was going to taste different. My dad had overheard me though.
‘I think you would rather a coke,’ he said in a meaningful and conspiratorial tone. ‘I would definitely prefer one.’
I glanced at him. He checked to make sure my mother was not paying attention and showed me the hip flask in his jacket pocket. It would be full of rum and would indeed make the coke more interesting. I seriously considered it but, in the end, I declined although I got a coke for my dad so he could sneakily have a drink without my mum knowing. He grinned when I handed him his glass.
There was an open fire supplying welcome heat to the large dining room but a wide semi-circle in front of it where patrons had established it was too hot to go closer. We were escorted to a table way back in the depths of the pub which was next to a large window that looked out over the river. As I watched, a small pleasure cruiser went past, the skipper standing high up to see over the canopy as he steered.
On the drive over, mum and dad had both asked me about the attack and about the Klowns. I had admitted that I had no idea why they had targeted me or what they were trying to achieve in their attack or in general. Now, sat at the table the conversation continued.
‘Surely they must have said something?’ my mother insisted.
‘They said lots of things, mother. Most of them are not repeatable. It wasn’t exactly a conversation we were having.’
‘I don’t understand why they would just attack you. You must have done something to upset them.’
‘Leave the boy alone, Mary,’ instructed my father, knowing full well she would utterly ignore him.
‘It is entirely possible that I have, mother. I simply do not know what that might be. The police are trying to find something that links the crimes they are already responsible for but are drawing a blank, so far as I know.'
‘Ooh, is that lovely Amanda still helping you out?’ Here we go.
‘Yes, mother.’
‘Have you asked her out yet?’
‘No, mother.’
‘Why ever not, Tempest. She is ever so pretty and is just the right age for breeding.’
My word!
‘Mother,’ I said with an edge of impatience, ‘Amanda is already dating someone.’
‘Is that because you didn’t ask her out? I know how slow you are at making a move. You will never get a woman at your pace.’
My right eye twitched.
‘Mary,’ my father warned.
I tried to present an argument that would make sense to her, ‘Mother, Amanda and I work together. It would be inappropriate for us to be in a relationship. It would certainly be inappropriate for me to make advances towards her. If there ever was an opportunity, it has passed and there is no point in discussing it.’
‘Love always find a way, Tempest,’ mother loved a cliché.
‘But we are not in love, mother.’
‘She might not be,’ my mother said under her breath as she took a gulp of wine that nearly emptied the large glass in one hit. ‘I need another glass,’ she announced happily.
‘Mother, if you continue to pester me about Amanda I am going to leave,’ I threatened.
‘Fine,’ she drained the rest of her glass. ‘Ooh,’ she said, excitedly tapping the table to get my attention. ‘What about the girl from last weekend?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Oh, what was her name? You remember, Tempest. You went to school with her.’
‘Sophie!’ I exclaimed. I could feel the colour draining from my face.
Nuts! I was supposed to be taking her out for lunch today.
‘That's right. Sophie. She is nice. Maybe you should ask her out.' At least for once, my mother was trying to fix me up with a lady I was actually interested in and not a woman that could be confused with a walrus.
I slid slowly out of my chair, excused myself and went outside to make a phone call.
Sophie answered almost immediately.
‘Tempest.’ There was a definite snippiness to her voice. That she was monosyllabic was a clear indication of displeasure.
I elected to go with the "beg for forgiveness" strategy. It worked, but only after I explained that I had spent the night in the hospital and still had morphine in my body. I detected a mothering instinct in her reaction to my news that I was injured. It was not necessarily a bad thing.
‘Would it be acceptable to rearrange for tomorrow evening? I would very much still like to take you out for dinner.’
‘That sounds lovely, Tempest. Shall we say seven o’clock?’
‘I will pick you up at seven.’
We said goodbye and I wandered back into the pub. My steak was waiting for me. My parents were already tucking into theirs. ‘Everything alright, kid?' My dad asked once he had cleared his mouth of half-chewed cow.
‘Yes. I had a lunch date with Sophie arranged for today but forgot all about it. I am seeing her tomorrow night instead.’ My mother beamed at me and raised her glass in salute. There was food in front of her though, so I was safe from interrogation for a few minutes at least.
