Pistache Returns, Page 3

  ‘Indeed,’ said young Will Lawless, the tousle-headed adventurer who was Sir Hector’s illegitimate son. ‘But surely enlightened people can make arrangements beyond the constraints of society.’

  The impudent young man appeared to have a twitch in his eyelid, Gertrude remarked; unless . . . he was winking at her. No wonder, she thought with a shudder, that the village slatterns referred to him as the Divine Will.

  ‘The solution you all crave is not easily dispensed,’ Gertrude declared, surveying the row of credulous domestics. ‘This library embodies mankind’s futile search for a key to all mysteries. The jewels about Sir Hector’s throat are the single pearls of wisdom that he gathered before drowning in the mill race of time. The miscreant you search is not among the humble people gathered here tonight. No parlour maid, or groom, no cook or housekeeper, no underfootman or even head footman could have wrought such an infernal deed.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Will, ‘it is the work of the Supreme Power.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ cried Gertrude. ‘The Butler did it.’

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  once tried a crime story. Only once, though . . .

  Cordelia Galloway was pruning roses in the walled garden at Tillingfold, distracted by the sensation of their perfume, their scent, their aroma.

  ‘Call for you, Mrs G,’ said Walsh, the odd-job man. ‘Milton Keynes uniform branch.’

  Mrs Galloway put her fingers to her temples. With Maynard Keynes she was familiar, but who was this Milton who so opportuned her by the electric telephone? As for the ‘uniform branch’, there could be no such thing. Every branch was particular, as G. E. Moore had established, unique in its own quiddity; none could therefore be ‘uniform’.

  ‘They’re sending a car,’ said Walsh. ‘Young woman’s been murdered.’

  Cordelia was by way of being terrified of automobiles, unless they were driven by her own chauffeur, Billingham. On the back seat, she thought of how the variety and noise of the world closed down to a moment of silence, to a core of selfhood. She gazed through the glass at a vulgar settlement, a city, she supposed – a town.

  At the police station, Cordelia met an officer whose bulging eyes gave him something of the toad.

  ‘Inspector Ness,’ he said, holding out his labourer’s hand. ‘But the lads just call me Ness.’

  ‘Cordelia Galloway,’ she returned. ‘Private investigator from Russell Square.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Ness. ‘The famous Bloomsbury Snoop.’

  ‘I also write books. My last was published in instalments.’

  ‘A serial thriller?’ The coarse man chuckled.

  ‘I have yet to hear The Weeks so described,’ said Cordelia.

  In the morgue Ness showed her the body of a young woman. Cordelia noted what appeared to be a mariner’s tattoo above the coccyx.

  ‘But, Ness,’ she exclaimed, ‘she’s a common little tart!’

  ‘She was,’ said Ness, ‘but she changed her ways. She was truly sorry.’

  Cordelia took one last look at the body. ‘You are quite right,’ she declared. ‘This girl was not murdered. She drowned in a stream of conscience, Ness.’

  JOHN GRISHAM

  sets a legal thriller on the Isle of Wight

  Dex Lewicki had been on secondment to the firm only six months, but already he’d seen too much. A shoplifting in Cowes. A parking violation in Seaview. But this was something else. This one smelled to high heaven.

  ‘Right,’ he said to Marion, the secretary. ‘I want the reports from the CIA and your British equivalent of the FBI. What is it – M Fifteen?’

  ‘Bear with me,’ said Marion. ‘M Fifteen? Well . . . There are two miles of slow moving traffic between Junction 12, Freshwater and Junction 13, Sandown. Or do you mean MI5?’

  Lewicki fired up a Kool. ‘What we got here, Marion, is corruption, top down. The Mayor of Ventnor’s trying to pin the rap on the chair of the justices in Shanklin, but he’s running for Boro’ surveyor of Bembridge. We gotta nail this guy before he crosses the state line into Hampsheer.’

  Marion giggled. ‘Sounds like a job for the Sweeney. You know, Sweeney Todd, the—’

  ‘Yeah, the Sondheim thing. I caught it last year at the Met.’

