Faraday's Eyes

By Brian Bodman

Tyler is commercially legitimate and free of his gambling debts, although outrageous good luck and risky legerdemain played a major part.

Yet, two years on, he somehow finds himself being pursued over Aintrees Grand National fences, at night and without a horse. Someone in authority believes he is in cahoots with his ex-mate Blackie who has absconded with some very damaging information.

When, back in South Wales, he eventually chances upon this highly incriminating evidence that Blackie has slyly secreted, he finds himself embroiled in a major drugs dealing concern, organised under-age sex and the blue movie business.

A body turns up in the boot of his car and only quick thinking allows him to dispose of the corpse before a couple of very suspect policemen come knocking his door. All he can do is use his considerable guile and street-wise talents to give the impression of complete innocence while frantically covering the tracks he has made wriggling out of any perceived association.

He has a kidnap and recue bid to deal with, another body to confuse the opposition and some improbably choreographed mayhem on the golf course before he can even begin to effect the only conclusion that will clear him of any links (no pun).
Bluff and double bluff is the name of Tylers game and his success or terminal failure depends on how well he plays his hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Dec 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493138876

Brian Bodman

Brian Bodman was born in Blackwood in S.Wales and still resides in The Valleys. He is Grammar educated - Lewis School, Pengam - is divorced with 2 children in close contact, and boasts a large family throughout Wales. In the 60's he worked in the Building and Construction Industry in a variety of Sales Management positions for a number of National and International firms, travelling a great deal. Then, in order to spend more quality time with his family, he switched careers into Pub and Club management until spinal athritis caused his retirement. He now writes to the exclusivity of a previously hedonostic lifestyle.

Book preview

A Good Place to Start

I awoke with a blink and, before even glancing over at the bedside clock, thought ‘Today’s the day. Today I am officially legitimate; finally, incontrovertibly legitimate’.

Now, did that idea feel exhilaratingly good or no?

Yes it did, indeed to goodness it did!

Then, after squealing out a self-congratulatory sigh, I snatched a look at the wall—clock, although it was more an automatic response than a necessity. Just as I anticipated, eight o’clock on the button; a legacy of my old repping days when I fostered the ability to instruct the old brain cells to click into gear at the appropriate time, no matter how inebriated I ended up from the dubious pleasures of entertaining prime customers, before clambering into bed, nullifying the need for an alarm call from the receptionist. It always seemed somehow miraculous to wake up at the designated time, but that internal clock never fails, no matter in what strange and beguiling resting place I sometimes find myself.

I have blessed the knack on more than one occasion.

Memories of a confrontation in the hallway of some semi-detached house, Newbridge or thereabouts if I recall correctly, with a husband coming home earlier than anticipated from a night shift wielding a graphite-shafted driver flashed along my retina like a home-movie. Only the enclosed space saved me as I beat him to the front door, but if he had chosen a nine-iron or a wedge . . .

The self-indulgence of ordering room-service tea and the morning paper had, by that time, been curtailed by a stricter regime of disapproving finance officers—Cavaliers versus Roundheads would describe the difference in attitudes between us freer spirits on the road and those in the office. They thought we were too flash by half, with our brand new company cars and the privileges of generous expense accounts. Joyless Cromwell wins again, but not before, at the annual Sales Conference, I had wallowed in the wanton excesses of a real live ‘Goblin Teasmaid’, a Filipino beauty who rejoiced in the jaw-droppingly wondrous name of Adoration Geronimo.

She brought the tray, sat on the edge of the bed, shook me gently awake but meaningfully kept the fingertips resting on my bared chest, stared earnestly and provocatively at me, and that was that. Out of one dream and into another. Mind you, I had been pouring on the charm the night before while she tended bar so it was not too much of a surprise. I don’t know whether it was a Filipino dialect that she was yelling in or that other undecipherable hybrid language that women sometimes use when beset by an out-of-body experience—myself too on occasions when the fever is in—but it was a very Comice-pear juicy encounter. The Lord only knows what it would have been like if there’d been time for a muff-diving foray; the mattress would have been a swamp. To my chagrin, she turned out to be a clinger.

How I got away with that is anybody’s guess, especially when my wife, ex-wife now, arrived for the Friday night dinner dance.

