Hand In Glove

By Paddy Bostock

PI Dr Jake Flintlock and his sidekick Dr Bum Park are inveigled by American theater director Chuck Cinzano into the investigation of a severed hand in a baseball glove on Primrose Hill, London. The assignment morphs into a murder case as Chuck is “stabbed to death” in Jake’s home. Having flown to Sausalito, CA, Jake and Bum begin to suspect they are being used as actors in a play. Yet, a real crime has been committed and somehow the culprit has to be found.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781613091852

Book preview

Paddy Bostock

A Wings ePress, Inc.

Humor/Adventure Novel

Edited by: Jeanne Smith

Copy Edited by: Joan C. Powell

Senior Editor: Jeanne Smith

Executive Editor: Marilyn Kapp

Cover Artist: Richard Stroud

All rights reserved

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Wings ePress Books

Copyright © 2014 by Paddy Bostock

ISBN 978-1-61309-185-2

Published by Wings ePress, Inc. at Smashwords

Wings ePress Inc.

3000 N. Rock Road

Newton, KS 67114

Dedication

To Dani: keep up the good work.

Part One

One

Primrose Hill, London NW1, on the first summer Saturday the mercury hit twenty-five degrees was not the place for me. Packed as it was with semi-naked people, the place looked more like the Costa del Sol in August. Bad decision, Jake! Better to have stayed at home and watched telly, but by then it was too late. There is no way Binkey can be dragged out of a park he’s already in. Hell to play as he wraps his lead around a tree and performs his idea of a sit-in, bottom rooted to the grass and forepaws planted in defiance while baring his teeth at passersby in what he thinks of as his wolf impression. Which I tell him makes him look at best mental, but you can see how passersby might feel differently when faced with a Dachshund/Doberman cross pretending to be a wolf; frightened, for example. Not that Binkey has ever bitten a passerby, you understand; just likes them to think he might. So it was I was left with little choice but to continue indulging Binkey’s walkie needs and trudge on through the mass of unedifying man—and womankind.

All the ones around me were currently turned to the sun spit-roasting themselves at a future cost to the National Health Service in carcinoma treatment of squillions, money the NHS couldn’t afford because the bankers had stolen it all and the government didn’t dare ask for it back. As I had time and again in my years on the planet, I asked myself what the world was coming to, a thought I shared with Binkey as we stumbled through the dumbed-down, bunkered-in, smartphone-silly, flabby flotsam of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

"Bloody hell, Binkey," I commented close to the top of the hill, narrowly avoiding the head of a whale-like German lying—well, more like floundering—on his stomach as he tried to capture on his iPad the splendour of the cityscape laid out beneath him: the London Eye, the Sexy Gherkin, the Shard, all of that. I knew the whale was German from the way he kept re-angling his iPad to get his picture exactly right and grunting, "Vorsprung durch Technik."

You wonder what a Martian expeditionary commander would make of this lot, don’t you? I asked Binkey. Probably call home straight away and tell his boss to cancel invasion plans in case the troops catch something nasty. Advise him to check out black holes instead.

Raaafff, raaafff! Binkey said from the other end of his lead, but I could tell from the way he was tugging towards an—illegal!—barbie a few yards away from the German’s head my analysis of the planet’s problems wasn’t the cause of his excitement. What was interesting Binkey more than self-induced Armageddon were the sausages currently turning the same shade as the people cooking them.

"Binkey, heel," I commanded.

Fat chance. Binkey doesn’t obey any commands except Walkies, Din-Dins and Bikkies, which strictly speaking aren’t commands at all. More like offers.

"HEEL!" I nonetheless repeated pointlessly...which was when the really bad thing had to happen.

Call it catastrophe theory, call it nemesis, call it anything you like, but I ask you: What ungodly presence was it which had to inspire the German, at that very moment, to kick out an excited leg at the capture of the pic he doubtless hoped would soon grace the cover of a Der Spiegel and thereby cause me to trip and let go of Binkey’s lead such that the freed beast made a bee-line for the barbie—tended as it turned out by a band of Russians—piss on it, scarf all the sausages, and then run away to the other side of the hill to take part in a baseball game organised by American dads for their cutesy Major-League-wannabe progeny...and steal their ball? I mean, life’s hard enough, right?