  ‘No. Not the Met,’ said Marion. ‘They’re the uniform branch.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Dex. ‘Now this Town Clerk of Freshwater guy. How’s his rap sheet read? Misdemeanours? Felonies? Give me the whole nine yards.’

  Marion looked at her screen. ‘Bear with me. Yes, here we are. He has had an ASBO once.’

  ‘Asbo? Yeah, I knew an Asbo once. Polish guy. DA in DC. Feds nailed his ass on a bum rap.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s him,’ said Marion. ‘An ASBO’s a punishment.’

  Dex’s eyes lit up. ‘Our man is a felon? What he do?’

  Marion peered at the screen. ‘Morris dancing at Bembridge. Without a licence.’

  SPORTS AND PASTIMES

  RABBIE BURNS

  turns his gaze for once on something very English: Wimbledon.

  First ae caper syne anither gang the weans a silver tassie

  Gie a skelp a gude swats the heed o’ peely-wally lassie

  Wee white kiltie shows her breeks, aye guiden grunt

  Wi chiels that winna ding – fae thrifty Dougal, worth a punt.

  Ye bonnie banks and backhand braes

  Ye hawk-eye ganga kennin wrang

  So gi’s a neep and cantie mair

  Srathspey your weans and wait yer hurry

  Behold, yon Lochinvar is Andy Murray!

  Wee sleekit cowrin’ tim’rous Tim . . .

  Wi’ sonsie face, a spindle shank

  The dreich that Cowdenbeath, Kilmarnock nil

  Guid kennin gang thegither

  Loathsome brae o’ Henman Hill.

  Aye . . . Gie’s pint o’ whisky, pint o’ wine,

  Nae pint o’ bairnswee Pimms.

  Tim’s made a halesome parritch o’ the smash,

  The histie wuzzock’s overheeds gang aft agley.

  It wasnae Scotia’s pride as donned guid kennin white

  For ance: fareweel – and tak’ the lowroad, Anglish shite!

  THOMAS HARDY

  is sent to cover the big match

  A traveller across that windy heath would have seen Wimborne Minster start the game well with a brace of neatly taken goals by the poacher, Boldwood, back from a loan spell with Charminster. The return of the native did not last long, however, as when celebrating his second, he slipped on ground made treacherous by a leaking gutter from the roof of the main stand and broke his back.

  On the stroke of half-time, Farfrae, the new boy from Ayr, was penalised for handball, though replays clearly showed that the ball had not touched him. Egdon scored from the spot and the Minsters’ lead was halved at the break.

  While the teams were off, heavy snow fell and the galeforce wind, which had been in Wimborne ’s face for the first forty-five minutes, turned round to confront them with its bitter fury once again.

  Henchard, the left-back, did not return to the field of play after the interval, when he discovered that his wife had been delivered of stillborn twins. Durbeville, Wimborne’s closeseason signing from Auxerre, was ruled ineligible when the Channel packet was delayed and his registration papers were accidentally delivered to the wrong address. To make matters worse for the Blues, Fawley, the other substitute, was found hanged in the team coach.

  Reduced to nine men, Wimborne Minster battled bravely against the elements till the sixtieth minute, when Winterbourne, a tireless labourer in the middle of the park, felt his Achilles tendon snap. Troy scored a tap-in equaliser for the visitors in the eightieth minute.

  In the pitiless rain, Wimborne held out till deep into stoppage time, when Everdene, on for the fatally injured Boldwood, sliced the ball into the roof of her own net from thirty yards. The President of the FA had, in the Aeschylean manner, finished his sport with Wimborne Minster.

  TED HUGHES
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  on the detention at an airport of José Mourinho’s Yorkshire terrier

  His eyes reflect the bed of lakes,

  The sodden moors where

  Stone walls endure his running and

  A skyline bends to the gravity of loss.

  His coat is an anchorite’s thistle shirt,

  His beard the tangle of the thief

  Bound for van Diemen’s land. His

  Squat jaw would tear the head from a pullet.