I had just enough wit to refrain from inquiring about the circumstances or experiences maybe that led to her being blessed with such a glorious affectation as ‘Geronimo’. Visions of naked paratroopers dropping in on her family’s village during the war in the Pacific almost ruined my presentation in front of the entire company directorship that same morning.

Surreal days.

Legit. That does sound nice. The word hangs in the air like a neon-lit sign, and I could not help but smile broadly. It was a good moment, not that I hadn’t been respectable for some time, but this was the first real occasion that I had cause to annunciate it to myself in such a confidant and self-satisfying manner. I am legit. It has a head-buzzing ring to it. It was definitely another moment of my life in which to wallow unashamedly.

It was I suppose a perfect case of one door closing and another one opening, and I refuse to put it down to a stroke of luck or fortune smiling on me because it was simply one of those nice things that happen now and again. You need them to balance out the sads, the bads and the downright—fucking-unfairs of this world before you begin to question your role in life.

This was one of those ventures that you couldn’t even think about embarking on without having lots of ready cash, and the foresight and resolve to make sure you pay up on the nail without any hint of prevarication. A bit like betting without credit. It felt, I thought, as though a loose gaggle of disparate strands were finally coming together in one neat knot. It could be even more accurately described as a feeling of having wandered aimlessly up and down lanes and B-roads for some interminable time, to suddenly find oneself on the motorway and the welcome appearance of a desirable destination.

It had only been something like five months, five intense months it must be stated, and the decision to give up on the Flat had been the crucial factor—not even a bet on the Derby—but there seemed to be a definite purpose to life now, something tangible on which to build. Gambling did not seem to fit in with the life-style somehow, as though indulging in it would stand out as a jarring intrusion. I hadn’t even been tempted by this new Summer sticks season, although I will admit to being one of the few amongst my contemporaries to think it was a splendid idea, and although the National Hunt season proper had already started, at the Market Rasen meeting in August as usual, in my mind the jumps did not start seriously until the Chepstow meeting on the first Saturday in October, which always coincided with the first leg of the Autumn Double, the Cambridgeshire at Newmarket, the day before the Arc De Triomphe at Longchamp in Paris. I used to live by those date-marked signposts, and I suppose they will always be etched on my memory bands, like rote-learned arithmetic tables.

Today was the first Saturday in October, and I was going to Chepstow once more but with absolutely no intention of laying a bet. It is doubtful whether I would have gone at all were it not for the fact that I had to begin the ball rolling on this next business phase of mine. It wasn’t really a new venture, just a diversification from a previous one. Hauling topsoil from Herefordshire building sites to prospective playing fields on the tops of flattened Welsh coal-tips is not that much different to hauling clay from Gloucestershire building sites to dis-continued County rubbish dumps.

The weather is unquestionably the definitive factor in the decision. It is all but impossible to transfer slurry-wet topsoil out of the bucket of a digger into the back of an empty lorry, and even if that messy task were accomplished, tipping the soil back out of the wagon when it sticks to the metal floor and sides like nougat to a hairy blanket is a ridiculous exercise. So carting topsoil is a summer programme, and then only as long as the sun shines.

Clay however is slab-like and impervious to the wet, which is why the County surveyors needed it to form a covering layer to seal off the toxicity that is redolent of a long-term rubbish dump. I had proved my honesty and trustworthiness with the topsoil contracts, and as a result now had the benefit of a one-year supply of Gloucestershire clay. If I could have located a steady supply of the stuff for five years—and I have my feelers out constantly—the surveyors would have handed me a contract for that amount without hesitation. To top it all, the real cream on the cake—I giggled myself silly on more than one occasion at the simplicity of it—the building contractor was actually paying me to remove the clay, as, unlike topsoil, it is superfluous to a new housing site and would be dumped any way, and then paid again to deliver it to the County Council designated site.

God’s overcoat has a multiplicity of pockets and I was presently nestling nicely in one of them.

Glyn Haulage, the coal merchant, would be well pleased with me considering the boost I had engineered to his turnover, which simply meant that his drivers could now return from their coal-hauling delivery service with a full load instead of the usual empty wagon. We had formed a pretty good arrangement out of nothing, and now had continuity for as long as the material was available. If I could also keep the summer topsoil going with some other sites I had earmarked I would be set fair for a lucratively profitable future.

I sprang out of bed thinking that the earth definitely moved for me these days.