~ * ~

"Hey, schmuck, that your dawg stole our ball? the Little League’s head honcho dad bawled at me as I chased Binkey down the backside of the hill after having parted company with twenty quid in recompense to the outraged Russians for their doused barbie, plus sausage loss. It had been either that or, as an amazon called Olga explained, a bick kickink." Right there in my own back yard. Me a resident of the area! But what can you do when confronted by not only the sort of woman who looked like she ate Chechens for breakfast, but also the phalanx of ex-KGB-looking types—not at all obese, this crew—who eyed me while flexing their pecs and checking their tatts? Not a lot, that’s what. Just as well I had some cash about my person, otherwise I would likely have been on my way to hospital rather than being free to stumble down the backside of the hill in search of Binkey and be called a schmuck by Chuck.

That’s what the head honcho dad was called—Chuck. And he didn’t calm down one jot when I finally came to a standstill in front of him. No handshaking or knuckle-bumping or anything like that. Only, "Chuck’s the name an’ don’t screw with me, ’kay? Just get our goddam ball off of your goddam mutt so’s we can carry on with our game. Some of the littler guys crying, you see that? Crying. And all ’cos’ve your dawg stealing their ball."

Chuck looked and sounded like a gone-to-seed linebacker. Probably little more than thirty-five years old, but, to judge from the lack of hair sprouting from the sides of the New York Yankees navy-with-white-and-light-blue-stripes cap, balding. He was big, though. Maybe six foot two and sixteen stone. Which made him more or less the same height as me, only heavier. I’m more the bean-pole type of tall person.

Hi, Chuck, I’m Jake, I said.

Do I care what your name is? Just get my ball off of your mutt.

"Okay. Any idea where my mutt is?" I said, shading my eyes from the blasting sun and peering about as some other jejune ex-jock dads came trotting over to join in hassling me.

"Yeah, Limey! Like now?" they chorused, hunching their shoulders and standing tough, even though most of them had even less hair than Chuck and were smaller. Average height five-nine, I reckoned as I continued with my sailor-scanning-the-horizon number in search of Binkey. And not a patch on the ex-KGB/New Mafiya barbie mob when it came to muscle either. Flaccid bottoms, wobbly guts, arachnid legs, that sort of thing. Most likely a group of marooned-in-London ex-Madoff wannabes. But nonetheless, I was heavily outnumbered, especially when a group of hefty moms and mini-Yankees took to egging on their menfolk. Not much mileage in getting quarrelsome then.

"Binkey! BIN-KEY!’ I therefore called. "B-I-I-NNK-E-E-Y C-O-O-M-E."

Silence. No obedient pawsteps trotting back to Master. No sign at all of the beast. Not that I was all that surprised. As I said, Binkey isn’t great at commands. Which disappointed the Americans big time. Grisling and growling all around. Mutterings about how pretty soon they’d be calling 911 unless they got some satisfaction. What the hell was it with us Brits and dogs? Stateside, dogs were kept on leashes everyplace, for crissakes!

I sighed.

Look, I said, palming air, haven’t you got a spare ball? A tennis ball or something?

"Tennis ball? TenNIS ball??? No self-respecting person plays baseball with a tennis ball, Juke. No way, José," I was informed by Chuck, who had now swivelled his cap around so the downturned peak covered his left ear.

"Plus the ball we had until your mutt stole it was, like, special? Signed by Alfredo Aceves and a bunch of other Yankees’ stars. No way are we gonna lose that ball to no dingbat mutt. You following me here, Juke?"

"Actually the name’s Jake? Doctor Jake Flintlock. I live here. And you are starting to piss me off," I said, feeling quarrelsome after all.

Well, that went down like a lead parachute. Moms and pops sucking in cheeks and jutting out jaws. Brats chewing gum at me. An international incident brewing, no question about it.

But, if you chaps would just like to calm down a little, I said Britishly. I shall do my best to find my dog and retrieve your precious ball.

"BINKEY, B-I-N-K-E-E-E-Y," I therefore hollered with little hope of success because, quite apart from going selectively deaf to commands he deems contrary to his welfare, Binkey refuses to respond to a name he likes even less than did that of the Far Side’s Doberman after which he’d been named—the one seen leaping from a ninetieth-floor apartment window upon learning his new owners were planning on calling him Binkey.