  Above the iron helmet of his skull

  He wears the topknot bow, Plantagenet

  Red, seeped in the war blood drained

  From turf at Stamford Bridge.

  To him in his wicker basket, there are

  No borders and no quarantine.

  On the drum of his caged ear resounds the

  Screech of hung rabbits in his teeth.

  All night in Departures, Terminal Two,

  Through the crazed yapping of his tongue,

  The long horizons reel.

  W. B. YEATS

  reports on the 2006 Ryder Cup at Kildare

  The restless multitude is pressed where

  The wild falcon and the linnet wing

  By Kildare’s foam-thrashed sea:

  More albatross than eagle, more

  Eagle than birdie, less birdie than halved in par

  In the afternoon four-balls

  With Woods and Love.

  Love and innocence is born in Seven Woods

  At Sligo in the spring,

  Though a five-wood’s all that’s needed with the wind behind.

  I think now of Kiltartan’s sons whose names

  The English Belfry tolled in widening gyres,

  The Irish soldiery gone beneath the mire:

  Paul McGinley, Padraig Harrington, a tattered stick

  Of Dublin rock upon the threatening fifth;

  Christy O’Connor Senior, sixty years the pro at Lissadell,

  Taken by the fairy as a child and shown the interlocking grip,

  More overlapping than interlocking,

  A public smiling man whose high slice

  Loosed left-handed Eamonn Darcy on the world.

  And in the final singles, as the sun falls behind

  The lakeside tower, I watch him

  Take the hickory stick. His limbs dance to a frenzied drum,

  His unsure grip bespoke

  By Lady Gregory’s own assiduous putting stroke

  Perfected on the borrowing lawns at Coole.

  An old man is a paltry thing who hides his head

  And cannot watch the white orb roll towards the cup.

  So may it be that when I am long stymied

  And gone beneath the divot

  Under bare Ben Hogan’s Head,

  You may always pierce the veil and dream

  Of Christy O’Connor Junior’s soaring three-iron

  To the gull-tormented eighteenth green.

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  loved his native land, which was not the Home Counties

  My father taught me what his uncle once showed him:

  To strike the safety match away from me.

  The diphthong of emery and phosphorus was

  The flare of Surrey dialects. I tossed the wooden ‘l’

  Into the tongueless babel of charcoal.

  By God, the old man could handle a Volvo.

  He drove at sixty on the old A3,

  His eye fixed on Hog’s Back, where

  Norman raiders glimpsed the upland, their

  Rapine footprint dripping from Virginia Water.

  In the scullery, my mother plunging raw hands

  In white ceramic, pulled up gold. Egg yolks

  Dripped through the webbing of her fingers.

  Legs planted like a pair of cricket bats,

  She drew the wisdom of the Sussex Downs

  Into the alchemy of quiche lorraine.

  The sausages spat protest at the flame, like

  Cranmer burned by Catholics at the stake.

  The T-bone wore a charred lattice of sectarian

  Divide. My aunt appeared at last after a

  Century, when dug out from the bog.

  To the longboat roar of Guildford bypass, we

  Drank all night, our kinship hammered out

  On Beaujolais, discovering at dawn

  The reinsurance market had gone belly-up;

  And with it, all my father’s cash at Lloyd’s.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  decides to clean his car, a Vauxhall

  I washed this morning Sunday morning’s office, oblation,

  Obligation – purifying man’s four-door estate.

  Garbed in chasuble, proof against

  Watersplash, dash from bucket brim,

  Down damp door sills and air-filled tyres, tireless

  In black, the soap sings to the sheen of the chamois and shower –

  Carburettor, biretta, camshaft, big end

  Oil pump, plump purple, vermilion, where the Lord

  Moves in motor ways, hatchback and patch, hard-shouldering me

  Windscreen-wiped, wheel-wetted wagon of rapture.

  Inside I brushed footwell and mock-leather trim,

  Disconnected the sat-nav, no need of direction

  Save only His who showed men the true way, the one-way,

  Led free to lead-free, the fuel of heart’s heat.