By the time we left the restaurant, mum had put away about a bottle and a half of Pinot Grigio, the obvious result of which was that she fell asleep before we made it out of the carpark. She would snooze in her armchair and wake in time to sing along with Songs of Praise on television later this evening.
On the way to their house, they dropped me at mine, but in the back of their car, my eyes had been getting heavy – the residual effect of the painkillers combined with limited sleep. Both dogs were asleep on my lap, one either side, making me warm which had added to the relaxed contentedness. Mum did not wake up when we stopped, she was snoring loudly in the passenger's seat, her mouth open and hanging to one side. Dad asked if I needed him to come in and help me with anything which I thanked him for but had no tasks I could not perform for myself.
I waved him off and took the dogs inside. The Klown case beckoned. However, it felt like too much effort to even spend time reading into it. There were numerous other tasks around the house and garden that I was definitely not about to tackle, so resignedly I selected a book from my bookshelf and settled down to read. The dogs climbed onto my lap and presently we all fell asleep.
The Blue Moon Office. Monday, 24th October 0900hrs
It was Monday morning and I had risen at 0730hrs which was far later than usual. Getting a shower had not been a comfortable experience; raising my right arm to wash my hair a particularly painful chore. The two painkillers I had taken when I awoke, didn’t begin to work their magic until I was making breakfast, and it wasn’t until I was ready to leave home that I could move and breathe without wincing.
By 0850hrs I was trudging up the stairs to my office. I had silently bet myself a skinny blueberry brownie from the coffee shop that it would be Jane this morning and not James that I would find at the desk.
‘Good morning, boss,' hallooed Jane as I went in. I would have fist pumped my successful guess but might then have had to explain why. She was sat at the desk wearing a blue satin top and a cashmere cardigan in a contrasting hue. I had asked her once where she managed to buy women's clothes to fit her frame and how they were always such great quality. The answer, she revealed was a website called, Hers for Him, where they sold second-hand ladies clothing tailored to the male shape.
‘How are you feeling? Would you like coffee?' she asked. Until recently, it had been my habit to arrive at work with a coffee in my hand, but since my run in with Hayley, I was avoiding the place. Hayley and I had a brief game of hide the sausage two weeks ago and a few days later, after a receiving a text from me that I had inadvertently addressed to Jane, she slapped me in the face in the street and called me several names.
‘Indeed, I would. Thank you, Jane,’ I answered as I passed her to take a seat by the window. ‘Could you also get me a blueberry muffin? One of the skinny ones?’
‘Goodness,’ Jane said staring at me. ‘I don’t know whether to be alarmed or elated. You never eat cake, not even skinny ones. Is everything okay? Ignoring the broken ribs, that is.’
I smiled. Jane was right. As a practice, I did not eat cake, but I felt that I could get away with it for once. She wasn't actually waiting for an answer; it had been a rhetorical question. She was getting up and putting her phone into her bag.
‘Won’t be long,’ she announced. ‘Macchiato or Americano?’
‘The Macchiato please.’
I had clients due any moment. I had no idea what they wanted, what case they were going to present me with or even if they would turn up for that matter. I expected that they would though and sure enough, not a minute later, I heard the bottom door open and men’s voices echoing up the stairs.
Making out what they were saying was not possible, but it appeared to be a discussion about whether they were indeed in the right place.
‘Come up, gentlemen,’ I called out. My request was rewarded with the sound of many feet trudging up the stairs toward my office. The chair I was sitting on was directly opposite the stairs, so I saw the top of a head followed by a face, then another head popped up behind the first and then another. The face of the first man was devoid of mirth, looking in fact as if nothing fun had ever happened to the man in his entire life. I estimated his age as late fifties. Most of his hair was gone and the ring of it that was left above his ears was almost all turned to grey. He was clean-shaven, which must have been quite fresh as I spotted a small piece of toilet paper still stuck to his neck. He was almost all the way up the stairs now, so I could see that he was quite short, perhaps less than five feet six inches. A small roll of body fat hung over the belt of his trousers to show the world that he was soft and pudgy. Very typical of the species.
I forced myself out of my chair without indulging myself with a grimace at my ribs and moved forward to greet them all.