"Who’re you telling to calm down?" Chuck wanted to know, readjusting his Yankees cap to the back of his—as I had correctly guessed—practically hairless head. Peak now upturned gangsta-style and all that.

You, I told him.

I was heavily outgunned, but we Flintlocks don’t back down easily in such situations, vide Sir Lawrence de Flintlock, who, according to the family annals Flintlocks Down the Ages: The True Story had stood his ground against impossible odds during an Arab revolt in the early years of the last century and single-handedly decapitated a hundred rabid Ottomans. Not that I had a lot in common with my illustrious ancestor. Had never been conscripted for any wars or anything. Hadn’t volunteered either. Not a lot of point in getting your legs blown off for no good reason was my thinking.

However, if forced to retaliate, there were still resources I could draw upon. Such as the, albeit long-ago, time when I’d played second-row forward for my local rugby third XV back on Merseyside. That had taught me a thing or two about eye-gouging, kidney rupturing and suchlike, I can tell you. Plus a couple of our recent cases had involved me and my PI partner Dr. Bum Park in some pretty full-on situations. Like the one in darkest Swabia where we were surrounded by fascists baying for our blood. So if Chuck got any ruder, well—even if the odds were poor—I planned on making a decent fist of it.

A pity Bum wasn’t around, because he’s the better equipped fighty person in the Flintlock/Park duo, the one with the black belts in any martial art you care to mention. But he wasn’t around. So, thinking discretion not valour, I opted for a more conceptual approach to the situation. After all, I was the designated thinker in the partnership.

"And if you and your pals don’t pull yourselves together and look at things reasonably, I shan’t even try looking for my mutt and your ball; I’ll just go home," I therefore said, with an edge of petulance I hadn’t wanted and thus needed to correct.

"How many more times have we Brits got to help out you Yanks in situations you can’t handle on your own even though you’re meant to be Top Nation now? I therefore challenged. First Iraq, then Afghanistan, then..."

That rattled the gone-to-seed frat-boys’ cages all right.

Practically bankrupting ourselves in the process! I continued. "At the same time as being screwed around by your Wall Street derivative devastators, sub-prime primadonnas, hedge-fund futures fuckwits, and algorithm arseholes. Only the Greedy, eh?"

These last three words I sang to the tune of Roy Orbison’s Only the Lonely. When pushed, I can work the ironies, what Socrates called the elenchus. Plus I’d done my homework on the direst financial crisis to hit the planet since the last time Wall Street managed that distinction back in 1929.

Silence from what looked to me increasingly like the very assortment of stranded-in-London banker-wanker Yanks I’d initially suspected. Chewing of hangnails, that type of thing. Eyes going swivelly and watering a bit. Bombast thwarted by feelings of guilt and uncertainty. You know how it is with reality, how little of it humans can bear. I knew all about the syndrome from my wife/partner, Claudia—ex-Threadneedle Street Wundermädchen turned Freudian and then CBT specialist—who now made almost as much money as she had in her best days at the City by behaviourising [sic] a small sect of inexplicably conscience-stricken yet filthy rich bankers, which was how she continued to pay for our mansion in Prince Albert Road.

I’ll tell you more about Claudia later. Bear with me.

Meanwhile Chuck and his otiose pals, plus their WAGs and offspring, were locked in an American football-type huddle slapping each other on the back and muttering, "hut, hut, hut."

When that was over, they all sidled off in different directions looking surly and Chuck said, Oookay, soooo, Duke, what’s your plan?

Jake.

"Yeah, yeah, sure...Jake."

Okay, then.

That’s when I inserted my index finger and little finger across my backfolded tongue, whistled hard, and then shouted, "Binkey, BINKEY, BIKKIES," which caused the beast to come hurtling out of undergrowth at the very farthest edge of Primrose Hill like an exorcet missile, and slaver at my feet.

It’s my best command, I was telling Chuck, although Chuck was less interested in the excellence of my dog-handling skills than he was in the badly chewed and barely recognisable baseball glove Binkey had dropped at my feet in the expectation of bikkies.

"Yuck, what the fuck?" Chuck said, picking up the mitt to inspect it.