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(2)

That particular analogy stuck with me as I stoked up on the full breakfast, not willing to trust to the availability of a table downstairs in the Members restaurant at Chepstow, thinking back to last night and that little bugger Maxine flickering her saucy bum at me down the golf club. I supposed I could have purloined her from under the noses of the younger element who were bar-drooling at her while taking a break from re-enacting the eighteen holes they’d just played, and I know she was only waiting for the merest hint of encouragement from me—she could only be about eighteen or nineteen—but I wouldn’t be shovelling bacon, eggs and black pudding now if I had succumbed to temptation. In any case, she would have chopsed or, failing that, made it plain with less than subtle hints that there was something going on between us, and there was no way I wanted that getting back to my darling Samantha.

At least she knew how to maintain a friendly hands-off distance, giving the ever-present, sly watchers-from-the-fringe no cause for dangerous speculation. All it takes is the wrong sort of smile in the wrong sort of context, or the folly of a complicit look across the stereotypically crowded room, and please don’t mention ‘I happen to be going your way, I’ll give you a lift home’, and the possessors of those beady eyes would concoct a saga of Wagnerian proportions before you could blink.

Her husband had no reason to be circumspect either, although how he had the gall to be so harshly jealous of her when he hardly bothered to cover his own wandering tracks was a puzzle. Working behind the bar of the golf club allowed her precious freedom from the monotony of domestic duties, and maybe the wickedly latent thought that she might be susceptible to somebody like me flavoured her decision. She was only in her middle twenties, younger than me by four or five, pretty, blue-eyed blond, petite and eminently cuddlesome, although the old butter wouldn’t melt to evaluate her guileless air, yet she had already produced four kids. I had long harboured the suspicion that people like her husband, Wayne, hoped that by making their wives continuously pregnant their appeal or desirability would fade, or that domesticity would wear them down into dowdiness, allowing them licence to philander without the green-eyed monster sitting on their shoulder and whispering that she could be dabbling in infidelity too.

Not my Sam. She was far too cute for that. There would be, she had vowed darkly one rain-gloomy afternoon, no more babies.

The rugby season had started and, whether playing home or away, her outside-centre husband either came home very, very late on a Saturday night—i.e. Sunday morning—or re-appeared with his little-boy-lost look at around lunch-time of the Sunday with an appropriate, well-alibi-ed excuse.

Suited me down to the . . . Well, suited me. I didn’t attend the rugby club very often these days, not that I ever played the bone-heads’ game which seemed to my eyes to be merely an extremely handy excuse to indulge in the most outrageously disgraceful behaviour that excessive quantities of booze will foster, but it did boast a couple of good snooker tables, you could invariably get a decent sports orientated conversation going, horse-racing in particular with one or two of the more discerning gamblers, and always some well-contested games of crib and don.

But since the nonsense with Blackie got more or less resolved, a tenuous assumption which I had no choice but to accept, I began to feel that I should attend less often as though there was something ambient there holding back my progress, like walking around in lead boots or into a headwind. Whatever adverse influence I had detected, or malign air—I know it sounds daft as it could easily be coincidence—my fortunes seemed to take a turn for the better as soon as I changed my routines. Yes luck comes into it, if you consider a well-plotted gamble that comes to fruition a jammy result, but the rest of my upwardly mobile progress was down to opportunism, guile, the experience gained in the cutthroat world of commerce, and hard work. But yes, without the successful wager the rest could not have followed.

Not too many years back I would have carried on punting with gleeful abandon, and although I still harbour a yearning to have a serious crack at this new spread betting game as soon as I become more proficient with the world of computers, I did feel that I was a little wiser these days. Even now, after two years, the nonsense with Blackie takes some fathoming. I am shaking my head at this minute, over the kitchen sink as I deal with the dishes, at the complete and utter incongruousness of it all, and it is very hard to think about it without giving a nod to that fickle Fay, Lady Luck, in the absolute conviction that she must have had a really good belly-laugh throughout it all.

I have never told anyone about it, not in a shaggy-dog story way, mostly because it would open too many cans of very wriggly worms, but otherwise for the simple reason that it is far too convoluted a plot to relate without a dizzying sense of the surreal creeping into the account. I do it often, map it out in my mind, trying different ways to enunciate all the incidences so that the punch-line, Lady Luck’s beautifully contrived denouement comes as something of a surprise to the listener. But it’s a tough one to get right, and I can tell a joke better than most, so I just keep it for my own self-amusement.