‘Good morning, gentlemen. Tempest Michaels, owner of Blue Moon Investigations Agency. Please come in.' I stood back to allow them to file in. The three men that had followed the first were all the same yet all also somehow different from the first man. Their ages were similar, their clothing as well but their heights and features could not have been more contrasting. The third man was well over six feet tall and as thin as a candy cane. He had long limbs like a spider and a long face as if someone had stretched it. The fourth man was less than four feet tall. I struggled with the right terminology. What was PC currently? Dwarf? Small person? I labelled him as R2D2 stand-by in my head and shook his hand anyway.
None of them had spoken yet. ‘So, gentlemen. How may I assist you?’ I prompted.
‘We called you yesterday,’ said the tall man. ‘We need your help to stop the Klowns.’
‘Okay,’ I replied, coaxing him or any of the others to provide a little more information.
The dwarf/small person took up the explanation. ‘There are fourteen of us so far and more joining every day. We are having to band together to stay safe and we cannot work. We dare not put on our work clothes and no one wants to hire us anyway.’
‘Hold on, sir. We need to back up a little. I feel that I have come in halfway through a conversation. Shall we start with some introductions.' I disliked when people failed to introduce themselves. ‘My name is Tempest Michaels, but you knew that anyway.' I looked at the man who had been first to arrive and popped my eyebrows as a question.
‘Oh. Err, David McLeash,’ he blurted, as if startled by the need to say his name. ‘Work name, Binky.’
Binky?
The second man told me his name was Mike Barfield then followed his friend and announced his work name as Mr. Cuddles. The tall man went next as he was next in line. His name was Kevin Brownfield and I realised then why they were in my office and what they wanted when he told me his work name was Coconutty Honkster and honked a horn that was hidden in his pocket.
They were all clowns.
The final chap to speak was the munchkin. His name, he told me, was Richard Levaraugh and he went by the workname Big Dick. I had to fold my bottom lip over my top and pretend to get something off of my desk so that he could not see me trying to suppress my laughter.
‘Can I assume that you are children’s entertainers?’ I asked.
‘Indeed, we are,’ answered Big Dick. I was trying to think of him as Richard, I really was, ‘and we need your help,’ he finished to a chorus of nods from his colleagues.
‘Right then, chaps. Please grab a seat where you can and take me back to the beginning. I need to know everything.’
The chaps looked about themselves, then all moved to get to a chair. There were enough chairs, so each chap needed only to reverse a bit to find one, but instead, they pratted about, bumping into each other and occasionally pretending to trip
as they manoeuvred to find a place to perch. Coconutty Honkster honked his horn several times as they shuffled and span. It seemed that they could not operate without playing the fool.
Eventually, all taking a seat, they looked at each other once more, each seemingly waiting for another to take up the story. In the end, Richard (well done, Tempest) rolled his eyes in defeat and started speaking.
‘We are here to seek protection for ourselves and our fellow clowns. We are being persecuted because the Klowns are hurting people. We formed a coalition of clowns so that we could find safety in numbers or perhaps present ourselves as a body of clowns that are managed and thus separate from the mayhem being perpetrated currently.’ The man handed me a card. It read: Clowns Living in Threat of Retribution in the South. I mumbled the words to myself a couple of times then laughed.
‘You are aware that the acronym for your little group spells CLITORIS?’
‘Show me that,' said Coconutty Honkster. ‘It does as well.' He honked his horn as he handed it to David McLeash. A short debate ensued regarding who was to blame for the damned silly name. I felt forced to bring them back to the matter at hand.
‘Gentlemen,’ I prompted with some volume.
They bickered for another second or so before Big Dick took up the narrative again. ‘We are being starved of business because no one wants to hire us in case we turn up and murder everyone. Clowns are very unpopular at the moment.' He went on to describe a few instances that the four of them and some of their colleagues had suffered in the past week or so. Coconutty Honkster honked his horn in places during the dialogue when he thought it appropriate. The noise it made was beginning to annoy me. About halfway through the explanation, Jane returned. The chaps glanced at the stairs as the bottom door opened audibly and again as she clip-clopped her way up the stairs in her size eleven Mary Janes. Jane handed over my coffee without speaking and with no available seats she hovered near the door.