Then he said, "Yeeerch, omigod, oh holy sh-i-i-i-t," before tossing the glove in the air, lurching about doing barf noises, and then falling in a dead faint on the grass, which caused consternation amongst his fellow Little League dads.

What the...? a number of them said as they herded the WAGs and brats away to a safe distance as though ET had just landed.

And then one called Dino, who’d instinctively caught the glove Chuck had chucked, peered down at it, and pretty soon he too was saying, "Yeeerch, omigod, oh holy sh-i-i-i-t," and then fainting too.

After that it was pretty much a domino effect as the glove was seized by one Little League dad after another, each one yeeerching, omigoding, holy sh-i-i-i-tting, and fainting, such that within minutes I was surrounded by a heap of comatose people, who were nothing like the ones you see in the movies when the going gets tough. Nothing like your John Waynes or Clint Eastwoods, or even your little Tom Cruises. Hollywood has a lot to answer for when it comes to exporting images, as I used to tell my final-year American Cinema with a Dash of Poststructuralism classes when I was still a don.

Don’t believe the hype, I would say. "Read your Foucault and Baudrillard. Think patinas. Think simulacra. Think untruths so deeply secreted and unexamined they have become normalised into truths."

And here I was, all these years later, with the newest batch of real-life non-heroes strewn all around me, some of them twitching with their spidery legs, while, huddled under a tree, their WAGS and offspring tore at their hair, clutched their mouths, and wailed. So much for those fictive dogged spirits who’d endured bitter hardships pushing west in covered wagons, and, when they’d screwed the Redskins, captured all the best land and taken up star-trekking to colonise space instead.

Mind you, once I’d retrieved the mitt from its most recent recipient—a person called Gene who was crawling about on hands and knees vomiting—I began to understand a little of its affects. What I’d hoped was, despite having been chewed to shreds by Binkey, the glove would at least have contained the treasured, signed-by-New-York-Yankees’ stars baseball, and I’d be home free. But no such luck. What the glove contained was a bloody—and evidently severed—hand with bits of gristle and carpal bone still attached.

~ * ~

Shit, I was therefore saying as I was approached by the only American in the whole gang with any wits about him. He said his name was Clyde and asked if I’d like to borrow his cellphone to call the cops. A kid of maybe fifteen or sixteen.

"It’s okay if you got your own phone, only...um...you know...you don’t look like the kinda guy that carries one?’

"And what would the kind of a guy who would carry one look like?" I countered, piqued. Okay, I was old but I wasn’t on a Zimmer yet.

Hey, no offence, mister. Only...

That’s when I relented and smiled. He was dead right, of course. I am a luddite technophobe with a specialism in mobiles in case they attack my brain with radio nuclides. I reckoned that was what the astute teen had spotted. And this was an emergency all right.

Okay, Clyde, none taken. And thanks, I told him as he reached over his iPhone. Only could you punch in the numbers for me? I’m not awfully sure how these things work.

Clyde, bless him, just shrugged.

Oookay, he said. Like nine-nine-nine over here, right? Not nine-one-one.

Nine-nine-nine, I told him. And don’t look at the glove, okay?

You got it, Clyde said, thumbing the tiny pad and then passing over the sleek instrument, which I pressed to my ear.

After only the third ring, a Welsh-sounding person called Morag answered and asked which service I required.

"POLICE!"

Not a lot of point on calling in medics. Not when, to the best of my knowledge, there weren’t any handless people running around needing a quick transplant.

Righty-ho, Doctor Footlink, said Morag after she’d taken my details and everything. An’ the incident what you is reportin’ is?

When I told her, the line went dead.

"An ’and? In a glove?" Morag whispered some seconds later when she came back on line.

Yes. A severed one.

And the b-body?

I hadn’t thought of that.

Body? Um...there doesn’t appear to be one of those as far as I can tell.

Mind you, Binkey was now off back in the undergrowth foraging again seeing as bikkies hadn’t been forthcoming, so I couldn’t be entirely sure of the veracity of my answer on the body front.

Okay, fine, I’ll have the coppers with you soonest, said Morag.

You fixed it, Mister? Clyde wanted to know when I handed him back his phone.

Think so, son, I told him as he sauntered off to revive his fallen father—Chuck as it turned out. A lucky guy, Chuck, to have such a spunky kid.