I get my stuff together—no Race-Notebook this time, which would have held all of last year’s race form as a guide; it would not be needed—the appropriate racing coat—the wind can whip across those stands like a razor—trilby and binoculars, shove a few hundred in an inside pocket, although I still have the accounts to bet off if I want to use the bankers cards, lock up, jump in the car and think it through again.

I’ve got a ground-floor flat now, in one of those small complexes on the edges of Cwm Pesawr—fragrant valley in translation—bought out of my share in the divorce split, plus a bit more I had craftily spirited away, only one bedroom—bugger visitors—but a good sized kitchen, which is fundamental for me, and an expansive lounge which is as comfy as I need. There is a car parking space allotted to me that has happily shown so far to be vandal proof. I generally leave the doors unlocked so that prospective thieves do not have to break anything to achieve their objectives i.e. radio cassette; if that is what they are after nothing will stop them anyway. The town is placed almost centrally in the enigmatic maze that is the South Wales valleys, so that the M4 is a mere fifteen minutes drive down one of the meandering cwms—it was termed Little Switzerland in the mid-nineteenth century, although yodelling is something of a dying art these days—and a similar distance northwards to the Heads of the Valleys’ dangerous three-laner.

I headed south for the motorway and the Severn Bridge.

I did not anticipate too much heavy traffic, but expected a lot more on the return trip with the West Country crowds heading for Chepstow racecourse. I kept the radio on low so that the urge to sing along to a favourite song would not disrupt my chain of thought. Why the urge to revisit the tale should be so strong I cannot say, except that the prospects of attending another Chepstow meeting seemed to chime some offbeat chord in me.

It began, to all intents and purposes, around two years ago, not at Chepstow but at a Friday afternoon, pre-Christmas Hereford meeting.

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(3)

It’s a funny thing, luck, and such an ephemeral commodity. You never know when it is about to change, to turn on you or go in your favour. In just the space of one beat of the heart it can bless you or curse you. It cannot be gauged, guessed at, or anticipated, but neither can it be ignored. You know when it is there, favouring you with that heady, intoxicating ambience, but you need to be tuned in to it at all times, aware of the fragility of its influence because you do not get a goodbye message before you find yourself alone and wondering. I’ve heard people call me the mystery man—‘how does he do it?’ I hear them whisper—but I suppose it’s my own fault for cultivating that louche mien. The Welsh love to put people into boxes, to categorise them, and it amused me to bolster the image by pre-planning my repartee. I can generally anticipate the questions coming my way, and it is not too difficult to have a ready retort to hand, which invariably serves to enhance the perceived reputation. I’d be more accurately termed ‘the illusion man’, but I am not volunteering that suggestion.

I had just had my driving licence taken away for six months, prompting me to assert at the bar of the rugby club that I had told the magistrate that I had only partaken of two bottles of shandy, but the deaf old coot thought I said two bottles of Chianti. I was, to be frank, very lucky as I was breathalysed under a lot more than two bottles of wine but the technology is still a little suspect and I do tend to sober up when scared. Still, the boys expect such quips from me, and who am I to disillusion them of the improbability of the situation. I have to watch myself sometimes in case play-acting becomes disdain.

It was fortunate then that Wilf the German was at a bit of a loose end, the building site having closed earlier than usual for the whole of the Christmas period, and was able to commandeer him as a driver. He is the key to the whole episode, so his background and mannerisms are intrinsic to the story. I can see the events unfolding before my eyes, and I can remember with a perfect clarity the feelings that I harboured and the thoughts that came unbidden to my mind, as though I had written it all down immediately it happened.