  But sheer suds and power-polish palm work make hubcaps gleam

  And the fire that shines panel of glory with – ah, labourful, luminous love,

  My roadster, redeemer – oh, my Cavalier!

  RAYMOND CHANDLER

  began his writing life as a poet – perhaps

  with a Shakespearean sonnet

  Should I compare you to a Chevrolet?

  No, you pack more power beneath the hood;

  The tailback on Sunset bars my way,

  The lousy price of gas can spoil the mood.

  Sometimes the fender gets stove in

  When a guy rear-ends you as you hit the brake.

  Every automobile has its fill of rovin’,

  Sold on to some young hustler on the make.

  But your upholstery will never dim,

  Your speed and comfort always set to thrill;

  No Junkyard Joe can crush your bodywork to him

  No rust will touch your hub or subframe sill.

  So long as men can lift the dipswitch to full beam,

  The headlamps of your eyes will make them dream.

  JOHN KEATS

  once wrote a sonnet to a non-poetic subject, a traffic jam

  When I have fears that I may not arrive

  Before my friends have cleared their groaning plates

  Before I’ve climbed out of my Renault Five

  Or even had the chance to greet my mates;

  When I behold upon the gridlocked street

  The blushing tail lights of the moonlit queue

  And think that I may never get to eat

  The dew-fresh salad or the monkfish stew;

  And when I feel, my neighbour for tonight,

  That I may never see your laughing eyes,

  As I sit for ever at the amber light

  Of non-reflective glass – then at the rise

  Of Hanger Lane I stall alone and think:

  Don’t let the bastards finish all the drink.

  IAN FLEMING

  finds an everyday job for his retired hero

  Bond stilled the roar of the Amherst-Villiers supercharger and stopped the Bentley at the end of the suburban cul-de-sac. He thought how much he loathed the new company crest on the door: ‘The Service. Plumbing and Heating Engineers. 24 Hours. Emergency’.

  He spotted a parking place between a Renault Twingo and a Hyundai Pony. He eased the Bentley into it masterfully and took his tool bag from the boot. The pink docket Tracy had given him at the office said: ‘Customer’s Name: Mrs Sappho Crumpet.’ Bond’s mouth tightened into a cruel line. He
enjoyed a challenge.

  Mrs Crumpet let him into the kitchen. She had a platinum perm and a badly blocked sink.

  ‘I’m going to have to rod your drains,’ said Bond.

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Mrs Crumpet.

  Bond took out his Vesper 416 power hose with the 2000-watt cold fusion battery. For perhaps ten minutes he used it cruelly.

  ‘No dice,’ said Bond eventually. ‘Can you show me the inspection hatch?’

  Mrs Crumpet took him outside. Between the potting shed and a garden gnome was what Bond wanted: an innocent-looking iron rectangle let into the crazy paving. In an instant, Bond was deep beneath the foundations, crawling through the watery underworld. He estimated he was directly under the kitchen sink when he saw something odd. It was a recording device with the telltale label: Property of SPECTRE.

  I might have known, thought Bond. Surbiton Plumbing Electrical Carpentry Tiling and Roofing Experts – the Firm’s deadliest rival.

  ‘We meet again, Mr Bond,’ said a voice behind him.

  It was Ernie Coldfinger, SPECTRE’s master of leaks.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Bond. ‘I expected to find a rat in a sewer.’

  Bond never liked having to kill people, but it was part of his job. He pulled out his Walton PPK adjustable spanner and did what was necessary, coldly, without remorse. That would teach SPECTRE to steal the Service’s clients, he thought, as he watched the corpse float away.

  ‘Cup of tea, Mr Bond?’ said Sappho Crumpet, back in the kitchen.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Bond. ‘Tea’s for old maids. Let me have a cocktail of Wolfschmidt vodka, Dom Perignon ’55 and a dozen Benzedrine.’

  ‘Coming right up,’ said Miss Crumpet.

  ‘Well, something is, Sappho,’ said Bond.