Two

What with the manic cuts after UK Inc.’s three zillion-pound mega flip-flop into deficit, I wasn’t expecting the wah-wah-wahing to start up any time soon. But, as luck had it, severed hands in baseball gloves evidently cut the mustard when it came to response times and, within fifteen minutes, I found myself seated on a park bench next to a Detective Inspector McGilligan, while his squad of plods, in this order:

1) told the little-league pops, moms, and brats to take a hike,

2) cleared the gawkers, rubberneckers, and Schadenfreude fiends,

3) sent out a mangy-looking sniffer dog (I hoped Binkey didn’t have an argument with it) to look for any body the hand might have belonged to,

and,

4) sealed off the whole area with those blue-and-white tapes saying Police—Get Lost.

So, Doctor Flatmack, nasty business, huh? DI McGilligan was saying.

Funny accent he had. Not like a London copper at all. Maybe Irish? Although some words sounded almost American.

Flintlock, actually. Jake Flintlock.

Right. Sticking out a hand for shaking.

It was all getting very pally, only I was keen to find Binkey and get back home. Claudia would be wondering where we were. She’d spent the afternoon shrinking a couple of loonies, but should have been finished by now and, given the recent excitement, I was fancying an iced Guinness and a couple of what my tobacconist, Charlie, calls Diskey Blues. The French, who invented the cigarettes, call them Disque Bleu, but not a lot gets lost in translation.

The loonies Claudia had been shrinking were both bonus-culture-confused bankers enrolled on her seminal and gobsmackingly profitable, six-month, twelve-step, post-Freudian, CBT programme, which, at a cost of a mere ten thousand pounds per capita with a two (-ish) percent refund should analysands relapse into criminal greed, promised social rehabilitation, and—with continued good behaviour—the chance of a return to normal extortion practices. And who better to shrink them than Claudia, a person who’d made more money on international stock markets than any woman alive? Why she’d suddenly switched to shrinkage beat me, but who was I to complain, given the Prince Albert Road mansion I was allowed to live in?

Vyn, said McGilligan, as I accepted the hand he’d offered. "Short for Melvyn? But I never liked Melvyn. Nor Mel neither."

Ah-hah, I said, flapping my crunched fingers and wiggling them to make sure they still worked. So that’s what you’d like me to call you?

Vyn shrugged and stared off.

"Oookay, then, Vyn," I said, reckoning him to be a prime client for Claudia’s second-string loony programme, the one designed for people reckoning their true personalities have been warped and, in extreme cases, ruined by misguided christening—the Adolf who was happier as Dolfie, the Sharon who thought of herself more as Alexandra, the Paul who preferred Pauline, that type of thing.

Only it is getting a bit late and my wife’ll be wondering where...

You are.

"Quite. And where Binkey is."

"Binkey?"

My dog. The one who found the glove with the hand in it.

Vyn shook his head and pouted.

Poodle is it? he said.

No. Dachshund/Doberman cross.

Blimey, he said, sounding a lot like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

I made no comment. This was no time to discuss the appropriateness of dog names. Particularly not with a copper called Vyn.

He’s over there somewhere, I said instead, gesturing towards the farthest backside of the park where I sincerely hoped Binkey wouldn’t bite the knackered-looking sniffer dog’s balls off.

Get it over ’ere, Vyn said.

"It?"

The dog, he said.

"Binkey’s not an ‘it.’ He’s a he."

Yeah, right. So call ’im.

I’m not awfully sure he’ll...

That’s when Vyn blew out his cheeks, held the air for maybe ten seconds, and then expelled it in a puff of exasperation, the kind of exasperation I didn’t like the look of at all. Palliness evidently history.

You got commands for it, right?

Um...

See, it wouldn’t look good for Bunkey.

Binkey.

"For Binkey, if it turned out ’e was the one what’d bitten off the ’and stuffed into this baseball glove what I am now ’oldin’. Now would it, Doctor Flatlook? Ask yourself the question."

"Now look here, Constable, you’re not suggesting for a second...?

"At this stage in the investigation, chummy, everyfink is ruled in, an’ nuffink is ruled out, okay? So just call the bleeder...if you wouldn’t mind," said DI Vyn McGilligan.

~ * ~

They say bad luck goes in threes. Only in my case, on this now stifling early summer evening, it had extended to fours.