Wilf is a real oddity, not of nature but of circumstances. He was eighteen when he was taken prisoner towards the end of the war and, by various circuitous routes that took him as far afield as Canada finally ended up working on the land in the rural idyll—no—one but the Welsh can say ‘rural idyll’ with such deep satisfaction (rewrull Idill)—of Monmouthshire. He ended up marrying one of the land girls, settled down and promptly set about turning himself into the most archetypal Welshman since Owain Glyndwr. As far as Wilf is concerned, Wales produces the best singers, poets, rugby-players and actors, not to mention boxers-of-a-certain-weight, in the world, so that as long as he is alive he is convinced he abides at the cultural centre of the universe. Consequently, in this age of National understatement, he sticks out like a pimple on the end of Richard Gere’s nose. It is germane to the German’s part in this tale that his position in the community as one of life’s characters needs expressing. In moments of fun, his drinking butties will insert into the conversation a liberal dosage of ‘veres’ ‘vots’ and ‘vyes’, and even I have been known to throw the odd ‘mein Herring’ into the pot. Yet, like some instance of mass hypnotism they all seem oblivious to the fact that, unlike most Germans, Wilf can quite adequately say ‘Wales’, ‘Winstone’ and ‘Wha’sname’. It’s as if they need him to retain that quirk of pronunciation to define him as a character and so do not question it. However, and also unfathomed by the crowd, he genuinely has got some sort of speech defect, and it is this aberration that lies at the very crux of the plot.

I was at the time in a very dire financial situation and it was taking gut-wrenching amounts of will power to hold my nerve. Under pressure it is all too easy to lose judgement. Negativity creeps in to your reasoning leaving you in lonely limbo.

At Hereford, I had missed the odd showing of fives about Duke of Monmouth in the first race, my banker of the day, a two-mile hurdle—there’s no flat racing at Hereford—but got on quickly at nine to two and it was never in danger of defeat, finishing at a well-backed seven to two favourite. That had steadied the tuneless jangling a smidgen.

I shouldn’t really have hazarded a bet on the next, it was only a lowly ‘conditional jockeys’ selling hurdle’ but I had taken note of Passo All’erta running a decent third down at Newton Abbot under similar soft going circumstances after coming back from unsuccessful attempts at chasing. It was just that I thought the thing was miles over-priced at sixteen to one, so I indulged myself with a decent each way punt. Now there was a fine example of luck being with you or against you.

He took second spot three out behind the long-time leader, who I knew from the Form book only just lasted out this minimum trip, joined him at the last hurdle with me roaring like a bull elephant, promptly made a monumental mistake with his rider waving to his granny in the stands, which almost had me crumpling to the floor in harmony with him, but then quickly picked himself up and, as though nothing untoward had happened, ran on to win close home by three-quarters of a length. A bit of a miracle really, as the Hereford run-in is very short and any horse bar the extremely knackered runner up would have been home and hosed. I said a thank you to the old fickle deity, knowing that on another day it would have been an unlucky second with my place money giving a small return or’ on another, bleaker day, crumpled to the turf and me to the depths of despair.

How do you conjugate those disparate scenarios? Who decides what will happen and when? All you can do is wait for that special feeling of invincibility to creep over you as though you have entered another dimension in space and time.

I was in the Members bar I recall, anaesthetising my jangling nerves with a tart G&T, when Gombo tapped me on the shoulder, which is the equivalent of saying that heavyweight champion Mike Tyson caresses his opponents into oblivion. I would like to have re-nicknamed him Moose, after the Mike Mazurki character, Moose Malloy in ‘Farewell My Lovely’ who entreats Dick Powell’s Phillip Marlowe to ‘find my Velda for me’.

At that moment I would have promised to find Lord Lucan for him if he’d had the foresight to wait a couple of hours and allow me to consolidate my winnings with the newly-acquired mien of confidence that had suddenly enveloped me, but brawn and wit have never been comfortable soul-mates. All he had to burble to me was that Mr Ezzard wanted to see me in the Members’ car park after racing, where he would be waiting in his Mercedes. The invitation was almost certainly not to share a Fortnum and Masons hamper. I did wonder what he was doing at Hereford on a Friday, because he certainly does not rent a pitch there, but the thought was fleeting.

I should take more notice of fleeting thoughts, like you should with first impressions on meeting someone for the first time. He must have found out that I would be there though, so he had clearly come along expressly to see me for some purpose or other, nothing of which would be in my favour. Gombo went out of the door and Lady Luck went out the window. How fictitious does this sound?

The next five favourites came in, and I was too nerve-wrackingly deflated to re-build my enthusiasm, other than a hefty punt on an even money poke as a means of covering the day’s expenses. You can’t have six out of seven favourites winning at Hereford can you for God’s sake?