First the German whale, then the Russian Mafiya, then the beached Madoff wannabes, and now DI Vyn, the cut of whose jib I was starting to dislike. Apart from anything, if there were now innuendo surrounding Binkey’s role in the severing of the hand, what suspicions did the bloke harbour about me? After all, he’d sent the Yanks and the gawkers packing. So they couldn’t be suspects. Which left...

Yup, me.

You ’eard what I said or didn’t you? he said.

About?

If shove came to heave, as I suspected it might, I reckoned I’d need to call on the services of my old pal Dick Everhard, himself an ex-high-ranking Met copper and now the proud proprietor of an NHS-backed gymnasium for thinnies and fatties in Islington. Dick had helped me and Bum out on a number of our cases and, despite having been out of the Yard for a while, still carried clout where it mattered.

Gettin’ your dog over ’ere.

"Ah, that..."

"Yeah, that. Do it, and do it now," said Vyn.

It was just as I was inserting the little finger and index back into my mouth over the bent-back tongue to prepare for the whistle I knew there was no chance of Binkey obeying without the addition of me screaming BIKKIES, when one of Vyn’s goons dressed in a Kevlar vest, came puffing up to our bench with Binkey chewing at his heels, finger-hooked his boss into whispering distance, and then hissed something into his ear which caused Vyn to eye me malevolently for a long moment, and then sigh.

Okay, Footlock, you can go. Just get out of here, he told me when he’d stopped sighing. And take the dog with you.

Well, as you can imagine, there was nothing I would have liked more than to be let into the secret of why Binkey and I were being released at such short notice, but this didn’t seem to be the moment for enquiry. Discretion and valour all over again.

But don’t leave town, Vyn was saying as if he were Wyatt Earp or somebody. There’ll be questions I’ll be ’avin’ for you, only I ain’t thought of them yet. But when I do...

You’ll be in touch. And I’ll look forward to it, Inspector, I said, attaching an excited Binkey to his lead and standing to leave.

"Not so fast, Finklick. Gonna want your number, innit? An’ your address. An’ it’s Detective Inspector to you."

"Fine. Jolly good, Detective Inspector," I said giving him my landline number and the Prince Albert Road address, at which he frowned.

Something wrong? That’s where I live. Call my wife if you don’t believe me. She’s called Claudia.

And good luck to you, Cock Sparrow!

Born and raised in Rome, it’s Claudia’s view all policemen are in the pay of the government, the mafia, the pope, or all three, and has at her command a vivid set of bestially sacrilegious epithets she uses whenever in conversation with them. Porcine incubi preying on vestal virgins, that type of thing. Plus, as the result of her liceo classico education, she has at her disposal rhetorical tropes of which ancient Athenians would have been proud—zeugma, catachresis, stuff like that. And a range of Italian cusses that would put a British fishwife to shame. Put simply, there’s nobody better equipped to confuse-a-cop than Claudia.

Give her a ring any time, I smiled.

But Vyn was still frowning. Pulling at an earlobe too.

"What I was asking for was your number and your address, right?"

Right. And I’ve just given them to you.

"Only this number don’t look nuffink like no mobile number, do it? An’ you call this an email address?"

So that was it, the twenty-first-century’s addiction to trace-you-to-your-toilet communication.

I have a mobile but keep it switched off to save on batteries, I told the peculiar plod before telling him its number. And if you want to reach me by email, the address is [e-mail]. But don’t expect a quick answer. I only check my messages every six months.

The PI part of my address is clear enough. The plagiarism bit refers to the articles I continue to write for academics unable to write articles for themselves. Not a big money spinner, but it keeps me in Y-fronts. McGilligan sighed while punching this information into a cellphone the size of Cornflake.

It was while he was doing this that discretion and valour performed an unexpected volte face in the Flintlock mind. And so it was, as I was beating a retreat with Binkey, that I called over my shoulder to McGilligan, So you didn’t find a body then?

Silence from McGilligan, although I was pleased to see him stabbing at his Cornflake as if trying to kill it.

Three

By the time Binkey and I buzzed ourselves through the mansion’s gates, it was close to seven-thirty and still Mediterranean muggy.

Phew, I said, wiping my brow as we were welcomed back to the homestead by Stormin’ Normin, our speaking intruder-alarm system.