I found him in the gloaming in the corner of the field that serves as the Members’ car park, sitting in the back of his menacing black motor. Gombo would have elbow-grip escorted anyone else, but Mr Ezz had me figured. I steeled myself for a conversation that would tax an Enigma code-cracking expert—he did so like to talk around the houses, and you have to be on your toes at all times trying to decipher him. Mind you, if his first words had contained the word, ‘Marion’, which is his earthy, frighteningly insatiable well-cushioned missus, I would have been back out of the door and heading for somewhere eminently more safe, like Rwanda.

I had only seen her on the Monday after the Ludlow meeting was abandoned to frost, safe in the knowledge that Mr Ezzard was laying the odds down at Newton Abbot. Would it be crass to say that I was laying a red-hot favourite of my own?

He was waiting patiently in the back seat of the motor, indicating with a flick of his finger—you would be well advised also to have a basic knowledge of semaphore along with a smattering of sign language—to open the door and join him.

I closed the door. He said ‘How are you doing, young Tyler?"—My name—which did not mean ‘how are you doing at this particular race meeting?’ but ‘what are the state of your finances, as if I didn’t already know?’

Coming back from a sticky spell, Mr Ezz. You know how it is. Swings and those other things.

It has come to my notice that you were very close to being persona non grata with some of the Major’s.

I’m OK till the end of next month.

Not with me you’re not.

Well, you know I’m good for it, I protested, suddenly not liking the way my antenna began to hum. I was conscious of a certain unwelcome vibrato in my tonsils, a sure sign that my heart is heading for my mouth.

You are two months past your sell-by date already, and while I have been generous enough in the past to allow you a little leeway on your credit—heavy emphasis on the ‘c’ word—at this festive moment in time I feel I could quite adequately step into the shoes of a certain character in Mr Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ .

Well before he had completed his cute analogy I had decided he wanted something that shouted a ‘sailing close to the wind’ assignment, and blackmail was the swiftest and surest way to get a positive response from me. Gambling debts are not enforceable in law, so any meaningful deficits in that direction inevitably triggers the universal and extremely painful ‘pound of flesh’ response, with the additional penalty of an official complaint to Tattersalls and a heart-breaking blacklisting. Goodbye hedonistic lifestyle, hello Nevill Hall Hospital, Abergavenny. He held up a hand to stay my arguments—I had them queuing up eagerly like plane stacking over Heathrow—palm facing me. In Ezz-speak, this gesture has two distinct meanings. Either he wants to sit cross-legged around a campfire swapping beads, scalps or smoking um peace pipe, or he is about to launch the Seventh Cavalry at you.

I thought a parley might be a slight favourite.

I composed my face to look attentive and resisted the urge to move my fingers towards the door handle.

In my kind of business, Tyler (not just gambling. He had his fingers in more pies than a Mr Kipling choux chef) Good solid reliable information is the backbone to success. It is an intrinsic ingredient in the smooth running of my everyday operations. Without it I would just be another…

His multiply purposed hand made a backward, dismissive wave out of the window to indicate the rest of the world, in a style that would have had Don Corleone nodding with approval. I sat there as though I was drinking in the words of wisdom offered by a favourite uncle. His face had that peaceful, faraway look that I loathed. It was also unnerving in the extreme to stare into his eyes; so black you could comb your hair in them. If there was a stare-you-out competition between him and the Gorgon, I know who I’d have my money on.

Concentrate and translate, I told myself.

Yesterday, I was in receipt of a bit of bad news.

(Pet gerbil passed away, or entire family massacred by a rampaging tribe of juiced-up Watusi while on a safari camping holiday).

Bad for me personally. You do remember do you not, that little operation down Taunton way which got so spectacularly and publicly closed down last year?

(We were talking counterfeit money that was being laundered through betting offices and racetrack gambling).

I nodded non-commitedly, not really wanting to recollect my part in it, although I had cut my ties well in advance of the bust. There was a slippery slope at the end of that particular road, and I so dislike being out of control.

I very nearly got dragged into the ensuing morass as you know, but a little guile and forethought kept me out of harm’s way. I was under surveillance for quite some time. Very unnerving. Recently I was introduced to another outfit, from the Forest of Dean way, which produced a test run of fifty for me (grand) that unfortunately turned out to be less than perfect. Faraday’s eyes are not that blue, if blue they truly be.

Got it straight away. Courtesy of Wednesday’s quiz night, which helps to keep me out of mischief, and occasionally gives my ego a boost. Fifty grand’s worth of twenty-pound notes had been produced, on the reverse of which Michael Faraday’s eyes were found to be brighter than Paul Newman’s baby blues. Neon-lit message; not to be offered up for transactions, traceable to source.

Aha.

A warning finger went up, indicating the stinger.

Not a problem you might think? Repackage and return. The manufacturer’s warning phone call came in time. Take two trusted employees, (there were always two for each delivery) and point them towards Dennis Potter land. Yes? No! Half my boys, girls too, are down with this dreaded virus that’s doing the rounds. Just one trusty, long-serving member of my team still standing, Sniffer Warburton, who you of course know, and several scallywags waiting in the wings. The handiest of them just happened to be a very good mate of yours, one Daniel Black, Blackie, who I very unwisely allowed into my home to help with the re-packaging. An unprecedented lapse of concentration on my part for which I berated myself fulsomely.

My guts fell with a resounding thud.

Come the off, Blackie rings in saying he too has succumbed to the bug and was incapacitated, leaving Sniffer to journey on alone. Guess what, Tyler, guess what?

My mouth tightened in a lemon-sucking wince. Guesses were superfluous.

There’s five grand short when they count at the other end. They are less than happy as you would imagine, but hoping optimistically for an accounting error at this end. I have to tell you, Tyler, that I would trust Sniffer implicitly, if only for the simple reason that as an ex-pug of the boxing-booth variety he is too dull to steal. That leaves us with your oppo, but in order to give him the benefit of any doubt I took the precaution of sending someone to his current abode to testify to his state of health. The young lady with whom he resides had not seen him for twenty-four hours, but begs us to send her love using the most explicit of epithets. I need not translate. Those valley girls certainly know how to trot out a pretty phrase. Now, I cannot can I, have him running amok amongst those impenetrable valleys of yours with five big ones in high-explosive loot? I have always known him to be unstable (not a pun on the fact that Blackie used to work for various horsy establishments in the Epsom area) which is why I deserve the castigation I addressed to myself, but I never thought of him as stupid. Tyler, I simply cannot afford the very real chance of his being picked up on an innocent drunk and disorderly with his pockets stuffed with naughty merchandise. Even the Monmouthshire constabulary would be able to make two and two equal a very serious four, would they not?

Would they not half!

I am in no position to be investigated at the present moment for any kind of spurious reason. So I want him found and I want the goods, (he searched the ether for the most suitable adjective) neutralised.

Well…

You are going to ask me why I am relating all this to you, aren’t you? (He had the ability to read minds too, especially tremulous ones). So before you come up with your most plausible excuses for acting as a mere spectator in this drama, I believe you may have misunderstood my earlier sentiments. I have taken the opportunity of settling your accounts with the big boys, which means that instead of owing me the better part of two and a half you are now in debt to the tune of ten and a half. And I would like it paid by next Monday. Am I being clear? Do you need pictures?

Pictures? It was Cinemascope, it was Vistavision, and it was Todd A-O. Hand me the red and green-lensed glasses; it was all in 3D.

It got cold suddenly, the chill emanating entirely from Reg Ezzard, bookmaker and potential gravedigger.

I shall be in the office on Monday (no horseracing until Boxing Day Thursday) awaiting your presence with, let us be optimistic, good news. In return for this small favour I will be pleased to extend your credit facilities on a loosely indefinite basis, within certain limits of course. The penalty for failure to locate the quarry, by the way, will not only reflect badly upon you. You should be aware that after midnight on Sunday someone entirely more lethal than our Gombo would be hunting for Mr Light-Fingered Black. I have no say whatsoever in that decision. My hands are tied. (As will be Blackie’s!) There it is in a nutshell. Simple.

Simple! My mate, my ex-mate, my very-ex-mate, has been in possession of a large bundle of readies for a day and a half at least, which is somewhat akin to appointing Vlad the Impaler as janitor of a girl’s school. Without going too deeply into his psyche, Blackie is an impulse character. Act now; worry later, although the word ‘worry’ does not figure too prominently in his vocabulary. I doubt that he has ever in his life seen a project through to the end, being a fully paid up member of the ‘Que Sera Sera’ school of forward planning. Anyone more lethal than Gombo on his trail would bear visiting cards fringed in black.

I was so engrossed with my little problem